SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Intel Linux Graphics Driver Adding Device Local Memory - Possible Start of dGPU Bring-Up

A big patch series was sent out today amounting to 42 patches and over four thousand lines of code for introducing the concept of memory regions to the Intel Linux graphics driver. The memory regions support is preparing for device local memory with future Intel graphics products.

The concept of memory regions is being added to the Intel "i915" Linux kernel DRM driver for "preparation for upcoming devices with device local memory." The concept is about having different "regions" of memory for system memory as for any device local memory (LMEM). Today's published code also introduces a simple allocator and allowing the existing GEM memory management code to be able to allocate memory to these different memory regions. Up to now with Intel integrated graphics, they haven't had to worry about this functionality not even with their eDRAM/L4 cache of select graphics processors.

This device-local memory for future Intel GPUs is almost surely for Intel's discrete graphics cards with dedicated vRAM expected to debut in 2020. For the past several generations of Iris Pro with eDRAM, the Intel Linux driver has already supported that functionality. The patch message itself makes it clear that this is for "upcoming devices" but without enabling any hardware support at this time. This memory region code doesn't touch any of the existing hardware support such as the already mainlined Icelake "Gen 11" graphics code.

Previously: Intel Planning a Return to the Discrete GPU Market, Nvidia CEO Responds
Intel Discrete GPU Planned to be Released in 2020
Intel Announces "Sunny Cove", Gen11 Graphics, Discrete Graphics Brand Name, 3D Packaging, and More

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Submitted via IRC for chromas

'These maps are bogus': U.S. lawmakers tear into telecom execs over spotty rural coverage

Members of Congress are fed up with the state of cellphone coverage in the United States, and on Wednesday, they weren't afraid to lodge their complaints personally — with the leaders of some of the country's biggest wireless networks.

As Sprint and T-Mobile went to Capitol Hill to defend their $26 billion proposed merger, lawmakers buttonholed T-Mobile's chief executive, John Legere, and Sprint's executive chairman, Marcelo Claure, on the frustrating inability to get a cell signal in many parts of the country, particularly in rural areas.

Waving a coverage map of his state in the middle of a congressional hearing, Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said that despite flashy promises to build a dazzling 5G network, wireless carriers can scarcely manage to serve Vermont with regular 4G LTE. "In a lot of Vermont, we have no-G," said Welch. "These maps are bogus."

When Claure tried to shift the blame to AT&T and Verizon, saying Sprint's network often relies on those companies' infrastructure in many areas, Welch interrupted. "These are no good! These are phony maps!" he bellowed.

Can you hear me now?

Original Submission

RandomFactor writes:

In a Washington Post story picked up by the S. Louis Post-Dispatch, reporter Rachel Siegel asks the question "Are dollar stores a response to poverty - or a cause?"

The fundamental premise of the story is

fear the stores deter other business, especially in neighborhoods without grocers or options for healthy food. Dollar stores rarely sell fresh produce or meats, but they undercut grocery stores on prices of everyday items, often pushing them out of business.

this creates what is referred to by one patron as a 'food desert'

their unstoppable rise...keeps grocers from opening.

implications are made

With fewer options for fresh food and health care, people in a North Tulsa ZIP code have an average life expectancy of 11 years less than those in South Tulsa, according to a 2015 city report.

"It creates an overall sense of the neighborhood being run-down," said Stacy Mitchell, [of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance]. "It's a recipe for locking in poverty rather than alleviating it."

canopic jug writes:

Developer Aral Balkan has written a reaction piece on human rights in response to some poor ideas put out by a Palantir- and Google- sponsored docent teaching "Privacy and Big Data" at a university in The Netherlands. His point is that the attempts to spin privacy as anything other than a basic human right are nothing more than efforts to eliminate it:

Given the levels of institutional corruption in academia and in the regulatory bodies and advocacy institutions that should be protecting our privacy, very few things shock me these days. So hats off to Bart van der Sloot for managing the impossible and finding a new low by framing institutional corruption as scientific neutrality in his article Dubbele petten in de privacywetenschap.

The gist of Mr. van der Sloot’s argument can be summarised with this doozy of a quote from his article¹:

Should privacy science be pro-privacy, or is it an undermining of the neutrality of privacy science? If privacy science should be neutral, why is there so much commotion about the sponsorship by commercial parties like Google, Facebook and Palantir and are there few words wasted on sponsorship by activist civil rights organizations such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPiC), Privacy First and Bits of Freedom, which are outspoken pro-privacy? Does this not indicate that the criticism of sponsorship by commercial parties comes from persons who are not themselves neutral and objective, but actually pursue a pro-privacy agenda?

Where does one begin to dissect such a juicy turd?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://electrek.co/2019/02/09/tesla-model-3-cost-surprise-porsche-audi-reverse-engineering/:

Tesla Model 3 is now entering the European market and it is making some automakers nervous. According to a new report, Porsche and Audi reverse-engineered Tesla’s new electric car and they were quite surprised by its cost.

[...] During the early production ramp up, it was difficult to get your hands on a Model 3, but some automakers paid a pretty penny to be amongst the first to be able to check out the new electric car.

About a year ago, two Model 3 vehicles were spotted on their way to Germany – presumably to be reverse-engineered.

Later, a report came out about a German automaker being impressed by Model 3 after reverse-engineering it.

Now a new report from Germany’s Manager Magazin [in German and paywalled] includes a deep dive into the state of Audi with comments from executives and insider sources.

It claims that Porsche and Audi, who are working together on a next-generation electric platform, had to change their approach because the cost was too high compared to what Tesla is achieving.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

'Google, this is bogus as hell' — one of the fathers of the internet blasts Google for how Chromecast behaves on his home network

"Google, this is bogus as hell," Paul Vixie ranted on Internet Engineering Task Force mail list this week. The IETF mail list is where the people who create the internet's technologies converse.

The post was noticed because Paul Vixie is an Internet Hall of Fame engineer known for his pioneering work on the modern Domain Name Service (DNS).

And it is how Google was using DNS in its Chromecast Ultra streaming device that ticked him off.

[...] [Vixie] bought a Google Chromecast. But when he went to set it up, he found it doing something no device in his network is allowed to do: It wouldn't use his own, private DNS server. It would only use Google's public server.

Related: Paul Vixie: New TLDs a Money Grab, and a Mistake
VLC 3.0.0 Released, With Better Hardware Decoding and Support for HDR, 360-Degree Video, Chromecast
Paul Vixie on the Benefits of Running DNS Services Locally

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Three people were injured Friday night when panicked audience members "self-evacuated" during a performance of the musical "Hamilton" in San Francisco, police said.

A woman in the audience had a medical emergency during the scene in which the title character, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, is shot on stage, said Joseph Tomlinson, public information officer for the San Francisco police.

Audience members mistakenly thought there was a real-life shooting and rushed the exits, he said.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hamilton-3-injured-when-audience-flees-during-performance-in-san-francisco/ar-BBTFnpd

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Due to delays and potential delays in launching crew to the International Space Station (ISS) using American-made spacecraft, NASA is prepared to purchase two more seats to the ISS from Russia's Roscosmos:

Despite the scheduled return of US domestic crew launch capability this year, NASA is set to purchase more rides on the Russian Soyuz through 2020. The agency is adhering to a recommendation from its Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) after concerns were raised about the lack of a back-up option covering the potential delays that could be suffered during a challenging test flight phase for Dragon 2 and Starliner.

[...] "Past experience has shown the difficulties associated with achieving first flights on time in the final year of development. Typically, problems will be discovered during these test flights. The consequences of no US crew on ISS warrant protection by acquiring additional seats. The absence of U.S. crewmembers at any point would diminish ISS operations to an inoperable state," noted a procurement document published on February 13. "NASA is considering contracting with the State Space Corporation "Roscosmos" for these services on a sole source basis for two (2) Soyuz seats and associated services to the International Space Station (ISS) on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft vehicle. This transportation would be for one crewmember in the Fall of 2019 and one crewmember in the Spring of 2020."

The two seats in Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 seem to be in reference to the Soyuz MS-15 and MS-16 flights. Soyuz MS-15 currently has its third seat occupied by a paying spaceflight participant – who will now likely be bumped to accommodate a permanent US Station crewmember – and Soyuz MS-16 is a schedule two-person flight with a vacant third seat available.

While the action does not point to an increase in uncertainty over the progress being made by Commercial Crew providers, it does cite the wish to avoid placing schedule pressure on the companies, an issue that still haunts NASA after it was determined to have played a direct role in the loss of Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

Also at Space News and Ars Technica.

Previously: Boeing Crewed Test Flight to the ISS May be Upgraded to a Full Mission
SpaceX and Boeing Not Ready to Transport Astronauts to the International Space Station
SpaceX, Boeing (and NASA) Push Back 1st Test Launches of Private Spaceships

Related: NASA Confident in Soyuz, Ready for Crewed Launch in December

Original Submission

martyb writes:

It all started when Slashdot rolled out a new, "Beta" user interface that was soundly disliked. In response, they posted a story calling us an "audience". That did not go over well. At all. Cries of "Buck Feta" were numerous and frequent. Then came a call for a Slashdot boycott — a "Slashcott" — scheduled for the week of February 10-17, 2014.

While the Slashcott was going on, a handful of intrepid nerds pulled down the (horribly out-of-date and unmaintained) open source code dump of Slashcode, forked it, and started whacking it into shape. This culminated in our announcement to the world: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!.

Now, one could argue as to the exact date of our birth. Was it when the domain "soylentnews.org" was first registered? (2014-02-09T01:50:26Z) How about when the first user was registered to the site? (2014-02-12 06:00:06 "NCommander") Or, maybe, the very first story posted to the site? Welcome Testers ... (2014.02.11 21:28 UTC)

Whichever one of those you choose, it has now been at least FIVE years...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SOYLENTNEWS!

We've had hiccups along the way. Even the past year was not problem-free. Server reboots so our hosting provider, Linode, could roll out mitigations for the Spectre and Meltdown attacks. Then we had a server go down on us, which would not be such a big deal except its mirror had already predeceased it, so there was nothing to fail over to. A couple more issues with Apache and nginx going off to who-knows-where and needing to be restarted. Oh, and our mailserver decided to stop serving mail at one point, too. There may have been another couple of things which happened over the past year that escape me at the moment, but all-in-all I would like to think we are doing a pretty good job of keeping things up and running. Consider we are an entirely volunteer organization. Consider, too, that big-named sites like Wells Fargo, TSB, Google, and others all had site-wide outages in one or more of their services... we've got a good group here and it has been truly a wonderful experience to be a part of what keeps this site running.

A quick look around the site reveals some interesting statistics. That by week's end, we will have posted our 26,000th story. To that, add the 3,994 journal entries that have been posted by the community. We had our 800,000th comment posted to the site just this week. We have had, however, comparatively few comment moderations: ~540,000. We have 7,333 registered users, too!

Many thanks are in order to those who have helped keep everything up and running. Not just the sysops who lurk in the background, but also those of you who have opened your wallets and bought the subscriptions which pay the server bills, domain registrations, as well as the CPA for filing taxes, and the like.

Ultimately, this site is for you, the community. We focus stories on those which have a technical or science (aka nerd) angle with maybe a politically oriented story posted each day. And an occasional story that looks like it might engender discussion. There are plenty of other sites which cater to the latest Hollywood gossip, political machinations, recipes, and cat pictures... you've made it clear you don't want a bunch of that here. Submit stories. Make journal entries. Post and moderate comments.

Yes, we have had many accomplishments over these years, but we know nothing is perfect. We are overdue for a site upgrade, but it's likely nothing much will happen for a few months until TheMightyBuzzard can free up some of his time to work on it. Complaining is easy, but if you have concrete suggestions on what we could do better and how we might go about it, we can't promise anything (one man's drink is another man's poison), but we will certainly give it serious consideration.

If you should run into an issue with the site, please send details to admin (at) soylentnews.org noting the date/time/timezone and any data you can provide to help us locate and isolate the problem. That includes the URL for the story or journal entry. If it pertains to a comment, then please also include a link to that, as well. (That is the link under the (#nnnnn) in the comment header). Fair warning: complaining in the comments about a story not being accepted or about the moderation of one of your comments is generally off-topic and often moderated that way. Exception: if you accidentally modded a comment as spam, or have had a comment of yours moderated as spam that you think is incorrect, please send an e-mail to the admin address and we will take a look at it. We are running a bit lean on staff ATM with several of us in the midst of time-consuming things IRL, so please be patient.

Thank you.

Thanks to all of you who have helped this site persevere all these years!

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump wrote in with a story about digital license plates:

Digital license plates now available as option for Arizona motorists

Arizona drivers now have another option for their license plates, one that the tech savvy will love - electronic digital plates.

The new plate option is called Rplate Digital License Plates. According to the Arizona Department of Transportation, they are LTE wireless connected devices similar to a tablet. The license plate number is constantly displayed, and the technology allows for added messages such as "invalid," "stolen" and other notifications if needed.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Samsung stops releasing Blu-ray players in the US

Did you notice that Samsung hasn't made a peep about Blu-ray players at CES or other recent trade shows? There's a good reason for it: the company is exiting the category in the US. Samsung told Forbes and CNET that it's no longer introducing Blu-ray players for the country. It didn't provide reasoning for the move, but Forbes sources reportedly said that Samsung had scrapped a high-end model that was supposed to arrive later in 2019.

Related: Ultra HD Blu-Ray Specification Completed
Sony Launches Quad-Layer 128 GB Blu-Ray Discs

Original Submission

realDonaldTrump writes:

[F]oxnews.com/science/extinct-human-species-lived-together-in-siberian-cave-new-research-shows reports that "Bones recently found in a Siberian cave have given researchers a new glimpse into the timeline of an extinct human species. The species – known as Denisovans – at one time lived alongside Neanderthals in the same cave, the evidence showed."

A new study revealed that the Denisovans lived in the cave from at least 200,000 to less than 50,000 years ago. The team used optical dating– a process that measures the time since sediment was exposed to sunlight.

From https://www.inverse.com/article/52926-denisova-cave-dating-sediment-culture

Both Neanderthals and Denisovans belong to the genus Homo, though it's still not entirely clear whether the Denisovans are a separate species or a subspecies of modern humans — after all, we only have six fossil fragments to go on. Nevertheless, we're one step closer to finding out. Both studies, published in Nature, describe new discoveries in the Denisova Cave of the Altai Mountains, where excavations have continued for the past 40 years. Those efforts have revealed ancient human remains carrying the DNA of both the Denisovans and Neanderthals who made the high-ceilinged cave their home — sometimes, even having children together.

More from www.abc.net.au.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

More than 45% of non-elderly adults with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) report financial hardship due to the associated medical bills, according to a Yale research team. Worse still, about one in five report being unable to pay those medical bills at all, said the researchers.

This study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

According to the study, which was scaled up from the data sample provided by the 2013-2017 National Health Interview Survey, the non-elderly American adults with ASCVD experiencing medical bill-related financial hardship represents an estimated 3.9 million individuals.

"It is remarkably disheartening to see how many people suffer severe financial adverse effects of having atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease," said Harlan Krumholz, M.D., Yale cardiologist and director of the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation (CORE). "We have much work to do to ensure that people are spared the financial toxicity of disease that is imposed by our current healthcare system."

Of the group who indicated financial hardship, more than one in three reported that they have also experienced significant financial distress, cut back on purchasing basic necessities like food, and/or skimped on taking essential but costly medications in response to the burden of their medical bills.

Materials provided by Yale University.

-- submitted from IRC

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Google security researchers have come to the conclusion that speculative execution attacks are here to stay without drastic changes to modern CPU architectures, such as removing speculative execution entirely.

Spectre is here to stay: An analysis of side-channels and speculative execution

Related:

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

Patch for Intel Speculative Execution Vulnerability Could Reduce Performance by 5 to 35% [Update: 2]
Qualcomm Joins Others in Confirming its CPUs Suffer From Spectre, and Other Meltdown News
Congress Questions Chipmakers About Meltdown and Spectre
What Impact Has Meltdown/Spectre Had on YOUR Systems?
Intel Admits a Load of its CPUs Have Spectre V2 Flaw That Can't be Fixed
Intel FPU Speculation Vulnerability Confirmed
New Spectre Variant SpectreRSB Targets Return Stack Buffer
Intel Discloses a Speculative Execution Attack in Software Guard eXtensions (SGX)
Intel 'Gags' Linux Distros From Revealing Performance Hit From Spectre Patches
MIT Researchers Claim to Have a Solution for Some Speculative Execution Attacks
Spectre, Meltdown Researchers Unveil 7 More Speculative Execution Attacks
New Side-Channel Leak: Researchers Attack Operating System Page Caches

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Bloomberg:

Chinese investment in the U.S. biotechnology industry presents a risk to national security, potentially giving China’s government access to patient data that could be used to blackmail Americans, according to a report for a Congressional advisory commission.

Biotech companies in China have access to technology and data through investments in U.S. companies, partnerships with American universities and recruitment of U.S.-trained researchers, the report for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said.

“Chinese biotechnology companies are acquiring technologies crucial to advancement in the field as well as amassing large collections of clinical and genetic data on U.S. residents,” the report published Feb. 14 said.

Can they really blackmail you with medical information you've already mentioned on social media?

Original Submission