fidzu : geek

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: Every other week, it seems, a new Chinese launch company pops up with a rocket design and a plan to reach orbit within a few years. For a long time, the majority of these companies revealed designs that looked a lot like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The first of these copy cats, the medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket built by LandSpace, launched earlier this month. Its primary mission was nominal, but the Zhuque-3 rocket failed its landing attempt, which is understandable for a first flight. Doubtless there will be more Chinese Falcon 9-like rockets making their debut in the near future. However, over the last year, there has been a distinct change in announcements from China when it comes to new launch technology. Just as SpaceX is seeking to transition from its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket -- which has now been flying for a decade and a half -- to the fully reusable Starship design, so too are Chinese companies modifying their visions. The trend began with the Chinese government. In November 2024 the government announced a significant shift in the design of its super-heavy lift rocket, the Long March 9. Instead of the previous design, a fully expendable rocket with three stages and solid rocket boosters strapped to the sides, the country's state-owned rocket maker revealed a vehicle that mimicked SpaceX's fully reusable Starship. Around the same time, a Chinese launch firm named Cosmoleap announced plans to develop a fully reusable "Leap" rocket within the next few years. An animated video that accompanied the funding announcement indicated that the company seeks to emulate the tower catch-with-chopsticks methodology that SpaceX has successfully employed. But wait, there's more. In June a company called Astronstone said it too was developing a stainless steel, methane-fueled rocket that would also use a chopstick-style system for first stage recovery. Astronstone didn't even pretend to not copy SpaceX, saying it was "fully aligning its technical approach with Elon Musk's SpaceX." And then, on Friday, the state-aligned China.com reported that a company called "Beijing Leading Rocket Technology" took things a step further. It has named its vehicle "Starship-1," adding that the new rocket will have enhancements from AI and is billed as a "fully reusable AI rocket."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) community is grieving after the "shocking" shooting death of the director of its plasma science and fusion center, according to officials. Nuno FG Loureiro, 47, had been shot multiple times at his home in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday night when police said they received a call to investigate. Emergency responders brought Loureiro to a hospital, and the award-winning scientist was pronounced dead there Tuesday morning, the Norfolk county district attorney's office said in a statement. The Boston Globe reported speaking with a neighbor of Loureiro who heard gunshots, found the academic lying on his back in the foyer of their building and then called for help alongside the victim's wife. The statement from the Norfolk district attorney's office said an investigation into Loureiro's slaying remained ongoing later Tuesday. But the agency did not immediately release any details about a possible suspect or motive in the killing, which gained widespread attention across academic circles, the US and in Loureiro's native Portugal. Portugal's minster of foreign affairs announced Loureiro's death in a public hearing Tuesday, as CNN reported. Separately, MIT president Sally Kornbluth issued a university-wide letter expressing "great sadness" over the death of Loureiro, whose survivors include his wife. "This shocking loss for our community comes in a period of disturbing violence in many other places," said Kornbluth's letter, released after a weekend marred by deadly mass shootings at Brown University in Rhode Island -- about 50 miles away from MIT -- as well as on Australia's Bondi Beach. The letter concluded by providing a list of mental health resources, saying: "It's entirely natural to feel the need for comfort and support."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Dec 2025 3:30am GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Politico: The Senate on Wednesday approved Jared Isaacman for the top job at NASA -- an unprecedented comeback after President Donald Trump yanked his nomination this spring. Senators confirmed the billionaire private astronaut in a 67-30 vote. Trump renominated Isaacman for NASA administrator in November, after pulling his original nomination in May. He cited Isaacman's relationship with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, with whom Trump had just had a falling out, as the rationale for his decision. Isaacman's surprise rebound followed months of political jockeying and help from high-profile figures in Trump's orbit. [...] Isaacman garnered backing from lawmakers during his hearing by confirming his support for NASA's Artemis moon-landing mission, a key prerogative for Capitol Hill. He also committed to instilling urgency at the space agency, citing China's space ambitions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Dec 2025 12:50am GMT

A long and winding road to reach NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC.

18 Dec 2025 12:19am GMT

New method uses no freezing technology or refrigeration equipment-just water and a vacuum.

17 Dec 2025 10:46pm GMT

New GPT Image 1.5 allows more detailed conversational image editing, for better or worse.

17 Dec 2025 10:22pm GMT

Mark Weiser has written a really interesting article about just how desirable new computing environments, like VR, "AI" agents, and so on, really are. On the topic of "AI" agents, he writes: Take intelligent agents. The idea, as near as I can tell, is that the ideal computer should be like a human being, only more obedient. Anything so insidiously appealing should immediately give pause. Why should a computer be anything like a human being? Are airplanes like birds, typewriters like pens, alphabets like mouths, cars like horses? Are human interactions so free of trouble, misunderstandings, and ambiguity that they represent a desirable computer interface goal? Further, it takes a lot of time and attention to build and maintain a smoothly running team of people, even a pair of people. A computer that I must talk to, give commands to, or have a relationship with (much less be intimate with), is a computer that is too much the center of attention. ↫ Mark Weiser That's one hell of a laser-focused takedown of "AI" tools in modern computing. When it comes to voice input, he argues that it's too intrusive, too attention-grabbing, and a good tool is supposed to be the exact opposite of that. Voice input, especially when there's other people around, puts the interface at the center of everyone's attention, and that's not what you should want. With regards to virtual reality, he notes that it replaces your entire perception with nothing but interface, all around you, making it as much the center of attention as it could be. What's most fascinating about this article and its focus on "AI" agents, virtual reality, and more, is that it was published in January 1994. All the same questions, worries, and problems in computing we deal with today, were just as much topics of debate over thirty years ago. It's remarkable how you could copy and paste many of the paragraphs written by Weiser in 1994 into the modern day, and they'd be just applicable now as they were then. I bet many of you had no idea the quoted paragraph was over thirty years old. Mark Weiser was a visionary computer scientist, and had a long career at Xerox PARC, eventually landing him the role of Chief Technology Officer at PARC in 1996. He coined the term "ubiquitous computing" in 1988, the idea that computers are everywhere, in the form of wearables, handhelds, and larger displays - very prescient for 1988. He argued that computers should be unobtrusive, get out of your way, help you get things done that aren't managing and shepherding the computer itself, and most of all, that computers should make users feel calm. Sadly, he passed away in 1999, at the age of 46, clearly way too early for someone with such astonishing forward-looking insight into computing. Looking at what computers have become today, and what kinds of interfaces the major technology companies are trying to shove down our throats, we clearly strayed far from Weiser's vision. Modern computers and interfaces are the exact opposite of unobtrusive and calming, and often hinder the things you're trying to get done more than they should. I wonder what Weiser would think about computing in 2025.

17 Dec 2025 9:36pm GMT

In recent years, things have not been going well for Mozilla. Firefox's market share is a rounding error, and financially, the company is effectively entirely dependent on free money from Google for making it the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla's tried to stem the bleeding with deeply unpopular efforts like focusing on online advertising and cramming more and more "AI" into Firefox, but so far, nothing has worked, and more and more of the remaining small group of Firefox users are moving to modded versions of Firefox without the "AI" nonsense and other anti-features. The task of turning the tide is now up to Mozilla's new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, who took up the role starting today. In his first message to the public in his new role as CEO of Mozilla, he lays out his vision for the future of the company. What are his plans for Mozilla's most important product, the Firefox web browser? Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Firefox will remain our anchor. It will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions. ↫ Anthony Enzor-DeMeo So far, the "AI" additions to Firefox have not exactly been met with thunderous applause - to put it mildly - and I don't see how increasing these efforts is going to magically turn that sentiment around. I'd hazard a guess that Firefox users, in particular, are probably quite averse to "AI" and what it stands for, further strengthening the feeling that the people leading Mozilla seem a little bit out of touch with their own users. Add to this the obvious fact that "AI" is a bubble waiting to pop, and I'm left wondering how investing in "AI" now is going to do anything but make Mozilla waste even more money. I don't want Firefox to fail, as it is currently the only browser that isn't Chrome, Chrome in a trench coat, or Safari, but it seems Mozilla is trying to do everything to chase away what few users Firefox had left. In the short term, we can at least use modified versions of Firefox that have the "AI" nonsense and other anti-features removed, but for the long term, we're going to need something else if Mozilla keeps going down the same path it's been going in recent years. The only viable long-term alternative is Servo, but that's still a long way off from being a usable day-to-day browser. The browser landscape ain't looking so hot, and this new Mozilla CEO is not making me feel any better.

16 Dec 2025 11:15pm GMT

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It's neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don't think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces, to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I've learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent article had me thinking about it again, and how I could do better than before. In this article I will enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument, allowing us to more directly pass extra context. I'm using w64devkit on x64, but the everything here should work out-of-the-box with any x64 toolchain that speaks GNU assembly. ↫ Chris Wellons Sometimes, people get upset when I mention something is out of my wheelhouse, so just for those people, here's an article well outside of my wheelhouse. I choose honesty over faking confidence.

16 Dec 2025 3:27pm 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

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT