Feed aggregator

Maybe this might work after all

Loon, known for its giant billowing broadband-beaming balloons, says it has figured out how to use machine-learning algorithms to keep its lofty vehicles hovering in place autonomously in the stratosphere.…

Admins have until late 2021 to move away, but Windows containers need caution

"Docker support is being deprecated in Kubernetes. You need to pay attention to this and plan for it. THIS WILL BREAK YOUR CLUSTERS," said CNCF Ambassador Ian Coldwater on Twitter.…

Is this some kind of sick game of alien whack-a-mole?

This is getting out of hand. Mere days after the metal "monolith" found out in the boondocks of Utah vanished, a similar structure has popped up on a Californian mountaintop.…

Somebody get this project more investment

The LibreOffice team has published the first beta of version 7.1, with general availability planned for February 2021.…

Has anyone really ever seen someone else use either of these in the wild?

Samsung hasn't given up on Bixby. No, the South Korean electronics giant has confirmed a major update to its voice assistant platform, introducing support for the DeX desktop computing mode while taking design cues from Apple's latest Siri refresh.…

You're probably all patched by now, which is just as well

A Google security guru has published details of a critical hole in Apple's iOS that can be exploited by miscreants to hijack strangers' iPhones over the air without any user interaction.…

Has the TLD debacle forced ISOC back to its roots? Maybe

The Internet Society has agreed to place the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on a firmer footing with a six-year funding commitment.…

While also making it harder to label dedicated and skilled sysadmins as recalcitrant box-huggers

COMMENT Amazon Web Services poured out a deluge of news yesterday, but the most significant announcement could be an unusual and, I think, very significant hybrid cloud play with a set of new applainces.…

Shareholders happy, employees out of work

Despite all the problems this year, 2020 has been great for online gambling companies because everyone has spent much more time at home. But while things have been lucrative for companies, hundreds of employees of NetEnt are about to find themselves unemployed.

On Tuesday, online gaming company Evolution, which specialized in live casino games, completed its $2.3 billion acquisition of NetEnt. Because of an overlap in the products they offer, Evolution immediately close NetEnt’s live dealer studio in Qormi, Malta, and sent many other employees home. Most know – particularly those who worked in the studio – know that they are out of jobs, but others, at least as of Tuesday morning, were waiting for e-mails with more information from Evolution.

According to the Times of Malta, “a few hundred” of NetEnt’s more than 1,000 employees worldwide will be handed their pink slips. Malta’s Ministry for the Economy is already beginning to try to help those who lose their jobs to find new work. Additionally, the Gaming Malta Foundation is going to look for other gaming companies that might be able to hire the affected employees. Malta is home to more than 250 online gambling companies, so there should be landing spots for many.

Evolution originally approached NetEnt in June about an acquisition bid. The offer was 0.1306 Evolution shares for each NetEnt share. The proposal put the valye of a NetEnt share at SEK 79.93 ($9.44), 43% above NetEnt’s June 23 closing price. The total value of the deal was SEK 19.6bn ($2.3bn).

NetEnt shareholders approved the offer last week. By the time the extended acceptance period ended on Monday, shareholders representing 96.8% of outstanding shares and 98.6% of the company’s votes gave their approval.

Live dealer games gaining popularity

Evolution specializes in live dealer online casino games. It is a weird-sounding type of game, to be sure: live and online? For the unfamiliar, they are online casino games like roulette and blackjack, but instead of a computer simulating the spin of the wheel or deal of the cards, a real human being is doing it, just like at a casino.

The human dealers are in a studio, live-streaming the action through the gaming site or app. All of the equipment used has RFID chips or special barcodes which are read by scanners on the table. The data is fed into the gaming system and results are calculated.

The original idea behind live dealer casinos was to make people who wanted to gamble online, but were skeptical of its legitimacy, the confidence to try it out. They could see the cards just like in a real casino, so they could be sure that the deal was legitimate. Over time, it has become a very popular form of online gambling, not as much for the “internet gaming is rigged” crowd, but for the people who want to get as real of a live gaming experience as possible.

There has been a site or two that has tried the same concept for poker, but it never panned out.

The post Evolution Completes NetEnt Acquisition, Hundreds of Employees to Be Laid Off appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Here’s how to prepare your business for the next big disruption

Promo The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has painfully illustrated how the ability of organizations to respond to disruption is determined by their ability to reconfigure their business and supporting technology operating models rapidly, successively and at scale.…

We’re talking about China’s Chang’e 5 lunar sample return mission, which has accomplished one of its main jobs

China has released video of its Chang’e 5 probe successfully … erm … probing the moon.…

Three-day test before full launch

BetMGM is in the midst of an online casino soft launch in Pennsylvania. Running Tuesday through Thursday, it is a test run, with limited hours and limited games to be sure everything works and looks good for state regulators. Assuming the soft launch finishes without any major hiccups, the full launch will be on Friday, December 4.

BetMGM is the leading online casino operator in New Jersey, but is late to the party in Pennsylvania, following a dozen competing sites/apps. The state’s online gambling industry has been running since last summer.

Late entry in busy market

It is certainly odd that such a major player would sacrifice more than a year of revenue in an attractive market, but a series of business decisions seem to be the main reason for the delay. Licenses in Pennsylvania were open to the state’s licensed brick-and-mortar casinos. If an online operator wanted in, they could partner with a casino.

If some of the licenses went unclaimed – not all casinos applied for all different types of licenses – the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB) considered out-of-state casinos to fill in the gaps. These outside casinos are called “qualified gaming entities” (QGE). BetMGM decided to partner with Atlantic City’s Borgata, as it does in the New Jersey market.

That decision in and of itself gave BetMGM a late start, as QGEs were at the bottom of the applicant list. But then the company changed course, ditched Borgata, and partnered with Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course in Grantville, Pennsylvania, causing further delays.

Just online casino games for now

To start, BetMGM is only offering online casino gaming. Sports betting is all the rage right now – operators are racing to launch apps wherever it is legal – but this is another situation where BetMGM’s partnering decision may be hurting it.

QGEs can’t offer sports betting in the Keystone State, so in that sense, it is good that BetMGM is not paired with Borgata. But in-state licensees are only permitted a total of three skins, and of those, only one can be a sportsbook. Hollywood Casino already has a sports betting site, so BetMGM might be out in the cold there.

Then there is online poker. BetMGM is a brand of Roar Digital (the actual MGM/GVC joint venture), along with partypoker, Borgata Online, and PartyCasino in the United States. BetMGM Poker is part of the partypoker New Jersey network, so it would only be natural for BetMGM to launch a poker site in Pennsylvania. There is only one site, PokerStars, in the state right now, and a future interstate network with New Jersey’s partypoker network would work great. One would expect a BetMGM poker room to launch at some point in Pennsylvania, but it may be a while.

The post BetMGM Launches Pennsylvania Online Casino, No Poker Yet appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Make your voice heard

The World Series of Poker has opened the public nomination process for the 2020 Poker Hall of Fame class. It is only open until December 11, so submit your nominations quickly if you want a say in one of the few good moments of this trash heap of a year.

As is always the case, there are the criteria a person must meet to be eligible for the Hall:

• A player must have played poker against acknowledged top competition
• Played for high stakes
• Be a minimum of 40 years old at time of nomination
• Played consistently well, gaining the respect of peers
• Stood the test of time
• Or, for non-players, contributed to the overall growth and success of the game of poker, with indelible positive and lasting results.

There is nothing surprising there. Everything is reasonable. Clearly, a poker player needs to have played against the best and have played well for a long time to even be thought of as a possibility for the Poker Hall of Fame. Nobody is about to nominate their $10 home game buddy.

The age floor speaks for itself, plus it goes hand-in-hand for standing the test of time. While there are a few players that most people would not have had a problem with being nominated before age 40 (like Phil Ivey), it is a reasonable requirement.

The non-player criteria is more subjective, and while we can always argue about who deserves it more than someone else, there usually isn’t much debate on whether a particular non-player should even been in the conversation.

It’s not always the biggest names

Last year’s Poker Hall of Fame inductees were Chris Moneymaker and David Oppenheim. Moneymaker, while not at the level of traditional poker legends when it comes to poker skill, is clearly one of the most important players in the history of the game. His 2003 WSOP Main Event win helped jump start the poker boom and he has been a fantastic ambassador for the game ever since.

Oppenheim is largely unknown to casual poker fans, but is regarded as one of the all-time greatest high stakes cash game players.

The other eight finalists in 2019 were Chris Bjorin, David Chiu, Eli Elezra, Antonio Esfandiari, Chris Ferguson, Ted Forrest, Mike Matusow, and Huckleberry Seed.

The process will move fast

Those who wish to nominate someone can go to https://www.wsop.com/phof/ and fill out the web form, including the reasons they believe the person should be a Hall of Famer. The top ten vote-getters will be reviewed by the Poker Hall of Fame Governing Council to be sure all are eligible; it is possible a person or two could be removed.

From there, the list of finalists will be sent to the 32 living Poker Hall of Fame members, who will each have ten votes to divide among the nominees however they would like. They could give all ten votes to one person or split them among multiple finalists.

In previous years, a select group of poker media members also voted, but assuming the information provided by the WSOP in its news release and on the Hall of Fame page is correct, it seems like the voting is only for Hall of Fame members this year. That’s good, because I didn’t want this to be the 15th year in a row where I didn’t get a ballot. My friend and colleague, Earl Burton, has been voter, which is total crap, if you ask me.

Caesars Entertainment will announce the finalists on December 16. There will be just one person inducted this year, the name of whom will be revealed on December 30.

The post 2020 Poker Hall of Fame Nomination Process Open appeared first on Poker News Daily.

Means India no longer has the same number of visas to bid for as tiny countries

The US Senate has passed an Act that will abolish per-country caps on visas for skilled workers.…

This one has Australia, America, even the wine-drinking world angry

China has unleashed a fearsome new cyber-weapon: a meme so dank it has sparked a diplomatic incident.…

Microsoft's cloud repo rental biz finds a silver lining in 2020

It was the best of times for software developers, it was the worst of times for everyone else.…

Telecoms regulator now firmly a part of the burnt partisan landscape

Analysis Although the Trump administration is in its final days, the destructive partisan politics it has persistently fanned are still in full effect at the FCC.…

Ryan Hernandez continued to raid gaming giant's systems even after FBI gave him a warning

A young man caught hacking into Nintendo’s servers to steal secret Switch blueprints has been sentenced to three years in prison after ignoring an FBI warning to stop.…

And HPE is the one to do it, yeah?

Better late than never, right? HPE CEO Antonio Neri has at last congratulated Joe Biden on his victory in the US election, taking the opportunity to urge his administration to focus on digital transformation.…

Join us and Pure Storage online to find out how to pay back borrowed time

Webcast You’re not wearing cargo shorts, velour tracksuits, or Matrix trench coats anymore, so why on Earth would you be running SQL Server 2008?…