fidzu : nerd

"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid - (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 - by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com. Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; Tim McCoy, one of the main curators of meteorites at the Smithsonian Institution; and University of Arizona research scientist Melissa Brucker, leader of the Spacewatch program, which has discovered more than 179,000 asteroids.) The scientists also convinced the International Astronomical Union to name an asteroid after one of Yankovic's major influences, famous musical humorist and political satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last year at age 97. Lehrer's work includes "The Elements," a 1959 song in which he recites the entire periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song." "He was a mathematician and teacher and also wrote math- and science-themed songs," McGraw said. "We felt that someone who had that kind of science enthusiasm really deserved to have their name up in the sky...." McGraw is hoping that naming space rocks after stars like Lehrer and "Weird Al" will cast some reflected light on two things she's passionate about: asteroid research and science communication. Six years ago a 92-year-old Tom Lehrer released all his lyrics into the public domain. (Wikipedia notes he'd "largely retired" by the 1970s to become a mathematics teacher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Slashdot ran a brief career retrospective when Lehrer died last year at age 97. And the IAU writes that "Generations of scientists have been inspired" by Weird Al Yankovic's "comedic musical works, including 'It's All About the Pentiums' and 'White and Nerdy'." ("I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon," Yankovic sings in the latter.) He appears in a song envisioning a rap battle between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Sir Isaac Newton... And in 1999 he recorded a five-minute summation of Star Wars: Phantom Menace, sung to the wistful tune of Don McLean's American Pie. Performing it last month in a NPR Tiny Desk concert, "most of the audience was singing along," remembers an interviewer at NPR. "It felt like something that was very personal to them." Weird Al: It's one of those songs that means a lot to people, particularly "Star Wars" fans, of course. But I mean, I see a lot of people in the audience cosplaying as Jedi Knights and waving their light sabers... I've even heard that, you know, they play that song at "Star Wars" conventions, and people get weepy, you know... [I]t really hits people in a tender place somehow... "Oh my, my, this here Anakin guy may be Vader someday later, now he's just a small fry. And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye, sayin' soon, I'm gonna be a Jedi." Yankovic has led a geek-friendly career. In the heyday of Napster, he released an anthem-style parody mocking the arguments of the Recording Industry Association of America, titled "Don't Download This Song. ("Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong...") "Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge To break international copyright law... you start out stealing songs, then you're robbing liquor stores And selling crack and running over school kids with your car..." As a student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Yankovic bootstrapped a career in 1979 by recording his first novelty song "My Bologna" (a parody of "My Sharona" by the Knack) while playing his accordion in a bathroom for its acoustics. And even the IAU acknowledged the geeky themes in his 1999 song "It's All About the Pentiums" (a filk on Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins"). "You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half? You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette You're the biggest joke on the Internet..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Sep 2026 5:34pm GMT

Comments

25 Sep 2026 3:31pm GMT

Comments

25 Sep 2026 3:29pm GMT

Comments

25 Sep 2026 3:27pm GMT

Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings "jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6 million." Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM adoption: direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the customer order backlog doubled during the half to 2.6 million units. Demand was particularly robust in the Smart Home and Aerospace and Defence segments, and the company launched the AI HAT+ 2 for Raspberry Pi 5, extending its edge-AI product line. DRAM prices have been increasing everywhere, notes The Times of London, and Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton "said new customers, who required computers or microcontrollers to manufacture other technologies, were choosing Raspberry Pi's computers because they had a better inventory of components than competitors." "There's always that choice for an original equipment manufacturer as to whether they should 'make' or 'buy' the computer elements of their platforms," Upton said. "The supply chain disruption is making 'make' a much harder choice and it's making the cost of repair a much harder choice. So we're seeing strength there." Raspberry Pi has already increased its suppliers of Dram more than threefold... Upton said the increased demand had led to its backlog for units doubling to 2.6 million, which meant production rates would need to increase to prevent the numbers from getting "unhealthy". New production capacity at the manufacturing facility in Pencoed, Wales was expected to come online this week... Exports were almost evenly split between North America, Europe and the rest of the world, which was primarily China, where demand was growing... Analysts at Peel Hunt said the company was "well positioned for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond" with demand expected from enthusiasts as well as the AI and security sectors. In other news, Hackaday notes the Raspberry Pi Foundation has "pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM..." This change restricts upgrading the RAM chip on your Pi 4 and Pi 5, as well as Compute Modules. By the looks of it, it does not restrict replacing the RAM chip with a chip of a similar size, quote, "locking devices to their original RAM size". As such, this does not prevent repair of your Raspberry Pi board, but does somewhat limit your repair part choice, at most. This restriction is easily bypassable. The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far. This means even if you manually swap the RAM chip, all you need to do is to also downgrade the bootloader to the last known good release - 2024-09-10 - and then your Pi board or Compute Module will function with upgraded RAM. If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader. For most regular use, having a two-year old bootloader version won't really matter... For the reference, this bootloader change happened almost exactly two years ago, at some point between September 10 and September 23, 2024... The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) justifies this as follows: they saw third-party resellers sourcing low-RAM Compute Modules, upgrading them with RAM from unknown source and unknown stability. My observation is that they'd also be reselling the modules at a markup for purely commercial gain, while undercutting RPF who would otherwise direct that money into RnD, something I much enjoy to see them do. This creates perverse incentives and risk for people buying Raspberry Pi boards online, and RPF decided to limit this primarily for their users' benefit, plus, if you ask me, some of theirs... The related GitHub issues have a fair few pingbacks, and exploring them makes the problem look grim to me.... My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest. Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2011 and 2016.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Sep 2026 1:04pm GMT

The new systemd-report collects system facts and runtime metrics into unified, timestamped JSON reports for monitoring and fleet management.

25 Sep 2026 11:53am GMT

Mageia 9 support ends September 30, 2026, with users advised to upgrade to Mageia 10 for continued updates and security fixes.

25 Sep 2026 9:09am GMT

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register. Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid... [D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register with Google and verify their identities. Google's Full Distribution option includes paying a one-time $25 fee, handing over a copy of a government-issued ID to verify one's identity, and conforming to Google's terms of service. Google also offers a free Limited Distribution option that doesn't require government ID verification but restricts distribution to 20 authorized devices, while apps from unverified developers can still be installed by users who enable Android's advanced installation flow. The potential death warrant hanging over its head hasn't stopped the F-Droid team from rolling out a bunch of new features for an app it says it intends to keep working on for years to come... The team also credited the EU's many Digital Markets Act decisions against Google for making the installation experience smoother for users. F-Droid can now use a unified installation service for its apps thanks to the availability of a pre-approval API that allows users to approve an installation when they request it, rather than waiting until the app has finished downloading. That, said the F-Droid team, "brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide." Additionally, F-Droid 2.0 can fetch and install app updates automatically, which it now does by default. All of those changes, however, won't matter much if Google pushes ahead undeterred with its plans to force registration onto non-Play Store developers. F-Droid's announcement on Thursday makes it seem that the team isn't going to go quietly. F-Droid has gone 10 years without a major update, notes Ars Technica - and spent over a year developing F-Droid 2.0: The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there's optional support for Android's Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus... Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn't track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions - it helps you find things and gets out of the way. F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names. "One of the goals of the rewrite was to lower the barrier for new contributors," F-Droid said in their announcement. "We are excited to begin rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks after 14 test releases." (And if you want the 2.0 release right now, it's available on the versions page.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

25 Sep 2026 8:34am GMT

Samba 4.25 introduces experimental SMB3 Persistent Handles, Ceph Object Gateway integration, cluster-wide rate limiting, and more.

25 Sep 2026 8:23am GMT

Health department previously blamed delay on "not yet finalized procurement decisions."

24 Sep 2026 10:29pm GMT

Introducing the "world-famous authority on outer space..."

24 Sep 2026 9:40pm GMT

F-Droid's Android app store has been rebuilt from the ground up.

24 Sep 2026 7:30pm GMT