SoylentNews

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

I don't remember when I first started using a floppy disk in the mid-70s. It was either installing firmware on IBM S/370 mainframes or on a dedicated library workstation to create Library of Congress catalog records. Oh, the exciting life I've led! In either case, it would have been a single-sided, 8-inch floppy disk, which held an amazing 79.7 KiloBytes (KB) of data.

[...] As personal computers gained popularity in the 1970s, the floppy disk moved from my world of mainframes and workstations to PCs. There, it found its place as an affordable and accessible storage solution. 

Then, in 1976, a guy named Steve Wozniak wanted to add a floppy drive to his next computer. His buddy, Steve Jobs, got a 5.25-inch floppy disk from Shugart's new company, Shugart Associates, in 1976, and after a lot of hacking, Woz got the first floppy drive to run on what would become the Apple II. 

[...] It wasn't just major companies, either. Floppy disks enabled anyone to create and sell programs, which sparked the freeware and shareware movements. They also enabled people to share data easily for the first time. Long before we were using modems and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) to share programs, pictures, and data, we would share them by "sneakerware." That is, literally walking the information from one computer to another by hand carrying disks. 

[...] By the early 2000s, floppy disks had become increasingly rare, used primarily with legacy hardware and industrial equipment. Sony manufactured the last new floppy disk in 2011. 

Despite its obsolescence, the floppy disk's legacy endures. Its iconic design has become a symbol of data storage, and the floppy disk icon still appears on many computer desktops as the file-saving symbol.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2013/02/looking-at-silicon-to-understanding.html

The 8085 microprocessor has two undocumented status flags: V and K. These flags can be reverse-engineered by looking at the silicon of the chip, and their function turns out to be different from previous explanations. In addition, the implementation of these flags shows that they were deliberately implemented, which raises the question of why there [sic] were not documented or supported by Intel. Finally, examining how these flag circuits were implemented in silicon provides an interesting look at how microprocessors are physically implemented.

Like most microprocessors, the 8085 has a flag register that holds status information on the results of an operation. The flag register is 8 bits: bit 0 holds the carry flag, bit 2 holds the parity, bit 3 is always 0, bit 4 holds the half-carry, bit 6 holds the zero status, and bit 7 holds the sign. But what about the missing bits: 1 and 5?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Payments helped AT&T obtain key legislative wins in Illinois, prosecutors say:

The US government has provided more detail on how a former AT&T executive allegedly bribed a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain legislation favorable to AT&T's business.

Former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza is set to go on trial in September 2024 after being indicted on charges of conspiracy to unlawfully influence then-Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan. AT&T itself agreed to pay a $23 million fine in October 2022 in connection with the alleged illegal influence campaign and said it was "committed to ensuring that this never happens again."

US government prosecutors offered a preview of their case against La Schiazza in a filing on Friday in US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A contract lobbyist hired by AT&T "is expected to testify that AT&T successfully passed two major pieces of legislation after the company started making payments to Individual FR-1."

The Madigan ally referred to in the court document as "Individual FR-1" is former state Rep. Edward Acevedo, a Chicago Tribune article notes. Acevedo, who was Madigan's assistant majority leader in the Illinois House before retiring in 2017, was sentenced to six months in prison for tax evasion in 2022. Madigan left his House speaker post in 2021.

In one internal email sent to an AT&T employee, La Schiazza allegedly described the company's quid pro quo with Madigan as "the friends and family plan."

The government said the bribery scheme resulted in passage of legislation eliminating AT&T's Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation to provide landline phone service, and separate legislation related to small cell deployments. Madigan, a Democrat, was House speaker when both bills were passed. The lobbyist who is expected to testify allegedly acted as an intermediary by transmitting payments to Madigan's ally.

upstart writes:

Team KeePassXC (@keepassxc@fosstodon.org):

Debian Users - Be aware the maintainer of the KeePassXC package for Debian has unilaterally decided to remove ALL features from it. You will need to switch to `keepassxc-full` to maintain capabilities once this lands outside of testing/sid.

The default install package is being changed to one where all extra functionality has been removed by default, such as networking capability and browser integration. There is a lot of arguing whether this was the proper way to handle it, or whether the default compiler options should have remained the same in the default package and a keepassxc-minimal optional package have been offered instead.

For those who rely on package managers, which approach would you have preferred?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

One of the biggest, most iconic gaming series is almost back. Grand Theft Auto 6 is apparently on track for a fall launch next year — a little more specific than the previous release window of “2025.”

There’s no new trailer, and GTA publisher, Take-Two, is not quite ready to offer a specific release date. CEO Strauss Zelnick told Variety: “I think we’re going to leave it there for now.”

The sixth mainline installment will be set in Leonida (Rockstar’s Florida equivalent) and focused mostly on Vice City (Miami). Compared to GTA Vice City, however, it’ll be contemporary. So, I’m banking on OnlyFans pastiches, vapes, self-driving cars and everything else 2020s. Plus explosions and crime.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Auto-safety regulator is investigating 22 reports of Waymo cars malfunctioning:

Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones—all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said Monday.

To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries.

Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices."

The ODI plans to compare notes between incidents to decide if Waymo cars pose a safety risk or require updates to prevent malfunctioning. There is already evidence from the ODI's initial evaluation showing that Waymo's automated driving systems (ADS) were either "engaged throughout the incident" or abruptly "disengaged in the moments just before an incident occurred," NHTSA said.

[...] Earlier this year, Waymo voluntarily recalled more than 400 self-driving cars after back-to-back collisions in Arizona. While Waymo relies on machine learning to "interpret complex object and scene semantics" that ensure self-driving cars safely navigate roads, Waymo has said it's mostly focused on responding to varied weather patterns or less predictable movements of emergency vehicles and is still learning how unpredictable navigating the road can be.

hubie writes:

https://apnews.com/article/michigan-store-rooftop-sign-homeless-0185c0d7e4cd7a2f8581e8b8e0eb01b7

Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery store made a startling discovery: A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.

"She was homeless," Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department said Thursday. "It's a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody living up in a sign."

The woman, whose name was not released, told police she had a job elsewhere but had been living inside the Family Fare sign for roughly a year, Warren said. She was found April 23.

Midland, best known as the global home of Dow Inc., is 130 miles (209 kilometers) north of Detroit.

The Family Fare store is in a retail strip with a triangle-shaped sign at the top of the building. The sign structure, probably 5 feet (1.5 meter) wide and 8 feet (2.4 meters) high, has a door and is accessible from the roof, Warren said.

"There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk," he said. "Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you'd have in your home."

The woman was able to get electricity through a power cord plugged into an outlet on the roof, Warren said.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward has submitted the following story:

The New York Times is running a story on the difficulties of obtaining homeowner's insurance in areas of the USA affected by firestorms/storms/floods, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/13/climate/insurance-homes-climate-change-weather.html or non-paywalled at https://archive.is/BB8wQ

The insurance turmoil caused by climate change — which had been concentrated in Florida, California and Louisiana — is fast becoming a contagion, spreading to states like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, the trends are worsening.

In 2023, insurers lost money on homeowners coverage in 18 states, more than a third of the country, according to a New York Times analysis of newly available financial data. That's up from 12 states five years ago, and eight states in 2013. The result is that insurance companies are raising premiums by as much as 50 percent or more, cutting back on coverage or leaving entire states altogether. Nationally, over the last decade, insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody's, and those losses are increasing.

[...] The turmoil in insurance markets is a flashing red light for an American economy that is built on real property. Without insurance, banks won't issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can't buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services.

The link includes a number of plots to support the article.

Have you changed to higher deductible homeowner's insurance to effectively "co-insure" your house, while saving on the premium? If you are unable to buy insurance at all, are you prepared to self-insure, accepting all the financial risk--or is this even possible if your bank still holds a significant mortgage?

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

Ars Technica is reporting on Comcast's announcement that they are rolling out another steaming pile^W^W streaming bundle

From the article:

In an ironic twist, cable TV and Internet provider Comcast has announced that it, too, will sell a bundle of video-streaming services for a discounted price. The announcement comes as Comcast has been rapidly losing cable TV subscribers to streaming services and seeks to bring the same type of bundling that originally drew people away from cable to streaming.

Starting on an unspecified date this month, the bundle, called Streamsaver, will offer Peacock, which Comcast owns, Apple TV+, and Netflix to people who subscribe to Comcast's cable TV and/or broadband. Comcast already offers Netflix or Apple TV+ as add-ons to its cable TV, but Streamsaver expands Comcast's streaming-related bundling efforts.

Comcast didn't say how much the streaming bundle would cost, but CEO Brian Roberts said that it will "come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today" when announcing the bundle on Tuesday at MoffettNathanson's 2024 Media, Internet and Communications Conference in New York, per Variety. If we factor in Peacock's upcoming price hike, subscribing to Apple TV+, Netflix, and Peacock separately would cost $39.47 per month without ads, or $24.97/month with ads.

[...] One of the common reasons people abandoned cable TV were bundled packages that forced people to pay for services, like phone or Internet, or channels that they didn't want. Now, Comcast is looking to save its shrinking subscriber base by bundling its cable TV or Internet service with some of its biggest competitors. Like streaming services, Comcast is hoping that bundling its products will deter people from canceling their subscriptions since they're tied to each other.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Days after we reported that its $630 million IPO (Initial Public Offer) was just days away, Raspberry Pi has announced an "expected intention to float" on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The announcement also contains financial reports and data for investors to inform their purchase, and gives us an insight into the company.

[...] An interesting section of the announcement states "Raspberry Pi aims to release new iterations of its core technology platform every three to four years, develop form-factor derivatives which better serve subsets of its customer base, and expand its range of first-party accessories, including cameras, displays, USB peripherals and HATs." 

New models of the core Raspberry Pi arrive every 3 years or so, but the form-factor derivatives for a sub-set of customers is an interesting snippet which could lead to more bespoke products aimed at specific use cases. An example of this is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4S, a version of the Compute Module 4 that uses the SODIMM connector of the Compute Module 1-3. This enables legacy users to upgrade the brains of its products without buying or designing all new carrier boards.

The potential offer highlights the expectations of the IPO, and that "the Company (Raspberry Pi)  would be admitted to listing on the premium listing segment of the Official List of the FCA and to trading on the Main Market of the London Stock Exchange." The IPO is composed of new shares to be issued by Raspberry Pi and shares to be sold by existing shareholders, including Raspberry Pi Foundation (the charity) and major Raspberry Pi shareholders. The offer is expected to be targeted at "institutional investors outside of the United States".

owl writes:

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/sir-theres-a-cat-in-your-mirror-dimension

A while back, we talked about the frequency domain: a clever reinterpretation of everyday signals that translates them into the amplitudes of constituent waveforms. The most common basis for this operation are sine waves running at increasing frequencies, but countless other waveforms can be used to create a number of alternative frequency domains.

In that earlier article, I also noted two important properties of frequency domain transforms. First, they are reversible: you can recover the original ("time domain" or "spatial domain") data from its frequency image. Second, the transforms have input-output symmetry: the same mathematical operation is used to go both ways. In effect, we have a lever that takes us to a mirror dimension and back. Which of the lever positions is called home is a matter of habit, not math.

Of course, in real life, the distinction matters — and it's particularly important for compression. If you take an image, convert it to the frequency-domain representation, and then reduce the precision of (or outright obliterate!) the high-frequency components, the resulting image still looks perceptually the same — but you now have much less data to transmit or store:

This makes you wonder: if the frequency-domain representation of a typical image looks like diffuse noise, if most of it is perceptually unimportant, and if the transform is just a lever that takes us back and forth between two functionally-equivalent dimensions... could we start calling that mirror dimension home and move some stuff in?

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Both the chips are aimed at gamers on a budget and come with relatively affordable price tags. While the 8700F is priced at $269, the 8400F costs just $169. However, the affordability comes with a compromise, as they miss out on the integrated graphics found on the Ryzen 8000G processors. For example, the Ryzen 7 8700G comes with an integrated RDNA 3 chip with 16 Compute Units, making it a better option for casual gamers who'd rather not invest in a discrete GPU.

The Ryzen 7 8700F and the Ryzen 5 8400F are both based on the Zen 4 architecture, but while the former comes with 8 cores and 16 threads, the latter features 6 cores and 12 threads. Both are compatible with AMD's existing AM5 socket and have unlocked multipliers to facilitate overclocking.

In terms of specifications, the 8700F has a base clock of 4.1 GHz and a boost clock of 5 GHz, both of which are marginally lower than that of the Ryzen 7 8700G. Other notable features of the 8700F include 8MB of L2 cache, 16MB of L3 cache, and a 45-65W configurable TDP. It also comes with AI capabilities, thanks to the built-in 16 TOPS XDNA NPU.

As for the 8400F, it has a 4.2 GHz base clock and 4.7 GHz boost clock. Like the 8700F, it also offers 16MB of L3 cache, but the amount of L2 cache is slightly lower, at 6MB. It also has a 45-65W cTDP like its more powerful sibling, but misses out on the native NPU.

Original Submission

"dalek" writes:

In sports, it's been said that winning is everything, and if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'. But for several decades, until 1947, winning wasn't important enough in baseball to justify signing the best players regardless of race. Although there was never a formal rule prohibiting American League (AL) and National League (NL) teams from signing Black players, no general manager was willing to do so. Many of the best Black players instead participated in the Negro leagues, which were professional baseball teams comprised of players who were unwelcome in the AL and NL due to segregation. Although Negro league players have long been included in the Baseball Hall of Fame, it was only in 2020 that Major League Baseball (MLB) formally recognized that the Negro leagues were major leagues, and were of the same quality as the NL and AL. Because of this, MLB decided that the statistical records from the Negro leagues should be merged into their own statistical records.

The achievements of players and teams are often measured through their statistics. These include Henry Aaron hitting 755 career home runs, the 60 home runs Babe Ruth hit in the 1927 season, or Ted Williams being the last player to hit .400, with a batting average of .406 in the 1941 season. MLB's goal is to have a similarly accurate statistical record for the Negro leagues, things like how many home runs Josh Gibson hit, how many bases Cool Papa Bell stole, and Satchel Paige's earned run average during the prime of his career. Although a vast array of data is collected in modern professional baseball, statistics for a few games are missing as recently as the early 1970s. Incorporating Negro league statistics into the MLB historical record has been particularly challenging because the accounts of many of their games have been lost. The process of reconstructing the statistical records of Negro league teams has been somewhat like the search for lost Doctor Who episodes.

AL and NL teams of the era played 154 game seasons, but Negro league seasons were much shorter, instead spending the rest of their time barnstorming. The practice of barnstorming originated because racism and Jim Crow laws forced Black baseball teams to play any willing opponent, and continued even after the more formalized structure of the Negro leagues in 1920. Unfortunately, records of barnstorming games are particularly difficult to find. Many newspapers only reported on home games, so records are incomplete. To the best extent possible, these games are reconstructed, often from reporting in newspapers with a primarily Black readership. In some cases, a box score might be available, providing somewhat detailed statistics from a game. In many other cases there is little more than a sentence or two in an old newspaper describing the outcome of a game, and many editions of these newspapers have not been preserved well. Sometimes descriptions of games and box scores can be found by searching online, but in many cases they can only be obtained from microfilm or actual old newspapers.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/chief-scientist-ilya-sutskever-leaves-openai-six-months-after-altman-ouster/

On Tuesday evening, OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever announced that he is leaving the company he co-founded, six months after he participated in the coup that temporarily ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Jan Leike, a fellow member of Sutskever's Superalignment team, is reportedly resigning with him.

"After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI," Sutskever tweeted. "The company's trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I'm confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm. It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly."

[...] To replace Sutskever as chief scientist, OpenAI announced it has appointed Jakub Pachocki, who previously served as OpenAI's director of research. OpenAI says that Pachocki spearheaded the development of GPT-4.

[...] So far, Sutskever has not announced exactly what he has planned for his next career move, but Altman mentioned that Sutskever has "something personally meaningful to work on." The former chief scientist himself left a very similar hint in his parting tweet: "I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time."

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/real-id-deadline-will-never-arrive/678370/

Archive link: https://archive.is/w2oC2

If you fly regularly, you've probably seen signs saying that the Real ID Act will soon go into full effect. When that happens, all domestic travelers using a driver's license at TSA checkpoints will have to show a federally compliant one—or be turned away. On May 7, exactly a year ahead of the latest purported enforcement date, a USA Today story bore the headline "The 2025 Real ID Deadline for New Licenses Is Really Real This Time, DHS Says." Maybe the Department of Homeland Security needs to pinkie-swear to make the 2025 date really, really real, because those airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. If past extensions are any indication, it probably never will.

The 2005 Real ID law created a national system for sharing driver information, set more onerous documentation standards for driver's licenses than states had previously used, and added security rules that pushed states to mail licenses to applicants rather than issuing them on the spot. During the years of collective panic that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and executive-branch agencies pushed through a raft of measures—common-sense ones, such as fortified cockpit doors, but also more controversial ones, such as expanded data surveillance and airport body-scanning machines. To this day, recorded airport announcements still warn passengers about "heightened security measures" that have been in place for more than a decade and might well remain heightened in perpetuity.

Originally meant to take full effect in 2008, Real ID now looks like a particularly misguided bit of post-9/11 security theater. The measure survives in public policy despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its lack of urgency.

Original Submission