geek

28 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Earth's Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years

A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to speculative galactic influences. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: One possibility lies deep within Earth itself. The planet's mantle is constantly circulating through convection, albeit at an almost unimaginably slow pace. Periodic changes in mantle convection, or the initiation of mantle plumes, could influence volcanism, plate tectonics, mountain building, and other large-scale geological processes. Because these systems are closely interconnected, disturbances originating deep within Earth could eventually ripple through the planet's surface, oceans, climate, and biosphere. Another hypothesis focuses on interactions between Earth's surface and interior. Long-term orbital variations influence climate and sea level, periodically redistributing enormous amounts of water, ice, and sediment across the planet. [New York University geologist Michael Rampino] discusses the possibility that these changing surface loads subtly modify stresses within Earth's crust and upper mantle, potentially influencing tectonic and volcanic activity over geological timescales. Rampino also considers possible influences beyond Earth, an idea he has been weighing up since the 1980s. As the Solar System orbits the center of the Milky Way, it oscillates above and below the galaxy's mid-plane, with the timing of these passages aligning with that of Earth's major upheavals. These crossings, other researchers have suggested, could also gravitationally perturb comets in the distant Oort Cloud, increasing the likelihood of large asteroid impacts. Another, even more speculative, hypothesis suggests that if dark matter is concentrated near the galactic plane, a fraction of it could occasionally be captured by Earth. Over millions of years, this process could generate small amounts of internal heat, potentially influencing geological activity. At present, however, there is no direct evidence supporting either mechanism, so they remain very controversial. Large asteroid impacts are discussed separately in the paper. Although they were not included in the statistical analysis of the 89 geological events, the timing of several of Earth's largest known impact craters appears broadly consistent with the proposed 27.5-million-year rhythm, as Rampino has discussed in earlier papers. Rampino suggests this correspondence may warrant further investigation, but stops short of claiming a causal relationship.

A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison For 18 Months

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name "fus__ro_dah" (two underscores after "fus"), but they accidentally requested records for the username "fus_ro_dah" (one underscore after "fus"). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. (Ars readers may recognize "fus ro dah" as the Unrelenting Force "dragon shout" from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.) Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term. Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme's conviction, writing: "Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted." [...] As the court puts it, "Although the information about the usernames was available at the time of the trial, there is no evidence confirming or explaining how it went unnoticed."

27 Jul 2026

OSnews

Windows NT got its name from one of Intel’s failed x86 replacements

Dave Farquhar published an article today about Windows NT 3.1's place in the market when it was originally released, and while the article is interesting and a fun read, it does mention this: Microsoft took its nascent code that it intended to form the base of OS/2 3.0, renamed it Windows New Technology, and eventually released it as Windows NT 3.1. ↫ Dave Farquhar While Microsoft did, in fact, use the "New Technology" branding as a marketing trick, this is not what "NT" originally stood for. Two developers from the original Windows NT development team, Mark Lucovsky and David Thompson, explained all the way back in 2003 that "NT" came from the codename for Intel's then-new RISC platform, the Intel i860 (Raymond Chen confirmed the veracity of their story). The i860 was the first target platform for Windows NT, and it was codenamed "N-10" - NT. Finally, it was time to start writing some code. "We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. "Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'" ↫ Paul Thurrott The i860 was one of Intel's many attempts over the years to replace x86 with something more modern, but - as would become tradition with Intel and attempting to replace its x86 architecture - it suffered from endless delays, missed targets, and lacklustre performance. It saw only sporadic use in the market, and ended up on the chopping block after only a few years. Intel tried to replace x86 again soon after with Itanium, which suffered an identical fate. Still, the engineers working on the i860 platform in the late '80s and early '90s at Intel can at least take some pride in that to this day, the most popular desktop operating system in the world got its name from the product they developed. Intel's i860 might barely even be worthy of a footnote today, but billions of PC users log into their Windows "N-10" machines every day, unwittingly carrying a torch for the failed x86 replacement.

27 Jul 2026 11:37pm GMT

Slashdot

Peacock to Be Included With YouTube Premium In Major Streaming Tie-Up

YouTube Premium will include Peacock Premium at no extra charge beginning in early 2027. "The deal brings a slew of premium content to the [$15.99 per month] YouTube Premium subscription, including live sports like the NFL, NBA and MLB and entertainment like Law & Order, Saturday Night Live and Love Island," reports The Hollywood Reporter. "It also has the potential to dramatically scale Peacock, which remains smaller than many of its streaming competitors." From the report: Peacock has 48 million subscribers, while YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have a combined 125 million subscribers, though they don't break out how many each of those offerings have. The agreement, which expands on the deal the company inked with YouTube parent company Google last year, will also extend the entertainment company's programming deal with YouTube TV, while bringing some of YouTube's offerings to Comcast Xfinity and Xumo platforms. There's also a notable sports and production element to the deal, with NBC Sports agreeing to stream some live sporting events on its YouTube channels, and with NBC agreeing to serve as the production partner for select live events on YouTube. YouTube will also bundle some of the company's International streaming offerings like Universal+ and Hayu in select markets.

Ars Technica

Microsoft unveils AI security tools it says outperform competing platforms

Microsoft says tools cost less than competing ones and outperform them, too.

27 Jul 2026 9:56pm GMT

Trump admin exempts SpaceX's Starlink from FCC ban on foreign-made routers

Starlink has a Texas factory but also makes routers in Vietnam.

27 Jul 2026 9:40pm GMT

Epic diarrhea outbreak has 40% of Americans avoiding fruits and veggies

Kennedy has focused on nutrition but has neglected food safety, critics say.

27 Jul 2026 8:42pm GMT

OSnews

The Fedora 45 sausage factory

This is a walkthrough of how Fedora turns source code and packages into the artifacts you download and install. It follows the a package from a packager's git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments. ↫ Simon de Vlieger Linux distributions - good ones like Fedora, at least - are really complex operations, with a ton of checks and balances to ensure no git push eventually ends up causing problems on individual users' machines way down the line. The fact so many people involved in this complex web of processes also happen to be volunteers doing all of this out of the goodness of their hearts is amazing. Of course, this doesn't just apply to Fedora, but also the countless other distributions out there, especially those not owned by some giant corporation like IBM. If you're just a casual Fedora user, there's really no reason you have to know or be aware of any of this, but it's still fun and interesting to understand the inner workings of your distribution of choice.

27 Jul 2026 7:33pm GMT

Comanche: Maximum Overkill from 1992 does weird things on Intel processors

Let's do another article about weird code in video games. The original 1992 Comanche release is extremely picky about memory managers. The game refuses to work with EMM emulators and crashes when EMM386 is active. The game may also hang or reboot the system when HIMEM.SYS is not loaded (the problem seems to be system configuration dependent). These issues are clearly noted in the Comanche documentations, but at the same time they're also all signs of a substandard DOS extender. On top of that, the game authors accomplished a remarkable feat: By only loosely following Intel's instructions on how to enter protected mode, NovaLogic managed to write a game which worked on the then-existing 386 and 486 processors, but under some circumstances failed to run on Pentium and later processors. ↫ Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum As usual, a great read from Michal Nacesek.

27 Jul 2026 7:23pm GMT