Day: October 26, 2018

It’s official: Microsoft now owns GitHub. After European Commission officials approved the deal last week, it seemed only a matter of time until the $7.5 billion acquisition was completed.

GitHub’s new CEO Nat Friedman, a former vice president of developer services at Microsoft, emphasized in a blog post that GitHub will operate independently of its owner. He noted the open-source repository will continue to support developers no matter the tools they choose to do their job (so you can opt for Amazon Web Services over Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Services, for instance).

The Microsoft acquisition of GitHub is complete, and we couldn’t be more excited to roll up our sleeves and start the next chapter. 🎉 https://t.co/epE4kx0SP1

— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) October 26, 2018

Friedman wrote that GitHub has three core objectives: ensuring the platform is the best option for productive teams and communities; making the repository more accessible to developers everywhere; and boosting performance, reliability and security. There are plans to improve search, notifications and how you use GitHub on mobile, while GitHub Actions, which is currently in a public beta, will become more widely available for the platform’s 31 million developers.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

October 26, 2018 at 08:54AM

Microsoft says PC players will be able to access a version of its all-you-can-download Xbox Game Pass subscription service some time in the future.

The news comes from CEO Satya Nadella, who mentioned the move offhandedly in response to a question about cloud gaming in a recent earnings call. Nadella said “increasing the strength of the community” around the Xbox brand is important to the company’s bottom line and that “obviously, bringing Game Pass to even the PC is going to be a big element of that.”

It’s not clear which PC games exactly would be included with such a subscription or whether PC games would require their own separate subscription on top of the existing console Game Pass. For years, Microsoft has been

promoting its “Play Anywhere” initiative

for games that you buy once and play across PC and console, though

we’ve run into trouble with that compatibility

in practical testing.

On a PC, Game Pass will compete with existing PC subscription services like Utomik, Humble Monthly, and the indie-focused Jump, all of which already provide unlimited access to anywhere from dozens to hundreds of games for a flat monthly fee. But Microsoft’s tight relationships with third-party publishers, and direct control over the Windows platform as a whole, might give its service a leg up.

Launched in early 2017, the $10-per-month Game Pass subscription on Xbox One gives players access to a shifting lineup that now includes more than 200 games from 11 studios.

Back in January, Microsoft promised every subsequent first-party Microsoft Studios game on Xbox One would be available to Game Pass subscribers on launch day. That move seems to have helped games like Sea of Thieves and Forza Horizon 4 both attract 2 million users each in their first week of sale.

And back in August, Game Pass and Xbox Live became part of

an “Xbox All Access” subscription plan

that offers users free console hardware with a two-year subscription agreement starting at $22 a month.

Elsewhere in the earnings call, Microsoft revealed it now has 57 million active Xbox Live users, up from 53 million a year ago but flat since the last quarter. Xbox software and services revenue was up 36 percent year over year, while hardware revenue was up 96 percent.

Slider phones are making a comeback! The quest to maximize smartphone screen space has created all sorts of strange compromises in the design of slab phones. The screen can only get so big before it encroaches on the space meant for the front-facing camera, and then what? Lately the answer has been to carve out a chunk of the screen to make room, but what if you just didn’t put the front-facing camera on the front? A new trend is arising that puts the camera on a slide-out or pop-up mechanism. Chinese smartphone giant BBK started the trend with the Vivo Nex and Oppo Find X. Huawei will soon be jumping on board with the Honor Magic 2, and, today, Xiaomi is making its official entry with the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3.

With no camera to worry about, the front of the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 can house a 6.39-inch, 2340×1080 Samsung-made AMOLED display and… not much else. The screen is rectangular with no blemishes or interruptions. There’s a speaker grill on the top edge of the phone and then the bezels rapidly fall off, leaving you with basically an all-screen phone. Xiaomi says the Mi Mix 3 has a 93.4-percent screen-to-body ratio (although the company has provided inaccurate measurements of this stat in the past).

Just like an old-school Palm Pre or Nokia N95, the Mi Mix 3 is split vertically down the side into a front and back portion. The front half contains the screen and not much else, while the bottom half contains the battery, cameras, and processors. There’s a slider mechanism in between the two halves, so you can slide the screen down and the body up to reveal a new chunk of real-estate for the front camera. The slide-up area houses a 24MP front camera plus a second 2MP sensor to capture depth information for things like bokeh effects. The slider portion also seems to house the earpiece, and, presumably, it just passes through the speaker grill on the top.

Oh, snap!

Oppo really went overboard with the Find X slider, making it rise up and down with a tiny whirring motor. Here the slider needs to be started by hand, but after the initial push it becomes magnetically assisted. Here’s how Xiaomi puts it:

Mi MIX 3’s patented slider incorporates neodymium magnets that have been carefully calibrated. Once the screen is pushed down, the magnetic mechanism immediately kicks in and finishes the opening in a snap with just the right amount of force. Xiaomi has dedicated substantial resources to the production process to ensure the slider has a life expectancy of 300,000 cycles in lab tests.

It sounds like Xiaomi is not only bringing the slider phone back but also including a sweet snap action when it opens and closes. The top slider portion houses the earpiece for calls, so you slide the top part up to answer incoming calls. Hopefully this means you can also dramatically hang up on a call by slamming the slider down. (Please, Xiaomi!) When you’re not in a call, it appears the slider action is customizable, and you can have it open the selfie camera, start an app, or launch a shortcuts drawer.

The specs start about where you would expect: a 2.8GHz Snapdragon 845 (that’s 100MHz faster than normal!), 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 3200mAh battery. There’s 10W wireless charging (with a charger in the box!), a rear fingerprint reader, and a dual 12MP camera setup in the rear. There’s no headphone jack. Like the first Mi Mix, rather than a glass back panel, Xiaomi is using ceramic.

This starting spec will run RMB 3,299 (~$475), but if that’s not enough RAM for you, you can upgrade to an 8GB model for RMB 3,599 (~$518). If that’s still not enough, the highest-end model, called the (deep breath) “Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 Palace Museum Edition,” has 256GB of storage and a whopping 10GB of RAM for RMB 4,999 (~$719).

If you haven’t guessed from the pricing yet, this phone is destined for China at launch, with other markets to be announced later. The Mi Mix 3 launches in China on November 1, and a “5G” version will supposedly launch some time next year.

Listing image by Xiaomi

This week Microsoft released a new blog dedicated to the Windows Kernel internals. The purpose of the blog is to dive into the Kernel across a variety of architectures and delve into the elements, such as the evolution of the kernel, the components, the organization, and in this post, the focus was on the scheduler. The goal is to develop the blog over the next few months with insights into what goes on behind the scenes, and the reasons why it does what it does. However, we got a sneak peek into a big system that Microsoft looks like it is working on.

For those that want to read the blog, it’s really good. Take a look here:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel-Internals/One-Windows-Kernel/ba-p/267142

When discussing the scalability of Windows, the author Hari Pulapaka, Lead Program Manager in the Windows Core Kernel Platform, showcases a screenshot of Task Manager from what he describes as a ‘pre-release Windows DataCenter class machine’ running Windows. Here’s the image:

Click to zoom. Unfortunately the original image is low resolution

If you weren’t amazed by the number of threads in task manager, you might notice that on the side there’s a scroll bar. That’s right: 896 cores means 1792 threads when hyperthreading is enabled, which is too much for task manager to show at once, and this new type of ‘DataCenter class machine’ looks like it has access to them all. But what are we really seeing here, aside from every single thread loaded at 100%?

So to start, the CPU listed is a Xeon Platinum 8180, Intel’s highest core count, highest performing Xeon Scalable ‘Skylake-SP’ processor. It has 28 cores and 56 threads, and by math we get a 32 socket system. In fact in the bumf below the threads all running at 100%, it literally says ‘Sockets: 32’. So this is 32 full 28 core processors all acting together under one version of Windows. Again, the question is how?

Normally, Intel only rates Xeon Platinum processors for up to 8 sockets. It does this by using three QPI links per processor to form a dual-box configuration. The Xeon Gold 6100 range does up to four sockets with three QPI links, ensuring each processor is linked to each other processor, and then the rest of the range does single socket or dual socket.

What Intel doesn’t mention is that with an appropriate fabric connecting them, system builders and OEMs can chain together several 4-socket or 8-socket systems into a single, many-socket interface. Aside from the fabric to be used and the messaging, there are other factors in play here, such as latency and memory architecture, which are already present in 2-8 socket platforms but get substantially increased going beyond eight sockets. If one processor needs memory that is two fabric hops and a processor hop is away, to a certain extent having that data in a local SDD might be quicker.

As for the fabric: I’m actually going to use an analogy here. AMD’s EPYC platform goes up to two sockets, but for the interconnect between sockets, it uses 64 PCIe lanes from each processor to host AMD’s Infinity Fabric protocol to act as links, and has the benefit of the combined bandwidth of 128 PCIe lanes. If EPYC had 256 PCIe lanes for example, or cut the number of PCIe lanes down to 32 per link, then we could end up with EPYC servers with more than two sockets built on Infinity Fabric. With Intel CPUs, we’re still using the PCIe lanes, but we’re doing it in one of three ways: control over Omni-Path using PCIe, control over Infiniband using PCIe, or control using custom FPGAs, again over PCIe. This is essentially how modern supercomputers are run, albeit not as one unified system.

Unfortunately this is where we go out of my depth. When I spoke to a large server OEM last year, they said quad socket and eight socket systems are becoming rarer and rarer as each CPU by itself has more cores the need for systems that big just doesn’t exist anymore. Back in the days pre-Nehalem, the big eight socket 32-core servers were all the rage, but today not so much, and unless a company is willing to spend $250k+ (before support contracts or DRAM/NAND) on a single 8-socket system, it’s reserved for the big players in town. Today, those are the cloud providers.

In order to get 32 sockets, we’re likely seeing eight quad-socket systems connected in this way in one big blade infrastructure. It likely takes up half a rack, of not a whole one, and your guess is as good as mine on the price, or power consumption. In our screenshot above it does say ‘Virtualization: Enabled’, and given that this is Microsoft we’re talking about, this might be one of their internal planned Azure systems that is either rented to defence-like contractors or partitioned off in instances to others.

I’ve tried reaching out to Hari to get more information on the system this is, and will report back if we get anything. Microsoft may make an official announcement if these large 32-socket systems are going to be ‘widespread’ (meant in the leanest sense) offerings on Azure.

Note: DataCenter is stylized with a capital C as quoted through Microsoft’s blog post.

Related Reading

The European Parliament voted on Wednesday to enact a complete ban on some single-use plastics — such as drinking straws and disposable cutlery — across the European Union and a reduction on others in an effort to reduce ocean waste.

Members of the European Parliament passed the measure overwhelmingly, by a vote of 571 to 53, with 34 abstentions.

Before the legislation goes into effect, the European Parliament must negotiate with the European Council of government ministers from its member states. The council is expected to make a decision on Dec. 16.

“We have adopted the most ambitious legislation against single-use plastics. It is up to us now to stay the course in the upcoming negotiations with the Council,” Belgian MEP Frédérique Ries said in a news release. “It is essential in order to protect the marine environment and reduce the costs of environmental damage attributed to plastic pollution in Europe, estimated at 22 billion euros by 2030.”

The legislation calls for direct bans on single-use plastic items such as “plates, cutlery, straws, balloon sticks or cotton buds” by 2021.

Consumption of single-use plastics “for which no alternative exists,” such as single-use food boxes or containers for fruits, vegetables or ice cream, must be reduced by at least 25 percent by 2025, according to the legislation.

The measure also cracks down on fishing gear, such as monofilament fishing line, and tobacco waste. It seeks to reduce waste from tobacco products and cigarette filters containing plastic by 50 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2030.

“Member states should also ensure that at least 50 percent of lost or abandoned fishing gear containing plastic is collected per year, with a recycling target of at least 15 percent by 2025,” said the release. “Fishing gear represents 27 percent of waste found on Europe’s beaches.”

The measures also held tobacco producers and producers of fishing gear containing plastic more accountable — companies in those industries must cover the costs of waste collection for their products, “including transport, treatment and litter collection.”

The European Parliament also seeks to recycle a target of 90 percent of all recyclable drink bottles by 2025.

The measures are the latest in a growing, global movement to reduce single-use plastic waste. According to the European Commission, plastic makes up more than 80 percent of marine litter.

The United Nations announced last year that it was “declaring war” on ocean plastic:

“Each year, more than 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the oceans, wreaking havoc on marine wildlife, fisheries and tourism, and costing at least $8 billion in damage to marine ecosystems. Up to 80 per cent of all litter in our oceans is made of plastic.

“According to some estimates, at the rate we are dumping items such as plastic bottles, bags and cups after a single use, by 2050 oceans will carry more plastic than fish and an estimated 99 per cent of seabirds will have ingested plastic.”

The movement to eliminate plastic straws spread across the U.S. and other parts of the world this summer.

Starbucks said it would drop plastic straws worldwide by 2020, and Marriot International said it would do the same by next summer.

McDonald’s said it would use paper straws instead of plastic ones in some 1,300 restaurants in the U.K. and Ireland.

The

McLaren

Speedtail hypercar is finally here, and it’s a streamlined stunner. The whole car is slicker than a bar of soap, and everything about it is there to make it the fastest McLaren road car in history. Grilles and air intakes are kept small and out of the way. It has a long tapering tail. The front wheels have large smooth covers. One of the particularly curious parts is the rear active spoiler. It consists of flaps that appear to not have any kind of joint or gap where they lift.

The cockpit is suitably futuristic and unique, too. As the company previously mentioned, the seat is in the center, as with the old McLaren F1 road car. Immediately in front of the driver is the steering wheel and a main screen for instruments, and to either side are additional screens for other information and interfaces. At the base of either pillar are two smaller screens which are connected to cameras that substitute side mirrors for less drag. In what seems like a nod to airplanes, key controls including the gear select buttons and other knobs and switches are above the driver on the ceiling.

McLaren revealed about its ultimate Ultimate Series car on Friday, offering details only hinted at before. The automaker says the Speedtail is its most aerodynamic car ever, and that this was its “singleminded vision” — not hard to believe, looking at it: “A jaw-dropping elongated body makes it as much a work of art as a masterpiece of technology.” It’s also McLaren’s fastest, with a

hybrid

powertrain putting out over 1,000 horsepower.

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