An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The U.S. cable industry's biggest lobby group has dropped the word "cable" from its name in a rebrand focusing on its members' role as providers of both Internet and TV services. The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) will henceforth be called NCTA-The Internet and Television Association. NCTA will be maintained in the name as a nod to the group's past, even though the initials no longer stand for any particular words. "Just as our industry is witnessing an exciting transformation driven by technology and connectivity, NCTA's brand must reflect the vibrancy and diversity of our members," NCTA CEO Michael Powell (a former Federal Communications Commission chairman) said in today's announcement. The group's "mission to drive the industry forward remains the same," he said. This isn't the NCTA's first name change. The group began as the National Community Television Council in 1951 and then became the National Community Television Association in 1952, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications. Despite dropping the word "cable," the NCTA's name change announcement makes reference to how cable companies are dominating the broadband market. Powell noted that the NCTA "represent[s] an industry that is America's largest and fastest home Internet provider." As it goes forward, the NCTA won't be the only telecom lobby group initialism that no longer stands for anything. The CTIA -- previously known as the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and then the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association -- is now just "CTIA-The Wireless Association."

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I was a guest on the Supertop podcast a couple weeks ago, and I spaced on linking to it.

Here’s the podcast. It’s made by the fine folks who make Unread and Castro. (I’m an Unread user. It’s in my iPhone’s dock, even.)

(I’d check out Castro except that I actually don’t listen to podcasts on my iPhone. I listen to them at work via my iTunes on my Mac. Which is dreadfully weird of me, I know.)

I was a guest on the Supertop podcast a couple weeks ago, and I spaced on linking to it.

Here’s the podcast. It’s made by the fine folks who make Unread and Castro. (I’m an Unread user. It’s in my iPhone’s dock, even.)

(I’d check out Castro except that I actually don’t listen to podcasts on my iPhone. I listen to them at work via my iTunes on my Mac. Which is dreadfully weird of me, I know.)

Fighting rages with more than 30 civilians killed as US and Russia seek to salvage beleaguered truce.

Fighting rages with more than 30 civilians killed as US and Russia seek to salvage beleaguered truce.

The long-awaited GoPro drone has officially launched. Dubbed Karma, GoPro's new drone works with the Hero5 and Hero5 Session, two new flagship cameras. The Hero5 features a 2-inch touch display, 12-megapixel photos with RAW support, built-in GPS, electronic image stabilization, waterproofing up to 33 feet (10 meters), and voice control. The GoPro Hero5 Session on the other hand consists of a tiny cube camera that is capable of 4K video recording at 30 fps and 10-megapixel photos. It too is waterproof up to 33 feet (10 meters) and offers support for voice commands. You can say, "GoPro, start recording," and it will start recording. They are also both cloud-connected, meaning they can auto-upload photos and video to an account when the camera is charging (requires a paid subscription to GoPro's new cloud service). While the Karma works with the Hero5 and Hero5 Session, it also works with the Hero4 cameras. CNET reports: The Karma's small, too. Like fold-it-up-and-stick-it-in-a-regular-backpack small. In fact, it even comes with the backpack. And of course it's made with the new Hero5 Black and Hero5 Session cameras, but will also work with the Hero4 cameras. So you're not stuck with a camera that's permanently attached to a drone, you're getting a camera you can use on its own or in the drone. Perhaps its greatest asset is the three-axis camera stabilizer on the drone. Not only will it keep your video looking smooth in the air, but it can be removed and attached to the included Karma Grip. GoPro says the grip can then be used handheld, perfect for running, riding, skating, etc. alongside your friends, or mounted on other gear. Karma arrives on October 23 for $799 without a camera, $999 with a Hero5 Session and $1,099 with the Hero5 Black.

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Oracle has unveiled its second generation of cloud infrastructure for third-party developers to run their applications in Oracle data centers. What is interesting about the announcement is that Oracle co-founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison claiming that "Amazon's lead is over. Amazon's going to have serious competition going forward." From a VentureBeat report: One particular instance, or virtual-machine (VM) type, that Oracle is making available in this second-generation offering -- the Dense IO Shape -- offers 28.8TB, 512GB, and 36 cores, at a price of $5.40 per hour. This product offers more than 10 times the input-output capacity of Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically the i2.8xlarge instance, said Ellison. Currently, AWS leads the cloud infrastructure market, with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM trailing behind. Oracle's public cloud was not included in the most recent version of Gartner's highly regarded cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) Magic Quadrant, which was released last month. "Oracle also does not have enough market share to qualify for inclusion," the authors of the report wrote.

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An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld: Venerable open source Java IDE NetBeans would move from Oracle's jurisdiction to the Apache Software Foundation under a proposal... endorsed by Java founder James Gosling, a longtime fan of the IDE. Moving NetBeans to a neutral venue like Apache, with its strong governance model, would help the project attract more contributions from various organizations, according to the proposal posted in the Apache wiki. "Large companies are using NetBeans as an application framework to build internal or commercial applications and are much more likely to contribute to it once it moves to neutral Apache ground," the proposal says. While Oracle will relinquish its control over NetBeans under the proposal, individual contributors from Oracle are expected to continue contributing to the project. On Facebook, Gosling posted the proposal meant "folks like me can more easily contribute to our favorite IDE. The finest IDE in existence will be getting even better, faster!" InfoWorld reports that when aked if Oracle had neglected NetBeans, Gosling said, "Oracle didn't single out NetBeans for neglect, they neglect everything... I'm thrilled that the NetBeans community will now be able to chart its own course."

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"Unpatent is a crowdfunding platform that eliminates bad patents," reads their web site. "We do that by crowdsourcing the prior art -- that is all the evidence that makes clear that a patent was not novel -- and filing reexamination requests to the patent office." An anonymous Slashdot reader reports: "Everyone in the world can back the crowdfunding campaign against the patent," explains their site, which includes a special section with "Featured stupid patents". The first $16,000 raised covers the lawyers and fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and "The rest is distributed to those who find valid prior art...any evidence that a patent is not novel. We review all the prior art pieces and reward those that may invalidate a claim... Then, we file an ex partes reexamination to the USPTO." Their team includes Lee Cheng, the legal officer at Newegg, "worldwide renowned as the patent trolls' nightmare," as well as Lus Cuende, who created his own Linux distro when he was 15 and is now CTO of Stampery, a company using the Bitcoin blockchain to notarize data. They're currently targeting the infamous US8738435 covering "personalized content relating to offered products and services," which in February the EFF featured as their "stupid patent of the month." Its page on Unpatent.co argues that "Taking something so obvious such as personalizing content and offers...and writing the word online everywhere shouldn't grant you a monopoly over it." Unpatent's slogan? "We invalidate patents that shouldn't exist."

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Could you beat wireless headphones by creating your own DIY home audio system? Two weeks ago one Slashdot commenter argued, "to have good audio that is truly yours and something to be proud of, you need to make your own vacuum tube amplifier and then use it to power real electrostatic headphones over a wire." And now long-time Slashdot reader mallyn is stepping up to the challenge: I want to try to make my own vacuum tubes. Is there anyone here who has tried DIY vacuum tubes (or valves, to you Europeans)? I need help getting started -- how to put together the vacuum plumbing system; how to make a glass lathe; what metals to use for the elements (grid, plate, etc). If this is not the correct forum, can anyone please gently shove me into the correct direction? It needs to be online as my physical location (Bellingham, Washington) is too far away from the university labs where this type of work is likely to be done. Slashdot's covered the "tubes vs. transistors" debate before, but has anyone actually tried to homebrew their own? Leave your best answers in the comments. How do you build your own vacuum tubes?

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An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes TechCrunch: When Google announced Angular 2 in 2014, it created quite a stir in the web development community because this new version wasn't just an update, but instead a complete rewrite that wasn't compatible with the older version... "Angular 1 first solved the problem of how to develop for an emerging web," the company writes... "Six years later, the challenges faced by today's application developers, and the sophistication of the devices that applications must support, have both changed immensely." Announcing the final release version of Angular 2 last week, Google thanked the open source community, saying "We are grateful to the large number of contributors who dedicated time to submitting pull requests, issues, and repro cases, who discussed and debated design decisions, and validated (and pushed back on) our RCs." TechCrunch writes that Google's Angular team "now also recommends that developers use TypeScript to write their apps...a Microsoft-developed superset of JavaScript that adds features like static typing and class-based object-oriented programming."

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An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld: "Move fast and break things," the saying goes. Apple does both with the 3.0 version of its Swift programming language...its first full point revision since it became an open source project... In a blog post detailing the full body of changes for Swift 3.0, Apple singled out the two biggest breaking changes. The first is better translation of Objective-C APIs into Swift, meaning that code imported from Objective-C and translated into Swift will be more readable and Swift-like. The bad news is any code previously imported from Objective-C into Swift will not work in Swift 3; it will need to be re-imported. The other major change... Most every item referenced in the standard library has been renamed to be less wordy. But again, this brings bad news for anyone with an existing Swift codebase: Apple says "the proposed changes are massively source-breaking for Swift code, and will require a migrator to translate Swift 2 code into Swift 3 code." Apple will provide migration tools in version 8.0 of their XCode IDE, "but such tools go only so far," notes the article, questioning what will happen to the Linux and Windows ports of Swift.

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GoDaddy has announced "an open set of APIs for DNS providers and web service providers," called Domain Connect. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "Once enabled, customers can quickly configure their domain to point to the web service of their choice with push button simplicity," according to the announcement, "streamlining and simplifying the process of connecting websites and domain names registered on different platforms." GoDaddy's submitted it for consideration as an IETF standard, where they have the support of Microsoft and Squarespace, as well as the other two largest registries, eNome and Name.com. But in the meantime, they told ProgrammableWeb, the specificaion is "out there in the public, open for feedback and adjustment." "GoDaddy is seeking to take all the friction out of the process," the site reports, "by offering service providers like Squarepace, Wix, Google, Microsoft, Wordpress and others a registrar-agnostic API that they can use to programmatically configure all the necessary DNS entries... in lieu of making end users laboriously crawl through a bunch of forms and then praying that they've done it all correctly." Different access levels will be available based on the service being provided, and for GoDaddy's implementation of the API their senior VP of Domains Engineering "said that the program will not be open to public developers and that any service providers wanting access will have to be approved by his team at GoDaddy."

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An anonymous reader writes: For most of its 14-year existence, SpaceX has focused on designing and developing the hardware that will lead to its ultimate goal: colonizing Mars. These plans have remained largely secret from the general public, as company founder Elon Musk has dropped only the barest of hints. But that is expected to change on Sept. 27, during a session at the International Astronautical Congress, when Musk details some of these plans for the first time in a public forum. However, on the eve of the meeting, Musk dropped a surprise on Twitter. The workhorse spacecraft that will carry approximately 100 tons of cargo or 100 people to the surface of Mars, which until now has been popularly known as the Mars Colonial Transporter, can't be called that, Musk said. "Turns out MCT can go well beyond Mars, so will need a new name..." he tweeted on Friday evening. By Saturday evening he had a new name dubbing the spacecraft the "Interplanetary Transport System," or ITS. Mars, it turns out, isn't the solar system's only marginally habitable world for would-be new world colonists. The Moon, Venus, the asteroid Ceres, and outer Solar System moons Titan and Callisto all have some advantages that could allow for colonies to subsist. However, Mars has generally been the preferred destination -- due to its relative proximity to Earth, a thin atmosphere, and sources of water ice. Musk now seems to be suggesting that some of these more distant destinations, especially moons around Jupiter and Saturn, might be reachable with the Interplanetary Transport System.

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