The Linux Foundation Open Source Leadership Summit is the premier forum where open source leaders convene to drive digital transformation with open source technologies and learn how to collaboratively manage the largest shared technology investment of our time.
An intimate, by invitation only event, Open Source Leadership Summit fosters innovation, growth and partnerships among the leading projects and corporations working in open technology development. It is a must-attend for business and technical leaders looking to advance open source strategy, implementation and investment.
Open Networking Summit is the industry’s premier open networking event, gathering enterprises, service providers and cloud providers across the ecosystem to share learnings, highlight innovation and discuss the future of Open Source Networking, including SDN, NFV, orchestration and the automation of cloud, network, & IoT services.
Thanks to the sheer ubiquity of Red Dead Redemption 2, video game fans are seeing a lot of cowboy imagery these days. But you don't need to buy Rockstar's open-world blockbuster to indulge your inner cattleman. Between now and November 17, anyone with an Amazon/Twitch Prime account can pick up some free cowboy-themed loot for the PC version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.
To get your PUBG freebies, head over to Twitch and click on the crown-shaped icon at the top. That opens a dropdown menu with all of the free items you have available. Among them is the PUBG Gunslinger's Crate. This loot set contains five gunslinger outfit items and two weapon skins (Engraved R45 and Engraved S686). As usual, the items don't affect gameplay, but they sure do make you look stylish.
To make the items appear in your game, you'll need to open PUBG and sign in, then click the Twitch "Glitch" icon in the upper right corner of the lobby screen. There, you can link your PUBG account to Twitch, after which you'll find the loot in your inventory.
Other recent Twitch Prime freebies include a monthly set of free PC games, a Golden Loot Box for Overwatch, colorful outfits in Rainbow Six Siege, as well as freebies for Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Warframe. All of the free items are available for a limited time, so make sure you collect the ones you want before they vanish forever.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 10-30-2018, 10:31 PM - Forum: Windows
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Transforming higher education to address the skills gap
Digital transformation is reshaping every aspect of our lives – how we live, learn, and work. This transformation impacts the skills students need to succeed both in the workplace of today and in the future, when they will be tasked with solving the most complex issues of any generation in history.
As a company, Microsoft has a vested interest in the skills economy that will drive future breakthroughs in innovation. Further, as parents, colleagues and citizens, we feel compelled to help support digital transformation in Higher Education, so that every student has an opportunity to learn what we call future-readyskills.
So, what can we do to help?
To help students acquire future-ready skills, we believe there are three key focus areas we must address in the near term:
Support future-ready skills curricula while ensuring learning tools are accessible to all students
Empower institutions with tools to improve student engagement, experiences, and outcomes
Create safe and secure learning environments in the classroom and online
This week at the EDUCAUSE 2018 Annual Conference, Microsoft Education will share our new future-ready skills offering, new solutions for student success and lifecycle management, and advancements in safety and security. All are aimed at empowering Higher Education institutions to drive future-ready skills in safe and secure learning environments with successful outcomes.
Future-ready skills and accessible learning
As cyberthreats increase, so too does the demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals. Businesses need experts that can protect key systems, detect threats early on, and minimize business impact in the event of a security incident.
The new Microsoft Professional Program (MPP) Certificate in Cybersecurity was built to address the evolving landscape of threats businesses face and to enable students to develop the skills needed to start or grow a cybersecurity career. This 10-course MPP Cybersecurity track provides online courses, hands-on labs, and expert instruction to learn how to safeguard key systems, develop a cybersecurity defense plan, detect threats early, and minimize the business impact of information breaches. See the Microsoft Professional Program for CyberSecurity available on Microsoft’s Learning as a Service platform, delivered on OpenEdEx.
On campus, Higher Education Institutions depend on physical computer labs for classroom learning and development and test scenarios. Now, with Azure Lab Services, educators and IT admins can easily create computer labs in the cloud: automatically scale the number of virtual machines to the usage needed at the cost threshold you set, and delete the lab with a single click once you’re done. The service empowers professors, technicians, and students to work with virtual machines in the cloud without having to master the complexities of setting up the cloud infrastructure. Get an introduction, take a tutorial, or set up a classroom lab visit.
A key benefit to learning through technology, whether in the classroom or online, is that it can make content and engagement accessible to all students. Tools like Immersive Reader, Read Aloud and Dictation within Learning Tools help students of all abilities read, write and communicate. Building on top of these tools, new offerings like auto-generated captions and transcriptions for videos in English and Spanish are available with Microsoft Stream, in all Education plans of Office 365 for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (coming soon for audio and video in OneDrive and SharePoint Online). Capabilities such as Accessibility Checker and Automatic Alt-Text are also available in familiar applications such as Word and PowerPoint, to help content creators make visually compelling and accessible content for all learners.
Student success and lifecycle management
The new Dynamics Higher Education Accelerator, announced at EDUCAUSE today and available open-sourced on GitHub, makes it easier for all partners and developers to create new apps and workflows in Dynamics 365, enabling them to take new products to market faster. It contains industry standard data entities (e.g. student, course, test scores, etc.), pre-built dashboards, workflows, and sample data, as well as other tools to help partners and developers rapidly build business and analytic solutions for Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform.
CampusNexus Engage, scheduled to be generally available in December 2018, is the outcome of a collaboration project between Microsoft and Campus Management, built using the Higher Education Accelerator.
In October, Campus Management announced that AccelerEd, a UMUC Ventures portfolio company bringing academic enablement and next-generation technology to educational institutions, has selected the CampusNexus® Suite on behalf of University of Maryland University College (UMUC). UMUC and AccelerEd will use CampusNexus, running on Microsoft’s Azure and Dynamics 365 platform, to increase student engagement, retention, and improve graduation rates through personalized experiences.
“At AccelerEd, our institutional relationships are always focused on improving the customer experience, advancing academic delivery, realizing cost efficiencies and creating a platform for growth and innovation in today’s competitive higher education landscape,” said AccelerEd President Tracy Woods. “Campus Management and Microsoft offer a technology collaboration that delivers on our performance expectations and our customer’s vision.”
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Physical safety and online security
Our students live in an age of increased physical threats on campus, including gun violence, natural disasters and other safety risks. At the same time, data breaches, where personal information is stolen, and student cyberbullying are also a real concern. All potential hazards mandate the use of the strongest security technology, monitoring, notification and emergency response systems and technologies on today’s campuses.
Microsoft provides a comprehensive, intelligent, and extensible cloud platform to help keep students safe and secure in the classroom and online. Microsoft Threat Protection, announced last month at Ignite, is a new end-to-end solution that detects cyberthreats, remediates their effects, and protects Institutions from new and changing threats. It is Microsoft’s most comprehensive security solution and combines the intelligence of Microsoft’s security products. Microsoft co-sell ready partners provide solutions for access control, video surveillance and more.
Azure Digital Twins, a new IoT platform available in public preview on Oct. 15, will enable partners to build comprehensive digital models on any physical environment. These virtually represent the physical world and enable custom solutions that address Institutional needs to develop even more safe and secure learning environments on campus. Learn more about Microsoft Threat Protection and get the ebook on Physical Safety and Security.
For more information about Microsoft’s efforts across higher education, visit us at Microsoft’s Higher Education site.
In Football Manager 2019 YOU are the author of your club's success: you define the tactics and style of play, and drive player recruitment to build the ultimate squad. You take an active role on the training ground, developing your squad and fine-tuning the preparations for upcoming matches.
Then, when Match Day arrives, you take your place on the touchline, overseeing proceedings as your players cross that magical white line. Now, your footballing vision is put to the test! Will the perfect substitution or tactical tweak be the difference between an agonising defeat or an ecstatic victory?
Features:
* Test your skills in 50 of the biggest footballing countries.
* Climb to the top of the table and beyond with any one of world's top 2500 clubs.
* Play the transfer market and scout more than 500,000 real players and staff.
* Watch your unique football vision play-out on our acclaimed 3D engine.
No Man's Sky "The Abyss" Update Explores The Ocean Depths
No Man's Sky has launched a free update that explores a slightly different kind of black void. The Abyss is available now, and adds more detail to underwater environments and some heavily reworked gameplay elements for exploring the briny depths of a planet.
A post on the PlayStation Blog detailed the update, titled The Abyss. It introduces five times more variety for aquatic environments and more variety of creature behaviors. Underwater creatures appear more frequently, and more unique and scary underwater creatures have been added. You can also explore sunken wrecks to scavenge their cargo, customize a new submarine called the Nautilon, and build an underwater base of operations with more than a dozen new base parts
For a more narrative experience, you can play a new story scenario called The Dreams of the Deep. In it, you'll uncover the mysteries of a stranded crew or someone lost in the depths of the ocean.
This is part of the continuing ongoing content following No Man's Sky Next, the big title update that served as a sort of second launch for the once-beleaguered game. That update itself added all sorts of new space oddities and quality-of-life improvements. The 1.58 update also added weekly content updates for long-term play.
The Abyss update specifically mentions that this is part of Hello Games' plan for ongoing large title updates to complement the ongoing smaller-scale reworks. This one is focused on the oceans of waterlogged planets, but it seems the studio has more large updates in the works as well.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 10-30-2018, 04:30 PM - Forum: Windows
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ID@Xbox celebrates release of 1,000 titles
Before we announced the ID@Xbox program, we did a listening tour in 2012 with more than 50 developers to help us shape a program that really worked for developers. At the time, it felt like a lot of people! It’s almost surreal that we’re now looking at thousands of talented people working at more than 3,000 studios independently creating games for millions of players around the world on Xbox One and Windows 10 with the ID@Xbox program. It’s an amazing feeling to not only see how much the independent development scene has grown over the years, but also to be part of a program that empowers and helps independent developers continue to do what they love.
Sixty-seven countries across the globe, over four billion hours played by the community and more than a billion dollars in digital revenue later, we’re thrilled to share that 1,000 games have been released through the ID@Xbox program. Joining some of our most memorable releases like Studio MDHR’s Cuphead, Fullbright’s Tacoma, playdead’s INSIDE, Chucklefish’s Stardew Valley, Matt Makes Games’ Celeste and The Behemoth’s Pit People, games including Team17’s Overcooked 2, Dark Star’s Sinner: Sacrifice for Redemption and Pixel Trip Studios’ The Videokid launched this year helping push us to this new milestone.
Over these past five years, we’ve seen the releases of incredible titles across every single genre imaginable – and lots of games we never could have imagined when we got started! We’re stoked that ID@Xbox is continuing to offer developers a place to share their stories in a meaningful way, helping to increase independent game discoverability and shaping Xbox One and Windows 10 as platforms that anyone can make games on and create with. We’re continuing to celebrate this momentum into the future and bring even more rad experiences to players with upcoming titles like Slow Bros.’s Harold Halibut, Capybara Games’ Below, Aurora 44’s Ashen, Black Desert from Pearl Abyss and Sable from Shedworks.
The 1,000th release this month marks an important milestone for ID@Xbox, and we’re taking the opportunity to look back on the impact our development partners and fans have had on the program:
Above all, thank you to the fans that have shown independent developers an indescribable amount of love on Xbox since day one, and thank you to the developers that keep making awesome game and giving us great feedback on a daily basis about how we can improve our program. We’re psyched to help developers bring us more surprises, more outside-of-the-box thinking and discovering new ways to push boundaries within gaming.
Stay tuned to Xbox Wire for more exciting updates on awesome games coming from independent developers via ID@Xbox!
55 Percent of Cloud Developers Contribute to Open Source, Says Survey
In presenting the results of its survey of 4,300 cloud developers, DigitalOcean seemed surprised that only 55 percent of respondents contribute to open source projects. Yet to tech outsiders — or old-timers — it may be more surprising that more than half of developers do contribute. There are relatively few professions in which companies and their employers regularly offer pro bono services for the greater good of the industry.
DigitalOcean, which provides cloud infrastructure software and services, has timed its “Currents” survey release in conjunction with the conclusion of its fifth annual Hacktoberfest program. Co-hosted with GitHub and twilio, Hacktoberfest invites developers to collaborate during the month of October on a smorgasbord of open source projects.
Corporate leaders appear to be sending mixed messages to their developers about open source. Although 71 percent of respondents to the DigitalOcean survey said that their employers “expect them to use open source software as part of their day-to-day development work,” employers are less supportive of their developers contributing to software that doesn’t directly benefit the company. Only 34 percent of respondents said they were given time to work on open source projects not related to work.
Younger developers more willing to contribute
The report reveals some encouraging signs, as well. Some 37 percent of the developers said they would contribute more to open source if their companies gave them the time to do so. In addition, despite some 44 percent of respondents saying they don’t contribute because they feel they lack the right skills and 45 percent saying they don’t know how to get started, the less experienced, and presumably younger, developers appear more open to contributing. A total of 60 percent of developers with five or fewer years of experience contribute to open source, while the number is “significantly less” for developers with more experience, says DigitalOcean. This bodes well for future contribution levels.
Developers in India were more likely to contribute to open source projects (68 percent) than any other nationality. Although DigitalOcean did not speculate, this may be due in part to the younger average age of Indian developers.
Motivations to contribute include the opportunity to improve coding skills, learn new technologies, and advance one’s career. Also noted was the less tangible benefit of being part of a community.
Among the many other findings in the survey, the leading programming language for open source projects was JavaScript (62 percent) followed by Python at 52 percent. The only other languages over 20 percent were PHP (29 percent), Java (28 percent), and CSS (25 percent). When asked which open source projects have “excited you the most” over the last three years, the React.js JavaScript library for building UIs took the top spot with 468 mentions, followed by Kubernetes (335), Docker (252), Linux (240), and Tensorflow (226).
Companies are failing to lead the open source charge by example. Only 18 percent of employees said their companies actively participated in open source organizations such as the listed examples: Apache Foundation, Node.js Foundation, and Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Three out of four respondents said their companies have donated $1,000 or less to such organizations over the last year.
Not surprisingly, high cost was the leading reason (38 percent) why companies skimp on open source donations and labor contributions. This was followed by a preference for in-house development (33 percent) and lack of knowledge of the listed organizations (27 percent). More promisingly, 29 percent said their companies plan to contribute to such organizations in the future.
When asked which of the five leading tech companies were doing the most to support open source, 53 percent listed Google, and Microsoft came in second at 23 percent. Next came Facebook (10%), Amazon (4%), and Apple (1%). Although IBM does not appear on this list, its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat this weekend — the largest software acquisition in history — should boost its already extensive open source contributions in cloud software.
Sega Launches Official Online Merchandise Stores In UK And Europe
New official Sega merchandise stores for the UK and Europe are now available to visit online.
Sega tells us that the Sega Shop is “the definitive shopping portal for Sega themed merchandise”, with a range of Numskull Designs-developed products available to purchase as we speak. Products for both stores are set to include t-shirts, beanies, snapbacks, socks, pin badges, mugs, and more from some of Sega’s most iconic brands.
The launch range has a pretty impressive mix of iconic SEGA properties including Sonic the Hedgehog, Alex Kidd, Altered Beast, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and Yakuza, alongside even more merch relating to the Mega Drive and Dreamcast consoles. Jason Rice, Director of Licensing for SEGA Europe, has said the following:
“Our partnership with Numskull represents a major part in the strategy to grow our e-commerce presence, and to offer a destination for SEGA fans, who can now obtain exclusive and innovative products across a range of categories and brands.”
If you sign up to your chosen store’s mailing list, you’ll be able to snag 15% off your first order (you can find links to do just that near the bottom of the store’s home page).
Do we have any Sega fans in the room? Are you resisting the urge to spend your life savings as we speak? Let us know if you’ll be visiting the store in the comments.
