fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For a while, it seemed the notion that light drinking was good for the heart had gone by the wayside, debunked by new studies and overshadowed by warnings that alcohol causes cancer. Now the American Heart Association has revived the idea in a scientific review that is drawing intense criticism, setting off a new round of debate about alcohol consumption. The paper, which sought to summarize the latest research and was aimed at practicing cardiologists, concluded that light drinking -- one to two drinks a day -- posed no risk for coronary disease, stroke, sudden death and possibly heart failure, and may even reduce the risk of developing these conditions. Controversy over the influential organization's review has been simmering since it was published in the association's journal Circulation in July. Public health groups and many doctors have warned on the basis of recent studies that alcohol can be harmful even in small amounts. Groups like the European Heart Network and the World Heart Federation have stressed that even modest drinking increases the odds of cardiovascular disease. "It says in all our guidelines right now, 'If you don't drink, don't start.' There's not enough evidence to suggest conclusively that it prevents heart disease," said Dr. Mariell Jessup, the chief science and medical officer at the heart association, adding that the review was not meant to serve as a guideline and that the group's advice to patients has not changed. Critics argue that suggesting any heart-health benefits from alcohol is dangerous given its well-documented risks, and they accuse the heart association of selectively weighing studies. They also say a past tie to the alcohol industry by one author should have disqualified him from participating. "The cardiovascular benefits of moderate drinking are questionable at best," said Dr. Elizabeth Farkouh, an internist and alcohol researcher. "But even if there was a benefit, there are so many other ways to reduce cardiovascular risk that don't come with an associated cancer risk." The new review's conclusion is also at odds with the CDC's guidance on alcohol, which notes that "even moderate drinking may increase your risk of death and other alcohol-related harms, compared to not drinking." It also seems to diverge from the heart association's diet and lifestyle recommendation to consume "limited or preferably no alcohol," along with its 2023 statement that recent research suggests there is "no safe level of alcohol use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Jan 2026 3:30am GMT

Warren Buffett is retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at age 95, ending a 55-year run that reshaped how generations of Americans think about investing. "The 95-year-old, often referred to as the 'Oracle of Omaha' and the 'billionaire next door,' will relinquish the title after a career that saw him turn a failing textile firm into one of the most successful asset managers in the world," reports NBC News. From the report: Greg Abel, the 63-year-old lesser-known CEO of Berkshire's energy business, will take the helm of the conglomerate on Thursday. Buffett will remain its chairman. Under Buffett's leadership, Nebraska-based Berkshire has thrived at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, with investments in industries ranging from railroads and insurance to candy and ice cream. Along the way, while living in the same house he bought for just over $30,000 in the late 1950s, he redefined investing for the American public with his folksy and practical advice, became one of the wealthiest people on Earth and dedicated much of that fortune to philanthropy. Berkshire's most significant tech bet was initiated in 2016 when it invested $1 billion. Apple has since become Berkshire Hathaway's largest single holding, representing over 20% of the portfolio and valued at more than $65 billion. While Buffett largely avoided pure tech for decades, Buffett long considered technology a blind spot, famously saying "I wish I had" bought Apple earlier. Throughout the years, Buffett expressed his disinterest in cryptocurrency and said he would "never own bitcoin," referring to it as "probably rat poison squared" and a "gambling token."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Jan 2026 1:10am GMT

Pibroch(CiH) writes: According to the obituary linked, Stewart Cheifet of Computer Chronicles fame has died. The obituary states he passed Dec 28, 2025. Cheifet and Digital Research founder Gary Kildall hosted the public television show The Computer Chronicles starting in 1984, and Stewart continued to host the show well into the 1990s. He was well-known for his affable presence and adeptness at interviewing guests and finding out the straight dope about their products. He had recently undergone spinal surgery and had somewhat disappeared from public view after the death of his wife Peta in 2024.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Jan 2026 12:50am GMT

It's 31 December 2025 today, the last day of the year, but it also happens to mark the end of support for the last and final version of one of my favourite operating systems: HP-UX. Today is the day HPE puts the final nail in the coffin of their long-running UNIX operating system, marking the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux. HP-UX' versioning is a bit of a convoluted mess for those not in the know, but the versions that matter are all part of the HP-UX 11i family. HP-UX 11i v1 and v2 (also known as 11.11 and 11.23, respectively) have been out of support for exactly a decade now, while HP-UX 11i v3 (also known as 11.31) is the version whose support ends today. To further complicate matters, like 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3 supports two hardware platforms: HP 9000 (PA-RISC) and HP Integrity (Intel Itanium). Support for the HP-UX 11i v3 variant for HP 9000 ended exactly four years ago, and today marks the end of support for HP-UX 11i v3 for HP Integrity. And that's all she wrote. I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract). The various versions of HP-UX 11i come with a variety "operating environments" you can choose from, depending on the role your installation is supposed to fulfill. In the case of my c8000, it's running the Technical Computing Operating Environment, which is the OE intended for workstations. HP-UX 11i v1 was the last PA-RISC version of the operating system to officially support workstations, with 11i v2 only supporting Itanium workstations. There are some rumblings online that 11i v2 will still work just fine on PA-RISC workstations, but I have not yet tried this out. My c8000 also has a ton of other random software on it, of course, and only yesterday I discovered that the most recent release of sudo configures, compiles, and installs from source just fine on it. Sadly, a ton of other modern open source code does not run on it, considering the slightly outdated toolchain on HP-UX and few people willing and/or able to add special workarounds for such an obscure platform. Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean. Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it. HP-UX didn't star in a Steven Spielberg blockbuster, it didn't leave behind influential technologies like ZFS. Despite being supported up until today, it's mostly forgotten - and not even HPE itself seems to care. And that makes me sad. When you raise your glasses tonight to mark the end of 2025 and welcome the new year, spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists. I know I will.

31 Dec 2025 10:09pm GMT

This time, a Colorado plant scheduled to shut down will be kept on standby.

31 Dec 2025 4:30pm GMT

The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list.

31 Dec 2025 1:15pm GMT

In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, would-be oracles became software tools.

31 Dec 2025 12:00pm GMT

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft. ↫ The loss32 homepage Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what you think it is: a Linux kernel with the Windows user interface running on top through Wine. I'm sure quite a few of use mused about this very concept at some point in time, but hikari_no_yume went a step further and created this working concept. It's rough around the edges and needs a ton of work, but I do think the idea is sound and could offer real benefits for certain types of users. It's definitely a more realistic idea than ReactOS, a project that's perpetually chasing the dragon but never coming even close to catching it. Not having to recreate the entire Windows NT kernel, drivers, and subsystems, and using Linux instead, is simply a more realistic approach that could bring results within our lifetimes. The added benefit here is that this could still run Linux applications, too, of course. hikari_no_yume is looking for help with the project, and I hope they find it. This is a great idea, with an absolutely amazing name, too.

30 Dec 2025 1:39pm GMT

Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she's ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on. I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it. I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me "port" Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port. ↫ Nina Kalinina To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn't aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it's rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead - which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way. The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren't many people around doing stuff like this, and it's great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it's still been worth it.

30 Dec 2025 1:26pm GMT

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.
• Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Peter Jung via arch-announce wrote:

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the 'nvidia' package with 'nvidia-open', 'nvidia-dkms' with 'nvidia-open-dkms', and 'nvidia-lts' with 'nvidia-lts-open'. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official 'nvidia', 'nvidia-lts', or 'nvidia-dkms' packages.
• Install 'nvidia-580xx-dkms' from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-d … l-modules/

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT