Geekish

Anyone who works as a freelancer these days has to be at least a bit familiar with techie things. But it isn’t just that. When I was a kid and those vaguely SF puppet shows were on the television and all the other kids wanted to be Greg Gogetem or Steve Savetheuniverse, I wanted to be the guy in a white coat and glasses called Doc or Brains. Here are some technology-related feeds I find useful and/or entertaining.

Slashdot » Are Corporate Interests Holding Back US Electrical Grid Expansion?

Sunday 25 February 23:34:00 UTC 2024

Long-time Slashdot reader BishopBerkeley writes: Though it does not come as much of a surprise, a new study highlighted in IEEE Spectrum delves into how corporate profit motives are preventing the upgrading and the expansion of the U.S. electrical grid. The full report can be downloaded here from the source [the nonprofit economic research group NBER]. Besides opening up the … [Link]

Slashdot » Julia v1.10 Improves Performance, and Gnuplot Gets Pie Charts

Sunday 25 February 22:34:00 UTC 2024

Julia 1.0 was released in 2018 — after a six-year wait. And there's now another update. LWN.net gets you up to speed, calling Julia "a general-purpose, open-source programming language with a focus on high-performance scientific computing." Some of Julia's unusual features: – Lisp-inspired metaprogramming – The ability to examine compiled representations of code in the REPL or in a "reactive … [Link]

Slashdot » Scientists Create DVD-Sized Disk Storing 1 Petabit (125,000 Gigabytes) of Data

Sunday 25 February 21:34:00 UTC 2024

Popular Science points out that for encoding data, "optical disks almost always offer just a single, 2D layer — that reflective, silver underside." "If you could boost a disk's number of available, encodable layers, however, you could hypothetically gain a massive amount of extra space…" Researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently set out to do … [Link]

Slashdot » The Companies Helping Governments Hack Citizens' Phones: a 'Thriving' Industry

Sunday 25 February 20:34:00 UTC 2024

Fast Company notes that "the deadly impacts of Pegasus and other cyberweapons — wielded by governments from Spain to Saudi Arabia against human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers and others — is by now well documented. A wave of scrutiny and sanctions have helped expose the secretive, quasi-legal industry behind these tools, and put financial strain on firms like Israel's NSO … [Link]

Slashdot » AT&T Will Issue $5 Reimbursements For 12-Hour Outage

Sunday 25 February 19:34:00 UTC 2024

CNN reports: AT&T is reimbursing customers for the nearly 12-hour network outage on Thursday, the company announced in a news release. The mobile network will issue a $5 credit to "potentially impacted" AT&T Wireless customers, which it says is the "average cost of a full day of service." The credit will be applied automatically "within 2 bill cycles," according to … [Link]

Slashdot » Remembering How Plan 9 Evolved at Bell Labs

Sunday 25 February 18:34:00 UTC 2024

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The Register has been running a series of articles about the evolution of Unix, from humble beginnings to the transition to Plan9. There is a short discussion of why Plan9 and its successors never really took off (despite being vastly superior to microkernels), along with the ongoing development of 9Front. From the article: Plan 9 … [Link]

Slashdot » In Netflix's New Sci-Fi Movie 'Spaceman', an Introverted Astronaut Confronts Isolation

Sunday 25 February 17:34:00 UTC 2024

Netflix's new sci-fi drama Spaceman centers on Czech astronaut Jakub Procházk, described by Polygon as "painfully introverted, emotionally repressed, and above all, quiet… so muted and compressed, he seems like a trauma victim." The film, adapted from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia written by Czech author Jaroslav KalfaÅ(TM), is a solemn drama in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, … [Link]

Slashdot » Texas Just Got a New 1.1-Million-Panel Solar Farm

Sunday 25 February 16:34:00 UTC 2024

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Renewable developer Clearway Energy Group has completed a 452-megawatt (MW) solar farm in West Texas — and it's huge… It's built on around 5,000 acres of land and features over 1.1 million solar panels… Texas Solar Nova will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually. It's got an offtake agreement … [Link]

Slashdot » Oklahoma Man Hacked US Government Site To Buy Cars At Auction For $1

Sunday 25 February 15:34:00 UTC 2024

A U.S. government auction site was breached by an Oklahoma man, reports NBC News. So when it came time to pay up on his winning bids, he "falsified the true auction price to $1," according to the U.S. attorney's office. He defrauded the government out of more than $150,000 between Jan. 31 and March 21, 2019, the indictment alleges. Included … [Link]

Slashdot » Moon Landing's Payloads Include Archive of Human Knowledge, Lunar Data Center Test, NFTs

Sunday 25 February 12:34:00 UTC 2024

In 2019 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched an Israeli spacecraft carrying a 30-million page archive of human civilization to the moon. Unfortunately, that spacecraft crashed. But thanks to this week's moon landing by the Odysseus, there's now a 30-million page "Lunar Library" on the moon — according to a Medium post by the Arch Mission Foundation. "This historic moment … [Link]

Slashdot » What Happened After Peter Thiel Paid 271 Students to Drop Out of College?

Sunday 25 February 8:34:00 UTC 2024

Since 2010, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has offered to pay about 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school each year "to start companies or nonprofits," reports the Wall Street Journal. His program has now backed 271 people, and this year the applicant pool "is bigger than ever." So how's it going? Some big successes include Vitalik Buterin, co-founder … [Link]

Slashdot » How 'Smart Keys' Have Fueled a New Wave of Car Thefts

Sunday 25 February 4:34:00 UTC 2024

"One London resident watched on CCTV as a thief walked up to his £40,000 car and drove away," reports the Observer. "Now manufacturers say they are being drawn in to a hi-tech 'arms race' with criminals." [H]i-tech devices disguised as handheld games consoles are being traded online for thousands of pounds and are used by organised crime gangs to mimic … [Link]

Slashdot » Scientists Pursue Cancer Vaccines Tailored to the Genetic Makeup of an Individual's Tumor

Sunday 25 February 2:34:00 UTC 2024

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which selects Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, last week awarded Dr. Wu its Sjöberg Prize in honor of 'decisive contributions' to cancer research," reports CNN. Their profile of the oncologist from Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute notes Dr. Wu's research "has laid the scientific foundation for the development of cancer vaccines tailored to the … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons