By popular request, a new poll is up: What was the first computer system you used? As usual, it's hard to list everything, so use the comments section if your first system isn't on the list. Use the comments as well to describe the context of the happy memories from those (probably) simpler times.

And yes, it's a multiple choice poll this time, so you can only choose one, even if you used your VIC-20 to hack into a DataGeneral mini from which you launched DOS attacks on the school mainframe, or whatever.

This week, CERN scientists published an analysis of data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which has been riding aboard the International Space Station since 2011, which detects subatomic particles constantly bombarding Earth. They include positrons, also known as anti-electrons, exceedingly rare antimatter particles that can result from the breakdown of dark matter.

"AMS now unveiled data that no other experiment could ever record," said CERN spokesman Arnaud Marsollier.

http://www.channel3000.com/technology/emerging-clues-may-point-to-dark-matter/28166232

In 2005, work began on a project headed by Andrei Zmievski to bring native Unicode support to the language by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library and internally representing strings as UTF-16. Because this project would lead to major internal and user-affecting changes, it was planned to be the next major PHP version (i.e. version 6) along with a few other features.

By using UTF-16 as default encoding, developers would need to convert the code and all input (e.g. data from requests, database, etc.) from one encoding to UTF-16 and back again. This conversion takes a lot of CPU time, memory (to store the much larger strings), and creates a higher complexity in the implementation due to the increased need to detect the proper encoding for the situation. In light of all of this and the relatively small gain, many contributors became unwilling to use "trunk" as their main development branch and instead either using the stable 5.2/5.3 branches or refusing to do development at all. This shortage of developers led to delays in the project.

In 2009, PHP 5.3 release with many non-Unicode features back-ported from PHP6, most notably namespaces. This became the widely used, stable version of PHP, and in March 2010, the PHP6 project was officially abandoned, and instead PHP 5.4 was prepared containing most remaining non-Unicode features from PHP 6, such as traits and closure re-binding.

Why Jump to PHP7?

After a vote in July of 2014, it was officially decided that the next major release would be called PHP7. The primary reason for even considering the name is the widely-known existence of the previous failed attempt of a new major release, and the existence of numerous books and other resources which already referred to the previous PHP 6. To address potential confusion, there was an RFC (i.e. request for comments) and a vote on whether or not to reuse this name.

Read the rest at the Halls of Valhalla.

It seems our polls remain active for about 3 days before getting no new votes or comments, so maybe we'll move to two polls a week: one on Monday and a second one mid-week after the first one quiets down. Could use some suggestions and contributions - what shall we poll? Typical categories involve polls about user preferences, opinion about the site, and polls about something that's just happened in the news. But let's be creative.

Your suggestions here - and we'll run them over the next coming weeks, starting Monday.

KDE has always been full of tons of configuration options. And the KDE team has remained somewhat stalwart in defending that approach even as the Gnome3 project decided their mantra would be "simplify, simplify, simplify."

Suddenly, at least one journal is reporting the KDE developers are reconsidering that approach and deciding they'll simplify too.

KDE usability team lead Thomas Pfeiffer posted on the future roadmap of the KDE user interface and user experience on his blog. While he acknowledges that the great power and flexibility that comes with KDE Plasma and associated applications is the main reason behind its huge fanbase, in his opinion these are also the reasons why newbies get intimidated by the overwhelming number of features exposed at one place.

Developer Thomas Pfeiffer is behind the statement, having posted on his blog: "Anything that makes Linux interesting for technical users (shells, compilation, drivers, minute user settings) will be available; not as the default way of doing things, but at the user's discretion." In the design vision and principles section of the KDE HIG, we condensed and evolved this goal into a simple guiding principle: Simple by default, powerful when needed."

[Ed. note: I've got a bad feeling about this.]

A fork of systemd has recently emerged, calling itself "uselessd (the useless daemon, or the daemon that uses less... depending on your viewpoint)".

They describe the project as such:

uselessd is a project which aims to reduce systemd to a base initd, process supervisor and transactional dependency system, while minimizing intrusiveness and isolationism. Basically, it's systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.

uselessd is still in its early stages and it is not recommended for regular use or system integration, but nonetheless, below is what we have thus far.

They then go on to list features such as support for musl libc and uClibc, decoupling from journald and udevd, removal of superfluous unit types and daemons unrelated to process management, as well as the preliminary foundation for potential future ports to non-Linux systems.

This is certainly an interesting development in the entire systemd saga.

Scientists have identified lead poisoning - transmitted through cookware made of recycled metal - as an important factor in the health of Africans. And lead poisoning has important impacts on health, learning, and cognition.

Despite the ban on lead in gasoline, blood lead levels in African nations have remained stubbornly high. Now, researchers from Ashland University think they might know why. According to their tests, cookware made in Africa from recycled metals is leaching lead into food in quantities nearly 200 times the levels permissible in the United States.

"This previously unrecognized lead exposure source has the potential to be of much greater public health significance than lead paint or other well-known sources that are common around the world," added co-author Perry Gottesfeld. Lead exposure in children has been linked to brain damage, impaired cognition, lower educational performance, and a range of other health effects. It has also been suggested that the worldwide drop in violent crime was linked to the banning of leaded gasoline.

The seemingly on-again, off-again negotiations between IBM and GlobalFoundries over IBM's microchip manufacturing operations may have reached a successful conclusion this week. Dan Nenni, a semiconductor industry writer and consultant, published a story on Tuesday on the SemiWiki website asserting that IBM and GlobalFoundries have reached a "handshake" agreement on a deal valued at more than $2 billion, "on pretty good authority."

The potential deal is part of the transformation of the computer chip industry toward a "fabless" model under which chip companies outsource their manufacturing to so-called "foundry" companies such as GlobalFoundries and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The trend has even led companies like Intel Corp. and Samsung Electronics, which still make their own chips, to offer foundry services.

IBM sent shock waves through the industry when it was reported they were investigating a sale of their chip fabrication business earlier this year. IBM has been a stalwart of the world semiconductor industry, inventing DRAM, mastering SiGe, SOI and much more besides and supplies manufacturing process technology to half the world's major companies, including Samsung, Globalfoundries, UMC, STMicroelectronics, Renesas, NEC, Freescale, Toshiba and Infineon.

Electronics Weekly has a good look at the deal, the history, and the implications for the industry.

Ahoy there. Let's say you'll be wantin' a Linux distro that's been blessed by his ownself the Grand Admiral of the GNU revolution, Richard Stallman. Arrr. And supposin' you can't abide by the wretched bilge that's binary blobs infectin' yer own GNU/Linux system, foisted upon ya by the likes of those lowly bastards Adobe and NVidia, whose scurvy, un-transparent and despicable rot goes against your very bein'. Well then, you'll be wantin' to make sure yer own good ship Linux hoists the latest version of Trisquel GNU/Linux, and smartly at that.

Off with ya then, to the grimy bastards at Distrowatch, with some right fine background for ya. Trisquel hails from Spain, a piratin' and thievin' port of call if ever there was one. Arrr. But they've chosen what's proper over what's easy. Turn away if you've got an Nvidia graphics card, or if ya can't stand the likes of a distro based on the latest Ubuntu. Trisquel is a fine lookin' ship if ever I've laid my eyes on one, hoistin' aloft clean versions of LXDE, XFCE, and KDE desktops, but believe you me when I tell ya they've been stripped bare of any software that isn't cut from the purest, GPL cloth. I sailed that ship in a virtual machine while hittin' no reefs, aaar, but I do reckon if your hardware isn't the plainest of vanilla, you may find it chafes your britches when you install 'er.

That said though, avast, she's a smart little distro, she sails a beaut, and she's right easy on the eyes, if I do say so myself. As for the package selection, aaar, when I'm at the tiller and the mainsail's drawin' wind, most of the packages I use I found sittin' sweet as a lily in the repos. Your own position at sea might be affected, though, if you find yerself needin' something exotic.

I myself am as pure as the next Linux captain, who be supportin' the cause of throwin' all those lily-livered binary blobs in the brig. But not if it means I can't sail my ship. That's why you won't be findin' this pirate sailin' Trisquel myself. But if ideological purity be yer cup-o-rum, well then, aaaarrr: raise the plank on Trisquel, and may fine winds be at yer back. Drop in at the Trisquel tavern where you can break yer jaw askin' yer questions, and tell 'em Captain Zafiro17 sent ya, like the devil himmself. Aaaar haar haar har har har.

Imagine being able to chat with another user using what's in effect a modem program that transmits sounds at near ultrasonic frequencies. Now imagine your cat or dog being royally pissed off by your conversation.

The future is now. An anonymous Pipedotter wrote it to direct out attention to quietnet, a program that does just that. It is a simple chat program that works without Wifi or Bluetooth connections and won't show up in a pcap. You need a good pair of speakers to make it work: If you can clearly hear the send script working then your speakers may not be high quality enough to produce sounds in the near ultrasonic range.

Quietnet is dependant on pyaudio[1] and Numpy[2].

[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/hubert/pyaudio/
[2] http://www.numpy.org/

The same Anonymous Coward notes: "Quietnet is just a toy! Take a look at minimodem[3] or gnuradio[4] if you need something robust."

[3] http://www.whence.com/minimodem/
[4] http://gnuradio.org/

[Ed. note: looks pretty interesting. Time to test out my cat's audio frequency sensitivity, that fuzzy bastard.]