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damnbunni writes:

https://hackaday.com/2024/04/19/end-of-life-for-z80-cpu-and-peripherals-announced/

Zilog To End Standalone Sales Of The Legendary Z80 CPU

Zilog's parent company Littelfuse has notified customers and distributors that it's end of life for the good ol' Z80. In a End of Life / Last Time Buy notification (https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Littelfuse_PCN_Z84C00.pdf ) they state:

"Please be advised that our Wafer Foundry Manufacturer will be discontinuing support for the Z80 product and other product lines."

You can place a final order up until 6/14, if you need to stock up on Z80s.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

End of an Era: End-Of-Life for the Venerable Zilog Z80

Production of some models of Z80 processor – the chip that helped spark the PC boom of the 1980s – will cease in June 2024 after an all-too-brief 48 years.

The Z80 debuted in 1976, using a 4-micron process. Readers will doubtless be aware that some modern silicon is made on a 4-nanometer process – meaning elements are 1,000 times smaller than those etched into a Z80.

Zilog will accept orders for the device until June 14, 2024. After that, it's the end for the eight-bit CPU – or at least the ZC8400 range. Zilog appears to still make the Z180 and eZ80 – successors that added lots of whistles and bells and are often packaged into SoCs.

The original Z80 packed just 8,500 transistors and chugged along at 2.5Mhz, but that was enough to power lots of fun stuff – helped by the fact that it was compatible with Intel's 8080 processor and sold at a cheaper price.

The Sinclair ZX range was perhaps the most famous application of the Z80, using it to power affordable and accessible machines that introduced many Register readers (and writers) to tech. The chip also found its way into arcade games such as Pac Man, and early Roland synthesizers.

But Zilog was overtaken by Intel in the PC market, and by the 1990s decided to focus on microcontrollers instead. The Z80 was one of its key offerings, and over the years was adapted and enhanced: we even spotted a new variant of the chip in 2016!

That sort of upgrade helped the processor and its heirs to hold on in some consumer-facing applications such as graphing calculators like the TI-84 Plus CE. But it mostly disappeared into industrial kit, where it hummed along reliably and offered developers a tried-and-true target for their code.

Perhaps someone will place a giant order for ZC8400s to hoard them, so that those committed to the platform can continue to get kit – a plausible scenario given the likelihood the processor retains a hidden-but-critical role in defense or some legacy tech that will persist for decades.

Or perhaps there's one last batch of ZX Spectrums to be made!

See also:

• https://www.techspot.com/news/102684-zilog-discontinuing-z80-microprocessor-after-almost-50-years.html
• https://www.mouser.com/PCN/Littelfuse_PCN_Z84C00.pdf

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

upstart writes:

US Air Force successfully tests AI-controlled fighter jet in dogfight against human pilots:

In what has been hailed as a milestone moment for artificial intelligence's use in the military, the US Air Force has announced that it successfully tested a modified, AI-controlled fighter jet in a dogfight against human pilots last year.

The US Air Force Test Pilot School and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first started testing a Lockheed Martin X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) fitted with AI software back in December 2022, part of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program. Able to mimic the performance characteristics of other aircraft, the X-62A was flown for by the AI for over 17 hours.

DARPA revealed on Thursday that in September 2023, the X-62A carried out the first successful AI versus human within-visual-range engagements, also known as a dogfight.

The AI dogfights paired the X-62A VISTA against manned F-16 aircraft in the skies above Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California. After initial flight safety was built up using defensive maneuvers, the aircraft switched to offensive high-aspect nose-to-nose engagements where they approached within 2,000 feet of each other at 1,200 miles per hour. It isn't revealed which side won the simulated battle.

[...] In addition to its autonomous flight capabilities, the X-62A VISTA, a modified F-16, also features a high-resolution camera, a compact size, lightweight construction, and is versatile enough to be used for a wide range of applications, including scientific research, surveillance, recon, environmental monitoring, and emergency response.

Could Air Force pilots be yet another profession that is eventually threatened by AI? The 2020 AlphaDogfight Trials, a three-day competition designed to demonstrate advanced algorithms capable of dogfighting (using VR simulations), saw an experienced F-16 Air Force pilot lose 5-0 to the AI agent. DARPA said the machine performed aggressive and precise maneuvers that the human pilot could not match.

DARPA says that the X-62A VISTA will continue to serve a variety of customers for research while providing key academic lessons for the next generation of test leaders.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/linus-torvalds-reiterates-his-tabs-versus-spaces-stance-with-a-kernel-trap/

Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the subject of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness, though he has been working on it since 2018. You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed. It involves tabs.
[...]
By attempting to smooth over one tiny part of the kernel so that a parsing tool could see a space character as a delineating whitespace, Prasad Pandit inadvertently spurred a robust rebuttal:

It wasn't clear what tool it was, but let's make sure it gets fixed. Because if you can't parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files.

In fact, let's make such breakage more obvious than some esoteric ftrace record size option. If you can't parse tabs, you can't have page sizes.

Yes, tab-vs-space confusion is sadly a traditional Unix thing, and 'make' is famous for being broken in this regard. But no, that does not mean that it's ok.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Interstellar debuted in late 2014, and features a star-studded cast including Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, John Lithgow, and Matt Damon. It is set in a near dystopian future where humans have more or less destroyed Earth and are on the hunt for a new home elsewhere in the cosmos.

The flick earned an impressive $731 million at the box office during its first run a decade ago opposite a budget of just $165 million, and earned a score of 73 percent on Rotten Tomatoes versus a more favorable audience score of 86 percent.

Theatrical re-releases have been commonplace in Hollywood over the past few years and can be traced back to the Covid era. During the pandemic, film production halted worldwide and the theater industry nearly sank. Attendance at AMC theaters in the US fell 96.8 percent in Q3 2020 compared to the previous year. Movies that were already complete saw on-demand releases at home.

[...] Interstellar will return to theaters on September 27, and will be shown on 70mm Imax and digital screens.

Did you see it the first time? Would you want to see it, or see it again, in the theater rather than just stream it?

Original Submission

acid andy writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-dennett-dead-at-82/

World-renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett, who championed controversial takes on consciousness and free will among other mind-bending subjects, died today at the age of 82.

"He was a towering figure in philosophy and in particular in the philosophy of AI," roboticist Rodney Brooks (MIT, emeritus) wrote on X, bemoaning that he'd never replied to Dennett's last email from 30 days ago. "Now we have only memories of him."

Dennett's many books, while dense, nonetheless sold very well and were hugely influential, and he was a distinguished speaker in great demand. His 2003 TED talk, "The Illusion of Consciousness," garnered more than 4 million views. While he gained particular prominence as a leader of the "New Atheist" movement of the early 2000s—colorfully dubbed one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism" alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris—that was never his primary focus, merely a natural extension of his more central philosophical concerns.

"Dan Dennett was the embodiment of a natural philosopher—someone who was brilliant at the careful conceptual analysis that characterizes the best philosophy, while caring deeply about what science has to teach us about the natural world," Johns Hopkins University physicist and philosopher Sean Carroll told Ars. "At the same time, he was the model of a publicly engaged academic, someone who wrote substantive books that anyone could read and who had a real impact on the wider world. People like that are incredibly rare and precious, and his passing is a real loss."

Dennett was a confirmed compatibilist on the fiercely debated subject of free will, meaning that he saw no conflict between philosophical determinism and free will. "Our only notable divergence was on the question of free will, which Dan maintained exists, in some sense of 'free,' whereas I just agreed that 'will' exists, but maintained that there is no freedom in it," Hoftstadter recalled.

I initially came across Dennett's writings in his book The Mind's I which he wrote with Douglas Hofstader including texts from other authors. It was when I first started to dip my toes into the philosopy of mind. He brings up some fascinating ideas from a rational perspective which always provoke a lot of thought and discussion.

Due to my being in the same philosophical camp as Dennett's great rival David Chalmers, I tend to side with those who called Denett's book, Consciousness Explained, Consciousness Avoided (Dennett actually wrote an epilogue in response to this accusation). This is because, as I understand it, Dennett has always strived to explain consciousness using only axioms derived directly from accepted science, which means it all starts and ends with a third person perspective. Dennett always raised some interesting counterarguments to other philosophers that attempted to discuss the really interesting first person phenomena of consciousness, so whether you agree with him or not, he represented a key school of thought in modern philosophy.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/thousands-complain-about-prime-videos-wrong-titles-lost-episodes-other-errors/

Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.

Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.
[...]
Following Insider's report, however, Quartz reported that an unnamed source it described as "familiar with the matter" said the documents were out of date, despite Insider claiming that the leaked reports included data from 2023. Quartz's source also claimed that customer engagement was not affected,

Ars Technica reached out to Amazon for comment but didn't hear back in time for publication. The company told Insider that "catalogue quality is an ongoing priority" and that Amazon takes "it seriously and work[s] relentlessly alongside our global partners and dedicated internal teams to continuously improve the overall customer experience."
[...]
Beyond Prime Video, users have underscored similar inaccuracies within the past year on rival services, like Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix. A former White Collar executive producer pointed out that the show's episodes were mislabeled and out of order on Netflix earlier this month. Inaccurate content catalogs appear more widespread if you go back two years or more. Some video streamers (like (Disney and Netflix) have pages explaining how to report such problems.
[...]
Insider said it spoke with an anonymous person involved with Prime Video library who described the inaccuracies as "extremely sloppy mistakes" that have affected Prime Video for years.
[...]
Streaming is in a cable-like rut, and subscribers are ditching their services faster than ever. That puts more pressure on streaming platforms to elevate the user experience (not just prices), including getting the basics right.

Improving behind-the-scenes tech and practices that benefit user experiences and user interfaces is something streaming companies may need to prioritize.
[...]
As people watch the cost of streaming rise, subscribers' standards are entitled to rise, too. Accurate titles and descriptions are just some of their expectations.

Original Submission

Mojibake Tengu writes:

Michael Larabel of Phoronix informs us:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Autodafe-0.2-Released

Autodafe 0.2 Released For Freeing Your Project From Autotools

Eric S Raymond has released version 0.2 of Autodafe, his latest open-source project that provides "tools for freeing your project from the clammy grip of Autotools."

Autodafe works to convert an Autotools build recipe into a bare makefile that "can be read and modified by humans." The Autodafe's README explains:

        "This project collects resources for converting an autotools build recipe to a bare makefile that can be read and modified by humans.
        ...
        The principal tool, makemake, reduces a generated Makefile to an equivalent form suitable for human modification and with internal automake cruft removed. It is intended to be used with ifdex(1) to enable severing a project from its autotools build recipe, leaving a bare Makefile in place. A HOWTO describing a conversion workflow for an entire project is included.

        One other tool is planned but not yet implemented."

Those wishing to learn more about ESR's Autodafe project can do so via GitLab.
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe

ESR additionally added on Twitter/X:

        "Release 0.2 of my autotools killer. It's ready for use on projects buiilding binaries or static libraries. Shared libraries is a more difficult problem and will gate the 1.0 release."

This is one way to work away from Autotools for those not wishing to join the Meson bandwagon or going to another build system outright.

This project intrigues me. It brings sanity to GNU. I consider Unix M4 (core macro language of Autotools) inferior even as a macro language.
I am used to craft a Makefile for my projects by hand, for decades. Having a humanized Makefile for fancy projects of others seems nice to me.

Useful links on project's GitLab:
De-Autoconfiscation HOWTO .
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe/-/blob/master/de-autoconfiscation.adoc

makemake manual page
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe/-/blob/master/makemake.adoc

Hacker's Guide to Autodafe
https://gitlab.com/esr/autodafe/-/blob/master/hacking.adoc

The project logo is the astrological symbol for planet Makemake, a Kuiper belt object 136472
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makemake#/media/File:Makemake_symbol_(bold).svg

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Conversation has an article about five things their team learned when researching 16th century beer making. A lot has changed since then, such as standardized grain varieties, standardized yeasts, standardized hops varieties, standardized temperatures, and so on.

As part of a major study of food and drink in early modern Ireland, funded by the European Research Council, we recreated and analysed a beer last brewed at Dublin Castle in 1574. Combining craft, microbiology, brewing science, archaeology, as well as history, this was the most comprehensive interdisciplinary study of historical beer ever undertaken. Here are five things that we discovered.

[...] To learn more about brewing a beer from 1574, visit our online exhibition. A documentary film is coming soon. Details will be on our website.

tldr; Historical documentation shows that your average workers consumed immense quantities of beer per day back then.

Previously:
(2024) "AI Could Make Better Beer. Here's How."
(2024) "Ransomware Halts Production At Belgian Beer Brewery Duvel"
(2023) "Long-Unknown Origins of Lager Beer Uncovered"
(2022) "Beer Hops Compounds Could Help Protect Against Alzheimer's Disease"
(2022) "Genetically Modified Yeast Yields Intense Hop Aromas in Beer"
(2022) "400-Year-Old Ecuadoran Beer Resurrected From Yeast"
... and many more.

Original Submission

Anonymous Coward writes:

University of Queensland researchers have built a generator that absorbs carbon dioxide (CO2) to make electricity.

"This nanogenerator is made of two components: a polyamine gel that is already used by industry to absorb CO2 and a skeleton a few atoms thick of boron nitrate that generates positive and negative ions," Dr Wang said.

"In nature and in the human body, ion transportation is the most efficient energy conversion – more efficient than electron transportation which is used in the power network."

"At present we can harvest around 1 per cent of the total energy carried intrinsically by gas CO2 but like other technologies, we will now work on improving efficiency and reducing cost."

"We could make a slightly bigger device that is portable to generate electricity to power a mobile phone or a laptop computer using CO2 from the atmosphere," Professor Zhang said.

"A second application on a much larger scale, would integrate this technology with an industrial CO2 capture process to harvest electricity."

https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2024/04/uq-turns-co2-sustainable-power
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47040-x

Original Submission

upstart writes:

First law protecting consumers' brainwaves signed by Colorado governor:

Colorado Governor Jared Polis on Wednesday signed into law the first measure passed in the U.S. that aims to protect the data found in a person's brainwaves.

Sponsors of the bill said it was necessary as quick advances in neurotechnology make scanning, analyzing and selling mental data increasingly more possible - and profitable.

State representative Cathy Kipp, a sponsor of the legislation, said in a statement that while advancements in the neurotechnology field hold great promise for improving the lives of many people, "we must provide a clear framework to protect Coloradans' personal data from being used without their consent while still allowing these new technologies to develop."

State senator Kevin Priola, another of the bill's sponsors, said that neurotechnology "is no longer confined to medical or research settings" and that when it comes to consumer products, the industry "can currently operate without regulation, data protection standards, or equivalent ethical constraints."

The Colorado law notes that neuratechnologies used in a clinical setting are already covered by medical privacy laws, so the new measure is aimed at consumer products available outside of a hospital.

[...] Elsewhere around the world, other governments have been working to increase consumer protections when it comes to neurotechnological products.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Microsoft has lifted a 29-month compatibility hold that prevented some Windows 10 systems from upgrading to Windows 11 due to an issue with an Intel Smart Sound Technology driver.

[...] As for Microsoft? It discovered back then [Nov 2021] that certain versions of drivers for Intel Smart Sound Technology (SST) could trip up the newest version of its Windows operating system – Windows 11 – and so threw up a compatibility hold to stop users updating from Windows 10 and encountering blue screen unpleasantness.

[...] Microsoft has now finally lifted that compatibility hold.

According to Microsoft: "Only devices with both an Intel 11th Gen Core processors and an Intel SST driver version of 10.29.0.5152 or 10.30.0.5152 are affected by this issue."

[...] It is debatable how many users are still affected by the issue. We asked Microsoft and will update should the company give us a figure.

Although unlikely to dramatically change the Windows 10 versus Windows 11 market share situation, there is a certain relief in seeing an issue that was bedeviling some users finally marked as "Resolved."

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/renovation-relic-man-finds-hominin-jawbone-in-parents-travertine-kitchen-tile/

Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.

User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:

While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.

Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.

[...] The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)

[...] Hawks notes, chances are that one wouldn't be able to clearly identify a fossil even if it was embedded in one's tile, given how thin such tiles and panels are typically cut. And one is far more likely to find fossils of algae, plants, mollusks, crustaceans, or similar smaller creatures than human remains. "Believe me, anthropologists don't want to hear about every blob of bone in your tile," Hawks wrote. "But certainly somebody has more pieces of the mandible of the Reddit post."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Juno captures images of Io's violence as study says it has always been that way:

Ever since the Voyager mission sent home images of Jupiter's moon Io spewing material into space, we've gradually built up a clearer picture of Io's volcanic activity. It slowly became clear that Io, which is a bit smaller than Mercury, is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, with all that activity driven by the gravitational strain caused by Jupiter and its three other giant moons. There is so much volcanism that its surface has been completely remodeled, with no signs of impact craters.

A few more details about its violence came to light this week, with new images being released of the moon's features, including an island in a lake of lava, taken by the Juno orbiter. At the same time, imaging done using an Earth-based telescope has provided some indications that this volcanism has been reshaping Io from almost the moment it formed.

The Juno orbiter's mission is primarily focused on studying Jupiter, including the dynamics of its storms and its internal composition. But many of its orbital passes have taken it right past Io, and this week, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory released some of the best images from these flybys. They include a shot of Loki Patera, a lake of lava that has an island within it. Also featured: the impossibly sheer slopes of Io's Steeple Mountain.

Looking more closely at the lake, the Juno team found that some of the areas within it were incredibly smooth, raising the possibility that obsidian glass had formed on the surface where it had cooled enough to solidify. Given the level of volcanism on Io, this may be more widespread than the Loki Patera.

Freeman writes:

https://www.popsci.com/technology/paintball-armed-ai-home-security-camera/

It's a bold pitch for homeowners: What if you let a small tech startup's crowdfunded AI surveillance system dispense vigilante justice for you?

A Slovenia-based company called OZ-IT recently announced PaintCam Eve, a line of autonomous property monitoring devices that will utilize motion detection and facial recognition to guard against supposed intruders. In the company's zany promo video, a voiceover promises Eve will protect owners from burglars, unwanted animal guests, and any hapless passersby who fail to heed its "zero compliance, zero tolerance" warning.
[...]
"Experience ultimate peace of mind," PaintCam's website declares, as Eve will offer owners a "perfect fusion of video security and physical presence" thanks to its "unintrusive [sic] design that stands as a beacon of safety."
[...]
There are apparently "Standard," "Advanced," and "Elite" versions of PaintCam Eve in the works. The basic tier only gets owners "smart security" and "app on/off" capabilities, while Eve+ also offers animal detection. Eve Pro apparently is the only one to include facial recognition, which implies the other two models could be a tad more... indiscriminate in their surveillance methodologies. It's unclear how much extra you'll need to shell out for the teargas tier, too.

PaintCam's Kickstarter is set to go live on April 23.

Original Submission

calmond writes:

The Atlantic has an interesting editorial posted, titled Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls. The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election.

It's probably an interesting read, but of course it's behind a paywall. Nevertheless, the concept is pretty straightforward. Discuss.

[Editors note: See below for snippets from the article]