Youtube Video

Clippy briefly resurrected as Teams add-on, brutally taken down by brand police

Microsoft apparently hates fun.

Clippy is, after all, far more expressive than Cortana. While Clippy and Cortana share a tendency to reshape their basic form to meet the needs of the task at hand—Clippy can distort itself into a question mark or an envelope or whatever, and Cortana can deviate from her usual circular form—Clippy has a killer advantage in that it has eyes, and more particularly, eyebrows, enabling a range of emotions such as incredulity and contemptuous pity that Cortana can only dream of.

Youtube Video

New Huawei phone has a 5x optical zoom, thanks to a periscope lens

How do you cram a 5x zoom into the P30 Pro? Just turn the whole assembly sideways!

Huawei officially announced the Huawei P30 Pro smartphone today. While it has a new Huawei-made SoC, an in-screen optical fingerprint reader, and lots of other high-end features, the highlight is definitely the camera's optical zoom, which is up to a whopping 5x. Not digital zoom. Real, optical zoom.

Watched this earlier today.... PBS Space Time is my new favourite show.

Youtube Video

Microsoft exec bans company from pulling any dumb April Fools’ pranks

Internal memo says that pranks have little upside and can too often backfire.

This was particularly striking in Google's 2016 mic drop feature on Gmail, where clicking the "mic drop" button sent a recipient a gif of a Despicable Me minion—a vile affront to humanity in and of itself—and then muted and archived the conversation, thus hiding any responses to it. Cue widespread complaints from users who clicked the button by accident, denying themselves jobs and offending their bosses.

Intel’s new assault on the data center: 56-core Xeons, 10nm FPGAs, 100gig Ethernet

Intel wants to sell you more than just some CPUs for your servers.

The star of the show is the new Cascade Lake Xeons. These were first announced last November, and at the time a dual-die chip with 48 cores, 96 threads, and 12 DDR4 2933 memory channels was going to be the top spec part. But Intel has gone even further than initially planned with the new Xeon Platinum 9200 range: the top-spec part, the Platinum 9282, pairs two 28 core dies for a total of 56 cores and 112 threads. It has a base frequency of 2.6GHz, a 3.8GHz turbo, 77MB of level 3 cache, 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 expansion, and a 400W power draw.

Park with daughters here too. Then gelato.

The robocall crisis will never totally be fixed

Like spam, we'll be able to manage it but not eliminate it.
Years into the robocalling frenzy, your phone probably still rings off the hook with "important information about your account," updates from the "Chinese embassy," and every bogus sweepstakes offer imaginable. That's despite promises from the telecom industry and the US government that solutions would be coming. Much like the firehose of spam that made email almost unusable in the late 1990s, robocalls have made people in the US wary of picking up their cell phones and landlines. In fact, email spam offers a useful analogy: a scourge that probably can't be eliminated but can be effectively managed.

Family is playing Sacred Order: Beyond Time today.

InitRAMFS, Dracut y Dracut Emergency Shell

The Linux startup process goes through several stages before reaching the final graphical or multi-user target. The initramfs stage occurs just before the root file system is mounted. Dracut is a tool that is used to manage the initramfs. The dracut emergency shell is an interactive mode that can be initiated while the initramfs is loaded.
This article will show how to use the dracut command to modify the initramfs. Some basic troubleshooting commands that can be run from the dracut emergency shell will also be demonstrated.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/concern-growing-for-brain-invading-worms-spread-by-slugs-and-rats/

This is the first photo of a black hole

The black hole image captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.
The Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, called EHT, is a global network of telescopes that captured the first-ever photograph of a black hole. More than 200 researchers were involved in the project. They have worked for more than a decade to capture this.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/04/hackers-set-off-dallas-156-emergency-sirens-over-a-dozen-times/

Julian Assange arrested, charged with conspiracy to hack US computers

Assange had been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012.
British police arrested Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Thursday. He had been hiding in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 and was arrested after the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police Service into the embassy to remove him. Assange was initially arrested for jumping bail in 2012, but the Metropolitan Police Service subsequently announced that he had been "further arrested on behalf of the United States authorities."

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/bacteria-killing-toothpastes-may-be-good-for-your-teeth-bad-for-your-gut/

House votes to restore net neutrality rules

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill to restore net neutrality protections
The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill to restore net neutrality protections that were repealed by President Donald Trump's Federal Communications Commission in a controversial move more than a year ago.
The bill, called the Save the Internet Act, would reinstate protections that require internet service providers to treat all online content the same. Providers would once again be explicitly prohibited from blocking, speeding up, or slowing down access to specific online services.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/after-delays-due-to-rocket-problems-next-space-station-crew-set-to-launch/

Joe Doss: How Do You Fedora?

We recently interviewed Joe Doss on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.