Slashdot Mirror

Reader joshtops writes: Indian ride-hailing company Ola, which operates in over 100 cities in the local country, is eyeing international expansion, according to a report, which cites multiple sources. The company, which leads rival Uber in India's ride-hailing market, has been looking at international markets for some time, and it has identified India's neighbours Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh as the first international countries where it will offer its services, the report added. Rival Uber already operates in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Ola is also eyeing other countries in Asia and North Africa to continue this expansion in the future, another person requesting anonymity told Gadgets 360. [...] Ola is exploring international markets at a time when Uber is increasingly expanding its reach in India. The global ride-hailing service, which operates in over 500 cities, is presently available in 29 cities in the country. India has become the fastest growing market for Uber, especially in the wake of its exit from China. The report adds that an alliance by US' Lyft, South Asia's Grab, China's Didi, and India's Ola, which they formed to utilize each other's resources to better fight Uber, ended this year. Now the companies could become direct competitors.

The fight over net neutrality just got more interesting as two tech giants said they will step off the sidelines and join a so-called "day of action" on July 12, which aims to preserve rules that forbid Internet providers from favoring some websites over others. From a report: Until now, Google and Facebook -- which have been staunch supporters of net neutrality in the past -- have stayed out of the debate. But this week, they confirmed they will join other companies in telling consumers to oppose the FCC's plan to tear up the current rules. The participation of Google and Facebook in the day-of-action campaign could be a game-changer because their sites are visited by hundreds of millions of Americans, and a message from them could rally new opposition to the FCC plan. The two tech giants have yet to explain what specific actions -- such as displaying a banner on their homepage -- they will take. Other companies that are participating in the protest are.

France is planning to ban the sale of any car that uses petrol or diesel fuel by 2040. The planned ban on fossil fuel vehicles is part of a renewed commitment to the Paris climate deal, reports BBC. From the report: Hybrid cars make up about 3.5% of the French market, with pure electric vehicles accounting for just 1.2%. It is not yet clear what will happen to existing fossil fuel vehicles still in use in 2040. President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement in June was explicitly named as a factor in France's new vehicle plan. "France has decided to become carbon neutral by 2050 following the U.S. decision," Nicolas Hulot, France's ecology minister, said, adding that the government would have to make investments to meet that target. Poorer households would receive financial assistance to replace older, more polluting vehicles with cleaner ones, he said. Other targets set in the French environmental plan include ending coal power plants by 2022, reducing nuclear power to 50% of total output by 2025, and ending the issuance of new oil and gas exploration licenses.

Microsoft announced a major reorganization on Wednesday that will include thousands of layoffs, largely in sales. From a report: The job cuts amount to less that 10 percent of the company's total sales force, and about 75 percent of them will be outside the U.S., the company said. Reports from last week suggested this was going to happen, and that Microsoft was going to specifically focus on how it sells its cloud services product, Azure. Microsoft's cloud business has been booming over recent quarters -- Microsoft noted Azure sales growth of 93 percent last quarter. While Amazon has become a bigger competitor in the space, Microsoft's restructuring is to pivot to software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure.

New submitter joshtops shares a report from Scientific American: As NASA makes plans to one day send humans to Mars, one of the key technical gaps the agency is working to fill is how to provide enough power on the Red Planet's surface for fuel production, habitats and other equipment. One option: small nuclear fission reactors, which work by splitting uranium atoms to generate heat, which is then converted into electric power. NASA's technology development branch has been funding a project called Kilopower for three years, with the aim of demonstrating the system at the Nevada National Security Site near Las Vegas. Testing is due to start in September and end in January 2018. The last time NASA tested a fission reactor was during the 1960s' Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power, or SNAP, which developed two types of nuclear power systems. The first system -- radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs -- taps heat released from the natural decay of a radioactive element, such as plutonium. RTGs have powered dozens of space probes over the years, including the Curiosity rover currently exploring Mars. The second technology developed under SNAP was an atom-splitting fission reactor. SNAP-10A was the first -- and so far, only -- U.S. nuclear power plant to operate in space. Launched on April 3, 1965, SNAP-10A operated for 43 days, producing 500 watts of electrical power, before an unrelated equipment failure ended the demonstration. The spacecraft remains in Earth orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cox, the third largest U.S. cable company, last week started charging overage fees to customers in four more states. Internet provider CenturyLink, on the other hand, recently ended an experiment with data caps and is giving bill credits to customers in the state of Washington who were charged overage fees during the yearlong trial. Cox, which operates in 18 states with about six million residential and business customers, last week brought overage fees to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Cox was already enforcing data caps and overage fees in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. California, Rhode Island, and Virginia technically have monthly caps but no enforcement of overage fees, according to Cox's list of data caps by location. Massachusetts and North Carolina seem to be exempt from the Cox data caps altogether. Similar to Comcast, Cox lets capped customers use 1TB of data a month and charges $10 for each additional block of 50GB. Cox will introduce a pricier "unlimited" plan later this year, Multichannel News reported. If Cox continues to match Comcast's pricing, the unlimited data plan would cost an additional $50 a month above what customers normally pay. A year ago, CenturyLink started a data-cap trial in Yakima, Washington, imposing a 300GB-per-month cap and overage fees of $10 for each additional 50GB. But instead of expanding the overage fees to more cities, CenturyLink ended the "usage-based billing program."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is moving ahead with plans to try out deflection techniques on a passing asteroid to prepare for future, threatening space matter. From a report: The space agency has entered the preliminary design phase for its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). This represents the first trial of what's called the "kinetic impactor technique" of asteroid deflection. Put another way, NASA hopes that by hurling a refrigerator-sized spacecraft at one of the space rocks at a speed roughly nine times that of a bullet, it can knock the asteroid off course and save the Earth. The plan is to launch the first DART satellite at a binary asteroid called Didymos ("Twins"); the twin asteroids are scheduled to pass by earth in 2022 and 2024. (Neither pass poses any threat, according to NASA.) By striking one of the two asteroids, scientists will be able to measure the impact of the collision.

Volvo has announced that starting in 2019, all of the new models it produces will be electric or hybrid. From a report: "This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car," said Hakan Samuelsson, Volvo president and chief executive, in a statement. "Volvo Cars has stated that it plans to have sold a total of 1 million electrified cars by 2025. When we said it we meant it. This is how we are going to do it." The move makes Volvo the first traditional automaker to set a date to phase out cars powered only by internal combustion engines, Reuters reports. The company said it will launch five fully electric cars between 2019 and 2021. Three of these will be Volvos, and two will be sold under the company's Polestar "electrified performance brand."

Hanoi -- a city of five million motorbikes -- is planning to ban the popular two-wheeled transport by 2030. From a report: The city council voted for the ban almost unanimously, hoping to unclog roads and reduce soaring levels of pollution. The council has also promised to increase public transport so that half the population are using it by 2030, instead of the current 12 percent. But some residents think it very unlikely the bikes will go for good. Council officials decided to put "immediate management measures" in place after a report found the number of motorbikes in Hanoi was set to grow at an "alarming" rate. Some studies suggest there are already as many as 2,500 motorbikes per kilometre. According to the non-governmental group GreenID, the city recorded 282 days of "excessive" levels of PM2.5, which is harmful to human health, last year.

Norway, which is the largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East, is set to become the first country in the world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings. The country plans to pass legislation that will stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards. The Independent reports: Vidar Helgesenlaid, the nation's Environment Minister, laid out the plans in a statement, saying: "Those using fossil oil for heating must find other options by 2020." The country advises its citizens to research alternatives to oil such as heat pumps, hydroelectricity, and even special stoves that burn wood chips. By some stage, the legislation could be widened to include restrictions on using natural gas to heat buildings. The Ministry of Climate and Environment said the ban would apply to both new and old buildings and cover both private homes and the public space of businesses and state-owned facilities. The ministry says the plans are expected to lessen Norway's emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by an estimated 340,000 tons per year, compared to overall national emissions of 53.9 million tons in 2015.

An anonymous reader writes Budget airline VivaColombia is considering plans to remove all seats from its planes and make passengers stand. They hope the move will drive down fares by allowing them to squeeze more passengers into each flight, opening up air travel to working class Colombians and budget holidaymakers. The no-frills carrier announced last week that it is adding 50 new Airbus 320s to its fleet to capitalise on the country's growing tourist market. The new planes will have more seats and lower running costs with the first one going into service at the start of 2018. VivaColombia's founder and CEO William Shaw told the Miami Herald the airline was looking into vertical travel options. He said: "There are people out there right now researching whether you can fly standing up -- we're very interested in anything that makes travel less expensive." He added: "Who cares if you don't have an inflight entertainment system for a one-hour flight? Who cares that there aren't marble floors... or that you don't get free peanuts?"

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is poised to layoff thousands of employees worldwide in a move to reorganize its salesforce. A source with knowledge of the planned downsizing told TechCrunch that the U.S. firm would lay off "thousands" of staff across the world. The restructuring is set to include an organizational merger that involves its enterprise customer unit and one or more of its SME-focused divisions. The changes are set to be announced this coming week, we understand. Microsoft declined to comment. Earlier this weekend, the Puget Sound Business Journal, Bloomberg and The Seattle Times all reported 'major' layoffs related to a move to increase the emphasis on cloud services within Microsoft's sales teams worldwide. Bloomberg said the redundancies would be "some of the most significant in the sales force in years."

Jim Hall is celebrating the 23rd birthday of the FreeDOS Project, calling it "a major milestone for any free software or open-source software project," and remembering how it all started. An anonymous reader quotes Linux Journal: If you remember Windows 3.1 at the time, it was a pretty rough environment. I didn't like that you could interact with Windows only via a mouse; there was no command line. I preferred working at the command line. So I was understandably distressed in 1994 when I read via various tech magazines that Microsoft planned to eliminate MS-DOS with the next version of Windows. I decided that if the next evolution of Windows was going to be anything like Windows 3.1, I wanted nothing to do with it... I decided to create my own version of DOS. And on June 29, 1994, I posted an announcement to a discussion group... Our "PD-DOS" project (for "Public Domain DOS") quickly grew into FreeDOS. And 23 years later, FreeDOS is still going strong! Today, many people around the world install FreeDOS to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software or develop embedded systems...

FreeDOS has become a modern DOS, due to the large number of developers that continue to work on it. You can download the FreeDOS 1.2 distribution and immediately start coding in C, Assembly, Pascal, BASIC or a number of other software development languages. The standard FreeDOS editor is quite nice, or you can select from more than 15 different editors, all included in the distribution. You can browse websites with the Dillo graphical web browser, or do it "old school" via the Lynx text-mode web browser. And for those who just want to play some great DOS games, you can try adventure games like Nethack or Beyond the Titanic, arcade games like Wing and Paku Paku, flight simulators, card games and a bunch of other genres of DOS games.
On his "Open Source Software and Usability" blog, Jim says he's been involved with open source software "since before anyone coined the term 'open source'," and first installed Linux on his home PC in 1993. Over on the project's blog, he's also sharing appreciative stories from FreeDOS users and from people involved with maintaining it (including memories of early 1980s computers like the Sinclair ZX80, the Atari 800XL and the Coleco Adam). Any Slashdot readers have their own fond memories to share?

An anonymous reader quotes CNN: The second launch of China's new-generation Long March-5 carrier rocket failed Sunday -- dealing a blow to the country's ambitious space aspirations. Carrying an experimental communications satellite, China's largest rocket lifted off at 7:23 p.m. local time (7:23 a.m. ET) toward clear skies from the seaside Wenchang space launch center on the southern Chinese island of Hainan. But 40 minutes later, the state-run Xinhua news agency flashed a headline declaring the launch a failure -- without providing any details.

Dubbed "Chubby 5" for its huge size -- 5 meters in diameter and 57 meters tall -- the LM-5 rocket is designed to carry up to 25 tons of payload into low orbit, more than doubling the country's previous lift capability... The launch failure means further delay for a series of planned Chinese space endeavors -- including its robotic and eventual human lunar programs -- according to Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the US Naval War College and an expert on China's space program... China has announced plans to land a robotic probe on the dark side of the moon later this year and to reach Mars around 2020. All such future missions will depend on the LM-5 and space officials told reporters Sunday that the latest launch would help perfect the rocket design, including enabling it to send a space station into orbit "in a year or two."
This morning Elon Musk tweeted his condolences, adding "I know how painful that is to the people who designed & built it."

An anonymous reader quotes InfoWorld:With a new round of voting completed this week, the Java Community Process Executive Committee passed by a 24-0 vote the Java Platform Module System public review ballot, the subject of Java Specification Request 376. In May, the same group, citing concerns over the plan being disruptive and lacking consensus, voted the measure down, 13 to 10... Red Hat, which voted no on the previous ballot but abstained from the latest one, said there were still several items in the current proposal that it wanted further work on. "However, we do not want to delay the Java 9 release," Red Hat said. Getting "real world" feedback on the modularity system will be key to determine where further changes need to occur, Red Hat said. The Eclipse Foundation, Hazelcast, and Twitter, all of which voted no previously and yes this time around, cited sufficient progress with modularity.
Java 9 is still slated for release on September 21st.

An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times: At an exclusive gathering at a golf resort near Lisbon, the big minds of monetary policy were seriously discussing the risk that artificial intelligence could eliminate jobs on a scale that would dwarf previous waves of technological change. "There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalpyse upon us?'" David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an audience Tuesday that included Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and dozens of other top central bankers and economists... [A]long with the optimism is a fear that the economic expansion might bypass large swaths of the population, in part because a growing number of jobs could be replaced by computers capable of learning -- artificial intelligence.

Policymakers and economists conceded that they have not paid enough attention to how much technology has hurt the earning power of some segments of society, or planned to address the concerns of those who have lost out... In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way... But artificial intelligence threatens broad categories of jobs previously seen as safe from automation, such as legal assistants, corporate auditors and investment managers. Large groups of people could become obsolete, suffering the same fate as plow horses after the invention of the tractor. "More and more, we are seeing economists saying, 'This time could be different,'âS" said Autor, who presented a paper on the subject that he wrote with Anna Salomons, an associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics in the Netherlands.
Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see, Autor concluded. "I say not Robocalpyse now. Perhaps Robocalpyse later."

Social media companies face fines of up to 50m Euro ($57m) if they persistently fail to remove illegal content from their sites under a new law passed in Germany. From a report: The German parliament on Friday approved the bill aimed at cracking down on hate speech, criminal material and fake news on social networks -- but critics warn it could have drastic consequences for free speech online. Germany has some of the world's toughest laws covering defamation, public incitement to commit crimes and threats of violence, with prison sentences for Holocaust denial or inciting hatred against minorities. The measure requires social media platforms to remove obviously illegal hate speech and other postings within 24 hours after receiving a notification or complaint, and to block other offensive content within seven days. The German justice minister, Heiko Maas, who was the driving force behind the bill, said: "Freedom of speech ends where the criminal law begins."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Limited partners in venture capital funds are having conversations about how to prevent themselves from investing in the next Binary Capital, the Silicon Valley firm that has collapsed over allegations that one of its co-founders sexually harassed female entrepreneurs. This includes the largest LP trade group -- the Institutional Limited Partners Association -- which tells Axios that it is planning to address these issues this summer, as part of the development of its new ILPA Principles 3.0 document. Silicon Valley, and venture capital in particular, has swept sexual harassment under the rug for decades. Binary Capital, coming on top of the situation at Uber, has grabbed that rug and begun to shake it vigorously.

Facebook has completed a second test of a solar-powered drone -- called Aquila -- designed to bring internet access to remote parts of the world. From a report: Facebook plans to develop a fleet of drones powered by sunlight that will fly for months at a time, communicating with each other through lasers and extending internet connectivity to the ground below. The company called the first test, in June 2016, a success after it flew above the Arizona desert for 1 hour and 36 minutes, three times longer than planned. It later said the drone had also crashed moments before landing and had suffered a damaged wing.

Japan plans to put a man on the moon around 2030, according to a new proposal by the government's Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). From a report: It is the first time JAXA has revealed an intention to send Japanese astronauts beyond the International Space Station, and it will mostly likely be part of an international mission, the agency said. The announcement from Japan is just the latest in a series of ambitious space exploration plans by Asian countries, with the increasing competition for space-related power and prestige in the region echoing that of the Cold War space race of the mid-20th century. In December 2016, China announced plans to land a rover on Mars by 2020 as well as a manned mission to the Moon at some point in the future.