News briefs for July 26, 2018.
A new version of KStars[1]—the free, open-source, cross-platform astronomy software—was released today. Version 2.9.7 includes new features, such as improvements to the polar alignment assistant and support for Ekos Live, as well as stability fixes. See the release notes[2] for all the changes.
Google yesterday announced two new products[3]: Edge TPU, a new "ASIC chip designed to run TensorFlow Lite ML models at the edge", and Cloud IoT Edge, which is "a software stack that extends Google Cloud's powerful AI capability to gateways and connected devices". Google states that "By running on-device machine learning models, Cloud IoT Edge with Edge TPU provides significantly faster predictions for critical IoT applications than general-purpose IoT gateways—all while ensuring data privacy and confidentiality."
The state of Lower Saxony in Germany is set to migrate away from Linux and back to Windows, following Munich's similar decision, ZDNet reports[4]. The state currently has 13,000 workstations running openSUSE that it plans to migrate to "a current version of Windows" because "many of its field workers and telephone support services already use Windows, so standardisation makes sense". It's unclear how many years this migration will take.
GCC 8.2 was released today[5]. This release is a bug-fix release and contains "important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 8.1 with more than 99 bugs fixed since the previous release", according to Jakub Jelinek's release statement. You can download GCC 8.2 here[6].
VMware announces VMworld 2018, which will be held August 26–30 in Las Vegas. The theme for the conference is "Possible Begins with You", and the event will feature keynotes by industry leaders, user-driven panels, certification training and labs. Topics will include "Data Center and Cloud, Networking and Security, Digital Workspace, Leading Digital Transformation, and Next-Gen Trends including the Internet of