Slashdot reader SoftwareArtist writes: Terminal emulators have barely changed in 30 years. They're still just scrolling windows of unstructured text. Why is there so little innovation in an application we use every day? There are so many ways they could be modernized to help us be more productive. For example: - If I type ls to show a directory listing, I should be able to right-click on a filename and get a list of operations to perform on that file, just like a file browser. - If I start to type a filename and press tab twice, it shouldn't just print a list of possible completions. It should provide a popup to select the one I want. - Why can't I cat an image file and see the image right in the terminal window? Are there any modern terminals that update this important tool for the 21st century? And if not, what prevents them?

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Frederick P. Brooks Jr., whose innovative work in computer design and software engineering helped shape the field of computer science, died on Thursday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his son, Roger, who said Dr. Brooks had been in declining health since having a stroke two years ago. The New York Times reports: Dr. Brooks had a wide-ranging career that included creating the computer science department at the University of North Carolina and leading influential research in computer graphics and virtual reality. But he is best known for being one of the technical leaders of IBM's 360 computer project in the 1960s. At a time when smaller rivals like Burroughs, Univac and NCR were making inroads, it was a hugely ambitious undertaking. Fortune magazine, in an article with the headline "IBM's $5,000,000,000 Gamble," described it as a "bet the company" venture. Until the 360, each model of computer had its own bespoke hardware design. That required engineers to overhaul their software programs to run on every new machine that was introduced. But IBM promised to eliminate that costly, repetitive labor with an approach championed by Dr. Brooks, a young engineering star at the company, and a few colleagues. In April 1964, IBM announced the 360 as a family of six compatible computers. Programs written for one 360 model could run on the others, without the need to rewrite software, as customers moved from smaller to larger computers. The shared design across several machines was described in a paper, written by Dr. Brooks and his colleagues Gene Amdahl and Gerrit Blaauw, titled "Architecture of the IBM System/360." "That was a breakthrough in computer architecture that Fred Brooks led," Richard Sites, a computer designer who studied under Dr. Brooks, said in an interview. But there was a problem. The software needed to deliver on the IBM promise of compatibility across machines and the capability to run multiple programs at once was not ready, as it proved to be a far more daunting challenge than anticipated. Operating system software is often described as the command and control system of a computer. The OS/360 was a forerunner of Microsoft's Windows, Apple's iOS and Google's Android. At the time IBM made the 360 announcement, Dr. Brooks was just 33 and headed for academia. He had agreed to return to North Carolina, where he grew up, and start a computer science department at Chapel Hill. But Thomas Watson Jr., the president of IBM, asked him to stay on for another year to tackle the company's software troubles. Dr. Brooks agreed, and eventually the OS/360 problems were sorted out. The 360 project turned out to be an enormous success, cementing the company's dominance of the computer market into the 1980s. "Fred Brooks was a brilliant scientist who changed computing," Arvind Krishna, IBM's chief executive and himself a computer scientist, said in a statement. "We are indebted to him for his pioneering contributions to the industry." Dr. Brooks published a book in 1975 titled, "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering." It was "a quirky classic, selling briskly year after year and routinely cited as gospel by computer scientists," reports the Times.

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At its Zoomtopia conference, the company announced a bunch of features that are coming to its platform, including two key ones for productivity: email and calendars. Engadget reports: You can connect third-party email and calendar services to Zoom and access them through the desktop app. The company says that can help save you time instead of having to switch between apps and perhaps needing to hunt for the right tab in your browser. Those on the Zoom One Pro or Zoom Standard Pro plans will be able to set up email accounts through the platform, and folks with certain plans have the option to use custom domains. You'll get up to 100GB of storage included. The key selling point is that messages sent directly between Zoom Mail Service users (i.e. those who use Zoom's email hosting services) will have end-to-end encryption. You'll also be able to send external emails that can expire and contain access-restricted links. As for Zoom Calendar, there will be options to see which of your contacts has joined a meeting, and you can schedule Zoom voice and video calls in the app. Zoom's own calendar service will include the ability to book appointments. On the way in 2023 is a feature called Zoom Spots. The company describes this as a virtual coworking space where colleagues can stay more connected during the workday via video-first conversations. While the company didn't reveal too much detail about Zoom Spots in its blog post, there may be a downside as the feature could enable bosses to keep a closer eye on what their employees are doing. Businesses will soon be able to employ Zoom Virtual Agent, a conversational AI and chatbot designed to help customers resolve issues. That tool will be available in early 2023. Other things in the pipeline include a way for developers to make money from the Zoom Apps Marketplace and a virtual coach to help sellers perfect their pitches. As for the core functions people know Zoom for, there's a feature on the way that connects team chats with in-meeting chats. You'll be able to carry the conversation from one to the other and back again to keep things flowing. The company is also looking to roll out translation options for team chats in 2023. In the near future, you'll be able to schedule a chat message to send at a later time. Zoom Phone is coming to the web, which should be handy for many folks. A progressive web app will be available for ChromeOS too. Meanwhile, users will be able to use a one-click chat message as a response when they can't answer a call. As for Zoom Rooms, there will be a way for folks in one of those to join a Google Meet room and vice versa. Last, but by no means least, Zoom revealed a string of updates for meetings. The Smart Recordings feature uses AI to generate summaries, next steps and chapters to make archived meetings more digestible and help you get to the part you're looking for. There will be meeting templates that can automatically configure the right settings and a way to record videos with narration and screensharing that you can send to colleagues. On top of that, you'll have more avatar options, including the ability to use a Meta avatar.

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Nearly four years after its last major release, VirtualBox 7.0 arrives with a... host of new features. Chief among them are Windows 11 support via TPM, EFI Secure Boot support, full encryption for virtual machines, and a few Linux niceties. From a report: The big news is support for Secure Boot and TPM 1.2 and 2.0, which makes it easier to install Windows 11 without registry hacks (the kind Oracle recommended for 6.1 users). It's strange to think about people unable to satisfy Windows 11's security requirements on their physical hardware, but doing so with a couple clicks in VirtualBox, but here we are. VirtualBox 7.0 also allows virtual machines to run with full encryption, not just inside the guest OSâ"but logs, saved states, and other files connected to the VM. At the moment, this support only works through the command line, "for now," Oracle notes in the changelog. This is the first official VirtualBox release with a Developer Preview for ARM-based Macs. Having loaded it on an M2 MacBook Air, I can report that the VirtualBox client informs you, extensively and consistently, about the non-production nature of your client. The changelog notes that it's an "unsupported work in progress" that is "known to have very modest performance." A "Beta Warning" shows up in the (new and unified) message center, and in the upper-right corner, a "BETA" warning on the window frame is stacked on top of a construction-style "Dev Preview" warning sign. It's still true that ARM-based Macs don't allow for running operating systems written for Intel or AMD-based processors inside virtual machines. You will, however, be able to run ARM-based Linux installations in macOS Venture that can themselves run x86 processors using Rosetta, Apple's own translation layer.

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An obscure software system synchronizes the network's clocks. Who will keep it running? From a report: To solve the problem of time synchronization on the arpanet, computer scientist David Mills built what programmers call a protocol -- a collection of rules and procedures that creates a lingua franca for disparate devices. The arpanet was experimental and capricious: electronics failed regularly, and technological misbehavior was common. His protocol sought to detect and correct for those misdeeds, creating a consensus about the time through an ingenious system of suspicion. Mills prided himself on puckish nomenclature, and so his clock-synchronizing system distinguished reliable "truechimers" from misleading "falsetickers." An operating system named Fuzzball, which he designed, facilitated the early work. Mills called his creation the Network Time Protocol, and N.T.P. soon became a key component of the nascent Internet. Programmers followed its instructions when they wrote timekeeping code for their computers. By 1988, Mills had refined N.T.P. to the point where it could synchronize the clocks of connected computers that had been telling vastly differing times to within tens of milliseconds -- a fraction of a blink of an eye. "I always thought that was sort of black magic," Vint Cerf, a pioneer of Internet infrastructure, told me. Today, we take global time synchronization for granted. It is critical to the Internet, and therefore to civilization. Vital systems -- power grids, financial markets, telecommunications networks -- rely on it to keep records and sort cause from effect. N.T.P. works in partnership with satellite systems, such as the Global Positioning System (G.P.S.), and other technologies to synchronize time on our many online devices. The time kept by precise and closely aligned atomic clocks, for instance, can be broadcast via G.P.S. to numerous receivers, including those in cell towers; those receivers can be attached to N.T.P. servers that then distribute the time across devices linked together by the Internet, almost all of which run N.T.P. (Atomic clocks can also directly feed the time to N.T.P. servers.) The protocol operates on billions of devices, coÃrdinating the time on every continent. Society has never been more synchronized.

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Robinhood is finally rolling out a beta version of its non-custodial crypto wallet to 10,000 customers on its waitlist after announcing the product in May, its CTO and general manager of crypto, Johann Kerbrat, told TechCrunch. The product is called Robinhood Wallet and will be the company's first internationally-available app, Kerbrat said. From a report: The company revealed new details about the offering in conjunction with the beta launch, most notably that it will launch exclusively with Polygon, a popular layer-two blockchain that plugs into Ethereum and makes the network faster and cheaper to use. This means beta users will be able to purchase the Polygon MATIC token on Robinhood's main exchange app and transfer it to their Robinhood Wallet. They will also be able to access dApps directly on the Polygon network, including DeFi apps such as Uniswap, Balancer and Kyberswap, and metaverse games such as Decentraland, a spokesperson for Polygon said in an email to TechCrunch. Over time, the Robinhood team plans to build out multi-chain support for the wallet beyond the Polygon ecosystem, Robinhood crypto product manager Seong Seog Lee told TechCrunch.

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Apple says it will increase App Store prices across Europe and in some Asian markets next month as currencies weaken against the strong US dollar. The price increases will effect both in-app purchases and regular apps on the App Store starting on October 5th. From a report: All countries using the Euro, Sweden, South Korea, Chile, Egypt, Malaysia, Pakistan, Vietnam, and Japan will be affected by the price hikes. All Euro markets, except Montenegro, will see the base $0.99 app pricing move to $1.19 next month, a 20 percent jump. In Japan the hikes are more than 30 percent, amid the yen dropping to a new 24-year low against the US dollar.

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Logitech makes some of the most popular webcams in the world, but using them on some of the most popular computers, like the M2 MacBook Air or M1 Pro MacBook Pro, is a less than stellar experience. From a report: Plugging one into any M1 or M2 Mac for a video call isn't an issue, but if you want to tweak in-depth settings or use some of these webcams' highlight features, doing that right now ranges from clumsy to impossible. That's because its most capable webcam software, Logitech Capture, isn't available on computers with Apple silicon. Logitech switched up its software plan for people who use newer Mac laptops and desktops without making much effort to tell anyone. Instead of offering Logitech Capture, its de facto software focused squarely on webcam settings and content creation features, it has two distinct and lesser Mac applications to choose from: Logi Tune and Logitech G Hub. Tune is a confusing app that lets you toggle settings for Logitech gadgets, with calendar integration added in, for some reason. G Hub was built for gamers who want to tweak RGB lighting and sensitivity settings for gaming-focused products and, now, webcams. Each app's interface looks different and lets you switch different settings, so you've got a choice with which app you use -- too much choice, if you ask me, given how limited the functionality is within each one. But neither offers as many options as Logitech Capture. You can access basic settings, like the ability to zoom in for a tighter crop or make a host of adjustments to the picture settings (or set them to auto settings), but you can't adjust the frame rate or the resolution. What that means is people who own an M1 or M2 Mac cannot utilize its face-tracking feature or switch between horizontal or vertical orientations on a nice, relatively high-end webcam like the $160 Logi StreamCam.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: If you watched ESPN2 during its stint last weekend as "ESPN8: The Ocho," you may have seen some odd, meme-friendly competitions, including corgi racing, precision paper airplane tossing, and slippery stair climbing. Or you might have seen "Excel Esports: All-Star Battle," a tournament in which an unexpected full-column Flash Fill is announced like a 50-yard Hail Mary. It's just the latest mainstream acknowledgment of Excel as a viable, if quirky, esport, complete with down-to-the-wire tension and surprising comebacks. [...] Featured in this all-star battle was 2021 FMWC World Cup winner Diarmuid Early, an FMWC grandmaster from Ireland who claims 10,000 hours in Excel. (He would be Lambda if he were a function, he said.) The winner of the first championship in 2020, Joseph Lau (28,600 hours, Isological), also competed, along with six other highly ranked function warriors. Diarmuid took a commanding lead in the first slot-like task, racking up more points more quickly in a first round than anyone has in an FMWC competition. Others faced the kinds of challenges that regular users see in less combative Excel work. Polish competitor Gabriela Stroj told the hosts that "one stupid error" -- leaving a formula linked to the wrong sheet -- likely cost her hundreds of points. David Brown from the US said that his major problem was pasting from his 32-bit Windows-based Excel to the official online Excel answer sheets, which left his formulas treated as text. The top four of the eight competitors moved on to round 2, simulating a yacht regatta in Excel. Diarmuid and third-ranked Andrew Ngai made it through. The two competed on creating a score-tracking mechanic for an entirely Excel-based retro-style 2D platformer, "Modelario." Ngai eked out the win, although with only 411 of a total 1,000 possible points. Ngai's reward for a more than two-hour cell-based marathon: a trip to Tucson, Arizona, for the FMWC finals. You can watch the full two-hour-and-48-minute all-star battle, which ESPN edited down to 30 minutes, here. You can also try the Excel tasks used in last weekend's battle yourself, as the organizers (the Financial Modeling World Cup) made all three of them available to download.

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With the 2022 Flash Memory Summit taking place this week, not only is there a slew of solid-state storage announcements in the pipe over the coming days, but the show is also increasingly a popular venue for discussing I/O and interconnect developments as well. Kicking things off on that front, on Monday the OpenCAPI and CXL consortiums issued a joint announcement that the two groups will be joining forces, with the OpenCAPI standard and the consortium's assets being transferred to the CXL consortium. From a report: With this integration, CXL is set to become the dominant CPU-to-device interconnect standard, as virtually all major manufacturers are now backing the standard, and competing standards have bowed out of the race and been absorbed by CXL. Pre-dating CXL by a few years, OpenCAPI was one of the earlier standards for a cache-coherent CPU interconnect. The standard, backed by AMD, Xilinx, and IBM, among others, was an extension of IBM's existing Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) technology, opening it up to the rest of the industry and placing its control under an industry consortium. In the last six years, OpenCAPI has seen a modest amount of use, most notably being implemented in IBM's POWER9 processor family. Like similar CPU-to-device interconnect standards, OpenCAPI was essentially an application extension on top of existing high speed I/O standards, adding things like cache-coherency and faster (lower latency) access modes so that CPUs and accelerators could work together more closely despite their physical disaggregation.

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The system for getting donated kidneys, livers and hearts to desperately ill patients relies on out-of-date technology that has crashed for hours at a time and has never been audited by federal officials for security weaknesses or other serious flaws, according to a confidential government review obtained by The Washington Post. From the report: The mechanics of the entire transplant system must be overhauled, the review concluded, citing aged software, periodic system failures, mistakes in programming and over-reliance on manual input of data. In its review, completed 18 months ago, the White House's U.S. Digital Service recommended that the government "break up the current monopoly" that the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit agency that operates the transplant system, has held for 36 years. It pushed for separating the contract for technology that powers the network from UNOS's policy responsibilities, such as deciding how to weigh considerations for transplant eligibility. About 106,000 people are on the waiting list for organs, the vast majority of them seeking kidneys, according to UNOS. An average of 22 people die each day waiting for organs. In 2021, 41,354 organs were transplanted, a record. UNOS is overseen by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), but that agency has little authority to regulate transplant activity. Its attempts to reform the transplant system have been rejected by UNOS, the report found. Yet HRSA continues to pay UNOS about $6.5 million annually toward its annual operating costs of about $64 million, most of which comes from patient fees. "In order to properly and equitably support the critical needs of these patients, the ecosystem needs to be vastly restructured," a team of engineers from the Digital Service wrote in the Jan. 5, 2021, report for HRSA, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

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David Matthews writes via Nature: See whether this sounds familiar: you build a piece of software to solve a research question. But when you move on to the next project, there's no one to maintain it. As it ages, it becomes obsolete, and the next academic to tackle a similar problem finds themselves having to reinvent the wheel. [...] Now, a funding initiative hopes to help ease that burden. [...] In January, Schmidt Futures, a science and technology-focused philanthropic organization founded by former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, launched the Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS), a network of centers across four universities in the United States and the United Kingdom. Each institution will hire around five or six engineers, says Stuart Feldman, Schmidt Futures' chief scientist, with funding typically running for five years and being reviewed annually. Overall, Schmidt Futures is putting US$40 million into the project, making it among the largest philanthropic investments in this area. The aim is to overcome a culture of relative neglect in academia for open-source scientific software, Feldman says, adding that support for software engineering is "a line item, just like fuel" at organizations such as NASA. "It's only in the university research lab environment where this is ancillary," he says. [...] Those setting up VISS centers say Schmidt Futures' steady, relatively long-term funding will help them to overcome a range of problems endemic to academic software. Research grants rarely provide for software development, and when they do, the positions they fund are seldom full-time and long-term. "If you've got all of this fractional effort, it's really hard to hire people and provide them with a real career path," says Andrew Connolly, an astronomer who is also helping to set up the Washington centre. What's more, software engineers tend to be scattered and isolated across a university. "Peer development and peer community is really important to those types of positions," says Stone. "And that would be extraordinarily rare in academia." To counter this, VISS centers hope to create cohesive, stable teams that can learn from one another. [...] Dario Taraborelli, who helps to coordinate another privately funded scientific-software project at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) in California, says that such initiatives fill a key gap in the scientific-software ecosystem, because funding agencies too often fail to prioritize crucial software infrastructure. Although there are now "substantial" grants dedicated to creating software, he says, there's precious little funding available to maintain what is built. Computer scientist Alexander Szalay, who is helping to set up a VISS centre at Johns Hopkins, agrees, noting that very few programs get to a point where enough researchers use and update them to remain useful. "They don't survive this 'Valley of Death,'" he says. "The funding stops when they actually develop the software prototype."

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slack_justyb writes: Thunderbird 102 has been released with some new UI improvements and new features. There has been a change in the icons, the layout of the address book has been upgraded to feature a more modern UI, and a new UI feature known as the spaces toolbar to get around Thunderbird. New features include an updated import and export wizard, a UI for editing the email header settings, and Matrix client support within Thunderbird, which is a messaging system using HTTPS that is similar to Discord if you've used that. Finally, the Thunderbird Twitter account released the first screenshot of the new UI that is being targeted for the 114 release. For those wondering what the Thunderbird team has done and is doing, you can always head over to the planning section of the developer site. The roadmap are things they're working on the current release and the backlog are the things they are working towards.

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Microsoft updated the Microsoft Store policies yesterday to prohibit publishers from charging fees for software that is open source or generally available for free. They're also no longer allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products. gHacks reports: If you have been to the Microsoft Store in the past couple of years, you may have noticed that it is home to more and more open source and free products. While that would be a good thing if the original developer would have uploaded the apps and games to the store, it is not, because the uploads have been made by third-parties. Even worse is the fact that many of these programs are not freely available, but available as paid applications. In other words: Microsoft customers have to pay money to buy a Store version of an app that is freely available elsewhere. Sometimes, free and paid versions exist side by side in the Store. Having to pay for a free application is bad enough, but this is not the only issue that users may experience when they make the purchase. Updates may be of concern as well, as the copycat programs may not be updated as often or as quickly as the source applications. Open source and free products may not be sold anymore on the Microsoft Store, if generally available for free, and publishers are not allowed to set irrationally high price tags for their products anymore. The developers of open source and free applications may charge for their products on the Microsoft Store, the developer of Paint.net does that, for example. If Microsoft enforces the policies, numerous applications will be removed from the Store. Developers could report applications to Microsoft before, but the new policies give Microsoft control over application listings and submissions directly.

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Nolan Lawson, writing in a blogpost: Anyone who's worked in the tech industry for long enough, especially at larger organizations, has seen it before. A legacy system exists: it's big, it's complex, and no one fully understands how it works. Architects are brought in to "fix" the system. They might wheel out a big whiteboard showing a lot of boxes and arrows pointing at other boxes, and inevitably, their solution is... to add more boxes and arrows. Nobody can subtract from the system; everyone just adds. This might go on for several years. At some point, though, an organizational shakeup probably occurs -- a merger, a reorg, the polite release of some senior executive to go focus on their painting hobby for a while. A new band of architects is brought in, and their solution to the "big diagram of boxes and arrows" problem is much simpler: draw a big red X through the whole thing. The old system is sunset or deprecated, the haggard veterans who worked on it either leave or are reshuffled to other projects, and a fresh-faced team is brought in to, blessedly, design a new system from scratch. As disappointing as it may be for those of us who might aspire to write the kind of software that is timeless and enduring, you have to admit that this system works. For all its wastefulness, inefficiency, and pure mendacity ("The old code works fine!" "No wait, the old code is terrible!"), this is the model that has sustained a lot of software companies over the past few decades. Will this cycle go on forever, though? I'm not so sure. Right now, the software industry has been in a nearly two-decade economic boom (with some fits and starts), but the one sure thing in economics is that booms eventually turn to busts. During the boom, software companies can keep hiring new headcount to manage their existing software (i.e. more engineers to understand more boxes and arrows), but if their labor force is forced to contract, then that same system may become unmaintainable. A rapid and permanent reduction in complexity may be the only long-term solution. One thing working in complexity's favor, though, is that engineers like complexity. Admit it: as much as we complain about other people's complexity, we love our own. We love sitting around and dreaming up new architectural diagrams that can comfortably sit inside our own heads -- it's only when these diagrams leave our heads, take shape in the real world, and outgrow the size of any one person's head that the problems begin. It takes a lot of discipline to resist complexity, to say "no" to new boxes and arrows. To say, "No, we won't solve that problem, because that will just introduce 10 new problems that we haven't imagined yet." Or to say, "Let's go with a much simpler design, even if it seems amateurish, because at least we can understand it." Or to just say, "Let's do less instead of more."

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Instant messaging app Telegram, which is used by over 500 million active users, said on Friday it's working on a premium tier, but plans to keep many of the current features available to existing users. In a post, Telegram Pavel Durov wrote: Since the day Telegram was launched almost 9 years ago, we've been giving our users more features and resources than any other messaging app. A free app as powerful as Telegram was revolutionary in 2013 and is still unprecedented in 2022. To this day, our limits on chats, media and file uploads are unrivaled. And yet, many have been asking us to raise the current limits even further, so we looked into ways to let you go beyond what is already crazy. The problem here is that if we were to remove all limits for everyone, our server and traffic costs would have become unmanageable, so the party would be unfortunately over for everyone. After giving it some thought, we realized that the only way to let our most demanding fans get more while keeping our existing features free is to make those raised limits a paid option. That's why this month we will introduce Telegram Premium, a subscription plan that allows anyone to acquire additional features, speed and resources. It will also allow users to support Telegram and join the club that receives new features first. Not to worry though: all existing features remain free, and there are plenty of new free features coming. Moreover, even users who don't subscribe to Telegram Premium will be able to enjoy some of its benefits: for example, they will be able to view extra-large documents, media and stickers sent by Premium users, or tap to add Premium reactions already pinned to a message to react in the same way. While our experiments with privacy-focused ads in public one-to-many channels have been more successful than we expected, I believe that Telegram should be funded primarily by its users, not advertisers. This way our users will always remain our main priority.

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GitHub has announced that it will sunset Atom, the text editor for software development that the company introduced in 2011. In a blog post, GitHub said that it will archive the Atom repository and all other repositories remaining in the Atom organization on December 15, 2022. From a report: Atom served as the foundation for the Electron framework, which paved the way for thousands of apps including Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, GitHub's own GitHub Desktop. But GitHub asserts that Atom community involvement has declined as new tools have emerged over the years. Atom itself hasn't seen significant feature development for the past several months beyond maintenance and security updates.

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Apple announced some major new features for Mail that finally bring the email app closer to parity with Gmail and other popular email clients. From a report: Perhaps the most useful will be an undo send feature, which will let you call back an email within 10 seconds of hitting the send button. A "remind me" feature will let you set a time for an email to come back to the top of your inbox. A new scheduled send feature that allows you to specify exactly when an email should go out. And Mail will even tell you when it thinks you've forgotten to include an attachment.

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Capital One, a major player in America's banking industry with $434 billion in assets and more than 100 million customers, is launching Capitol One Software, "a business that develops and sells software products to companies scaling up their use of data and cloud computing," reports Forbes. From the report: The new venture, which has been created by Capital One's CEO and founder, Rich Fairbank, is based at the company's headquarters in McLean, Virginia, and has its own dedicated personnel as well as access to software developers in Capital One's 12,000-strong technology team. Its first product, Capital One Slingshot, helps companies speed up their adoption of Snowflake, a popular cloud data platform, and manage costs associated with it. [...] Ravi Raghu, the head of Capital One Software, says executives at Capital One see its creation as a natural evolution of the overall company's digital journey. "We've been talking of Capital One as a technology company for a while now. The best proof of that is [to become] a technology company that's actually selling software. That innovation just runs in our DNA." Still, making Capital One Software a success will be no slam dunk. The markets the new business is targeting are big but they are also full of formidable competitors whose sole focus is on software and there are significant costs associated with things such as building teams that consult with customers to help them get the most out of the products they buy. Capital One may also need to reassure investors, who have seen its share price fall by almost 12% this year to $127.86 at close of trading on May 31, that its move into the software business will not distract executives from its core finance ones, especially as the economy shows signs it may be tilting towards recession.

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ellithligraw writes: Analytics company Pixalate found that there are over 1.5 million abandoned iOS and Android apps. This analysis comes after Apple's announcement of changes to their App Store for abandoned apps, prompting a discussion on the Web. "Pixalate claims they crawled the App Store and Play Store to analyze all apps available for download based on their last update to determine their degree of 'abandonment,'" reports InfoQ. "Based on the previous definitions, Pixalate found over 650k iOS apps and about 870k Android apps to qualify as abandoned apps (haven't been updated in over two years). Of those, just about 180k iOS apps and 130k Android apps qualify as super-abandoned (haven't been updated in at least five years)." Note that according to Statista there are 4 million iOS apps, and 3 million Android apps available.

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