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Updated 2024-11-23 22:31
Zapping Tiny Metal Drops With Sound Creates Wires for Soft Electronics
janrinok writes:A new way to make stretchy wiring uses ultrasound and microscopic spheres of liquid metal
The Pandemic Bike Boom Survives—in Cities That Stepped Up
An Anonymous Coward writes:Covid lockdowns prompted a surge of new cyclists. But the trend has faltered in places that didn't build bike-friendly infrastructure.
Scientists Discover a Mysterious Solar System. It's Nothing Like Ours.
An Anonymous Coward writes:https://mashable.com/article/space-solar-system-white-dwarf-discovery
This Ancient Canaanite Comb is Engraved With a Plea Against Lice
mrpg writes:https://www.sciencenews.org/article/canaanite-comb-lice-israel-alphabetEngraved into the side of a nearly 4,000-year-old ivory comb is a simple wish: Get these lice out of my hair.
Apple Sued for Tracking Users' Activity Even When Turned Off in Settings
An Anonymous Coward writes:The iPhone maker knows a lot about what a user does on their phone
Virtual Model of Mouse Cortex Solves Visual Tasks
acid andy writes:Researchers for the Human Brain Project have trained a large-scale computer model of the mouse primary visual cortex to accurately solve five visual tasks.
Undetectable Very-Low Frequency Sound Increases Dancing at a Live Concert
hubie writes:Want to fire up the dance floor? Play low-frequency bass:
The Unusual Bootstrap Drivers Inside the 8086 Microprocessor Chip
owl writes:https://www.righto.com/2022/11/the-unusual-bootstrap-drivers-inside.html
NASA’s Troubled Microwave Oven-Sized Spacecraft Finally Reached The Moon
mrpg writes:A spacecraft no bigger than a microwave oven will become the first CubeSat to orbit the Moon:
Beer Hops Compounds Could Help Protect Against Alzheimer's Disease
hubie writes:Beer hops compounds could help protect against Alzheimer's disease:
Smelling in VR Environment Possible With New Gaming Technology
hubie writes:Smelling in VR environment possible with new gaming technology:
Microsoft Links Russia's Military to Cyberattacks in Poland and Ukraine
janrinok writes:The hacking group Microsoft ID'd is among the world's most cutthroat and skilled
Apple’s ‘Ask App not to Track’ Helped TikTok's War Against Facebook
Runaway1956 writes:Apple's recent privacy changes leveled the digital advertising field
How Many Bees Can You Fit in an X-Ray Machine?
hubie writes:How many bees can you fit in an X-ray machine? That's not a joke:
Tesla Open-Sources its Power Connector
takyon writes:Tesla open-sources its connector to take on CCS with 'half the size twice the power' North American Charging Standard
“Dark Ships” Emerge From the Shadow of the Nord Stream Pipeline Mystery
janrinok writes:Satellite monitors found 2 vessels with their trackers turned off in area of explosions
NASA Says its SLS Rocket is Good to Go for a Launch Attempt Wednesday
janrinok writes:"If we didn't design it to be out there in harsh weather we picked the wrong launch spot":
Time is an Illusion, Unix Time Doubly So...
fab23 writes:Today the xkcd: Y2K and 2038 comic was published and this reminded me of the recent very good technical blog post Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so... from Jan Schaumann where he explains how time is handled on different operating systems including some historical background.A famous scientist and adventurer once said: 'time is not linear but something like "Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey"'. He has since been proven more correct than he ever imagined.
EFF Files Amicus Brief Challenging Orange County, CA's Controversial DNA Collection Program
Runaway1956 writes:https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/eff-files-amicus-brief-challenging-orange-county-cas-controversial-dna-collection
SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
canopic jug writes:Distributed computing researcher, Murat Demirbas, has written a blog post about what he sees as the past, present, and future of SQLite.
Musk Proposes Turning Twitter Into a Bank to Avoid Bankruptcy
janrinok writes:https://arstechnica.com/?p=1897185
End Of Maintenance Period - Day 1
Alright, I've literally been at it for seven hours. Here's what done, here's what needs to done, and if you find something broken, let me know.
Divers Uncover Wreckage From Challenger Space Shuttle
Runaway1956 writes:Divers for a History Channel documentary have found a large section of the destroyed space shuttle Challenger:
Southeast US Has Hit the Roof of CDC's Respiratory Illness Level Scale
janrinok writes:https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/southeast-us-has-hit-the-roof-of-cdcs-respiratory-illness-level-scale/
Site Overhaul Work Starting at 2PM EST - Watch Live!
Well, the time is coming, I'm going to be livestreaming on YouTube starting at 2PM ET to try to re-habitate the infrastructure, and get ready for steps going forward. I'm going to be streaming this as part of an ongoing charity stream, and VTubing, as show of solidary with others who get harassed because they choose to use an avatar than not. I'll talk more about this at the start, and then we're going to do what we can to try and at least make the situation "less bad". Current goals is to try and at least get the machines to more up-to-date software, rebuild the nginx web frontend, and determine a long term plan for handling emailHope to see you all there,~ NRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Why Are There So Many Species? Chaos Is An Important Factor For Biodiversity
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Amazon Unveils Smaller Delivery Drone That Can Fly in Rain
An Anonymous Coward writes:https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/amazon-unveils-smaller-delivery-drone-that-can-fly-in-rain/#ftag=CAD590a51e
An Antarctic Neutrino Telescope Has Detected A Signal From The Heart Of A Nearby ActiveGalaxy
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Site Back Up After Unexpected Downtime
So, quick update here. The site was down for most of the night because the database cluster shot itself in the head. I had restarted a machine to install updates, and this caused the backend cluster to entire to entirely loose its mind. Unfortunately, I didn't have a manual dump of the database made, just a VM snapshot, since, well, I wasn't tinkering with it directly. I've mostly been trying to patch things to the point that I can sleep, and leaving things down like IRC and email which need to be seriously overhauled before they can go back up.As far as damages go, it looks like we lost 10 or so days of messages, which uh, sucks for multiple reasons. We're currently on ##soylentnews on Libera.Chat while I pull bits of the site out of the flames, but I'm at the point that if I don't sleep, I will make things worse. Corruption in the production database is very much not what I wanted, and we're very much in limp mode for the moment. I'm going to let staff handle IRC and comments while I sleep, and then I'll post another update when I'm awake.See you in a few hours~ NCommanderRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Site Services Interrupted
I've been going through all the backend boxes to determine the state of things, and found more than a few servers that needed to be immediately shutdown simply due to their state. This includes the IRC and mailservers at the moment. I'm going to be using this weekend to rebuild things as I go, but for the moment, I'm only keeping the web frontends online as necessary. For the time being, we'll be using ##soylentnews on Libera.Chat until I can rebuild all services. Email for account registeration/password reset/etc. will be down until Saturday or Sunday at the earliestI'll keep you all up to date as I work on this ...~ NCommanderRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
Raspberry Pi Shortages Could Last Another Year
upstart writes:Raspberry Pi Shortages Could Last Another Year:
Greenland’s Frozen Hinterlands are Bleeding Worse Than We Thought
upstart writes:Estimates of global sea level rise from large ice flows might be much too low:
Fediverse Roundup
canopic jug writes:Twitter appears to still be imploding further each day. While a yet unpublished but large number of Twitter accounts are either bots or abandoned, many of the others are now looking for a way out. Those leaving or just backing off a little still seek to maintain their social control media fix and explore options. As a result, the Fediverse has suddenly caught the general public's attention for better or worse. There are many articles about the Fediverse and what it is like. In particular Mastodon has gotten a lot of attention.Here are some samples:Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week. Mastodon: All You Need To Know About Platform Emerging As Twitter's AlternativeThese servers are themed according to location, city or interest - like UK, social, technology etc - according to the BBC. However, users can interact with freely with others.It works similar to Twitter, which means that users can tag other users, share media and even follow other accounts. Independent servers is the only distinguishing feature between the two microblogging platforms.Half a million users move to decentralized alternative Mastodon following Elon Musk Twitter grabAmid uncertainty and criticism following Elon Musk's takeover of social media giant Twitter, nearly half a million users have flocked to Mastodon, a decentralized alternative.Mastodon, created by the German-based non-profit Mastodon gGmbH in 2016, is an open-source network of thousands of servers that act as individual social media platforms.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
AMD Launches 96-Core Epyc Genoa; Intel Launches MAX Xeons with HBM, and Data Center GPUs
takyon writes:AMD's Epyc Genoa server chips have been officially launched (press releae). They include up to 96 "Zen 4" cores, and 192 threads when using a full complement of twelve 8-core chiplets. L2 cache per core is doubled to 1 MiB, and AVX-512 instructions are supported. The CPUs support 128 PCIe 5.0 lanes (112 available, 16 reserved) and 12-channel DDR5 memory with 2 DIMMs per channel. This allows for up to 6 TB of memory (12 TB for dual-socket) when using 256 GB modules. Genoa also supports Compute Express Link (CXL).Performance claims vary, but in one benchmark (SPECrate 2017 INT_Base), 48-core Genoa models are 20-28% faster than the previous-generation 64-core EPYC 7763, while the 96-core EPYC 9654 is almost twice as fast.Intel has launched Xeon MAX CPUs (Sapphire Rapids HBM) with up to 56 cores and 64 GB of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2e) on package. This is a different approach from AMD's 3D stacking of L3 cache in Milan-X Epyc CPUs. It also allows the CPUs to be used without any DDR5 memory:Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
The Sign-In Menu is the Latest Frontier for Microsoft Ads in Windows 11
Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/the-sign-in-menu-is-the-latest-frontier-for-microsoft-ads-in-windows-11/
The Return of NCommander - Reprise
It's been a long while since I wrote one of these, and well, to say things are depressing is very much an understatement. It's been over eight years since we first went online, and the world has literally changed several times over. Presidential elections, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and well, we've been here through it all. It's a testament to our staying power that SN has remained online through it all, as a volunteer and community driven project.That's not to say it's all been good news though ...About two years ago, I de-facto resigned from the project after internal conflicts, and SoylentNews has slowly been rotting to death. To say the state of the backend is bad is very much an understatement. I found the SN emails were on spam blocklists, and well, I won't even talk about the state of the software ATM. It's holding together mostly out of the sheer amount of overengineering, and good intentions. The last major overhaul was I did when the site was migrated to rehash 7 years ago ... yeah it's been awhile ...At this point, I think we need to talk about where we're going, because its either going to be long slow painful death, an execution, or an attempted comeback tour. This is your host NCommander, and today, we're going to look towards the future ...Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
IBM Unveils its 433 Qubit Osprey Quantum Computer
upstart writes:IBM unveils its 433 qubit Osprey quantum computer:
Hitting the Snooze Button? You're Far From Alone
hubie writes:Hitting the snooze button? You're far from alone, study shows:
NASA Leaves Its Artemis I Rocket Exposed to Winds Above Design Limits
Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/11/nasas-artemis-i-rocket-just-endured-hours-of-hurricane-like-wind-gusts/
FTX on Brink of Collapse after Binance Abandons Rescue
Freeman writes:https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/ftx-on-brink-of-collapse-after-binance-abandons-rescue/
Cygnus Cargo Ship Arrive at Space Station after Solar Array Trouble
upstart writes:Cygnus cargo ship arrive at space station after solar array trouble – Spaceflight Now:
The State of SoylentNews ...
It's been a long while since I wrote one of these, and well, to say things are depressing is very much an understatement. It's been over eight years since we first went online, and the world has literally changed several times over. Presidential elections, a global pandemic, war in Europe, and well, we've been here through it all. It's a testament to our staying power that SN has remained online through it all, as a volunteer and community driven project.That's not to say it's all been good news though ...About two years ago, I de-facto resigned from the project after internal conflicts, and SoylentNews has slowly been rotting to death. To say the state of the backend is bad is very much an understatement. I found the SN emails were on spam blocklists, and well, I won't even talk about the state of the software ATM. It's holding together mostly out of the sheer amount of overengineering, and good intentions. The last major overhaul was I did when the site was migrated to rehash 7 years ago ... yeah it's been awhile ...At this point, I think we need to talk about where we're going, because its either going to be long slow painful death, an execution, or an attempted comeback tour. This is your host NCommander, and today, we're going to look towards the future ...Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
Chipmakers are Slowing Down Products to Dodge US China Ban
upstart writes:Chipmakers are slowing down products to dodge US China ban:
"Robin Banks" Phishing Service Reemerges on Russian Platform
upstart writes:Robin Banks phishing service reemerges on Russian platform:
Meta to Cut 11,000 Jobs Globally
upstart writes:Meta to cut 11,000 jobs globally, with Irish workers affected:
Scientists Say COVID Changed the Way Sysadmins Work
upstart writes:Scientists say COVID changed the way sysadmins work:
Redditor Discovers Legendary 1956 Computer in Grandparents' Basement
Redditor Discovers Legendary 1956 Computer in Grandparents' BasementFreeman writes:Redditor discovers legendary 1956 computer in grandparents' basement:
Former iPhone Leader Joins Arm to Bring More Chips Into Your Life
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Megalodon and Other Extinct Giant Sharks Started Life in Nurseries
upstart writes:The largest sharks ever seem to have left their young in an unsupervised daycare:
The RTX 4080 Could Launch With Up to 40% Less Stock Than the RTX 4090
upstart writes:The RTX 4080 could launch with up to 40% less stock than the RTX 4090:
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