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upstart writes:

Broadcom to acquire VMware in massive $61B deal – TechCrunch:

Sometimes when there is smoke, there is actually fire. Such was the case with the rumors of Broadcom's interest in VMware this past weekend. It turns out that fire was burning hot, and today, Broadcom announced it is acquiring VMware in a massive $61 billion deal.

The deal is a combination of cash and stock, with Broadcom assuming $8 billion in VMware debt.

With VMware, Broadcom gets more than the core virtualization, which the company was built on. It also gets other pieces it acquired along the way to diversify, like Heptio for containerization, and Pivotal, which helps provide support services for companies transitioning to modern technology. At the same time it bought Pivotal, it also acquired security company Carbon Black.

That touches upon a lot of technology, but it begs the question, where does it all fit with Broadcom (which has spent a fair amount of money in recent years buying up a couple of key software pieces prior to today's announcement)?

[...] VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram put the typical positive spin on the deal about the two companies being better together. "Combining our assets and talented team with Broadcom's existing enterprise software portfolio, all housed under the VMware brand, creates a remarkable enterprise software player," he said in a statement, referring to those two other pieces Broadcom already owns.

Also reported at:

• reuters.com
• https://www.engadget.com
• https://www.cnbc.com/

Previously: Broadcom in Talks to Buy Cloud Computing Firm VMWare

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Phoenix666 writes:

Phys.org:

This year is the worst start to the wildfire season in the past decade. More than 3,737 square miles (9,679 square kilometers) have burned across the U.S., almost triple the 10-year average.

With no shortage of burn scars around the West, researchers and private groups such as The Nature Conservancy have been tapping New Mexico State University's center for seedlings to learn how best to restore forests after the flames are extinguished.

The center has provided sprouts for projects in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Texas and California, but experts said its capacity for turning out as many as 300,000 seedlings annually isn't enough now and certainly won't be in the future as climate change and drought persist.

[...] If the West wants to keep its forests, policymakers need to think about it in economic terms that would have significant benefits for water supplies, recreation and the rural and tribal communities that hold these mountain landscapes sacred, said Collin Haffey, forest and watershed health coordinator with the New Mexico Forestry Division.

Are direct human interventions like re-planting after forest fires enough to hold back climate change?

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upstart writes:

World's largest vertical strawberry farm opens in Jersey City:

Damn, that's sweet: Controlled environment agriculture company Oishii has opened the world's largest vertical strawberry farm at the old Anheuser-Busch factory in Jersey City, growing strawberries five rows deep in the retrofitted 74,000-square-foot facility.

The expanded growing capacity will allow the company to decrease the sticker shock on its berries, which until May 18 sold for $50 per 11-pack of medium berries at high-end grocery stores like Van Hook Cheese & Grocery in Jersey City and Montclair. As of May 19, the 11-pack price has dropped to $20, with six-berry trays at $11 and three-berry trays at $6 also available.

Making the berries more affordable was "the whole purpose" of expanding operations and focusing on efficiencies, Oishii co-founder and CEO Hiroki Koga said.

[...] "Now, it's just a matter of how quickly can we deploy these farms across the world," said Koga.

[...] The new facility won't fulfill demand for Oishii's products, and Koga said both New York metro-area farms and farms in other cities are coming down the pike. New produce is on its way, too, specifically tomatoes and melons.

Do you think this scales well and can eventually supply produce at a reasonable price, or will this always serve the niche $2/berry crowd?

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upstart writes:

FTC fines Twitter $150M for using 2FA info for targeted advertising:

The Federal Trade Commission has fined Twitter $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected to enable two-factor authentication for targeted advertising.

[...] This is a direct violation of the FTC Act and a 2011 Commission administrative order which banned the company from misrepresenting its security and privacy practices and profiting from deceptively collected data.

[...] Twitter apologized for using phone numbers and email addresses provided for account security like two-factor authentication for advertising in October 2019, saying they "may have been used accidentally for ad targeting."

"We recently discovered that when you provided an email address or phone number for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) this data may have inadvertently been used for advertising purposes, specifically in our Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system," said the company at the time.

[...] Something very similar happened in 2018 when Facebook built complex advertising profiles for all its users with everything from their 2FA phone numbers to info harvested from their friends' profiles.

Facebook later used the users' 2FA phone numbers as an additional vector to deliver targeted ads.

upstart writes:

Low-cost gel film can pluck drinking water from desert air:

More than a third of the world's population lives in drylands, areas that experience significant water shortages. Scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a solution that could help people in these areas access clean drinking water.

The team developed a low-cost gel film made of abundant materials that can pull water from the air in even the driest climates. The materials that facilitate this reaction cost a mere $2 per kilogram, and a single kilogram can produce more than 6 liters of water per day in areas with less than 15% relative humidity and 13 liters in areas with up to 30% relative humidity.

[...] "This new work is about practical solutions that people can use to get water in the hottest, driest places on Earth," said Guihua Yu, professor of materials science and mechanical engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering. "This could allow millions of people without consistent access to drinking water to have simple, water generating devices at home that they can easily operate."

upstart writes:

US Postal Service wants to provide digital ID and collect more biometric data:

In a new report on the role of the US Postal Service (USPS) in identity verification, the Office of the Inspector General for the agency has pushed for it to have an expanded role in the collection of biometric data and the rollout of digital ID.

The report suggests extending the provision of in-person biometric data collection to the 4,800 locations where the USPS already provides a Passport Acceptance Service to the US Department of State. It also notes that the USPS could provide biometric and verification services to other government agencies.

In an example of how the USPS's expanded verification services could be utilized, the report proposes that the USPS could provide online name and address validation to government agencies by providing these agencies with a "confidence level" that a person lives at a specific address. The USPS notes that this confidence level could be generated by querying national databases such as the USPS's Address Management System (AMS), the National Change of Address (NCOA) database, and the USPS's Informed Delivery database.

The report also pushes for the USPS's Informed Delivery service (a service that gives subscribers a digital preview of their incoming mail and currently has 47 million subscribers) to potentially be expanded into a digital ID verification service. Additionally, it suggests legislative reforms that would allow the USPS to provide ID verification and digital ID services to the private sector.

Phoenix666 writes:

SciTechDaily:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a new way to 3D-print glass microstructures that is faster and produces objects with higher optical quality, design flexibility, and strength, according to a new study published in the journal Science.

The CAL [computed axial lithography] process is fundamentally different from today's industrial 3D-printing manufacturing processes, which build up objects from thin layers of material. This technique can be time-intensive and result in rough surface texture. CAL, however, 3D-prints the entire object simultaneously. Researchers use a laser to project patterns of light into a rotating volume of light-sensitive material, building up a 3D light dose that then solidifies in the desired shape. The layer-less nature of the CAL process enables smooth surfaces and complex geometries.

The researchers have achieved a resolution of 20μm.

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canopic jug and owl write in with news about some classic software:

Hacker Tavis Ormandy has ported IBM's Lotus 1-2-3 to GNU/Linux and writes in his blog about how he did it. It's 100% usable even if the DOS emulation version still looks a little better.

Yikes - it's an original unstripped object file from 1-2-3. There are nearly 20,000 symbols including private symbols and debug information.

Why would Lotus ship this? It's so big it must have required them to phyiscally ship an extra disk to every customer? Could it have been a mistake, accidentally left on the final release image?

I had so many questions, but I'm not old enough to have any experience with SysV, so I asked the greybeards on alt.folklore.computers if they had seen this before and why this might have happened.

The answer was that this is probably deliberate - dlopen() was not widely available on UNIX in the early 90s, so there was no easy way to load native plugins or extensions. To solve this, vendors would ship a bunch of partially linked object files with a script to relink them with your extensions – Clever!

I can't tell you how useful this discovery was – the debug information answered so many questions I had about Lotus 1-2-3 internals! This was a direct source port from DOS, so it mostly worked the same way but now I had debugging data. For example, I really wanted to hook into the rasterizer in my driver so that I could improve the appearance of graphs in the terminal... but it was just too complex to understand without documentation.

The spreadsheet package Lotus 1-2-3 was the fast follower to Bricklin and Frankton's VisiCalc, and between the two the electronic spreadsheet was the main reason why every small business quickly went out and purchased a microcomputer. Other killer apps include e-mail, Mosaic, and PageMaker. That is to say the program was valuable enough on its own to warrant the purchase of a whole microcomputer.

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takyon writes:

Microsoft announces a brand-new Arm-powered desktop PC and Arm-native dev tools

At its Build developer conference Tuesday, Microsoft made a few announcements aimed at bolstering Windows on Arm. The first is Project Volterra, a Microsoft-branded mini-desktop computer powered by an unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. More relevant for developers who already have Arm hardware, Volterra will be accompanied by a fully Arm-native suite of developer tools.

According to Microsoft's blog post, the company will be releasing ARM-native versions of Visual Studio 2022 and VSCode, Visual C++, Modern .NET 6, the classic .NET framework, Windows Terminal, and both the Windows Subsystem for Linux and Windows Subsystem for Android. Arm-native versions of these apps will allow developers to run them without the performance penalty associated with translating x86 code to run on Arm devices—especially helpful given that Arm Windows devices usually don't have much performance to spare.

[...] As for the Volterra hardware, what we know is that it's running a Qualcomm SoC with a built-in neural processing unit (NPU), "best-in-class AI computing capacity," and support for Qualcomm's Neural Processing SDK. Microsoft is pushing it as a solution for testing AI and machine-learning apps, although depending on the other specs it could also be a good general-purpose development box for Windows on Arm apps.

Microsoft Project Volterra: Stackable mini-PC introduced with what could be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen3

While Microsoft remains quiet on what chipset powers Project Volterra, WinFuture asserts that it is the Snapdragon 8cx Gen3, which contains four ARM Cortex-X1 cores running at 2.99 GHz and an additional four Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz.

[...] Moreover, Microsoft claims that Project Volterra is stackable, theoretically allowing developers to combine two or more Snapdragon 8cx Gen3 chipsets together.

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An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2022/05/21/why_are_catfish_in_sweden_living_as_long_as_humans_833078.html

Europe's Wels catfish has to be one of the most intriguing freshwater fish in the world. Individuals can grow to monstrous sizes, proven to measure as long as nine feet and weigh 400 pounds or more in rare circumstances. They've even been repeatedly seen beaching themselves to capture and consume pigeons dawdling on the shores of lakes and rivers. Now, a team of biologists based out of Linnaeus University in Sweden reports that catfish in the Nordic country are living 70 years or longer.

To determine the creatures' ages, the researchers captured, marked, and released 1,183 Wels catfish from lakes and rivers in southern Sweden between 2006 and 2020. Over that span, they recaptured 162 individuals, allowing them to estimate the catfish's growth rate. They then plugged this rate into an established statistical model specifically created to estimate length and age for fish.

"Our estimates suggest that individuals in [Sweden] with a length of around 100 cm were about 25 years old while a 150 cm long fish was about 40 years old, which is about four times older than in catfish from the core habitat in central Europe," they wrote.

upstart writes:

Scientists 'see' puzzling features deep in Earth's interior:

New research led by the University of Cambridge is the first to obtain a detailed 'image' of an unusual pocket of rock at the boundary layer with Earth's core, some three thousand kilometres beneath the surface.

The enigmatic area of rock, which is located almost directly beneath the Hawaiian Islands, is one of several ultra-low velocity zones – so-called because earthquake waves slow to a crawl as they pass through them.

[...] Earth's interior is layered like an onion: at the centre sits the iron-nickel core, surrounded by a thick layer known as the mantle, and on top of that a thin outer shell — the crust we live on. Although the mantle is solid rock, it is hot enough to flow extremely slowly. These internal convection currents feed heat to the surface, driving the movement of tectonic plates and fuelling volcanic eruptions.

[...] The researchers used the latest numerical modelling methods to reveal kilometre-scale structures at the core-mantle boundary. According to co-author Dr Kuangdai Leng, who developed the methods while at the University of Oxford, "We are really pushing the limits of modern high-performance computing for elastodynamic simulations, taking advantage of wave symmetries unnoticed or unused before."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Do you miss having an original SoundBlaster card? Now you can build your own! Take a look at the Snark Barker on GitHub.

'The Snark Barker is a 100% compatible clone of the famed SB 1.0 "Killer Card" sound card from 1989. It implements all the features, including the digital sound playback and recording, Ad Lib compatible synthesis, the joystick/MIDI port, and the CMS chips (which are actually Philips SAA1099 synthesizer devices).'

Original Submission

hubie writes:

'I don't even remember what I read':

Sometimes when we are reading a good book, it's like we are transported into another world and we stop paying attention to what's around us.

Researchers at the University of Washington wondered if people enter a similar state of dissociation when surfing social media, and if that explains why users might feel out of control after spending so much time on their favorite app.

The team watched how participants interacted with a Twitter-like platform to show that some people are spacing out while they're scrolling. Researchers also designed intervention strategies that social media platforms could use to help people retain more control over their online experiences.

[...] The team designed and built an app called Chirp, which was connected to participants' Twitter accounts. Through Chirp, users' likes and tweets appear on the real social media platform, but researchers can control people's experience, adding new features or quick pop-up surveys.

[...] When internal interventions were activated, participants got a "you're all caught up!" message when they had seen all new tweets. People also had to organize the accounts they followed into lists.

upstart writes:

Biden administration lays out plan for four carbon-capture facilities:

On Thursday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced the latest program to come out of the bipartisan infrastructure funding package that was passed last year. In this case, the money is going to foster the development of a technology that we'll almost certainly need but is currently underdeveloped: capture of carbon dioxide from the air and its stable storage. The infrastructure law set aside $3.5 billion for direct air capture, and the DOE plans to use that to fund four facilities spread across the US.

Direct air capture has suffered from a bit of a catch-22. Most scenarios for limiting end-of-century warming assume we'll emit enough carbon dioxide in the next few decades to overshoot our climate goals and will therefore need to remove some from the atmosphere. That would necessitate the development of direct air capture technologies. But, at present, there's no way to fund the operation of a facility to do the capturing, so the technology remains immature and its economics poorly understood.

The DOE's funding has the potential to change some of that. It has a total of $3.5 billion to spend in the years 2022 through 2026. It plans to use that to fund four carbon-capture and storage centers spread across the US, each with the capability of permanently storing a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

upstart writes:

Lockheed Martin, Filecoin Foundation plan demonstration of decentralized data storage in space - SpaceNews:

Lockheed Martin is working with the Filecoin Foundation to demonstrate a blockchain network in space, the organizations announced May 23 at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Joe Landon [...] said the goal of the project is to develop a mission to demonstrate the Interplanetary File System, or IPFS, in space.

IPFS is an open-source network that stores information that can be shared by users. The Filecoin Foundation is an independent organization that facilitates governance of the Filecoin network — a blockchain-based cryptocurrency and digital payment system that builds on top of the IPFS.

Landon said critical infrastructure is needed in space for accessing and sharing data. "We need to develop the technology to support a long-term presence in space without having to rely entirely on Earth-based communications and data storage," he said.

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