martyb writes:It was before I was scheduled to have my wisdom teeth extracted, when my dad suggested I "should prepare by staying up late and getting some good books to read because afterwards all I'll want to do is sleep or read." I stopped by the bookstore and looking around came upon Dune. It had a couple sequels and seemed to be well recommended, so I bought all three. It was the weekend with the surgery scheduled for Monday. I made the mistake of reading the dust cover and before I knew it, had finished reading the first book before having the operation!With all the stories on the COVID-19 virus, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the first half of Dune is being newly brought to the screen. Vanity Fair presents an exclusive first glimpse into its actors, history, and production. Though the film is currently scheduled for release on December 18, 2020 I thought others might like a little distraction, as well. If so, read on!Necessarily, there will be spoilers. So, if by chance you're unfamiliar with the story, consider yourself warned and stop here.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Oracle's April 2020 Critical Patch Update Brings 397 Security Fixesupstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:Oracle's April 2020 Critical Patch Update Brings 397 Security Fixes:
An Anonymous Coward writes:Anything where we can install it and watch it change all by itself, improving upon itself and not just some random action but something which LEARNS.[Ed. note: All of the preceding is exactly as received. AI has so many branches and sub-branches (twigs?) and has evolved greatly over the years. I suspect the submitter, like most of us, has seen numerous mentions of AI in the press: self-driving cars, natural language translation, Google's Deep Mind, IBM's Jeapordy-playing computer, object recognition... but knows not even where to begin. So, fellow Soylentils, what has been helpful to you in your explorations of AI? What software can be downloaded and experimented with so as to get some hands-on appreciation for what it can do? I suspect there are many others in the community who would not mind playing around with it, too. --martyb]Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
[20200416_005831 UTC; Updated title and corrected spelling of balanceTags(). --martyb]martyb writes:Ooops! Things should be working correctly, now.tl;dr: Back on March 20th, someone tripped over a bug that appears to be in the balanceTags() routine in our Perl code. I found a way to made a quick fix to prevent its happening again, but the fix was missing a couple steps. I caught and fixed one of them, but only now just handled the other.Workaround: When writing a comment, writing or editing a journal entry, or when submitting a story, use "DEL" instead of "STRIKE" to make text look like this.This story is the result of something I learned in the process: properly notify the community of any changes to the site!Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for both AzumaHazuki and SoyCow8192:Medical device "jailbreak" could help solve the dangerous shortage of ventilators:
wirelessduck submitted a link which brought us to:In a number system where the real numbers could not have an infinite number of digits, how would our physics models change?Does Time Really Flow? New Clues Come From a Century-Old Approach to Math.:
canopic jug writes:Tom's Hardware is reporting that Raspberry Pi Foundation is increasing production of its $5 Raspberry Pi Zero to meet demand from ventilator manufacturers which are using the board in their designs. The higher end Raspberry Pi boards are also reasonable desktop units for many typical home office uses, so they are being distributed in place of laptops to many working at home for the NHS. The Raspberry Pi is a low wattage single-board computer with convenient input-output hardware suitable for embedded applications but running a full Debian-based GNU/Linux distro, Raspbian.
canopic jug writes:Ross Anderson, a researcher at the Security Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, has written aboutcontact tracing in the real world enumerating in detail some of the many shortcomings with and false assumptions about contact tracing as means of fighting a pandemic.
An Anonymous Coward writes:Looking out at a city with no cars and realizing they were unable to help out directly with the pandemic, some artists at a Detroit advertising agency found another way to help,Originally found here, http://www.autoextremist.com/on-the-table1/2020/4/6/april-8-2020.html:[Ed note: It is a long article and, sadly, there are no anchors to permit a direct link to the quoted text. Scroll down to about the mid-point to find it. Also, emphasis from the original article is retained here. --martyb]