fidzu : geeks

Ming-Chi Kuo, a high-profile and reliable Apple analyst, says the demand for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max has been "lower than expected" since the devices became available to pre-order in the U.S. and dozens of other countries on Friday. From a report: Kuo said his data is based on a "supply chain survey" and shipping estimates listed on Apple's online store. Kuo estimated that sales of all four iPhone 16 models reached about 37 million units in the first weekend after Apple began accepting pre-orders, which is down nearly 13% compared to first-weekend sales of the iPhone 15 series last year. The analyst said a key factor for the decline is the lower demand for the Pro models, with first-weekend sales of the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max estimated to be down 27% and 16%, respectively, compared to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max sales during the equivalent period last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Sep 2024 3:20pm GMT

China will "gradually raise" its retirement age for the first time since the 1950s, as the country confronts an ageing population and a dwindling pension budget. From a report: The top legislative body on Friday approved proposals to raise the statutory retirement age from 50 to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs, and from 55 to 58 for females in white-collar jobs. Men will see an increase from 60 to 63. China's current retirement ages are among the lowest in the world. According to the plan passed on Friday, the change will set in from 1 January 2025, with the respective retirement ages raised every few months over the next 15 years, said Chinese state media. Retiring before the statutory age will not be allowed, state news agency Xinhua reported, although people can extend their retirement by no more than three years. Starting 2030, employees will also have to make more contributions to the social security system in order to receive pensions. By 2039, they would have to clock 20 years of contributions to access their pensions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Sep 2024 2:40pm GMT

NASA will coordinate with U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) following a policy directive from the White House in April. From a report: The agency's Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts on creating a coordinated time, which will enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar system. The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth's globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon's surface will appear to 'tick' faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time. To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird's wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Sep 2024 2:00pm GMT

It's one of the most pervasive common wisdoms shared all over the web, no matter where you go - it's one of those things everybody seems to universally agree on: Chrome will absolutely devastate your battery life on the Mac, and you should really be using Safari, because Apple's special integration magic pixie dust sprinkles ensures Safari sips instead of gulps electricity. Whether you read random forum posters, Apple PR spokespeople, or Apple's own executives on stage during events, this wisdom is hard to escape. Is it true, though? Well, Matt Birchler decided to do something entirely revolutionary and entirely unheard of: a benchmark. Back in the olden days of yore, we would run benchmarks to test the claims from companies and their PR departments, and Birchler decided to dust off this old technique and develop a routine to put the Chrome battery claims to the test. After 3 days of continuous testing on a freshly installed 14" MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB RAM running the latest stable releases of both browsers, Birchler came to some interesting conclusions. In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari. While I did experience some variability in each 3 hour test run, Chrome came out on top in 5 of the 6 direct comparisons. ↫ Matt Birchler His methodology seems quite sound and a good representation of what most laptop users will use their browser for: YouTube, social media, a few news websites, and editing a Google Doc, in a 20 minute loop that was repeated for three hours per test. Multiple of these three hour tests were then ran to counter variability. I highly doubt using different websites will radically change the results, but I obviously am curious to see a similar test ran on Windows and Linux, x86 and ARM, for a more complete picture that goes beyond just the Mac. Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and I think we have a classic case of that here. While there may have been a time in the past where Chrome on the Mac devastated battery life, it seems Chrome and Chromium engineers have closed the gap, and in some cases even beat Safari. Now, this doesn't mean everybody should rush and switch to Chrome, since there are countless other reasons to use Safari over Chrome other than supposed battery life advantages. With Apple PR arguing that alternative browser engines should not be allowed on iOS because Chrome would devastate iOS' battery life, tests like these are more important than ever, and I hope we're going to see more of them. Tech media always just seems to copy/paste whatever manufacturers and corporations claim without so much as a hint of skepticism, and this benchmark highlights the dangers of doing so, in case you didn't already know believing corporations was a terribly idea.

16 Sep 2024 10:54am GMT

Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 6.11 kernel as stable. There are many changes and new features in Linux 6.11 including numerous AMD CPU and GPU improvements, preparations for upcoming Intel platforms, initial block atomic write support for NVMe and SCSI drives, the DRM Panic infrastructure can now display a monochrome logo if desired, easier support for building Pacman kernel packages for Arch Linux, DeviceTree files for initial Snapdragon X1 laptops, and much more. ↫ Michael Larabel Especially the Snapdragon stuff interests me, as I really want to move to ARM for my laptop needs at some point, and I'm obviously not going to be using Windows or macOS. I hope the bringup for the Snapdragon laptop chips is smooth sailing from here and picks up pace, because I'd hate for Linux to miss out on this transition. Qualcomm talked big game about supporting Linux properly, but it feels like they're - what a surprise - not backing those words up with actions so far.

15 Sep 2024 8:00pm GMT

They flew high, they walked in space, and finally early on Sunday, they landed.

15 Sep 2024 8:22am GMT

Unidentified seismic object resulted in skyscraper-high tsunami.

14 Sep 2024 11:28am GMT

A signaling molecule that's so potent injected animals may drop more than one limb.

14 Sep 2024 11:07am GMT

With the release of version 7.0.0 pacman has added support for downloading packages as a separate user with dropped privileges. For users with local repos however this might imply that the download user does not have access to the files in question, which can be fixed by assigning the files and folder to the alpm group and ensuring the executable bit (+x) is set on the folders in question. $ chown :alpm -R /path/to/local/repo Remember to merge the .pacnew files to apply the new default. Pacman also introduced a change to improve checksum stability for git repos that utilize .gitattributes files. This might require a one-time checksum change for PKGBUILDs that use git sources.

14 Sep 2024 12:00am GMT

It's always a lovely day when it's a Haiku release day - and sadly, those don't come very often. Of course, Haiku's nightlies tend to be rather solid so an official release isn't really a must if you want to use Haiku, but if you were holding out for something more stable: Haiku has just released its fifth beta, Haiku R1/beta5. We've covered most of the new features and changes as they were developed, but since it's been so long since the previous beta, we should cover some of the highlights. One of the collection of improvements that's impossible to put in a screenshot is the performance improvements the successor to BeOS has received since the release of R1/beta4, and there are many. There's a ton of general performance improvements, of course, covering everything from the kernel to applications, including much better throughput in TCP, the network stack, which should lift Haiku's network performance much closer to that of other, more mature operating systems. There's also an overhaul of the user_mutex system, and much more. A great many performance optimizations were done to the kernel and drivers, including batching many more I/O operations, avoiding unnecessary locks on application startup, improved pre-mapping of memory mapped files, reduced lock contention in page mapping, batched modification of the global memory areas table (and a different implementation of its underlying data structure), changes to keep page lists in-order to ease allocations, temporary buffer allocation performance improvements in hot I/O paths, support for DT_GNU_HASH in the ELF loader, and more. ↫ Haiku R1/beta5 release notes Looking at the end user side of things, the Appearance dialog has been simplified without removing any features or capabilities, and Haiku now also comes with a dark mode. The little power/battery widget in Deskbar has also been overhauled to provide more accurate battery information, and it'll load automatically if a battery is detected in the system. Tracker (the file manager) and Icon-O-Matic have seen improvements, there's a rewritten FAT driver, a brand new UFS2 driver, and much more. There's also a ton of new application ports from the Qt and GTK world, especially if the last time you've tried Haiku was one of the previous betas. Thanks to all of these ports, it's much more realistic now to use Haiku as a daily driver. Haiku now also offers experimental support for .NET and FLTK, which provides further avenues for ports. This is just a small selection, as there is so much more contained in this new beta release. If you've been running the nightlies this new beta won't mean much to you, but if you've been out of the running for a while, Haiku R1/beta5 is a great place to start to see what the platform has to offer.

13 Sep 2024 7:48pm GMT

Some thoughts on why I started livestreaming my open-source development sessions and my future plans.

06 Sep 2024 12:00am GMT

In the previous article I investigated how to create a reproducible image but ended up with only managing to create two identical image directories. In this article we'll end up with a fully bit-by-bit reproducible filesystem image! Some things have changed since the last post, mkosi now no longer creates …

31 Aug 2024 12:00am GMT