Genode Labs as the creators of the open-source Genode Operating System Framework have released Sculpt OS 22.10 as the newest version of their general purpose operating system…
US businesses have been inventing “holidays” as excuses to get people
to spend money for more than a century.
About 10 of the many examples.
I decided long ago to disregard all the holidays that pressure people
to give gifts.
I would not “celebrate” Record Store Day, but I do wish there were a
good record store in Boston, with a big selection of classical and
world records — I would visit it from time to time to look for
interesting CDs to buy. The CD is the last media substrate that was
invented without malfeatures to restrict people or impose nonfree
technology, and I am happy to use it.
Meanwhile: Out, out, damned Spotify! It has the same injustices as Amazon…
People who use a digital method to pay for parking are contributing
to a system of tracking which endangers human rights and democracy.
Occasionally, some of them also get scammed and then screwed.
Repairing electronic devices isn’t as hard as it used to be. Thanks to the internet, it’s easy to find datasheets and application notes for any standard component inside your gadget, and once you’ve found the faulty one, you simply buy a replacement from one of a million web shops — assuming you don’t end up with a fake, of course. When it comes to non-standard components, however, things get more difficult, as [dpeddi] found out when a friend asked him for help in repairing a Roland Juno-G synthesizer with a broken display.
The main issue here was the fact that the display in question was a custom design, with no replacement or documentation available. The only thing…
Not all CEOs of tech startups have the time to write code. Fortunately while Textualize is still in its development phase I have plenty of opportunity to get my hands dirty.
I get a kick out of being creative within the limitation of the terminal. I may even have come up with with an entirely new way of drawing boxes in the terminal. As bizarre as that sounds
Boxes in the terminal are not new. Rich is full of them, but they predate Rich by a long time.
CLI apps will typically use box drawing characters to build boxes out of unicode characters. There are characters for vertical lines, horizontal lines, corners, and cross pieces. With a mixture of…
by Heather Vogell, ProPublica, with data analysis by Haru Coryne, ProPublica, and Ryan Little ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants. “Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said…
The inner orbits of the Hackaday solar system have been vibrating with the announcement of the 2022 Hackaday Supercon badge. The short version of the story is that it’s a “retrocomputer”. But I think that’s somehow selling it short a little bit. The badge really is an introduction to machine language or maybe a programming puzzle, a ton of sweet blinky lights and clicky buttons, and what I think of as a full-stack hacking invitation.
Voja Antonic designed the virtual 4-bit machine that lives inside. What separates this machine from actual old computers is that everything that you might want to learn about its state is broken out to an LED on the front face, from the…
Enlarge / In culture, nerve cells spontaneously form the structures needed to communicate with each other. (credit: JUAN GAERTNER / Getty Images)
One of the more exciting developments in AI has been the development of algorithms that can teach themselves the rules of a system. Early versions of things like game-playing algorithms had to be given the basics of a game. But newer versions don’t need that—they simply need a system that keeps track of some reward like a score, and they can figure out which actions maximize that without needing a formal description of the game’s rules.
A paper released by the journal Neuron takes this a step further by using actual neurons…
The Opus codec is an audio codec that
was designed from the beginning to avoid existing patents in the field and
be royalty-free for all users. It was standardized by the IETF in 2012 as RFC 6716.
Now a company called Vectis (“a premier
full-suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique“) is collecting
patents that are claimed to read on Opus as a way of demanding
royalties on its use. “The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be
directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or
content“. (Thanks to Paul Wise).
Federal voting rights laws have long held that voters cannot be disenfranchised for making a mistake that is not “material”. In other words, if the error made by the voter is merely technical and does not truly pertain to that voter’s ability to cast a vote, the error should not be used to discard the ballot.
On May 27, 2022, the Third Circuit had used that provision of federal law to allow some ballots to be counted in a Pennsylvania local race held in 2021. Even though certain mail-in ballots did not have the “date” blank filled in by the voter, the Court ruled that the ballots should count. All the arriving ballots had been date-stamped by…
2022-10-12Comments Off on Ballot Access News – U.S. Supreme Court Erases Third Circuit Decision on “Materiality” in Determining Whether a Ballot is Valid
The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a government-enforced intellectual monopoly for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose, including commercial ones. That’s the bargain, but it seems that the copyright maximalists in the French Parliament want to renege on it. Here’s an amendment to a finance bill that was proposed by 75 politicians in the National Assembly a few days ago (translation by DeepL):
The aim of this amendment is to increase aid to artistic creation by setting…
Enlarge (credit: Image courtesy of University of Sydney)
Today, Nature Astronomy released a paper that shows off the sorts of science the Webb Telescope was designed to produce. Early on, the new telescope was pointed at a system of two massive stars that orbit each other closely. Ground-based observations had detected a ring or two produced by the interactions of these giants; the Webb was able to determine that there are at least 17 concentric rings of material that have been put in place over the previous 130 years.
And just to show off, astronomers were able to obtain a spectrum of the material that forms the rings.
It’s difficult to express just how bizarre…
The end is nigh! PostgreSQL has
substantially tightened
restrictions on the use of the “public” schema.
Here, a standard login user (not superuser) tries to make a table, as one does:
user=> CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer); ERROR: permission denied for schema public
LINE 1: CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer);
NoooO! Why can I not write a table into public?
For developers and experimenters, one of the long-time joys of PostgreSQL has
been the free-and-easy security policy that PostgreSQL has shipped with for the “public” schema.
“public” is in the default search_path, so you can always find things in it;
and,
any user can create new objects in “public”; so,
“just throw it in public!” has been an easy collaboration trick.
by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner? In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening…
2022-10-12Comments Off on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead.
On Tuesday morning, an IPCC report author and climate scientist was taken into police custody while protesting alongside activists blocking traffic in Bern, Switzerland. The scientist, Julia Steinberger, is a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and contributed to the 6th Assessment Report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, specifically its third chapter on emissions mitigation pathways that are still possible this century. The protest was organized by Renovate Switzerland group, and advocated for improved energy efficiency in buildings. Activists glued themselves to the road as part of a blockade; it was the fifth action by the group in the last week, according to local news reports. In a video of…
Future generations will one day learn about the large-scale removal and replacement of one people with another on a scale not seen since urban renewal. Will we be able to tell them we did everything possible to stop it?
Mesa’s Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles…
On the October 30, 1965 episode of the musical variety show Shindig!, the special guests were Boris Karloff and Ted Cassidy (aka “Lurch” from the Addams Family)! Previously thought lost to the ages, here is an actual clip from that episode featuring a rendition of “Monster Marsh” with Karloff impersonating original “Monster Mash” singer Bobby Pickett who, of course, was impersonating Karloff in the song. — Read the rest
It always seemed to us that the Z-axis on a 3D printer, or pretty much any CNC machine for that matter, is criminally underused. To have the X- and Y-axes working together to make smooth planar motions while the Z-axis just sits there waiting for its big moment, which ends up just moving the print head and the bed another fraction of a millimeter from each other just doesn’t seem fair. Can’t the Z-axis have a little more fun?
Of course it can, and while non-planar 3D printing is nothing new, [Stefan] over at CNC Kitchen shows us a literal twist on the concept, with this four-axis non-planar printer. For obvious reasons, it’s called the “RotBot” and…
Ukraine’s economic advisor calls for privatization and flexibility of work.
(I presume that last would include making it easier to fire employees.)
Also, more borrowing.
It may be that Ukraine’s system is too inflexible, but any steps in
that direction must be taken with great care, because there are plenty
of advisors who serve the banks that want to lend you more than you
can pay and denominate the loans in a foreign currency. This path has
led many countries into a debt trap.
