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      JMP is Launched and Out of Beta

      Stephen Paul Weber · Monday, 12 June, 2023 - 11:00 edit · 2 minutes · 10 visibility

    JMP has been in beta for over six years, and today we are finally launching! With feedback and testing from thousands of users, our team has made improvements to billing, phone network compatibility, and also helped develop the Cheogram Android app which provides a smooth onboarding process, good Android integration, and phone-like UX for users of that platform. There is still a long road ahead of us, but with so much behind us we’re comfortable saying JMP is ready for launch, and that we know we can continue to work with our customers and our community for even better things in the future.  Check out our launch on Product Hunt today as well!

    JMP’s pricing has always been “while in beta” so the first question this raises for many is: what will the price be now? The new monthly price for a customer’s first JMP phone number is now $4.99 USD / month ($6.59 CAD), but we are running a sale so that all customers will continue to pay beta pricing of $2.99 USD / month ($3.59 CAD) until the end of August. We are extending until that time the option for anyone who wishes to prepay for up to 3 yearsand lock-in beta pricing. Contact support if you are interested in the prepay option. After August, all accounts who have not pre-paid will be put on the new plan with the new pricing. Those who do pre-pay won’t see their price increase until the end of the period they pre-paid for.  The new plan will also include a multi-line discount, so second, third, etc JMP phone numbers will be $2.45 USD / month ($3.45 CAD) when they are set to all bill from the same balance.  The new plan will also finally have zero-rated toll free calling.  All other costs (per-minute costs, etc) remain the same, see the pricing page for details.

    The account settings bot now has an option “Create a new phone number linked to this balance” so that you can get new numbers using your existing account credit and linked for billing to the same balance without support intervention.

    Thanks so much to all of you who have helped us get this far.  There is lots more exciting stuff coming this year, and we are so thankful to have such a supportive community along the way with us.  Don’t forget we’ll be at FOSSY in July, and be sure to check out our launch on Product Hunt today as well.

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      Apple removes $99 dev account requirement for first iOS 17 and macOS 14 betas

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Wednesday, 7 June, 2023 - 17:54

    Apple removes $99 dev account requirement for first iOS 17 and macOS 14 betas

    Enlarge (credit: Apple)

    Usually when Apple announces big new operating system updates at WWDC, it releases early, work-in-progress developer betas for app developers who have paid for an Apple Developer account. A few weeks later, once the betas have been updated a couple of times, it has released somewhat more-stable public beta versions for general consumption.

    That has changing this year. Anyone who signs in to Apple's developer site with their Apple ID will have access to the developer beta builds of iOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and Apple's other operating systems for free. Actually submitting apps to Apple for App Store distribution (or, on the Mac, signing them so that you can distribute them outside the App Store without setting off macOS' many unsigned app warning messages) will still cost $99 per year. But enthusiasts and testers who use developer accounts to get early beta access will no longer need to pay to do it.

    Apple will still release public beta builds of all its operating systems through its public beta program sometime in July.

    Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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      Newsletter: JMP is 6! Leaving beta this year! And FOSSY SLIGHTLY SMILING FACE

      denver · Wednesday, 15 February, 2023 - 03:30 edit · 4 minutes

    Hi everyone!

    Welcome to the latest edition of your pseudo-monthly JMP update!

    In case it’s been a while since you checked out JMP, here’s a refresher: JMP lets you send and receive text and picture messages (and calls) through a real phone number right from your computer, tablet, phone, or anything else that has a Jabber client.  Among other things, JMP has these features: Your phone number on every device; Multiple phone numbers, one app; Free as in Freedom; Share one number with multiple people.

    JMP is 6 years old today!  When we launched in 2017 we had no idea exactly how far we’d go, or that we’d be making one of the most popular chat clients on F-Droid (that is Cheogram Android, which is based on Conversations).  Last year we called JMP “phone-feature-complete” and since then we’ve made all of JMP’s features even easier to use, shepherding big improvements to various Jabber clients, including Movim and Dino, while continuing to provide first-class telephony and messaging features in our flagship mobile app: Cheogram Android.

    With so many of the edges now smoothed, and a new onboarding flow almost ready to go, it’s now time to announce: JMP will be leaving beta this year!

    What does that mean?  Primarily this is our vote of confidence (as the JMP and Cheogram team) that JMP, and apps we develop such as Cheogram Android, are ready for widespread use.  While of course there will still be improvements to make, we believe it will be able to be recommended to your friends and family (especiall Android users) without reservation.

    Naturally there are a couple things to do yet to make that happen, and one of them is to put Cheogram Android in the Play Store at last.  This will be a paid (but still free-as-in-freedom) app that will include one month of JMP service.  Of course, you will still be able to get Cheogram Android from all the other places you can already get it (such as F-Droid and our own repos/APKs).

    The other main thing is to set a final post-beta monthly price for JMP.  And, while it won’t take effect until we launch later this year, we are able to now officially announce it: US$4.99/month, with incidental pricing remaining the same (i.e. extra/international minutes will remain what they are now).  Note that there will be discounts for additional JMP numbers linked to your primary JMP number, and also (before JMP leaves beta) a chance to lock in the existing pricing for a period of time.  Having never changed the price since we started JMP 6 years ago, and given the inflation and our own staffing costs since then, we feel the new price will allow JMP to remain both sustainable, and able to face new challenges and exciting opportunities going forward (like the EU’s DMA, for one).  We want to make JMP the best phone number service, and Cheogram the best gateway to everything in the world!

    Speaking of Cheogram, a JMP newsletter these days wouldn’t be complete without mention of new Cheogram Android features (2.12.1-2 released in APK form and Cheogram F-Droid repo today!):

    • it will now offer to setup Dialer integration automatically when available
    • the Call Logs (cdrs) command replaces the usage command (giving you more info)
    • the new onboarding flow is improved even more
    • admins of a Snikket instance can create a new Jabber ID and JMP number all inside the app now (see the video demo)
    • new theme: any colour you want! (requires Android 11 or higher)

    Note that the Call Logs (cdrs) command will roll out to everyone in about a week.  If you’d like to try it before then, please send a private inquiry to JMP support and we’ll activate it for you.

    Lastly, some of you may be interested to know that the JMP/Cheogram team are going to be venturing out to a conference for the first time since March 2020!  In particular, most of the JMP/Cheogram team will be attending FOSSY this year, in Portland, Oregon, USA this July 13-16.  We’ll be announcing specifics of our involvement (whether we have a booth, talks, etc.) closer to the dates.  In the meantime, just know we’ll be there, and would love to chat with any JMP/Cheogram users, prospective customers, or otherwise!

    With that, we’ll cap off our 6 years. :)  And what an exciting 6 years it’s been!  With the big launch this year, you can bet on many more to come!

    To learn what’s happening with JMP between newsletters, here are some ways you can find out:

    Thanks for reading and have a wonderful rest of your week!

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      NVIDIA 510.39.01 Beta driver out for Linux

      news.movim.eu / GamingOnLinux · Tuesday, 11 January, 2022 - 15:29 · 2 minutes · 3 visibility

    After silently launching the RTX 3080 12GB , NVIDIA has also today put out a brand new Beta driver for Linux with version 510.39.01 now available.

    The interesting part is, the changelog mentions quite a number of things that were added in previous driver releases like support for the GBM API. There's also mentions of extensions that were added in previous stable releases too. It's likely that this will be their new "Production Branch" driver that has pulled over lots of changes from their "New Feature Branch". Confused? NVIDIA explain it like so:

    Production Branch Production Branch drivers provide ISV certification and optimal stability and performance for Unix customers. This driver is most commonly deployed at enterprises, providing support for the sustained bug fix and security updates commonly required.

    New Feature Branch New Feature Branch drivers provide early adopters and bleeding edge developers access to the latest driver features before they are integrated into the Production Branches

    Some extensions have jumped over in 510.39.01 from their other standalone Vulkan Beta Drivers though, and some are newly supported like these:

    • VK_EXT_depth_clip_control
    • VK_EXT_border_color_swizzle
    • VK_EXT_image_view_min_lod
    • VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product
    • VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart
    • VK_EXT_load_store_op_none
    • VK_KHR_maintenance4
    • VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2
    • VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering

    With Dynamic Rendering (VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering) being one of the major additions, something that The Khronos Group announced in late 2021 that many developers seemed excited about. This release newly brings AV1 decode support to the NVIDIA VDPAU driver, and brings on an optimization for the Vulkan fullscreen presentation path for X11 and direct-to-display swapchains.

    Some of the bug fixes include:

    • Fixed several issues which caused the supported-gpus.json file to contain incorrect product information.
    • Fixed a bug that caused the nvidia-settings control panel to report inaccurate ECC error counts, and completely prevented the reporting of aggregate ECC error counts. ECC error counts reported by nvidia-smi were not affected.
    • Fixed a bug which caused Vulkan applications to hang when the __GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS environment variable was set to enable threaded optimizations in the NVIDIA driver.
    • Fixed a bug where calls to vkWaitForPresentKHR would fail with VK_TIMEOUT on Maxwell and Pascal GPUs.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan compiler where 64-bit atomics were partially broken.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where VK_NULL_HANDLE was not properly handled as input to VkRenderingFragmentShadingRateAttachmentInfoKHR.imageView.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where the SPIR-V Centroid interpolation decoration was not ignored when used in conjunction with FragCoord.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where unreferenced descriptor bindings were sometimes not ignored properly.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where vkCmdBindDescriptorSets would not properly handle pDynamicOffsets for compute pipelines.
    • Fixed a bug which caused OpenGL and Vulkan applications to generate excessive traffic over dbus while attempting to communicate with nvidia-powerd, even though nvidia-powerd was not running.
    • Fixed a bug in the Vulkan driver where some Ray Tracing shaders would timeout, resulting in device loss.
    Article from GamingOnLinux.com taken from the RSS feed.