Month: January 2016

The much-maligned Java browser plugin, source of so many security flaws over the years, is to be killed off by Oracle. It will not be mourned.

Oracle, which acquired Java as part of its 2010 purchase of Sun Microsystems, has announced that the plugin will be deprecated in the next release of Java, version 9, which is currently available as an early access beta. A future release will remove it entirely.

Of course, Oracle's move is arguably a day late and a dollar short. Chrome started deprecating browser plugins last April, with Firefox announcing similar plans in October. Microsoft's new Edge browser also lacks any support for plugins. Taken together, it doesn't really matter much what Oracle does: even if the company continued developing and supporting its plugin, the browser vendors themselves were making it an irrelevance. Only Internet Explorer 11, itself a legacy browser that's receiving only security fixes, is set to offer any continued plugin support.

Sam Machkovech

Say hello to the HTC Vive Pre—the near-final version of the VR system. The headset comes complete with wo tracking wands and two laser-tracking stations.

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SEATTLE, Washington—Valve and HTC took the wraps off of their latest, near-final version of the Vive virtual reality system at this month's CES, but we barely got a chance to play with the refreshed headset. That changed on Wednesday thanks to an event hosted in Valve's hometown of Seattle, where the company offered Ars 12 lengthy demos of upcoming games and apps.

Our detailed impressions of those dozen demos are forthcoming, but in the meantime, we have good news. The pre-release Vive Pre hardware may not be phenomenally better than the original Vive dev kit, but every change has made an already-impressive VR system feel that much more complete, comfortable, and worth salivating over.

Like the original HTC Vive dev kit, the Vive Pre asks users to wear a VR headset whilst walking around a pre-defined, real-life space and holding motion-tracked wands in each hand. These wands' main buttons are still a gun-like trigger and a thumb-accessible, clickable trackpad; in addition, the handle has a button on each side of the controller's grip, and those are now positioned for easier hand access. New menu buttons have been placed above and below the trackpad, as well.

A startup led by the founder of Aereo says it plans to sell wireless Internet service with speeds of 1Gbps in Boston and then other cities.

Project Decibel was founded by Chet Kanojia, the founder and CEO of the ill-fated TV-over-the-Internet startup Aereo. While Aereo was doomed by a copyright battle with television networks, Kanojia is giving it a shot in the home Internet market dominated by cable companies and telcos.

Project Decibel's "Starry" Internet service "will launch its first beta in the Greater Boston area in the summer of 2016," with additional cities being announced later in the year, the company said. Project Decibel is based both in Boston and New York City.

(credit: Ferran Rodenas)

Members of VMware's "Hosted UI" team—the developers responsible for the virtualization company's Workstation and Fusion desktop products—were apparently laid off on Monday as part of a restructuring of the company that was announced yesterday. The developers were just a part of a larger layoff as the company moved to cut costs and brought aboard a new chief financial officer.

"VMware… announced a restructuring and realignment of approximately 800 roles," a company spokesperson said in a press release Monday, "and plans to take a GAAP charge estimated to be between $55 million and $65 million related to this action over the course of the first half of 2016. The company plans to reinvest the associated savings in field, technical and support resources associated with growth products."

In a blog post, Christian Hammond, a former member of the Hosted UI team, reported the layoff, along with concerns about the future of the "award winning and profitable" desktop virtualization products. "VMware lost a lot of amazing people, and will be feeling that for some time to come, once they realize what they’ve done," Hammond wrote. "It’s a shame. As for our team, well, I think everyone will do just fine. Some of the best companies in the Silicon Valley are full of ex-VMware members, many former Hosted UI, who would probably welcome the chance to work with their teammates again."

Board of the Wikimedia Foundation in July 2015, at an event in Mexico City. (credit: Pierre-Selim Huard)

The newest addition to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Tesla VP of Human Resources Arnnon Geshuri, has stepped down just a few weeks after he was appointed.

Geshuri's appointment was immediately controversial with editors of the site. The controversy grew this weekend when Ashley Van Haeften, who goes by the username Fae on Wikipedia, initiated a non-binding "vote of no confidence", in which Wikipedia's volunteer editors asked the board to remove Geshuri. The vote was ultimately 290-22 in favor of Geshuri's removal.

Geshuri's decision was announced in an e-mail message written by current board Chair Patricio Lorente and Vice-chair Alice Wiegand. The message reads:

A new Windows 10 insider version has been released.

The new build doesn't bring much that you'll notice. For the past few months, Microsoft has been updating and refining the processes used to build and develop Windows 10 to better meet the needs of a continuously developed, continuously delivered operating system, and this has meant that user visible feature work has taken a back seat. But the new build does have one big change: its build number has leaped from 11107 to 14251.

This isn't because the company quickly rattled off 300-odd builds in the last couple of weeks but because of continued synchronization between Windows 10 on the PC and Windows 10 Mobile. The build numbers had already been synced between the two versions, but various internal components were different. These differences are being eliminated as the codebases are unified and brought together. As part of unifying the code, the build numbers have to be brought together, too. It happens that the Mobile fork was already using higher version numbers internally than the desktop one, so the desktop operating system has had to have its build number rolled forward.

Computers have already beaten the best humans at Checkers, Chess, and Jeopardy, but mastery of the ancient Chinese game Go has eluded computer scientists for the longest time. Deepmind, Google's artificial intelligence division, claims to have made a big breakthrough using neural networks, and it recently took on and defeated a Go world champion.

As Google's blog posts puts it, "There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions" in Go, which makes the game very complex. Mapping out every possible move won't work for Go, making it the one game computers can't beat humans at. Performing well at Go is considered by some to be a benchmark for artificial intelligence.

Deepmind's AI, called "AlphaGo," recently took on reigning three-time European Go champion Fan Hui and won all five games. In March, AlphaGo has a throw-down scheduled with Lee Sedol, who has been the top Go player in the world for the past decade.