Syed Shah usually buys and sells stocks and currencies through his Interactive Brokers account, but he couldn’t resist trying his hand at some oil trading on April 20, the day prices plunged below zero for the first time ever. The day trader, working from his house in a Toronto suburb, figured he couldn’t lose as he spent $2,400 snapping up crude at $3.30 a barrel, and then 50 cents. Then came what looked like the deal of a lifetime: buying 212 futures contracts on West Texas Intermediate for an astonishing penny each.
What he didn’t know was oil’s first trip into negative pricing had broken Interactive Brokers Group Inc. Its software couldn’t cope with that pesky minus sign, even though it was always technically possible — though this was an outlandish idea before the pandemic — for the crude market to go upside down. Crude was actually around negative $3.70 a barrel when Shah’s screen had it at 1 cent. Interactive Brokers never displayed a subzero price to him as oil kept diving to end the day at minus $37.63 a barrel.
At midnight, Shah got the devastating news: he owed Interactive Brokers $9 million. He’d started the day with $77,000 in his account.
“I was in shock,” the 30-year-old said in a phone interview. “I felt like everything was going to be taken from me, all my assets.”
To be clear, investors who were long those oil contracts had a brutal day, regardless of what brokerage they had their account in. What set Interactive Brokers apart, though, is that its customers were flying blind, unable to see that prices had turned negative, or in other cases locked into their investments and blocked from trading. Compounding the problem, and a big reason why Shah lost an unbelievable amount in a few hours, is that the negative numbers also blew up the model Interactive Brokers used to calculate the amount of margin — aka collateral — that customers needed to secure their accounts.
Thomas Peterffy, the chairman and founder of Interactive Brokers, says the journey into negative territory exposed bugs in the company’s software. “It’s a $113 million mistake on our part,” the 75-year-old billionaire said in an interview Wednesday. Since then, his firm revised its maximum loss estimate to $109.3 million. It’s been a moving target from the start; on April 21, Interactive Brokers figured it was down $88 million from the incident.
Customers will be made whole, Peterffy said. “We will rebate from our own funds to our customers who were locked in with a long position during the time the price was negative any losses they suffered below zero.”
[…]
Besides locking up because of negative prices, a second issue concerned the amount of money Interactive Brokers required its customers to have on hand in order to trade. Known as margin, it’s a vital risk measure to ensure traders don’t lose more than they can afford. For the 212 oil contracts Shah bought for 1 cent each, the broker only required his account to have $30 of margin per contract. It was as if Interactive Brokers thought the potential loss of buying at one cent was one cent, rather than the almost unlimited downside that negative prices imply, he said.
“It seems like they didn’t know it could happen,” Shah said.
But it was known industrywide that CME Group Inc.’s benchmark oil contracts could go negative. Five days before the mayhem, the owner of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where the trading took place, sent a notice to all its clearing-member firms advising them that they could test their systems using negative prices. “Effective immediately, firms wishing to test such negative futures and/or strike prices in their systems may utilize CME’s ‘New Release’ testing environments” for crude oil, the exchange said.
Interactive Brokers got that notice, Peterffy said. But he says the firm needed more time to upgrade its trading platform.
Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development.
Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux. The native format of Inkscape is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), the web standard.
[…]
Inkscape 1.0 is most significant for Mac users. Previous releases for macOS required a compatibility component called XQuartz, which enables applications designed for the X windowing system to run on macOS Quartz, part of Apple’s Core Graphics framework. This is no longer required and Inkscape 1.0 is now a native macOS application – though it is not all good news. The announcement noted: “This latest version is labelled as ‘preview’, which means that additional improvements are scheduled for the next versions.”
[…]
Inkscape 1.0 seems polished and professional. Adobe, which sells Illustrator on a subscription basis starting at £19 (if you inhale the rest of the Creative Cloud), will likely not be worried, but apart from the cost saving there are advantages in simpler applications that are relatively lightweight and easy to learn, as well as running well on Linux.
Google has added a very useful feature to Google Lens, its multipurpose object recognition tool. You can now copy and paste handwritten notes from your phone to your computer with Lens, though it only works if your handwriting is neat enough.
In order to use the new feature, you need to have the latest version of Google Chrome as well as the standalone Google Lens app on Android or the Google app on iOS (where Lens can be accessed through a button next to the search bar). You’ll also need to be logged in to the same Google account on both devices.
That done, simply point your camera at any handwritten text, highlight it on-screen, and select copy. You can then go to any document in Google Docs, hit Edit, and then Paste to paste the text. And voila — or, viola, depending on your handwriting.
Copy and pasting with Google Lens.Gif: Google
In our tests, the feature was pretty hit or miss. If you don’t write neatly, you’ll definitely get some typos. But it’s still a cool feature that’s especially useful at a time when a lot of people are now working from home and relying on endless to-do lists to bring some sense of order to their day.
If you’ve been wondering why the free space on your Mac keeps getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller—even if you haven’t been using your Mac all that much—there’s a quirky bug with Apple’s Image Capture app that could be to blame.
According to a recent blog post from NeoFinder, you should resist the urge to use the Image Capture app to transfer photos from connected devices to your desktop or laptop. If you do, and you happen to uncheck the “keep originals” button because you want the app to convert your .HEIC images to friendlier .JPEGs, the bug kicks in:
Apples Image Capture will then happily convert the HEIF files to JPG format for you, when they are copied to your Mac. But what is also does is to add 1.5 MB of totally empty data to every single photo file it creates! We found that massive bug by pure chance when working on further improving the metadata editing capabilities in NeoFinder, using a so-called Hex-Editor “Hex Fiend”.
They continue:
Of course, this is a colossal waste of space, especially considering that Apple is seriously still selling new Macs with a ridiculously tiny 128 GB internal SSD. Such a small disk is quickly filled with totally wasted empty data.
With just 1000 photos, for example, this bug eats 1.5 GB off your precious and very expensive SSD disk space.
We have notified Apple of this new bug that was already present in macOS 10.14.6, and maybe they will fix it this time without adding yet additional new bugs in the process.
So, what are your options? First off, you don’t have to use the Image Capture app. Unless you’re transferring a huge batch of photos over, you could just sync your iPhone or iPad’s photo library to iCloud, and do the same on your Mac, to view anything you’ve shot. If that’s not an option, you could always just AirDrop your photos over to your Mac, too, or simply use Photos instead of Image Capture (if possible).
There appears to be a new character-linked bug in Messages, Mail, and other apps that can cause the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch to crash when receiving a specific string of characters.
Image from Twitter
In this particular case, the character string involves the Italian flag emoji along with characters in the Sindhi language, and it appears the system crash happens when an incoming notification is received with the problem-causing characters.
Based on information shared on Reddit, the character string began circulating on Telegram, but has also been found on Twitter.
These kind of device-crashing character bugs surface every so often and sometimes become widespread, leading to a significant number of people ending up with a malfunctioning iPhone, iPad, or Mac. In 2018, for example, a character string in the Telugu language circulated around the internet, crashing thousands of devices before Apple addressed the problem in an iOS update.
There is often no way to prevent these characters from causing crashes and freezes when received from a malicious person, and crashes caused through notifications often cause operating system re-springs and in some cases, a need to restore a device in DFU mode.
MacRumors readers should be aware that such a bug is circulating, and for those who are particularly concerned, as this bug appears to impact notifications, turning off notifications may mitigate the effects. Apple typically fixes these character bugs within a few days to a week.
Update: According to MacRumors reader Adam, who tested the bug on a device running iOS 13.4.5, the issue is fixed in the second beta of that update.
As users complain of blue screens of death, deleted files and reboot loops, here’s what you need to know about this Windows 10 update.
There’s a lot of truth in the notion that you can’t please all the people all of the time, as Microsoft knows only too well. With Windows 10 now installed on more than one billion devices, there will always be a wide variation in terms of user satisfaction. One area where this variation can be seen perhaps most clearly is that of updates.
[…]
The problems those users are reporting to the Microsoft support forums and on social media have included the installation failing and looping back to restart again, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) following a “successful” update and computers that simply refuse to boot again afterward. Among the more common issues, in terms of complaints after a Windows 10 update, were Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity related ones. But there were have also been users complaining that after a restart, all files from the C drive had been deleted.
[…]
Microsoft asks that any users experiencing problems use the Windows + F keyboard shortcut, or select Feedback Hub from the Start menu, to provide feedback so it can investigate.
More practically speaking, if you are experiencing any Windows Update issues, I would always suggest you head for the Windows Update Troubleshooter. This, more often than not, fixes any error code problems, Be warned, though, I have known it take more than one running of the troubleshooter before updates are all successfully installed, so do persevere
Apple’s latest update to macOS Catalina appears to have broken SSH for some users.
Developer Tyler Hall published a blog post on Monday detailing the issue, but removed it after his writeup got noticed.
The issue is that under Apple’s macOS 10.15.4 update, released on March 24, trying to open a SSH connection to a port greater than 8192 using a server name, rather than an IP address, no longer works – for some users at least. SSH is a Swiss army knife that can be used to securely connect to remote machines to run commands, transfer files and other data, and so on.
The Register asked Hall to elaborate on his findings but he declined, citing the possibility that the problem might be particular to his set up rather than a bug in the software Apple shipped.
Hall demonstrated similar post-publication remorse this last October when he criticized the code quality of macOS Catalina, comparing it to Windows Vista. That sentiment is shared among many other macOS users (eg: “macOS 10.15 is chockablock with paper-cut bugs” – John Gruber). But the responses Hall received from friends within Apple led him to regret that post, too.
We asked Apple to comment but we’ve received no reply. Cupertino seldom addresses public criticism. Until June 2016, Apple even implied in its App Store Review Guidelines that it would look unfavorably on developers who complain publicly about rejected apps. Up to that point, its policy said, “If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.”
The US government’s renewed antitrust scrutiny of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google in recent years has perhaps encouraged more caution in publicly declared tech platform policies.
The issue that Hall reported has been noted by others. A post two days ago on Apple’s discussion forum complains, “After that update I am no longer able to open a SSH connection to a port greater than 8192 using server name (instead of IP).” And three discussion participants claim they too have experienced the same issue.
One of these individuals, posting under the user name “webdeck,” filed a bug port in Open Radar, a public iOS and macOS bug reporting site created by developer Tim Burks because Apple hides its Radar bug reporting system from the public.
The bug report reads, “/usr/bin/ssh in macos 10.15.4 hangs if used with the -p flag to specify an alternate port and used with a hostname. This was not present in macOS 10.15.3.”
SINGAPORE – In a move to help the international community combat the coronavirus pandemic, the Government will be making the software for its contact-tracing application TraceTogether, which has already been installed by more than 620,000 people, freely available to developers around the world.
In a Facebook post on Monday (March 23), Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Initiative Vivian Balakrishnan said that the app, developed by the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) and the Ministry of Health, will be open-sourced.
This means that the software’s source code will be made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.
“We believe that making our code available to the world will enhance trust and collaboration in dealing with a global threat that does not respect boundaries, political systems or economies,” said Dr Balakrishnan, who is also Foreign Minister.
“Together, we can make our world safer for everyone.”
Launched last Friday, the TraceTogether app can identify people who have been within 2m of coronavirus patients for at least 30 minutes, using wireless Bluetooth technology. Its developers say the app is useful when those infected cannot recall whom they had been in close proximity with for an extended duration.
For the app to start tracing, the Bluetooth setting on mobile phones has to be turned on.
If a user gets infected, the authorities will be able to quickly find out the other users he has been in close contact with, allowing for easier identification of potential cases and helping curb the spread of the virus.
Official contact tracers will provide a code that users can match with a corresponding verification code on their app. Once authenticated, users will get a PIN that allows data to be submitted.
Contact tracers will not ask for any personal financial details or request that money be transferred over the phone.
In his post on Monday, Dr Balakrishnan said that the GovTech team was working “around the clock” to finalise documents to allow others to use the BlueTrace protocol – the building blocks of the TraceTogether app. He added that TraceTogether has been installed by more than 620,000 users so far.
Dr Janil Puthucheary, Minister-in-charge of GovTech, also weighed in on the app in a radio show on Monday, saying that a team of about 40 engineers spent more than 10,000 man-hours developing TraceTogether.
Dr Janil also encouraged more people to download TraceTogether as added protection.
TraceTogether’s developers uploaded a manifesto for BlueTrace on the app’s website on Monday, calling for international adoption of contact-tracing solutions in today’s globalised world as weapons to turn the tide against the Covid-19 outbreak.
“Covid-19 and other novel viruses do not respect national boundaries. Neither should humanity’s response. In a globalised world, with high volumes of international travel, any decentralised contact-tracing solution will need mass adoption to maximise network effects,” stated the app developers’ manifesto.
It’s all so painfully familiar: with a crunch date of February 3, the Democratic Party in Iowa decided to charge ahead with an IT rollout that comprised an entirely new software system spread out across thousands of sites to record the result of the Democratic caucus for its presidential nominee.
It was, inevitably, a complete failure. The results from the Iowa caucus were supposed to come in nearly 24 hours ago. Instead, it has become a rolling news cycle of tech catastrophe.
We’re not even going to bother to dig into lessons learned because they are the same ones that every sysadmin since the dawn of time has dealt with – and spends their entire career warning the suits about, to greater and lesser degrees of success.
[…]
We could write pages and pages of reports about how differently people experienced this almighty IT cock-up but what’s the point? If you’re reading The Reg you already know what the problem is and the details quickly become irrelevant.
Here’s what’s happened: the suits hired a company because they were swayed by their CVs and sales talk and didn’t run it past anyone that knew what they were doing. Then the suits didn’t listen to all the people telling them it was a bad idea and they should delay rollout. And they didn’t allow sufficient time for testing and training.
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance joined together to promote the formation of the Working Group. Zigbee Alliance board member companies IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also on board to join the Working Group and contribute to the project.
The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
The industry Working Group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol, and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster.
The project aims to make it easier for device manufacturers to build devices that are compatible with smart home and voice services such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and others. The planned protocol will complement existing technologies, and Working Group members encourage device manufacturers to continue innovating using technologies available today.
despite the fact that all the drivers generally have to do is simply sit on the internet, available when they’re necessary.
Apparently, that isn’t easy enough for Intel. Recently, the chipmaker took BIOS drivers, a boot-level firmware technology used for hardware initialization in earlier generations of PCs, for a number of its unsupported motherboards off its website, citing the fact that the programs have reached an “End of Life” status. While it reflects the fact that Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), a later generation of firmware technology used in PCs and Macs, is expected to ultimately replace BIOS entirely, it also leaves lots of users with old gadgets out in a lurch. And as Bleeping Computer has noted, it appears to be part of a broader trend to prevent downloads for unsupported hardware on the Intel website—things that have long lived past their current lives. After all, if something goes wrong, Intel can be sure it’s not liable if a 15-year-old BIOS update borks a system.
In a comment to Motherboard, Intel characterized the approach to and timing of the removals as reflecting industry norms.
[…]
However, this is a problem for folks who take collecting or use of old technology seriously, such as those on the forum Vogons, which noticed the issue first, though it’s far from anything new. Technology companies come and go all the time, and as things like mergers and redesigns happen, often the software repository gets affected when the technology goes out of date.
A Problem For Consumers & Collectors
Jason Scott, the Internet Archive’s lead software curator, says that Intel’s decision to no longer provide old drivers on its website reflects a tendency by hardware and software developers to ignore their legacies when possible—particularly in the case of consumer software, rather than in the enterprise, where companies’ willingness to pay for updates ensures that needed updates won’t simply sit on the shelf.
[…]
By the mid-90s, companies started to create FTP repositories to distribute software, which had the effect of changing the nature of updates: When the internet made distribution easier and both innovation and security risks grew more advanced, technology companies updated their apps far more often.
FTP’s Pending Fadeout
Many of those FTP servers are still around today, but the news cycle offers a separate, equally disappointing piece of information for those looking for vintage drivers: Major web browsers are planning to sunset support for the FTP protocol. Chrome plans to remove support for FTP sites by version 82, which is currently in the development cycle and will hit sometime next year. And Firefox makers Mozilla have made rumblings about doing the same thing.
The reasons for doing so, often cited for similar removals of legacy features, come down to security. FTP is a legacy service that can’t be secured in much the same way that its successor, SFTP, can.
While FTP applications like CyberDuck will likely exist for decades from now, the disconnect from the web browser will make these servers a lot harder to use. The reason goes back to the fact that the FTP protocol isn’t inherently searchable—but the best way to find information about it is with a web-based search engine … such as Google.
[…]
Earlier this year, I was attempting to get a vintage webcam working, and while I was ultimately unable to get it to work, it wasn’t due to lack of software access. See, Logitech actually kept copies of Connectix’s old webcam software on its FTP site. This is software that hasn’t seen updates in more than 20 years; that only supports Windows 3.1, Windows NT, and Windows 95; and that wasn’t on Logitech’s website.
One has to wonder how soon those links will disappear from Google searches once the two most popular desktop browsers remove easy access to those files. And there’s no guarantee that a company is going to keep a server online beyond that point.
“It was just it was this weird experience that FTP sites, especially, could have an inertia of 15 to 20 years now, where they could be running all this time, untouched,” Scott added. “And just every time that, you know, if the machine dies, it goes away.”
Owners of Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones are still trying to get the company to either fix or roll back a firmware update that removed noise-cancelling functions from their over-ear gear.
The problems date back to July and some owners seem to have managed to get Bose to exchange their cans for the company’s shiny new 700 headphones.
We were contacted by a reader who was first given a set of version II headphones when his V1 set were borked. When the updated firmware borked them as well, he declined the offer of a replacement set and was given a pair of 700s. Firmware version 4.5.2 was fingered as the main culprit.
Like all Bose gear, the cans don’t come cheap – they’ll set you back £259.95 to be precise, or £349.95 for a pair of limited edition white 700s.
Pissed-off punters have filled a deafening 182 pages of Bose’s support forums with complaints.
One has even set up a Change.org petition to beg for a pause on firmware updates until a fix is found.
The main complaint is that Bose seems to be deaf to the problem and the easiest solution – to roll everyone back to the previous firmware and restore noise cancelling.
As of Thursday, Bose was claiming that new firmware is coming soon to solve the problem, a long five-month wait for angry customers.
We’ve contacted Bose’s UK PR again but don’t expect to hear back. The company kept very quiet when firmware updates stopped their TV soundbars making any sound.
We asked if the replacement policy was open to all customers worldwide – our contact is in Europe.
One poor punter on the forum is from Brazil and pointed out it was a long trip to his nearest Bose service centre – in Mexico.
An experimental feature silently rolled out to the stable Chrome release on Tuesday caused chaos for IT admins this week after users complained of facing white, featureless tabs on Google’s massively popular browser.
The issue affected thousands of businesses’ terminal servers, with multiple users on the same server experiencing “white screen of death” at the same time.
We have confirmed and replicated; when any user on a shared session citrix box locks their screen, all Chrome windows stop rendering (“White screen of death”) until ANYONE unlocks their screen, upon which, all Chrome windows resume rendering. This looks like random behaviour to the user but we have confirmed lock/unlock is the culprit.
The person added: “We have fixed this temporarily by starting chrome with –disable-backgrounding-occluded-windows,” applying the fix through a group policy object.
Google software engineer David Bienvenu jumped in to explain:
The experiment/flag has been on in beta for ~5 months. It was turned on for stable (e.g., m77, m78) via an experiment that was pushed to released Chrome Tuesday morning.
At 1824 UTC last night, Bienvenu rolled back the experiment change, noting “I’m not sure how long it takes to go live, but once it’s live, users will need to restart Chrome to get the change.”
For those unfamiliar with SandDance, it was introduced nearly four years ago as a system for exploring and presenting data using “unit visualizations.” Instead of aggregating data and showing the resulting sums as bar charts, SandDance shows every single row of a dataset (for datasets up to ~500K rows). It represents each of these rows as a mark that can be colored and organized into different areas on the screen. Thus, bar charts are made of their constituent units, stacked, or sorted.
Nice. I hadn’t heard about SandDance until now, but I’m saving for later. You can grab the source on GitHub.
DoNotPay helps you get out of parking tickets and cancel forgotten subscriptions, and now it can call you when it’s your turn in a customer service phone queue. The app today is launching “Skip Waiting On Hold.” Just type in the company you need to talk to, and DoNotPay calls for you using tricks to get a human on the line quickly. Then it calls you back and connects you to the agent so you never have to listen to that annoying hold music.
And in case the company tries to jerk you around or screw you over, the DoNotPay app lets you instantly share to social media a legal recording of the call to shame them.
Skip Waiting On Hold comes as part of the $3 per month DoNotPay suite of services designed to save people time and money by battling bureaucracy on their behalf. It can handle DMV paperwork for you, write legal letters to scare businesses out of overcharging you and it provides a credit card that automatically cancels subscriptions when your free trial ends.
“I think the world would be a lot fairer place if people had someone fighting for them” says DoNotPay’s 22-year-old founder Joshua Browder. Indeed; $3 per month gets the iOS app‘s 10,000 customers unlimited access to all the features with no extra fees or commissions on money saved. “If DoNotPay takes a commission then we have an incentive to perpetuate the problems we are fighting against.”
[…]
he full list of DoNotPay services includes:
Customer service disputes where it contacts companies about refunds for Comcast bills, delayed flights, etc.
The free trial credit card that auto-cancels subscriptions before you’re actually charged
Traffic and parking appeals where it generates a letter for you based on answers to questions, like if signs were too hard to read or there was a mistake on the ticket
Hidden money discovery that finds refunds in your bank fees, identifies forgotten subscriptions, gets you free stuff on your birthday and more
Government paperworkassistance that can help you get DMV appointments and fill out forms
Deep TabNine is what’s known as a coding autocompleter. Programmers can install it as an add-on in their editor of choice, and when they start writing, it’ll suggest how to continue each line, offering small chunks at a time. Think of it as Gmail’s Smart Compose feature but for code.
Jacob Jackson, the computer science undergrad at the University of Waterloo who created Deep TabNine, says this sort of software isn’t new, but machine learning has hugely improved what it can offer. “It’s solved a problem for me,” he tells The Verge.
Jackson started work on the original version of the software, TabNine, in February last year before launching it that November. But earlier this month, he released an updated version that uses a deep learning text-generation algorithm called GPT-2, which was designed by the research lab OpenAI, to improve its abilities. The update has seriously impressed coders, who have called it “amazing,” “insane,” and “absolutely mind-blowing” on Twitter.
[…]
Deep TabNine is trained on 2 million files from coding repository GitHub. It finds patterns in this data and uses them to suggest what’s likely to appear next in any given line of code, whether that’s a variable name or a function.
Using deep learning to create autocompletion software offers several advantages, says Jackson. It makes it easy to add support for new languages, for a start. You only need to drop more training data into Deep TabNine’s hopper, and it’ll dig out patterns, he says. This means that Deep TabNine supports some 22 different coding languages while most alternatives just work with one.
(The full list of languages Deep TabNine supports are as follows: Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, C, PHP, Go, C#, Ruby, Objective-C, Rust, Swift, TypeScript, Haskell, OCaml, Scala, Kotlin, Perl, SQL, HTML, CSS, and Bash.)
Most importantly, thanks to the analytical abilities of deep learning, the suggestions Deep TabNine makes are of a high overall quality. And because the software doesn’t look at users’ own code to make suggestions, it can start helping with projects right from the word go, rather than waiting to get some cues from the code the user writes.
The software isn’t perfect, of course. It makes mistakes in its suggestions and isn’t useful for all types of coding. Users on various programming hang-outs like Hacker News and the r/programming subreddit have debated its merits and offered some mixedreviews (though they mostly skew positive). As you’d expect from a coding tool built for coders, people have a lot to say about how exactly it works with their existing editors and workflow.
One complaint that Jackson agrees is legitimate is that Deep TabNine is more suited to certain types of coding. It works best when autocompleting relatively rote code, the sort of programming that’s been done thousands of times with small variations. It’s less able to write exploratory code, where the user is solving a novel problem. That makes sense considering that the software’s smarts come from patterns found in archival data.
Deep TabNine being used to write some C++.
So how useful is it really for your average coder? That’ll depend on a whole lot of factors, like what programming language they use and what they’re trying to achieve. But Jackson says it’s more like a faster input method than a human coding partner (a common practice known as pair programming).
Some models of Airbus A350 airliners still need to be hard rebooted after exactly 149 hours, despite warnings from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) first issued two years ago.
In a mandatory airworthiness directive (AD) reissued earlier this week, EASA urged operators to turn their A350s off and on again to prevent “partial or total loss of some avionics systems or functions”.
The revised AD, effective from tomorrow (26 July), exempts only those new A350-941s which have had modified software pre-loaded on the production line. For all other A350-941s, operators need to completely power the airliner down before it reaches 149 hours of continuous power-on time.
[…]
Airbus’ rival Boeing very publicly suffered from a similar time-related problem with its 787 Dreamliner: back in 2015 a memory overflow bug was discovered that caused the 787’s generators to shut themselves down after 248 days of continual power-on operation. A software counter in the generators’ firmware, it was found, would overflow after that precise length of time. The Register is aware that this is not the only software-related problem to have plagued the 787 during its earlier years.
It is common for airliners to be left powered on while parked at airport gates so maintainers can carry out routine systems checks between flights, especially if the aircraft is plugged into ground power.
The remedy for the A350-941 problem is straightforward according to the AD: install Airbus software updates for a permanent cure, or switch the aeroplane off and on again.
Smart meters in England are suddenly switching to Welsh language displays, much to the confusion of owners.
Several people report that the meters, made by energy provider Bulb, are spontaneously opting for Welsh instead of English, sometimes after freezing and being restarted. This would be unhelpful even for many residents of Wales, but the problem has been seen as far east as West Sussex.
The issue is fixable, although choosing the right options is easier if you speak a bit of Welsh. Anyone remember the fun of switching your mate’s Nokia to Finnish language menus?
This seems to be the latest in a string of issues suffered by Bulb, although to be fair the firm is not the first to be stumped by the stupidity of smart meters.
Last month it updated customers who were having problems with the meters’ “In-Home Display” – a small screen connected to the meter that is meant to show electricity usage and costs. Bulb now reckons 85 per cent of these devices will link to the meter immediately: “And the majority of those that don’t connect first time can now be fixed remotely.”
It is also dealing with a problem of automatic, monthly readings not appearing on accounts by taking daily readings, which apparently have a different process.
Starting today, Windows 10 users are finding that the /sfc scannow feature is no longer working and that it states it found, but could not fix, corrupted Windows Defender PowerShell files.
The Windows System File Checker tool, commonly known as SFC, has a /scannow argument that will check the integrity of all protected Winodws system files and repair any issues that are found.
As of this morning, users in a wildersecurity.com thread have started reporting that when they run sfc /scannow, the program is stating that “Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them.” I too was able to reproduce this issue on a virtual machine with Windows Defender configured as the main antivirus program.
You might not even know what options you can tweak (or turn off) in your operating system, which is where the cleverly named O&O ShutUp10application comes in to play. It’s a simple application that makes it incredibly easy to tweak various aspects of Windows 10 that are normally buried or otherwise inaccessible to regular people. More importantly, the app comes with some helpful warnings so you don’t accidentally disable something you shouldn’t (like automatic updates)
To get started, all you have to do is download the app and run it. That’s it. There’s no installation to speak of, which already makes me thrilled. When the app loads, it’ll look like this:
You’ll see a bunch of different options you can turn on and off—some might already be enabled—as well as a handy “recommend” column that gives you a little more advice as to whether you should really mess with that setting or not. What I love about O&O ShutUp10, though, is that you can get even more information about what each setting means by simply hovering your mouse over each line and clicking, like so:
Screenshot: David Murphy
While you probably shouldn’t just go through and enable everything that’s recommended en masse, I would use that little green checkmark as a guide while you explore the app. Enable any related setting and you’re probably fine. Once you start getting into the yellow “limited” category, however, it gets a bit dicier. You might not want to, for example, disable all apps from accessing your microphone or camera—or maybe you do. Just remember you toggled that setting the next time you’re about to hop on a video conference.
I have been a bit critical of Linux Mint in the past, but the truth is, it is a great distribution that many people enjoy. While Mint is not my favorite desktop distro (that would be Fedora), I recognize its quality. Is it perfect? No, there is no such thing as a flawless Linux-based operating system.
Today should be happy times for the Linux Mint community, as we finally learn some new details about the upcoming version 19.2! It will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 and once again feature three desktop environments — Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon. We even found out the code name for Linux Mint 19.2 — “Tina.” And yet, it is hard to celebrate. Why? Because the developers seem to be depressed and defeated. They even appear to be a bit disenchanted with Free Software development overall.
Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, shared a very lengthy blog post today, and it really made me sad.
[…]
I can show them 500 people donated money last month, I can forward emails to the team where people tell me how much they love Linux Mint, I can tell them they’re making a difference but there’s nothing like interacting directly with a happy user, seeing first-hand somebody be delighted with what you worked on. How our community interacts with our developers is key, to their work, to their happiness and to their motivation.
Clem quite literally says he is not enjoying the Linux Mint development nowadays, which really breaks my heart.
[…]
I also have a life outside open source work, too. It’s not mentally sound to put the hours I’ve put into the compositor. I was only able to do what I could because I was unemployed in January. Now I’m working a job full time, and trying to keep up with bug fixes. I’ve been spending every night and weekend, basically every spare moment of my free time trying to fix things.
[…]
To make things even worse, Hicks is apparently embarrassed by the official Linux Mint blog post! Another Reddit member named tuxkrusader responds to Hicks by saying “I’m slightly concerned that you’re not a member of the linuxmint group on github anymore. I hope you’re not on bad terms with the project.” Hicks shockingly responds by saying “Nope, I hid my project affiliation because that blog post makes me look bad.”
Wow. Hiding his affiliation with the Linux Mint project on GitHub? It seems things may be worse than I originally thought…
Microsoft is introducing a really useful feature for Excel on mobile devices. The company is rolling out a new update to the Excel app for Android that makes it really easy to capture data.
If you ever had to manually enter data from a paper in real life into your spreadsheets, you are going to love this. Excel now lets you take pictures of a document/paper in real life, crop the picture, and turn that into an actual, editable data on Excel. After capturing the data, you can edit the data to make sure Excel’s image recognition is 100% accurate, and make any changes if some of the scanned data were incorrect.
The feature seems really useful, and it’s just one of the ways Microsoft has been pushing Office apps recently. The company’s continued focus on AI has really helped apps like Excel get better and better when it could just continue to be that one boring spreadsheet app. Microsoft can easily bring similar features powered by image recognition and AI to other Office apps as well, so this is probably just the beginning.
The company plans to bring the feature to iOS in the near future.
Add data to Excel directly from a photo—Using the Excel app, you can take a picture of a printed data table on your Android device and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This new image recognition functionality eliminates the need for you to manually enter hardcopy data. This capability is starting to roll out for the Excel Android app with iOS support coming soon.
At least 2 machines are needed to operate spacedesk. These machines must be connected via a Local Area Network (e.g. Ethernet or Wireless) supporting TCP/IP network protocol. Each one of the two machines is running a different spacedesk software:
1. The Primary Machine is a Windows PC, laptop or Surface Pro tablet. It runs the spacedesk DRIVER software. It includes network display server software and display device drivers. This allows to extend or duplicate the Windows Desktop to the screen of another machine over the network.
2. The Secondary Machine runs spacedesk VIEWER program which acts as the secondary display. It can be one (or multiple) of the following:
Android tablet or phone (Android VIEWER)
Windows PC, laptop or Surface Pro tablet (Windows Desktop application)
Apple Mac, iPad or iPhone (iOS VIEWER)
Linux PC and a variety of other machines (HTML5 VIEWER)
The network connection between the two machines can be via cable or wireless. If available, a cable is preferred. Cables usually achieve better performance than wireless connections. It can be one (or multiple) of the following:
Video game publisher Ubisoft is working with Mozilla to develop an artificial intelligence coding assistant called Clever-Commit, head of Ubisoft La Forge Yves Jacquier announced during DICE Summit 2019 on Tuesday.
Clever-Commit reportedly helps programmers evaluate whether or not a code change will introduce a new bug by learning from past bugs and fixes. The prototype, called Commit-Assistant, was tested using data collected during game development, Ubisoft said, and it’s already contributing to some major AAA titles. The publisher is also working on integrating it into other brands.
“Working with Mozilla on Clever-Commit allows us to support other programming languages and increase the overall performances of the technology. Using this tech in our games and Firefox will allow developers to be more productive as they can spend more time creating the next feature rather than fixing bugs. Ultimately, this will allow us to create even better experiences for our gamers and increase the frequency of our game updates,” said Mathieu Nayrolles, technical architect, data scientist, and member of the Technological Group at Ubisoft Montreal.
Mozilla is assisting Ubisoft by providing programming language expertise in Rust, C++, and Javascript. The technology will also help the company ship more stable versions of its Firefox internet browser.
Smartphone users in South Korea will soon be able to have the option of deleting unnecessary pre-installed bloatware, thanks to new industry guidelines commencing in April.
“The move aims to rectify an abnormal practice that causes inconvenience to smartphone users and causes unfair competition among industry players,” said the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, in a press release.
The measure will also help give users more data storage and improve battery life, said the ministry.
Under the new guidelines, telcos are required to make most of their pre-installed apps deletable except for four necessary items related to Wi-Fi connectivity, near-field communication (NFC), the customer service center and the app store.
For example, Samsung’s Galaxy S4 released by SK Telecom has a total of 80 apps pre-installed, including 25 apps loaded by the telco, 39 by Samsung and 16 by the OS provider Google, noted Yonhap News. When the new guidelines kick in, at least half of those apps can be deleted, it added.
