Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for June 28th from 07:52 to 22:54:

• SpaceX is sending an AI robot ‘crew member’ to join the astronauts on the space station – The Verge – “The robot’s name is CIMON — for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion — and it looks a bit like a volleyball with a computer screen on one side. The screen displays a simplified cartoon face that the bot will use to interact with the humans on the ISS.” – very GERTY, very Moon.
• Tempest 4000 comes to consoles next month – Polygon – $29.99!
• Halo TV series coming to Showtime – Polygon – Each episode will be an hour long, and production is set for early 2019. According to Showtime, the series will “take place in the universe that first came to be in 2001, dramatizing an epic 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant.”
• Pixar’s Sexist Boys Club – Be Yourself – “To my knowledge, the halls of Pixar are not filled with serial rapists or harassers of the hard-time-criminal variety, but the culture there is still far from squeaky clean or inclusive when it comes to male-female relations. In reading the latest #MeToo articles, it’s clear that lots of other well-known companies condoned much more extreme behaviors by comparison, but that doesn’t detract from my former employer’s legal and moral obligation to do better by the women in their ranks.”
• Apple Eyes Streaming Bundle for TV, Music and News — The Information – The only way they’re going to get any more subscription money from me outside of a Gigantic iCloud Storage account is if the new thing also includes the Gigantic iCloud Storage, and for families, too.
• New GPU-Accelerated Supercomputers Change the Balance of Power on the TOP500 | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites – In the latest TOP500 rankings announced this week, 56 percent of the additional flops were a result of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs running in new supercomputers – that according to the Nvidians, who enjoy keeping track of such things. In this case, most of those additional flops came from three top systems new to the list: Summit, Sierra, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI). 
• BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive – In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.

  The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.

• BBC Blogs – Technology & Creativity Blog – Building the Computer Literacy Project archive –