SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Busting cat-color myths: Your orange tabby isn't dumber than its feline pals:

The recent viral fame of an orange tabby cat named Jorts led to debates about whether Jorts was less intelligent than other cats simply because he has orange fur. Some said it was unfair and prejudicial to judge the feline based on its appearance.

But is there really a medically known tie between cat fur color and personality or intelligence? People think so, but science doesn't, Zarah Hedge, chief medical officer at the San Diego Humane Society, told me.

[...] "While there could be some genetic components associated with coat color that also impact personality, there is little scientific evidence demonstrating this to be the case in domestic cats," said Hedge, who has five cats of various colors.

The idea that fur color dictates personality isn't as crazy as it sounds. Some studies do show associations between coat color in other mammals and their behavior -- silver foxes, for one. But that hasn't been proven in domestic cats. And cat fur color can vary even within the same breed. The common domestic shorthair cat comes in many fur colors, so really, the stereotypes are often comparing apples to apples.

upstart writes:

Bank accidentally deposits $176 million into people's accounts on Christmas Day:

Thousands of people received a surprise gift on Christmas Day this year when European bank Santander accidentally deposited £ 130 million (US $ 176 million) in 75,000 transactions. their salaries doubled while the vendors got more than they expected.

Bank accounts operated by competing banks. "We regret that due to a technical problem, some payments from our corporate customers were incorrectly duplicated in the accounts of the recipients," a Santander spokesman told CNBC.

[...] "It ruined my vacation time thinking I accidentally paid hundreds of thousands. I thought I did something wrong, "a payroll manager reportedly told the BBC.

Just me and that I would get in trouble at work. The payroll manager added that Santander had not disclosed how companies should explain the second payment to employees, nor provided any information on the reimbursement, according to the report.

Original Submission

What skills do you have and take for granted but can recommend somebody give a try? Not everybody here is a greybeard with decades of experience behind them. What do you wish you had mastered earlier on in your own careers? Here are some that others have suggested:

How to Add Safe Mode to the Boot Menu in Windows 11

upstart writes:

How to add Safe Mode to the boot menu in Windows 11:

While Microsoft Windows 11 may be the latest and greatest version of the operating system, it is still subject to boot failures. To troubleshoot a Windows PC that won't boot properly, many users start with Safe Mode, which eliminates the loading of extraneous apps, systems and drivers. It is a tried-and-true troubleshooting method.

However, if you have a particularly problematic PC that just won't boot properly, you may want to improve your troubleshooting chances by adding Safe Mode to your list of booting choices. This would be less frustrating than trying to remember to request Safe Mode for each PC restart. Using the Boot Configuration Data (BCD) Editor, we can change the default settings to add Safe Mode to our list of Windows 11 booting options.

From Start to Finish: What Can You Do With a Linux Server?

upstart writes:

From start to finish: What can you do with a Linux server?:

An operating system that can do what Linux can is sure to be complex, and it has a steep learning curve. Luckily, lots of support is available to guide you.

The [...] "From start to finish" series explores the various things you can do with a Linux server. Better yet, it explains these concepts in detail, from beginning to end, without skipping any steps. Penned by our very own Linux expert, Jack Wallen, these resources are invaluable to getting the most out of the operating system.

How to Set Up a Git Repository in Minutes on Linux

upstart writes:

How to set up a Git repository in minutes on Linux:

Sometimes you just need to deploy a quick Git repository so you can collaborate on a project, back up your code or house your files on a remote machine. When you feel like doing that, you don't want to have to spend an hour or so deploying a server and setting it up ... especially when you already have everything you need at your fingertips.

I'm going to show you how you can quickly deploy a Git repository using just git and ssh. You should be able to spin this up in less than five minutes (two, if you type fast).

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

upstart writes:

Flexible tentaclelike robotic manipulators inspired by nature:

Traditional robots can have difficulty grasping and manipulating soft objects if their manipulators are not flexible in the way elephant trunks, octopus tentacles, or human fingers can be.

The soft manipulators are based on pneu-nets, which are pneumatically actuated elastomeric structures.

These structures have a tentaclelike shape and consist of a series of connected internal chambers which can be inflated pneumatically, blowing them up like a balloon. One side of the tentacle is highly flexible while the other is stiffer. Increasing air pressure to the chambers causes the structure to bend toward the stiff side.

Journal Reference:
Chengru Jiang, Dong Wang, Baowen Zhao, et al. Modeling and inverse design of bio-inspired multi-segment pneu-net soft manipulators for 3D trajectory motion, Applied Physics Reviews (DOI: 10.1063/5.0054468)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Ski Lift Design Does The Impossible | Hackaday:

Tis The Season, for those who are so inclined, to loft themselves to the top of a steep snow-covered hill and then go downhill, really fast. And if something gets in their way, turn. Whether they be on skis, a snowboard, or some other means, getting down usually involves using gravity. Getting up, on the other hand, usually involves a ski lift. And in the video by [kalsan15] after the break, we learn how technology has stepped in to make even the most inaccessible slopes just a lift ride away.

[The YouTube video is only 8m19s long; it clearly defines the problem... and the solution! --ed.]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

2022 is 'Soylent Green' year. Here's why you shouldn't worry.:

If you know the 1973 movie Soylent Green at all, it's likely for the arresting last line. "Soylent Green is people," lead actor Charlton Heston bellows as he is carried away on a stretcher, simultaneously becoming a meme and summing up the plot so thoroughly that there's little need to catch the rest of the film. (Soylent Green is a hot new food product in this starving overpopulated future New York; Heston's detective character discovers it is not made from plankton as the manufacturer claims.)

Less well known is the year Soylent Green is set in: 2022. That's right, we've reached the point when Hollywood told us that millions of New Yorkers would be fighting each other over protein bars made from the finest processed human. Presuming that a fad for cannibalism doesn't arrive with the next NYC fashion week, we can safely say that humanity has successfully avoided the threat of the movie's main premise. (Instead we're grappling with the threat of the Omicron variant, which itself sounds like a Charlton Heston movie.)

Does this mean Soylent Green got nothing right about our 21st century world? Not so fast. As with Blade Runner and its setting, the Los Angeles of 2019, the movie's predictive power is a mixed bag.

[...] WRONG: Soylent Green. RIGHT: Soylent. Soylent green is mint chocolate, it turns out.

[...] WRONG: Starvation. RIGHT: Ocean acidification.

[...] WRONG: Dump trucks for protesters. RIGHT: Global warming.

[...] WRONG: Mass euthanasia. RIGHT: Mass numbing.

[...] Soylent Green is available to buy or rent on Apple TV, Google Play, Amazon Prime, and YouTube TV.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

White House commits to ISS extension

The Biden administration formally supports extending operations of the International Space Station through the end of the decade, an announcement that is neither surprising nor addresses how to get all the station's partners, notably Russia, to agree on the station's future.

In a statement published on NASA's ISS blog Dec. 31, NASA said the White House agreed to extend operations of the ISS through 2030. Federal law, last revised in 2015 with the enactment of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, made it U.S. policy to operate the station through at least 2024.

[...] The White House's decision is alone not sufficient to continue ISS operations through the end of the decade. NASA said it would work with the station's partners — Canada, Europe, Japan and Russia — "to enable continuation of the groundbreaking research being conducted in this unique orbiting laboratory through the rest of this decade."

One partner has already signaled its willingness to continue the ISS. "I welcome this announcement & will submit a proposal to Member States for @esa to continue until 2030, as well," tweeted Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, shortly after NASA published its statement.

A bigger challenge, though, will be keeping Russia in the ISS partnership. Russian officials have expressed doubts about both the technical ability of the ISS to operate through the end of the decade given problems with the Russian segment of the station as well as a desire to develop a Russian national space station.

Also at The Verge.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A bicycle riser bar made from jute fibre reinforced polymer composite materials:

To meet the demand for alternative low-cost, sustainable, light weight and strong materials for two wheelers, Dr. JS Binoj from Sree Vidyanikethan Engineering College India has led a multi-national team to successfully develop a novel riser bar made from jute fiber reinforcing isophthalic polymer composite material.

[...] The novelty of the composite bar involves a new and effective way of tailoring the length of the jute fibers as well as the interfacial bonding interactions between the jute fibers and the isophthalic polymer, which functioned as the matrix phase for the composite material. Conventionally, riser bar is made from aluminum (which is inexpensive); more advanced ones are made from scandium and carbon fiber reinforced composites (which are expensive). More importantly the environmental impact of these materials could be contentious. On the other hand, the new isophthalic polymer-based composite material reinforced by jute fibers revealed mechanical strength, stiffness, extensibility and toughness that are comparable to conventional materials.

Isophthalic polymer is a low-cost, durable material that is used for construction in civil engineering. With the proof-of-concept demonstrated, the team is now looking for investors and new collaborators to support further development to bring the technology readiness level from 4 to 9.

Journal Reference:
J. B. Sajina, R. Christu Paulb, J. S. Bino, et al. Impact of fiber length on mechanical, morphological and thermal analysis of chemical treated jute fiber polymer composites for sustainable applications (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crgsc.2021.100241)

Original Submission

End of the Line Finally Coming for BlackBerry Devices

upstart writes:

End of the line finally coming for BlackBerry devices:

BlackBerry, the company that once dominated smart mobile devices, recently announced that it was finally discontinuing key services that support its phones. As of January 4th, the phones will no longer be provided with provisioning services, meaning that they will gradually lose the ability to join networks, including the cellular network.

It may seem difficult to imagine if you weren't using cell phones at the time, but BlackBerry once dominated the smartphone market. Its keyboard-based hardware was widely adopted in corporate settings, in part because the services it provided typically ran through BlackBerry servers, allowing for high levels of security and control. An indication of its importance is that early internal builds of Android looked like a cheap BlackBerry knockoff, rather than the cheap iPhone knockoff that was eventually released.

Unlike the people who developed Android, BlackBerry's leadership was blindsided by the iPhone's popularity. It dismissed on-screen keyboards, and counted on its stranglehold on corporate services to maintain its market. It took over a year after the iPhone's release for the company to come out with its own touch screen phone, and its software remained an awkward mix of old and new for some time after. In the mean time, corporate users fell in love with their Apple and Android phones, and compelled their IT departments to support them.

canopic jug writes:

As the new year starts, Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain reminds us that works from 1926 ascend to public domain, and become available for use by any and all in any manner they may wish. There is also a lot of recorded music starting to enter the public domain, as an estimated 400,000 sound recordings from before 1923 hit the scene. Most of them music recordings are salvaged from very fragile 78 RPM platters using multiple methods.

In 2022, the public domain will welcome a lot of “firsts”: the first Winnie-the-Pooh book from A. A. Milne, the first published novels from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems from Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. What’s more, for the first time ever, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Act, a special category of works—sound recordings—will finally begin to join other works in the public domain. On January 1 2022, the gates will open for all of the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology through the end of 1922—estimated at some 400,000 works—will be open for legal reuse.

Why celebrate the public domain? When works go into the public domain, they can legally be shared, without permission or fee. That is something Winnie-the-Pooh would appreciate. Community theaters can screen the films. Youth orchestras can perform the music publicly, without paying licensing fees. Online repositories such as the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and Google Books can make works fully available online. This helps enable access to cultural materials that might otherwise be lost to history. 1926 was a long time ago. The vast majority of works from 1926 are out of circulation. When they enter the public domain in 2022, anyone can rescue them from obscurity and make them available, where we can all discover, enjoy, and breathe new life into them.

The public domain is also a wellspring for creativity. The whole point of copyright is to promote creativity, and the public domain plays a central role in doing so. Copyright law gives authors important rights that encourage creativity and distribution—this is a very good thing. But it also ensures that those rights last for a “limited time,” so that when they expire, works go into the public domain, where future authors can legally build on the past—reimagining the books, making them into films, adapting the songs and movies. That’s a good thing too! As explained in a New York Times editorial:

When a work enters the public domain it means the public can afford to use it freely, to give it new currency . . . [public domain works] are an essential part of every artist’s sustenance, of every person’s sustenance.

See also, What Will Enter the Public Domain in 2022? A festive countdown which, were it not blocked by javascript, would highlight a selection of what has become available.

Previously:
(2021) Public Domain Day in the USA: Works from 1925 are Open to All!
(2020) January 1, 2020 is Public Domain Day: Works From 1924 Are Open to All!
(2018) Public Domain Day is Coming
(2014) Happy Public Domain Day: Here are the Works that Copyright Extension Stole From You in 2015
and more ...

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Tesla is recalling over 475,000 Model 3 and Model S vehicles:

Tesla is recalling over 475,000 of its vehicles because of a pair of safety issues. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 356,309 Tesla Model 3s covering model years 2017-2020 are being recalled due to problems with the rearview cameras. The 2017-2020 Model S is the other target with 119,009 of those BEVs due to a problem with the front hood latch.

[...] Owners of the affected vehicles will receive notification letters by the end of February, according to the NHTSA.

I almost hesitate to ask, but do we have any Tesla owners/drivers in our community?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Plans To Capture Co2 From Coal Plants Wasted Federal Dollars, Watchdog Says - The Verge:

The Biden administration wants to shove more money into projects that are supposed to capture CO2 emissions from power plants and industrial facilities before they can escape and heat up the planet. But carbon capture technologies that the Department of Energy has already supported in the name of tackling climate change have mostly fallen flat, according to a recent report by the watchdog Government Accountability Office.

About $1.1 billion has flowed from the Department of Energy to carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration projects since 2009. Had they panned out, nine coal plants and industrial facilities would have been outfitted with devices that scrub most of the CO2 out of their emissions. Once captured, the CO2 can be sent via pipelines to underground storage in geologic formations.

That's not what happened. The DOE doled out $684 million to coal[sic] six coal plants, but only one of them actually got built and started operating before shuttering in 2020. Of the three separate industrial facilities that received $438 million, just two got off the ground. Without more accountability, "DOE may risk expending significant taxpayer funds on CCS demonstrations that have little likelihood of success," the GAO says.

To stop that from happening, the GAO says there ought to be more congressional oversight of DOE-funded demonstration projects. The GAO report also recommends that the DOE do a better job of choosing which projects to fund and that the DOE should establish more consistent "scopes, schedules, and budgets" for projects.

takyon writes:

Year 2021 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

The biggest story of 2021 has to be the worsening of semiconductors shortages with extremely long lead times, prices of some components going up multiple folds, constant complaints on Twitter about availability and prices. I think I even saw a website, hopefully misconfigured, showing an estimated availability of a specific STM32 MCU in 2037. This also gave rise to opportunities and board redesigns, with MotorComm Ethernet chips replacing some Realtek chips in SBCs such as NanoPi R2C and Orange Pi R1S Plus LTS, and CH9102F showing up as a replacement for CP2104 in some IoT boards.

We also got some interesting Arm processors, but sadly the high-expected Rockchip RK3588 got delayed by another year, although it's getting really close with the first board expected in H1 2022. I promise! The company still introduced the RK3566 and RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processors with plenty of I/O for AIoT use cases. There was less to announce on Amlogic side with [the] S908X processor still being very elusive (or has it been canceled?), but we still got news of [an] Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53processor be found next year in the upcoming Khadas VIM4 single board computer. Allwinner hasn't released any really interesting [Arm] processors in the last couple of years, and 2021 was not different.

Instead, the most exciting announcement from Allwinner was their RISC-V processor namely [the] Allwinner D1 and D1s/F133, the first affordable RISC-V Linux processors found in boards such as Nezha and Lichee RV. In other RISC-V news, higher-end RISC-V cores were announced like the StarFive Dubhe (Cortex-A75 like) and SiFive Performance P650 (Cortex-A77 like) and should start to be found in new SoCs in 2022 or 2023. Espressif launched the ESP32-C3 WiFi & BLE SoC, announced the ESP32-H2 with BLE 5.2, ZIgbee and Thread connectivity, and we got announcements for a wider variety of RISC-V microcontroller or processors for televisions, the automotive market, the Smart Home with more Bluetooth LE 5.3 and Zigbee MCU, as well as artificial intelligence, and more.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

CES 2022 attendees scale back plans but keep plane tickets as Lenovo, T-Mobile, Twitter and Meta back out:

IT professionals with in-person tickets for CES 2022 are holding onto plans to attend as big tech companies scrap Las Vegas appearances. T-Mobile canceled its CES 2022 keynote earlier this week and Lenovo is keeping its team at home too. Amazon, AT&T, Meta and TikTok also have decided against in-person attendance.

Individual attendees with speaking plans and networking events are keeping their plane tickets for Las Vegas for now, while keeping an eye on case rates. The Omicron variant is pushing case numbers higher than the peak of Delta cases with the US hitting 267,305 cases on Tuesday, December 28. Cases reached 165,000 on Sept. 1. Cases are up 65% in the Las Vegas area as well. The vaccination rate is 53% in that part of the country.

Intel and self-driving car company Waymo also decided to move to a virtual-only CES 2022 late last week. P&G changed its plans on Tuesday and will be hosting its CES activities in its PGLifeLab. Google, Microsoft, AMD, HP, Nvidia and Intel also have cancelled plans for in-person attendance.

Is anybody in our community planning to go?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Elon Musk rejects claims his satellites are squeezing out rivals in space:

Elon Musk has hit back at criticism that his company's Starlink satellites are hogging too much room in space, and has instead argued there could be room for "tens of billions" of spacecraft in orbits close to Earth.

"Space is just extremely enormous, and satellites are very tiny," Musk said. "This is not some situation where we're effectively blocking others in any way. We've not blocked anyone from doing anything, nor do we expect to."

His comments, made in an interview with the Financial Times, came in response to a claim from Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, that Musk was "making the rules" for the new commercial space economy. Speaking to the FT earlier this month, Aschbacher warned that Musk's rush to launch thousands of communications satellites would leave fewer radio frequencies and orbital slots available for everyone else.

[...] Rejecting suggestions he was "squeezing out" future satellite competitors, Musk compared the number of satellites in low Earth orbit to what he said were 2 billion cars and trucks on Earth. Each orbital "shell" around the Earth is larger than the planet's surface, he said, with an additional shell every 10 meters or so further out into space.