fidzu : geek

SpaceX is scheduled to launch the Roman Space Telescope on a Falcon Heavy rocket, with the launch window opening at 7:26 a.m. EDT (1126 GMT). NASA will carry the launch live on YouTube. CNN offers this mission overview from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "Roman will investigate dark matter, dark energy and the structure of the universe itself, and accelerate the future of discovery of potentially habitable planets outside our solar system." In fact, "NASA anticipates that Roman will image more than 50 times as much of the sky in the next five years as Hubble covered in three decades," reports USA Today, noting that "every single image it beams back to Earth will contain the equivalent of 100 pictures Hubble would capture." The barrel-shaped Roman telescope is due to set up operations nearly 1 million miles from Earth and begin scouring previously unobservable areas of the cosmos... NASA will make all of Roman's data available for anyone to peruse, meaning astronomers from all over the world will have the opportunity to make use of the observatory for advanced research, NASA says... Spanning 42 feet long and more than 14 feet wide, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is outfitted with two primary instruments Its 300-megapixel near-infrared camera is built to look across the universe and study the three-dimensional distribution of dark matter, reports The Conversation. But it's also carrying a coronagraph instrument built to dramatically reduce the glare from distant stars "that will test the technology for future missions that plan to detect Earth-like planets around other stars." The mission's generating some excitement. "Nearly three decades after dark energy's discovery, astronomers are letting themselves hope that a breakthrough is almost at hand," writes Scientific American, adding that cosmologists "are increasingly questioning the validity of their vaunted standard model, although no one can decide exactly what comes next." Roman will chase down three different ways of detecting dark energy, seeking to more precisely define what its effects on the universe are and whether they're changing over time. The first one involves surveying the skies for a special variety of supernova that's so predictable that scientists can use it as a beacon for calculating what a host galaxy's distance is and how fast it's moving away from us - the same technique that first betrayed dark energy back in the 1990s. The second entails mapping large numbers of galaxies to discern huge, faint bubbles in the cosmos that represent the fossilized signatures of sound waves that froze out of the universe's primordial plasma as it expanded and cooled. The sizes of those bubbles scale with the size and growth of the very early universe, offering a powerful probe for studying cosmic change over time. The third tracer uses a technique called microlensing, which reveals clumps of dark matter via their warping of background starlight, to fill in scientists' still incomplete reckoning of matter's cosmic distribution. The Houston Chronicle reports that the telescope will also study rogue planets, isolated black holes, starquakes and planet-forming disks around nearby stars. "Almost regardless of what your scientific interest is, Roman is probably already planning to take observations," Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist at NASA, said during a July news conference." NBC News reports that after the Roman telescope launches, "it's set to spend more than three months journeying to its final destination, located roughly 1 million miles from Earth." Three primary surveys are planned over the course of the Roman telescope's mission. During the largest one, which will last over a year, the telescope will peer through the Milky Way's dense, star-packed center, known as the galactic bulge, building a vast catalog of all the astronomical objects it observes. The second and third surveys will focus on dark matter and dark energy. Axios notes that Roman's primary mirror "is about the same size as that of Hubble's, but at 80% less weight - reflecting huge tech advancements since Hubble was built in the 1970s." And NPR reports NASA began planning the $4.3 billion telescope 15 years ago to search for supernovas to help explore dark energy - when "a call came in from the government office in charge of surveillance satellites." "The National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA," [remembers cosmologist Daniel Scolnic at Duke University], "saying, 'We have this amazing satellite sitting in a hangar that we're not using. And what what do you guys think about instead of pointing downwards, we point upwards, and you guys use it?'" NASA said yes. It took some substantial modifications, but now that old satellite is set to become NASA's next major space observatory.... Another goal of the telescope is to spend a month surveying all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Julie McEnery is Roman's project scientist. She says even though Roman has broadly the same sensitivity and sharpness of vision as the currently orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, its design lets it do things much faster. "That one month of observations to survey our Milky Way galaxy would take about a century with Hubble," says McEnery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Aug 2026 11:22am GMT

BMW is about to release their most screen-dependent vehicles ever, reports Car and Driver: Step into the BMW iX3, and you'll notice something is missing: real buttons. The climate controls are fettered to the center screen, as is nearly every other feature, save for a handful located in the center console - at least the window switches are still on the doors... But don't blame a desire for larger profit margins; BMW's move away from physical switchgear and toward touchscreen dependence is the fault of younger buyers, according to one executive. In an interview with CarExpert, Vikram Pawah, the CEO of BMW Group Australia, said that young buyers prefer the newer controls... According to the executive, younger customers are less patient with their technology. "They want things done quickly, and they're multitasking," Pawah said. "And we have to keep that in mind. That's how customers are evolving. They are multitasking...." Tesla has always forced functions to its center screen; newer players such as Rivian do the same. And in recent years, established brands like Mazda and Mercedes-Benz have moved more and more functions to touchscreens. BMW's iX3 also includes a new safety feature - a side-radar that detects if a cyclist or vehicle is approaching, and delays the release of the electronic door lock "until the danger passes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Aug 2026 7:34am GMT

Google's AI assistant Gemini crawls your Google apps for "more personalized suggestions," in a feature they call Personal Intelligence. Now when given permission, an Android/iOS app called Dreambeans "uses Personal Intelligence to connect information from Google apps like Gmail, Calendar, Photos, YouTube and Search History, to curate a finite collection of daily stories designed to spark new ideas." In a slick new video Google says the app will "surface what matters to you." The blog 9to5Google notes that after previously requiring a subscription, Dreambeans "is now available for free Google Accounts in the US to test, calling it "very much like a hyper-personalized Google Now or Discover feed." Instead of using stock imagery, each Dreambeans story is accompanied by Nano Banana 2-generated artwork that uses an illustrated style. For example, if Dreambeans recommends a hike, you might see yourself and a group of friends at that location... There's also an "Ask anything" chat experience to get more information. You can leave feedback by tapping the heart or downvoting, while the chat interface allows you to provide more details. "Tune your feed" lets you tell Dreambeans what you "want more stories about" and what it should never show. Or, as TechCrunch senior writer Lucas Ropek puts it, you get a curated list of AI-illustrated "stories" that "will turn your life into a cartoon" [Gozde Oznur, the product lead behind the new app, told TechCrunch the app] has also been built as a doomscrolling antidote, in that it only provides users with a limited number of stories per day - typically 10 to 14. The idea is to get a few inspirational ideas and then go out and live your life, she said. A lot of companies are currently trying to court the user that is sick of phone addiction. I recently reviewed a startup, Bond, which also uses AI to auto-generate lifestyle suggestions for the user. What about privacy protections? According to Oznur, they are pretty solid. The only person with access to the app's stories is the user, she said. Users can also delete their data whenever they want, and can choose which Google services they want to connect to the tool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Aug 2026 4:34am GMT

Testing 100 companies found privacy requests often led to confusion and dead ends.

29 Aug 2026 10:50am GMT

Kalshi can't evade Nevada gambling laws by calling bets "swaps," judges rule.

28 Aug 2026 10:14pm GMT

Cancellations have accelerated.

28 Aug 2026 9:33pm GMT

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It's the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can't exactly overcome physics - laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers - there's a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you're a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it's just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux' advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop's speakers. EasyEffects' own description on its GitHub page doesn't really explain what it does or what it's capable of, so here's the description from Wikipedia instead. EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line. Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer. ↫ EasEffects' Wikipedia page None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs. What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio - MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more - aren't magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery. If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better. In an ideal world, you'd pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won't find one, so for most laptops you'll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I've long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I've tried it on, but of course, there's countless other presets for you to try to see if there's anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better. Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution's package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They'll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly. There's obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you're most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there's no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I'm talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE's System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything. Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I've ever tried it on, that I've become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you're already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset. In fact, I'd take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings. They shouldn't include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features. There's absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning,

27 Aug 2026 8:18pm GMT

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor's design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform's established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory. ↫ IBM press release IBM is still doing some amazing chip architecture design. ServeTheHome has more details of how this works: A key choice here is that IBM implemented AArch64 in full hardware rather than through translation. This design uses a little-endian Arm implementation alongside big-endian z/Architecture, with AArch64 v9.3, SVE and SVE2 support, and 2,792 implemented AArch64 instructions. IBM also claims Arm SystemReady compliance, which matters for how much off-the-shelf Arm software this core can absorb. This is absolutely crazy technology. Arm software sees a native Arm processor. Arm runs unmodified, out-of-the-box, and onto a standard Arm platform. IBM said the 2792 AArch64 instructions are more than twice the Z instructions. IBM made a funny quip about "reduced" in RISC. ↫ Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome This is bonkers technology. We can only dream of this ever serving a home.

27 Aug 2026 2:30pm GMT

It's always a special day on OSNews when Haiku has a new release. While OSNews was founded in 1997, it wasn't until 2001, when Eugenia took over and relaunched the site, that we really got going. Eugenia came from BeNews, a popular BeOS news website, which shut down in the wake of Be, Inc's infamous "focus shift" away from BeOS as a general purpose desktop operating system. BeOS continues to have a special place on OSNews ever since. Today marks the release of Haiku R1/beta6, the first official Haiku release in two years. As such, this new beta covers a monumental amount of progress since beta5, progress I've reported on diligently. The highlights of this new beta include a port of Firefox (including branding) and many of its forks, much improve support for Qemu, a new memory allocated largely based on the one from OpenBSD, and improved support for various filesystems. Of course, there's a massive list of performance improvements, memory management changes, as well as a truly massive number of new application ports. It's important to note, as I usually do, that while these Haiku beta releases serve as patches of calm in rough seas, Haiku is generally stable and capable enough that using the project's nightly releases is usually a totally acceptable way of installing and running the operating system. If you're not comfortable running nightly releases, however, and haven't tried Haiku since the previous beta, you're in for a massive overall improvement. Everybody loves Haiku.

27 Aug 2026 11:31am 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

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT