Every day the world is becoming more digital and every company is becoming a technology company. Cloud computing and AI combined with new productivity, communication and intelligent tools and services enable us to do more, do it more quickly and in ways that were simply unimaginable a generation ago. But participating in the digital economy means that people need digital skills and companies need skilled workers.

There will be 1.4 million computer science-related jobs by 2020, yet U.S. college graduates are expected to fill less than a third of those jobs. Millions of Americans whose skills were valuable just a few years ago, find themselves underemployed — or worse, out of work altogether. PBS’ new documentary, “CyberWork and the American Dream,” examines this challenge and delves into the history of solving problems posed by technological disruption.

Ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to participate in the digital economy means that we need to change the way people are educated, trained and hired. This isn’t a challenge any one company can address alone. It will take a focused public-private approach to ensure everyone can participate in the digital economy. Microsoft is working hard on this issue and will share more about our approach in the coming months.

If America’s leaders come together and take on the challenge of preparing all Americans for the economic opportunities of tomorrow, we can unlock the potential of our nation’s best asset: our skilled and talented workforce.

Tags: Education and Jobs

From 26th to 28th April, some of Europe’s best Pokémon players will be competing at the Estrel Berlin in Germany to be part of the Pokémon Europe International Championships. If you can’t attend the event, don’t worry! The whole thing will be livestreamed so that you can watch the action from home.

All the intense action, along with play-by-play analysis from a panel of expert commentators, will be streamed across three separate channels. The broadcast is in English only and can be viewed at the following:

Channels:
– Twitch.tv/Pokemon
– Twitch.tv/PokemonTCG
– Twitch.tv/PokkenTournament

Broadast Times:
– Friday 26 April from 08:30 BST / 09.30 CEST: Pokémon TCG and Pokémon video game match coverage
– Saturday 27 April from 08:00 BST / 09:00 CEST: Pokkén Tournament DX, Pokémon TCG, and Pokémon VG match coverage
– Sunday 28 April from 08:00 BST / 09:00 CEST: Final matches for Pokkén Tournament DX, Pokémon TCG, and Pokémon VG

The event will feature Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, the Pokémon Trading Card Game, and Pokkén Tournament DX. You can check out the hosts for each event below.

Calling the action for Pokémon Ultra Sun and Pokémon Ultra Moon video game battles:
Sebi Ernst, Markus Stadter, Labhaoisa Cromie and Adam Dorricott

Providing insight into Pokémon Trading Card Game matches:
Kyle “Pooka” Sucevich, Nicholas Pearce, Jamie Serhan and Joe Bernard

Analysing the blows in Pokkén Tournament DX:
Michael “H2” Graf, Evan “Wonderchef” Hashimoto and Solomon “SolCalibre” Richard-Croffie

Have you ever considered playing Pokémon competitively? Do you think you’d be able to play against the very best? Let us know in the comments.

We recently interviewed Joe Doss on how he uses Fedora. This is part of a series on the Fedora Magazine. The series profiles Fedora users and how they use Fedora to get things done. Contact us on the feedback form to express your interest in becoming a interviewee.

Who is Joe Doss?

Joe Doss lives in Chicago, Illinois USA and his favorite food is pizza. He is the Director of Engineering Operations and Kenna Security, Inc. Doss describes his employer this way: “Kenna uses data science to help enterprises combine their infrastructure and application vulnerability data with exploit intelligence to measure risk, predict attacks and prioritize remediation.”

His first Linux distribution was Red Hat Linux 5. A friend of his showed him a computer that wasn’t running Windows. Doss thought it was just a program to install on Windows when his friend gave him a Red Hat Linux 5 install disk. “I proceeded to install this Linux ‘program’ on my Father’s PC,” he says. Luckily for Doss, his father supported his interest in computers. “I ended up totally wiping out the Windows 95 install as a result and this was how I got my first computer.”

At Kenna, Doss’ group makes use of Fedora and Ansible: “We run Fedora Cloud in multiple VPC deployments in AWS and Google Compute with over 200 virtual machines. We use Ansible to automate everything we do with Fedora.”

Doss brews beer at home and contributes to open source in my free time. He also has a cat named Tibby. “I rescued Tibby off the street the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago when she was 7 months old. She is not very smart, but she makes up for that with cuteness.” His favorite place to visit is his childhood home of Michigan, but Doss says, “anywhere with a warm beach, a cool drink, and the ocean is pretty nice too.”

The Fedora community

Doss became involved with Fedora and the Fedora community through his job at Kenna Security. When he first joined the company they were using Ubuntu and Chef in production. There was a desire to make the infrastructure more reproducible and reliable, and he says, “I was able to greenfield our deployments with Fedora Cloud and Ansible.” This project got him involved in the Fedora Cloud release.

When asked about his first impression of the Fedora community, Doss said, “Overwhelming to be honest. There is so much going on and it is hard to figure out who are the stakeholders of each part of Fedora.” Once he figured out who he needed to talk to he found the community very welcoming and super supportive.

One of the ideas he had to improve the community was to unite the various projects and team under on bug tracking tool and community resource. “Pagure, Bugzilla, Github, Fedora Forums, Discourse Forums, Mailing lists… it is all over the place and hard to navigate at first.” Despite the initial complexity of becoming familiar with the Fedora Project, Doss feels it is amazingly rewarding to be involved. “It feels awesome it to be apart of a Linux distro that impacts so many people in very positive ways. You can make a difference.”

Doss called out Dusty Mabe at Red Hat for helping him become involved, saying Dusty “has been an amazing mentor and resource for enabling me to contribute back to Fedora.”

Doss has an interesting way of explaining to non-technical friends what he does. “Imagine changing the tires on a very large bus while it is going down the highway at 70 MPH and sometimes you need to get involved with the tire manufacturer to help make this process work well.” This metaphor helps people understand what replacing 200-plus VMs across more than five production VPCs in AWS and Google Compute with every Fedora release.

Doss drew my attention to one specific incident with Fedora 29 and Vagrant. “Recently we encountered an issue where Vagrant wouldn’t set the hostname on a Fresh Fedora 29 Beta VM. This was due to Fedora 29 Cloud no longer shipping the network service stub in favor of NetworkManager. This led to me working with a colleague at Kenna Security to send a patch upstream to the Vagrant project to help their developers produce a fix for Fedora 29. Vagrant usage with Fedora is a very large part of our development cycle at Kenna, and having this broken before the Fedora 29 release would have impacted us a lot.” As Doss said, “Sometimes you need to help make the tires before they go on the bus.”

Doss is the COPR Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS package maintainer for WireGuard VPN. “The CentOS repo just went over 60 thousand downloads last month which is pretty awesome.”

What Hardware?

Doss uses Fedora 29 cloud in the over five VPC deployments in AWS and Google computer. At home he has a SuperMicro SYS-5019A-FTN4 1U Server that runs Fedora 29 Server with Openshift OKD installed on it. His laptops are all Lenovo. “For Laptops I use a ThinkPad T460s for work and a ThinkPad 25 at home. Both have Fedora 29 installed. ThinkPads are the best with Fedora.”

What Software?

Doss used GNOME 3 as his preferred desktop on Fedora Workstation. “I use Sublime Text 3 for my text editor on the desktop or vim on servers.” For development and testing he uses Vagrant. “Ansible is what I use for any kind of automation with Fedora. I maintain an Ansible playbook for setting up my workstation.”

Ansible

I asked Doss if he had advice for people trying to learn Ansible.

“Start small. Automate the stuff that makes your life easier, but don’t over complicate it. Ansible Galaxy is a great resource to get things done quickly, but if you truly want to learn how to use Ansible, writing your own roles and playbooks the path I would take.

“I have helped a lot of my coworkers that have joined my Operations team at Kenna get up to speed on using Ansible by buying them a copy of Ansible for Devops by Jeff Geerling. This book will give anyone new to Ansible the foundation they need to start using it everyday. #ansible on Freenode is a great resource as well along with the official Ansible docs.”

Doss also said, “Knowing what to automate is most likely the most difficult thing to master without over complicating things. Debugging complex playbooks and roles is a close second.”

Home lab

He recommended setting up a home lab. “At Kenna and at home I use Vagrant with the Vagrant-libvirt plugin for developing Ansible roles and playbooks. You can iterate quickly to build your roles and playbooks on your laptop with your favorite editor and run vagrant provision to run your playbook. Quick feedback loop and the ability to burn down your Vagrant VM and start over quickly is an amazing workflow. Below is a sample Vagrant file that I keep handy to spin up a Fedora VM to test my playbooks.”

-- mode: ruby --
 vi: set ft=ruby :
 Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
 config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "dnf install nfs-utils rpcbind @development-tools @ansible-node redhat-rpm-config gcc-c++ -y"
 config.ssh.forward_agent = true
 config.vm.define "f29", autostart: false do |f29|
 f29.vm.box = "fedora/29-cloud-base"
 f29.vm.hostname = "f29.example.com"
 f29.vm.provider "libvirt" do |vm|
 vm.memory = 2048
 vm.cpus = 2
 vm.driver = "kvm"
 vm.nic_model_type = "e1000"
 end
config.vm.synced_folder '.', '/vagrant', disabled: true 

config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible| 
 ansible.groups = { 
 } 
 ansible.playbook = "playbooks/main.yml"
 ansible.inventory_path = "inventory/development"
 ansible.extra_vars = {
 ansible_python_interpreter: "/usr/bin/python3" 
 }
# ansible.verbose = 'vvv' end
end
end

Click Here!

Today’s SSD drives are so fast that they speed up your entire Mac —but unless you spend a lot of money, they’re also very small. You can manage on 128GB of space instead, but it takes discipline and apps to pull it off.

There’s no question: the more storage you have on your Mac, the happier you’ll be. Yet it’s easy to say that a decent minimum is a 512GB SSD, it’s harder to actually buy that.

You have to specify your drive size when you’re buying the Mac and you have to get it from Apple. That means both predicting what you’ll ever need with this machine —and paying well for it. A 512GB SSD adds $400 to the cost of a Mac mini, or practically half the price of the machine again.

A 1TB SSD is the same cost as a Mac mini, if you get it from Apple. And if you’re buying a MacBook Air, getting it with a 512GB SSD will make that cheapest Mac laptop cost $1,599.

You get the same or at least similar price issues with machines like the higher-cost, higher-spec iMac or MacBook Pro. And if you’re used to having a couple of terabytes of spinning hard drives on your old Mac, even a 512GB SSD is going to feel cramped.

On the one hand, though, that SSD is going to make your Mac feel faster than ever. If you have a Mac with a small drive —or one with just a lot less than you’re used to —then you’re going to have to change how you use that machine. There are, as ever, apps that can help you. There are settings that will be of use.

More than anything, however, you’re going to need discipline.

Discipline

There are certain things you have to have on your Mac’s internal drive, on its startup disk. There are others where through years of habit you think you have to have there. And then there are ones you don’t.

As soon as you can, buy external drives. It’s another outlay but it’s vastly cheaper than paying Apple for a bigger SSD. Get at least two, and train yourself to move documents to both when you’re done with them.

Archive everything when it doesn’t need to be on your boot drive. And if you can keep those drives permanently connected to your Mac, online services like Backblaze will back them up exactly as if they’re your internal drive.

And, Thunderbolt 3 is very fast, with theoretical maximums of 40 gbit/sec. Don’t be afraid to get an external USB 3.1 type C drive capable of 10 gbit/sec for things you need fast access from, like for Photoshop scratch files, or the like.

Little choice

It’s best to assume that applications must stay on your startup drive. That’s not entirely true, but for the great majority of applications, it is safest and wisest.

However, apps tend to use temporary space on your drive. If you’re editing video in any app, for instance, you’re going to get a low disk space warning very quickly because of this.

Check the app to see if you can have this temporary space on another drive, though. Final Cut Pro X, for example, lets you set any drive as the place for these temporary files. It will always be faster to be using your startup drive, but if the external is an SSD then the difference may not be noticeable.

It takes some thought, but you can move your iTunes library off your Mac’s startup drive

FCPX makes this easy but you can also do it with iTunes, which doesn’t.

It’s well worth the effort it takes to move iTunes’s libraries to another drive, but right now you should probably wait. It looks likely that Apple will split up iTunes into its constituent parts, separating music and video for instance. And while the technique for moving them to an external drive will be the same, you may decide you only want to do this for, say, books.

Apps to help get a grip

If you’re struggling right now with a drive that is complaining about how little room you’ve got left, use some apps to help you get a handle on it.

OmniDiskSweeper, for instance, is a very good and free utility from the makers of OmniFocus. It catalogues your drive and gives you a quick way to see what’s taking up space – and delete it, if you choose. It’s not for people who are new to the Mac, but it’s a great tool if you know you shouldn’t ever delete your Library.

For newer uses or just when you haven’t time to study every document’s file size, you can use Gemini. This app, included in Setapp, is a duplicate file finder and it’s peculiar how easily you end up with two or more copies of the same thing.

Apps to stay on top

Once you’ve got a decent amount of space on your drive, the most useful thing you can do is plan. Make a workflow for yourself, just a list of when you do what with your documents. Figure out when you are done with them and when you can archive them off.

Then think about downloads. Your downloads folder already has too many files in it and because you haven’t looked in a year, you can’t easily tell now what’s important and what isn’t.

So plan to delete or archive every download after you’ve downloaded it.

An extremely basic use of Hazel to stay on top of your Downloads folder

And if this all seems like too much trouble, it is —but you can get Hazel to help. Hazel is a reason to buy a Mac, it’s that good and useful. It monitors any folder you tell it to, and then it takes action on what it finds.

We have Hazel monitor our desktop for invoices which it archives off for us after a day. After a month, Hazel will collect up all the images we’ve created and not only move them to an external archive but rename and sort them to make it easy to find one later.

Archive or delete

There’s genuinely no question. If you have a Mac with a small drive then you are going to have to be conscious of what you Save and where you save it.

Yet if our Macs today come with smaller drives than we’re used to, they’re fantastically faster. If you move from an old iMac to a new Mac mini, well, you’ll likely miss the screen as well as the storage space, but you’d never go back either.

Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.

It’s been a bit of a slower week than I’d initially planned – I was away on Monday, but I was hoping to post up a review of Egypt: Old Kingdom yesterday. It released by accident when we mentioned it in a past Weekender update but we were expecting it to re-surface today – no joy though. Still as soon as it turns up we’ll have our review ready.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading out thoughts on Cultist Simulator & NecroDancer: Amplified. We’ve got plenty more reviews coming down the pipe now, and Nick’s even returning after a break for some feature work.

Meanwhile, in the world of mobile gaming…

Out Now

Solar Settles (iOS & Android) – Full review coming soon!

From the mind that also brought us Minos Strategos & Militia, Solar Settlers is essentially a worker placement game about space exploration and colonisation. It’s inspired by board game design, featuring a central grid and ‘cards’ that you can use to either gain resources or change a space on the board, provided you meet the placement requirements.

You only have a limited number of rounds to settle the required number of colonists, but colonists need oxygen to survive, which you have to harvest from nearby planets. You also need fuel hydrogen to move them around, and ores to play cards.

We actually meant to mention this last week, but it completely slipped my mind. I managed to take it for a quick spin last night, and it’s pretty interesting. A bit low budget, but the careful balancing act of moving your colonists around, getting the resources they need, but also ensuring you settle everyone in time (which you need to draw cards for) is pretty engaging. The game features challenges and a ranking system as well.

SFD ROGUE TRPG (iOS & Android) – Full Review Coming Soon!

The roguelike train keeps on rocking along, and we have a new one to offer up to the gods of permadeath this week. SFD seems to be a tactical RPG first, with roguelike elements, featuring randomly generated dungeons, turn-based combat, over 200 weapons, spells & other items as well as 7 adventures to try out.

There’s a free demo available for anyone who wants to give it a whirl first, which gives you access to a single dungeon floor. SFD stands for ‘Sigma Finite Dungeon’, apparently.

Construction Simulator 3 (iOS & Android)

Having spent my career covering PC games more than any other platform, I discovered the world of ‘Simulator’ games quite early. Like, the OG simulator games – Railway Simulator, Farming Simulator… it tickles me to learn that mobile is not immune to these pervasive, cumbersome games about drilling holes and driving around.

Construction Simulator 3 has been out since March, we think, but it recently got given a 1.1 update that brought it up to our radar. It’s mainly about driving around, building and/or repairing things, and this time it’s set in Europe. I mean, now it’s got the Liebherr LB28! That’s bound to have made someone’s day – apparently, it’s a drilling rig that lets you set better foundations for bridges. Yes mate. (Small caveat – there do appear to be IAPs for some kind of in-game currency.)

We’re also putting a shout-out for Aldarix the Battlemage, which is an android-only game that was described by the developer as “Kinda like Hoplie, but with spells”. I wasn’t able to give it a whirl in time for today’s tome, but if anyone does end up checking it out, let us know.

Updates

Reigns: Games of Thrones (iOS & Android) (Review)

Ahead of the imminent release of Season 8, The Game of Thrones Reigns spin-off has been given a free update with over 100 new cards which tie in with the upcoming show. We imagine there may be more than a few spoilers, so beware. There’s also a sale running on Android.

Marathon Trilogy (iOS Universal)

We our information to TouchArcade for this one – you should check out Jared’s write-up for the full story, but it seems that after six the free iOS ports of Bungie’s classic Marathon games are finally getting updates again. The first milestone dropped at the end of January that brought all three games up to speed and workable with iOS 12, and then different games have been getting additional patches in the months since.

I never played the Marathon games, but I’m a big fan of Halo, so I’m glad to see this part of Bungie’s history is still being cared for on mobile devices.

Ticket to Earth (iOS & Android) (Review)

Investing in Ticket to Earth is continuing to pay off. Episode 3 was finally released in December last year, and this week the game has received a new update that adds in new tutorials, as well as ‘rookie’ and ‘veteran’ difficulty modes that focus the player on either the story, or the tactical puzzles respectively. It’s also running a sale on iOS.

Sales

Going to do a quicker round-up than what we usually do this week, as it’s mainly iOS-only sales, sorry Android users!

Team 17 are running a sale on most of their iOS catalogue, and Overhaul have made Baldur’s Gate half price. It’s not the cheapest it’s been though, so you can probably afford to wait. Another PT favourite, Space Grunts, is going for a couple of dollars.

The only sale this week that’s on both iOS & Android is Age of Rivals, which is a great strategy boardgame.

Seen anything else you liked? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!

At GDC 2019, real-time raytracing was one of the marquee features.  Unreal was the first to market with DXR support added to Unreal Engine 4.22.  Unfortunately it also required you to have one of the newest generation video cards, an RTX 2060, 2070 or 2080.  Thankfully Nvidia also announced at GDC that they would be bringing DXR support to some older GeForce 10 series cards based on the Pascal architecture.   Does this mean you can now do real-time raytracing development on a older Nvidia GPU?  Let’s find out!

There are a few requirements before you can start:

• an Nvidia 1060 6GB, 1070 or 1080 card (or of course a RTX 2060+ card)
• Unreal Engine 4.22 or newer
• Nvidia Drivers, 425.31 ore newer
• Windows 10 Build 1809 or later

Be sure to launch Unreal Engine using the –dx12 flag, then enable raytracing in the project settings, the full process is documented here.  Watch the entire process and the mixed results in the video below.

So can you do raytracing in Unreal Engine using older cards?  Yes, yes you can… but the results aren’t perfect as of yet.  Once you have your raytraced project up and running, check here for documentation on how to configure raytracing in your project.

General Unreal