fidzu : computers

"I can say we're weeks away from launching on Vulcan."

09 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was right -- but the prediction was wrong. That week, Austrian American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two colleagues published a paper in Science with the stunningly succinct title "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." The work was based on a simple observation: The time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter. Using population estimates from about 400 B.C.E. until 1958 C.E., the authors -- all from the department of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign -- came up with an equation that best described the trend. If things continued the way they were going, the number of humans on Earth would rise faster and faster, reaching more than 25 billion by 2020. The researchers didn't calculate when humanity would run out of food, land, or energy. They just concluded that at some point this year, the equation ceased to give meaningful results because the predicted population shot toward infinity. That was their doomsday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death." The exact date was somewhat arbitrary, however. The formula solved to 2026.87 plus or minus 5.5 years, and The New York Times reported that von Foerster "searched the center of this doom-time span for an appropriate date and found that a Friday the Thirteenth would fall conveniently in November of 2026." (November 13 also happened to be his birthday.) [...] [D]emographers, annoyed by what they saw as a provocation by outsiders, pointed out obvious flaws. For example, the time it takes for the number of humans to double could get a lot shorter, but certainly not shorter than the 9 months it takes for a baby to develop. "In view of the comments that subsequently were published in this journal, an extensive discussion of this article does not seem to be required," public health expert Harold Dorn drily noted in Science 2 years after von Foerster's article was published. The forecast would set a record, he predicted, "for the short length of time required to demonstrate its unreliability." "The failure of the Doomsday equation is ultimately a cautionary tale about the dangers of extrapolating from historically exceptional circumstances," writes economist Javier Birchenall of the University of California, Santa Barbara writes in a Perspective published in Science today.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

The new EV's digital cockpit can mimic instrument displays from VWs of old.

09 Oct 2026 10:00am GMT

"Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedicated discipline. She worked at MIT from 1959 until the mid-1970s, after which she became a successful computing entrepreneur and CEO. Her life's work was recognized with many awards and honors, including the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whose citation noted: "Hamilton defined new forms of software engineering and helped launch an industry that would forever change human history. Her software architecture led to giant leaps for humankind, writing the code that helped America set foot on the moon." "To say Margaret Hamilton was a pioneer -- to say she was ahead of her time -- would be a dramatic understatement. She was a software engineer at a time when that field was in its infancy, and she not only developed advanced code herself but also led a team in using that nascent technology to develop one of the most complex systems humanity had ever achieved," says Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor and interim head of the MIT Department Aeronautics and Astronautics. "The Apollo program still stands as one of our greatest testaments to the power of collaboration, ingenuity, and engineering, and Margaret Hamilton was a fundamental contributor to that program's success. And for her that was just the beginning! She went on to become an entrepreneur and remained on the cutting edge of systems software throughout an extraordinary career, while acting as an advocate, mentor, and inspiration to millions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Oct 2026 7:00am GMT

Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to immediately supplant the worldwide network of atomic clocks, whose steady ticking we rely on for GPS and the definition of a second. Nor have they captured the record for most precise timepiece; the best atomic clocks are about 10,000 times more reliable and would take more than 100 billion years to lose one second. But nuclear clocks hold a bevy of potential advantages over existing atomic clocks. One day, they could be more reliable than the leading atomic versions, and nuclear clocks could be made more portable. They even hold the ability to search for certain kinds of dark matter -- the invisible stuff whose clumps make up 83 percent of the matter in the universe. If a particle of dark matter passed through the thorium nuclei, it could register as a wobble in the nuclear clock's otherwise steady ticktock. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Oct 2026 3:00am GMT

In this article. I am going to explain the different steps the I/O manager follows when initializing an I/O operation starting from determining the right target, choosing the right path and finally sending the request to be processed by the right drivers. To make it easier I choose to focus on read requests only since the major steps are common by all types of requests. ↫ Win-Ware A very in-depth look at Windows' I/O Manager.

08 Oct 2026 10:09pm GMT

At OSNews, we love us a hobby operating system project. I started a small experiment: writing a very basic kernel in Swift, and running on QEMU. The goal is obviously not to replace Linux or any other popular kernel, but just to have fun and understand what is required to make a program run without an operating system underneath it. Actually I made a similar experiment years before with arOS 10 years ago. For the moment, the kernel does only one thing: it prints a message through QEMU and then waits forever, which is enough for a first deep dive. ↫ Carette Antonin This is effectively a "hello world" kernel, as it doesn't actually do much else at this point. Still, there's a ton of details in the article for the aspiring kernel developers among you.

08 Oct 2026 10:05pm GMT

"These led to conjunctions of tens of meters to hundreds of meters. Way too close to comfort."

08 Oct 2026 9:37pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Whenever Microsoft starts messing with something like the search function in Windows, a lot of people are going to be holding their breath and expecting the worst. Well, get ready, because they're redesigning the whole thing. In July, we shared how we are improving the Windows Search Box with less clutter and more control. We introduced a calmer home screen, removed promotional content from web results, and gave you more choice over whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear. Today, we're carrying those investments forward with a new Windows Search experience built on WinUI 3. This modern foundation makes Windows Search faster and more efficient with resources, while delivering an even more streamlined and focused design. ↫ Anshul Rawat at the Windows Blogs The company claims this new version of search is faster and uses less memory, which, if true, are very welcome improvements. It's also just a single column of results now, and they're adding inline previews for things like weather and files on your machine, as well as for answers to all kinds of queries you might normally go to an online search engine for. You can now also use search to perform all kinds of tasks in Windows, like turning on dark mode, managing windows, and so on. All of this can be done using relatively natural language, and Microsoft claims they've implemented better detection of typing errors and synonyms, which is quite welcome. Weirdly enough, though, it's not yet integrated into the Start menu, since it's a preview just for testers, but that's something they're working on for future releases. Judging by the videos and screenshots, I'm actually kind of positively surprised. This looks quite decent and nice, and if the promised performance improvements actually materialise, this may actually be an upgrade to search worth looking forward to. Of course, this is still Microsoft, so it's just as likely they'll screw up somewhere between now and when this goes live to regular users. Still, I think it looks decent.

07 Oct 2026 11:47pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT