Paris voted overwhelmingly Sunday to banish for-hire electric scooters from the streets of the French capital, delivering a blow to operators and a victory for road safety campaigners. From a report: The referendum means the City of Light, once a pioneer in embracing e-scooter services, is set to become the only major European capital to outlaw the widespread devices booked on apps such as Lime. The city's residents were asked to weigh in for or against them in a public consultation organised by mayor Anne Hidalgo, with nearly 90 percent of the votes cast against, official results showed. "We're happy. It's what we've been fighting for over four years," said Arnaud Kielbasa, co-founder of the Apacauvi charity, which represents victims of e-scooter accidents. "All Parisians say they are nervous on the pavements, nervous when they cross the roads. You need to look everywhere," Kielbasa, whose wife and infant daughter were hit by an e-scooter driver, told AFP. "That's why they've voted against them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ACM's software engineering magazine Queue delves into the latest draft for "a new major revision of the C language standard, C23... due out this year," noting the highs, lows, and several useful new features. The most important, if not the most exciting, make it easier to write safe, correct, and secure code. For example, the new header standardizes checked integer arithmetic: int i =...; unsigned long ul =...; signed char sc =...; bool surprise = ckd_add(&i, ul, sc); The type-generic macro ckd_add() computes the sum of ul and sc "as if both operands were represented in a signed integer type with infinite range." If the mathematically correct sum fits into a signed int, it is stored in i and the macro returns false, indicating "no surprise"; otherwise, i ends up with the sum wrapped in a well-defined way and the macro returns true. Similar macros handle multiplication and subtraction. The ckd_* macros steer a refreshingly sane path around arithmetic pitfalls including C's "usual arithmetic conversions." C23 also adds new features to protect secrets from prying eyes and programmers from themselves. The new memset_explicit() function is for erasing sensitive in-memory data; unlike ordinary memset, it is intended to prevent optimizations from eliding the erasure. Good old calloc(size_t n, size_t s) still allocates a zero'd array of n objects of size s, but C23 requires that it return a null pointer if n*s would overflow. In addition to these new correctness and safety aids, C23 provides many new conveniences: Constants true, false, and nullptr are now language keywords; mercifully, they mean what you expect. The new typeof feature makes it easier to harmonize variable declarations. The preprocessor can now #embed arbitrary binary data in source files. Zero-initializing stack-allocated structures and variable-length arrays is a snap with the new standard "={}" syntax. C23 understands binary literals and permits apostrophe as a digit separator, so you can declare int j = 0b10'01'10, and the printf family supports a new conversion specifier for printing unsigned types as binary ("01010101"). The right solution to the classic job interview problem "Count the 1 bits in a given int" is now stdc_count_ones(). Sadly, good news isn't the only news about C23. The new standard's nonfeatures, misfeatures, and defeatures are sufficiently numerous and severe that programmers should not "upgrade" without carefully weighing risks against benefits... The article complains that C23 "transforms decades of perfectly legitimate programs into Molotov cocktails," citing the way C23 now declares realloc(ptr,0) to be undefined behavior. ("Compile old code as C23 only for good reason and only after verifying that it doesn't run afoul of any constriction in the new standard.") It also criticizes C23's new unreachable annotation, as well as its lack of improvement on pointers. "Comparing pointers to different objects (different arrays or dynamically allocated blocks of memory) is still undefined behavior, which is a polite way of saying that the standard permits the compiler to run mad and the machine to catch fire at run time." The article even cites the obligatory XKCD cartoon. "Let's not overthink it; if this code is still in use that far in the future, we'll have bigger problems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Evening Standard interviewed Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in a piece headlined "Will Wikipedia be written by AI?" "The discussion in the Wikipedia community that I've seen so far is...people are cautious in the sense that we're aware that the existing models are not good enough but also intrigued because there seems like there's a lot of possibility here," Wales said. "I think we're still a way away from: 'ChatGPT, please write a Wikipedia entry about the empire state building', but I don't know how far away we are from that, certainly closer than I would have thought two years ago," he said. Wales says that as much as ChatGPT has gripped the world's imagination over the past few weeks, his own tests of the technology show there are still plenty of flaws. "One of the issues with the existing ChatGPT is what they call in the field 'hallucinating' — I call it lying," he said. "It has a tendency to just make stuff up out of thin air which is just really bad for Wikipedia — that's just not OK. We've got to be really careful about that...." But while full AI authorship is off the cards in the near-term, there's already plenty of discussion at Wikipedia on what role AI technology could have in improving the encyclopaedia in the months ahead. "I do think there are some interesting opportunities for human assistance where if you had an AI that were trained on the right corpus of things — to say, for example here are two Wikipedia entries, check them and see if there are any statements that contradict each other and identify tensions where one article sems to be saying something slightly different to the other," Wales said. "A human could detect this but you'd have to read both articles side by side and think it through — if you automate feeding it in so you get out hundreds of examples I think our community could find that quite useful." Wales says another problem is AI technology's failure to spot internal contradictions within its responses. He once called out ChatGPT on this — "And it said, you're right, I apologise for my error."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"What would it look like if we called time on Big Tech's failed experiment?" asks the co-editor of the Oxford-based magazine New Internationalist: A better social media would need to be decentralized... As well as avoiding a single point of failure (or censorship), this would help with other goals: community ownership, and democratic control, would be facilitated by having many smaller, perhaps more local, sites. Existing social media giants must be brought into public (and transnational) ownership — in a way that hands power to citizens, not governments. But they should also be broken up, using existing anti-monopoly rules. It is hard to know what sort of algorithms would best promote real community until we try... But the algorithms that determine what enters peoples' social feeds must be transparent: open source, open for scrutiny, and for change. We could also adapt from sites like Wikipedia (collectively edited) and Reddit (where posts and comments' visibility is determined by user votes). Moderation policies — what content is and isn't allowed — could be decided collectively, according to groups' needs.... An important step towards a decentralized social network would be interoperability, and data portability. Different sites need to be able to talk to each other (or 'federate'), just as email providers or mobile operators are required to. There's no point being on a site if your friends aren't, but if your server can relay messages to theirs there is less of a barrier. Meanwhile encryption will be vital for privacy. One particularly intriguing idea is that of artist and software developer Darius Kazemi, who suggests every public library — there are 2.7 million worldwide — could host its own federated social media server. As well as providing local accountability and access, and boosting increasingly defunded neighbourhood assets, these servers would benefit from librarians' expertise in curating information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's not just the Ford Mustang that's losing its AM radio. The Detroit Free Press reports: "We are transitioning from AM radio for most new and updated 2024 models," Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood told the Free Press. "A majority of U.S. AM stations, as well as a number of countries and automakers globally, are modernizing radio by offering internet streaming through mobile apps, FM, digital and satellite radio options. Ford will continue to offer these alternatives for customers to hear their favorite AM radio music, news and podcasts as we remove amplitude modulation — the definition of AM in this case — from most new and updated models we bring to market." Commercial vehicles will continue to offer AM radio because of longstanding contract language, Sherwood said.... "In essence, EV motors generate a lot of electromagnetic interference that affects the frequencies of AM radio and make it difficult to get a clear signal," said Mike Ramsey, an analyst with Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Research Group, which specializes in digital transformation and innovation. "It could be shielded, but given the diminishing listening habits to AM, the automakers haven't chosen to do it. Most of the content there is available through other means, including podcast and internet streaming. In my view, this isn't that different from automakers discontinuing 8-track players, cassette players and CD players. Technology has advanced. The idea that it is a critical safety channel is a bit suspect given that almost all critical communication now is sent through mobile phones...." Veteran analyst John McEloy, host of "Autoline After Hours" webcast and podcast said automakers don't need to get rid of AM radio. "It's happening because automakers would love to get rid of the cost of an AM radio," he told the Free Press. "Some of them, like Ford, are using EVs as an excuse to get rid of it. GM shields its AM radios in its electric cars to they don't get any interference." But the article also quotes a spokesperson for GM saying they're "evaluating AM radio on future vehicles and not providing any further details at this time." Last month U.S. Senator Markey noted that seven more top automakers have already removed AM radio from their electric vehicles — BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember that entrepreneur planning an ostentatious NFT-based restaurant/members-only club in San Francisco? Seven months later it's still "an empty husk of a building, hindered by construction delays and unfulfilled crypto dreams," reports SFGate: Last August, Joshua Sigel held a "groundbreaking" event at what he said would be the future home of Sho Restaurant, located atop Salesforce Park in San Francisco. He told the gathered media that construction of the proposed Japanese fine dining restaurant would begin in less than two months, once some permitting issues were resolved, with a targeted opening date of September or October of 2023. Sigel maintained that he'd soon be offering 3,275 Sho Club NFT (non-fungible token) memberships — first via a private sale, then a larger public sale in late September — which would serve as the backbone of Sho Restaurant's clientele. (Sigel is the CEO of Sho Group, which encapsulates Sho Restaurant and Sho Club.) There were to be 2,878 "Earth" NFT memberships, priced at $7,500 each; 377 "Water" NFT memberships, priced at $15,000 each; and 20 "Fire" NFT memberships; priced at $300,000 each. The NFTs are basically membership cards for the restaurant, spruced up with Web3 jargon.... Each membership tier comes with increasingly luxurious benefits, though restaurant reservations would also be available for nonmembers. Seven months later, things don't seem to be going very well for Sho Club or for Sho Restaurant. I recently walked over to Salesforce Park and peered inside the shell of the building that's supposed to become a restaurant; I saw an empty space that looks almost exactly the same as it did in August. The mock-up design photos that journalists looked at during the "groundbreaking" in August remain strewn about on the floor. Permits for Sho Restaurant haven't been issued, the result of Sho Restaurant designers not yet responding to a number of San Francisco Department of Building Inspection notes, among a host of permitting steps that haven't been completed. Sho Club social media accounts have been radio silent since late September.... Sho Club appears to have sold around 100 NFT memberships, rather than 3,275, as Sigel originally projected. I repeatedly reached out to Sigel, to Sho Club, and its public relations representatives. No one replied to my questions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Connecticut police have charged two people with cutting more than 2,000 fiber optic cables" on March 24, reports the Associated Press — leaving more than 15,000 people without internet access. Norwalk police said they arrested Asheville, North Carolina, residents Jillian Persons and Austin Geddings on Saturday during a surveillance operation. Both were charged with larceny and criminal mischief crimes, as well as interfering with police. Persons also was accused of giving a false statement to police. Both were detained on $200,000 bail....The outages caused by the cable cutting have since been restored, according to Optimum's website. The Stamford Advocate investigated how many people were affected: Norwalk Deputy Police Chief Terry Blake said Sunday more than 40,000 customers in the area were left without internet service as a result of the vandalism. However, an Optimum spokesperson claimed at the time the outages only affected roughly 16,000 customers and the inflated numbers were inaccurate because of an issue with the company's online outage map.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Department of Defense "is gearing up for a future conflict in space," reports the Wall Street Journal, "as China and Russia deploy missiles and lasers that can take out satellites and disrupt military and civilian communications." The White House this month proposed a $30 billion annual budget for the U.S. Space Force, almost $4 billion more than last year and a bigger jump than for other services including the Air Force and the Navy.... A key aim of a stand-alone force was to plan, equip and defend U.S. interests in space for all of the services and focus attention on the emerging threats. For the first time, the spending request also includes plans for simulators and other equipment to train Guardians, as Space Force members are known, for potential battle.... Just as it is on Earth, China is the Pentagon's big worry in space. In unveiling a defense strategy late last year, the Biden administration cast China as the greatest danger to U.S. security. In space, the threats from China range from ground-launched missiles or lasers that could destroy or disable U.S. satellites, to jamming and other cyber interference and attacks in space, said Pentagon officials. China has invested heavily in its space program, with a crewed orbiting station, developing ground-based missiles and lasers as well as more surveillance capabilities. This is part of its broader military aims of denying adversaries access to space-based assets. China is "testing on-orbit satellite systems which could be weaponized as they have already shown the capability to physically control and move other satellites," Gen. Chance Saltzman, chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force, told a congressional hearing this month. "There's nothing we can do in space that's of any value if the networks that process the information and data are vulnerable to attack," Gen. Saltzman said. A central part of the Space Force's next tranche of military contracts for rocket launches is protecting them from attacks by China and other adversaries. The hope is to make satellites tougher to approach by adversaries' equipment as well as less susceptible to lasers and jamming from space or the ground, said Space Force leaders. The article also notes the US Defense Department "is moving away from a small number of school bus-size satellites to a planned constellation of hundreds of smaller ones. "The larger number of targets makes any one satellite less crucial to the network but also requires changes in the capabilities of the satellites themselves, the rockets that put them into orbit and the communications systems they host."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Researchers have 'hacked' the earliest stages of photosynthesis," according to a new announcement from the University of Cambridge. CNET reports: Scientists have studied photosynthesis in plants for centuries, but an international team believes they've unlocked new secrets in nature's great machine that could revolutionize sustainable fuels and fight climate change. The team says they've determined it's possible to extract an electrical charge at the best possible point in photosynthesis. This means harvesting the maximum amount of electrons from the process for potential use in power grids and some types of batteries. It could also improve the development of biofuels. While it's still early days, the findings, reported in the journal Nature, could reduce greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and provide insights to improve photovoltaic solar panels. The key breakthrough came when researchers observed the process of photosynthesis at ultrafast timescales. "We can take photos at different times which allow us to watch changes in the sample really, really quickly — a million billion times faster than your iPhone," Dr. Tomi Baikie, from the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, told CNET.... Previous demonstrations connected cyanobacteria, algae and other plants to electrodes to create so-called bio-photoelectrochemical cells that tap into the photosynthetic process to generate electricity. Baikie said they were surprised to discover a previously unknown pathway of energy flow at the beginning of the process that could enable extracting the charge in a more efficient way.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PINE64 has an update about their Star64 single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor: it will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99: Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features: - Quad core 64bit RISC-V - HDMI video output - 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates - i2c touch panel connector - dual Gigabit Ethernet ports - dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth - 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports - PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART). - The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots. The board will be available in two different RAM configurations — with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th. Liliputing offers this summary: The Star64 is a single-board computer with a quad-core RISC-V processor, support for up to 8GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage (as well as a microSD card reader). Developed by the folks at Pine64, it's designed to be an affordable platform for developers and hobbyists looking to get started with RISC-V architecture. Pine64 first announced it was working on the Star64 last summer... Meanwhile, PINE64's Linux tablets, the PineTab2 and PineTab-V, will launch one week later on Tuesday, April 11th. Other highlights from this month's community update: there's now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale for their Linux-based "PineNote" e-ink tablets. ("Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too.") And the update also includes photos of one user's cool 3D-printed replacement cases for their PinePhone featuring Tux the penguin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was exactly 30 years ago that The X-Files began filming in Vancouver. Now X-Files creator Chris Carter tells CBC's On the Coast that the groundbreaking TV series is going to be "remounted" by Black Panther director Ryan Coogler: Carter says he thinks the series would need to be significantly tweaked for current audiences. "We're so steeped in conspiracies now," he said. "The X-Files dealt with a central conspiracy, but now the world is so full of conspiracies that I think that it would be a different show." The original X-Files series is available for streaming on Disney+. (And Wikipedia notes there was also a six-episode 10th season ran in 2016 and a 10-episode 11th in 2018.) There was also a Lone Gunmen spin-off series in 2001 (co-created by Vince Gilligan, who went on to produce and create Breaking Bad). The CBC also reports that a documentary about the show will be released this fall. "Superfans Lauren Krattiger and Carly Blake have created The X-Files Fan Retrospective, where they conducted more than 90 interviews with crew members, cast and fans to memorialize the show and its impact." But don't get your hopes up for an X-Files cartoon. "A few years ago it was announced that Chris Carter was developing an X-Files animated series titled The X-Files: Albuquerque..." writes GeekTyrant, "but unfortunately, it's no longer moving forward at Fox." It was going to revolve around an "office full of misfit agents who investigate X-Files cases too wacky, ridiculous or downright dopey for Mulder and Scully to bother with." It's explained that these agents are basically the X-Files' B-team. Thanks to Slashdot reader GoJays for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: The exodus of people fleeing large urban areas during the height of the pandemic appears to be reversing, according to data from the Census Bureau released Thursday. Many workers who could telecommute abandoned crowded cities and counties for suburban or rural areas when covid struck, causing demographers and businesses to wonder whether the movement signified a permanent shift. But the overall patterns of population change are moving toward pre-pandemic rates, the bureau's Vintage 2022 estimates of population and components of change show. Eleven of the 15 largest metro areas gained residents or lost fewer people compared with the previous year, including the D.C. metro area, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution senior demographer William Frey.... Among the most striking recorded shifts were in Manhattan and San Francisco, both of which lost population at a significant rate between 2020 and 2021. Manhattan, which shrank by 5.87 percent in 2021, grew by 1.11 percent last year. San Francisco lost 6.79 percent of its population in 2021 but shrank by only a third of a percentage point last year. Both are home to a large number of people who were able to work remotely during the pandemic. Covid rates in New York City were especially high early in the pandemic, and many Manhattan residents moved to outlying counties.... "Many counties with large universities saw their populations fully rebound this year as students returned," said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for estimates and projections in the Census Bureau's population division. The article also makes the point that immigration into America was temporarily restricted during the pandemic, so outflows never had a chance to be counterbalanced by inflows. And the exodus to the suburbs may have already peaked. Last year Manhattan gained 17,472 people, the article points out, while counties outside the city lost residents. The Census Bureau notes that was a pattern for 2022: "the smallest counties nationally, those with populations below 10,000, experienced more population loss (60.8%) than gains (38.3%); while the largest counties, having populations at or greater than 100,000, largely experienced population increases (68%)." Beyond that, the executive director of the DC Fiscal Policy Institute argues that it's just too soon to know whether the pandemic-era outflow from cities was permanent. "We've just been through a major health and economic shock. There's been what I call a doomsday narrative about what's going to happen, with predictions of empty downtowns and city centers that wither and die." They believe the new census data "should give us pause in terms of declaring that we've arrived at a new normal. It's highly likely that some of the folks who left will come back, and we really don't know if it's going to be a lot of them or just a small portion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

U.S. states are now "doling out more cash than ever to lure multibillion-dollar microchip, electric vehicle and battery factories," reports the Associated Press, "inspiring ever-more competition as they dig deeper into their pockets to attract big employers and capitalize on a wave of huge new projects." Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas have made billion-dollar pledges for a microchip or EV plant, with more state-subsidized plant announcements by profitable automakers and semiconductor giants surely to come. States have long competed for big employers. But now they are floating more billion-dollar offers and offering record-high subsidies, lavishing companies with grants and low-interest loans, municipal road improvements, and breaks on taxes, real estate, power and water.... The projects come at a transformative time for the industries, with automakers investing heavily in electrification and chipmakers expanding production in the U.S. following pandemic-related supply chain disruptions that raised economic and national security concerns. One of the driving forces behind them are federal subsidies signed into law last summer that are meant to encourage companies to produce electric vehicles, EV batteries, and computer chips domestically. Another is that states are flush with cash thanks to inflation-juiced tax collections and federal pandemic relief subsidies. The number of big projects and the size of state subsidy packages are extraordinary, said Nathan Jensen, a University of Texas professor who researches government economic development strategies. "It is kind of a Wild West moment," Jensen said. "It's wild money and every state seems to be in on it." Many of the companies drawing the biggest subsidy offers — such as Intel, Hyundai, Panasonic, Micron, Toyota, Ford and General Motors — are profitable and operate around the globe. Some lesser-known names in the nascent EV field are getting big offers too, such as Rivian, Volkswagen-backed Scout Motors and Vietnamese automaker VinFast. The subsidy offers are generally embraced by politicians from both major parties and the business elite, who point to promises of hundreds or thousands of jobs, massive investments in construction and equipment, and what they contend are immeasurable trickle-down benefits. Still, academics who study such subsidies find them to be a waste of money and rarely decisive in a company's choice of location.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A Texas truck theft ended in gun fire after the suspected thief was tracked down by thevehicle's owner's AirTag," reports AppleInsider: San Antonio police received a stolen vehicle report at around 1 pm from a Braesview home. However, before police could recover the stolen truck, the owners of the vehicle decided to perform their own investigation, using an AirTag left in the truck to do so. The unnamed owners tracked the truck to a shopping center in Southeast Military Drive, reports KSAT. However, rather than wait for police to arrive, the truck owners decided to approach the vehicle and confront the suspect. While it is unknown exactly what happened, Police say it seems the suspected thief may have pulled out their own firearm. The vehicle owner responded by shooting and killing the suspect while they were inside the truck. It is unclear whether the vehicle owner will face charges over the matter, and an investigation is ongoing into whether the suspect actually had a weapon in the first place. The San Antonio police department's public information officer offered these remarks (in a video from KSAT): "Most importantly is, to the public, SAPD is urging you if you are to get your vehicle stolen: I know that it's frustrating, but please do not take matters into your own hands like this. Our police department has plenty of resources that could go into finding your vehicle, i.e. our drone system, trackers ourselves, very good patrolmen that look for these kind of things. It's never safe to take matters into your own hands, as you can see today by this incident.... That's why I urge the public, wait for police in this matter. Let us go with you. We have the training. We know exactly how to determine what's going to happen, these kind of factors and situations, and we know how to handle them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Around 4 in the morning one Tuesday night in San Francisco, an autonomously-driven Cruise vehicle stopped at a red light — and was rear-ended by a Honda. But then "the Honda driver reversed backward several feet, stopped and drove forward again, making contact with the Cruise vehicle a second time," reports NBC News. After damaging the car and injuring its two test drivers, according to a collision report the Honda then "left the scene without exchanging information." It's just part of "a pattern bedeviling tech companies that are trying to make driverless cars a reality," reports NBC News, after reviewing collision reports from the California Department of Motor Vehicles: The reports, which were written by employees of the tech companies, describe 36 instances in 2022 in which a person driving a car or truck left the scene of a crash involving their vehicle and an autonomous vehicle. The problem has continued at a similar pace this year, with seven examples as of early March.... "My best guess is that the drivers think they can't be held liable," said Anderson Franco, a personal injury attorney in the city. "If you are operating your own vehicle and you crash into an autonomous vehicle, the correct thing to do is take photographs, call the police and have it documented," he said. But it's not always clear from the outside of a Cruise or other autonomous vehicle what to do if there's a problem. Cruise said in a statement to NBC News that it was in the process of making its phone number more prominently displayed on the outside of vehicles, so drivers in a crash know who to call.... The human drivers who have hit autonomous vehicles appear to be getting away with little accountability. Autonomous vehicles are usually equipped with a variety of external cameras that could record the license plate numbers of hit-and-run drivers but it's not clear how often the companies have gone down that road.... Cruise said in a statement that the hit-and-runs are usually minor. It said it works with San Francisco police "when necessary" and searches its videos for the license plate numbers of other cars "if needed." Cruise declined to comment on specific cases. Waymo said it has kept its options open about how to respond to hit-and-runs. California's Department of Motor Vehicles pointed out that because of the limited data available, "it's unclear if the rate of hit-and-run incidents involving autonomous vehicles is higher or lower than the rate involving conventional vehicles."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Replacing their main machine, long-time Slashdot reader shanen had a sobering thought. "Considering how many years it's lasted and adding that number to my own age, I wouldn't want to bet on who will outlast which." And this prompted a look back at all the computers used over a lifetime: I've purchased at least 15 personal computers over the decades. Might be more like 20 and couldn't even count how many company computers I've used for various classes and work. Then there were the computer labs filled with my students. But this ultimately led them to two questions for Slashdot's readers: (1) What was the brand of your longest-lived PC? (2) What is the brand of your latest PC and how long do you expect it to last? Some answers have already been posted on the original submission. I think the longest-lasting computer that I used on a daily basis as my main device was a Lenovo ThinkPad R500. I bought it in 2010 and used it until 2019. It still worked when I retired it, but it was getting a bit slow. The longest lived was a PDP11/34A. Made in the late 70s or early 80s, it was still running when I sold it in 2005. Did a couple of component-level repairs, and I reckon there's every chance that it still runs today. Not sure if it counts as "personal" though. I have a polycarbonate Macbook from 2007 still going strong, so I guess that makes the answer "Apple". There's also an interesting story about a long-running server from days gone. But what's your own answer to the question? Share your own stories in the comments. What was the brand of your longest-lived PC — and how long do you expect your current PC to last?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today a warning was published from the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle. "Experts say post-pandemic woes stemming from office workers staying home instead of commuting into the city could send San Francisco into a 'doom loop' that would gut its tax base, decimate fare-reliant regional transit systems like BART and trap it in an economic death spiral...." Despite our housing crisis, it was years into the COVID pandemic before our leaders meaningfully questioned the logic of reserving some of the most prized real estate on Earth for fickle suburbanites and their cars. Downtown, after all, was San Francisco's golden goose. Companies in downtown offices accounted for 70% of San Francisco's pre-pandemic jobs and generated nearly 80% of its economic output, according to city economist Ted Egan. And so we wasted generous federal COVID emergency funds trying to bludgeon, cajole and pray for office workers to return downtown instead of planning for change. We're now staring down the consequences for that lack of vision. The San Francisco metropolitan area's economic recovery from the pandemic ranked 24th out of the 25 largest regions in the U.S., besting only Baltimore, according to a report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. In the first quarter of 2023, San Francisco's office vacancy rate shot up to a record-high 29.4% — the biggest three-year increase of any U.S. city. The trend isn't likely to end anytime soon: In January, nearly 30% of San Francisco job openings were for hybrid or fully remote work, the highest share of the nation's 50 largest cities. Amid lower property, business and real estate transfer taxes, the city is projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years. Transit ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. In January, downtown San Francisco BART stations had just 30% of the rider exits they did in 2019, according to a report from Egan's office. Many Bay Area transit agencies, including Muni, are rapidly approaching a fiscal cliff. San Francisco isn't dead; as of March, it was home to an estimated 173 of the country's 655 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Tourism is beginning to rebound. And new census data shows that San Francisco's population loss is slowing, a sign its pandemic exodus may be coming to an end. But the city can't afford to wait idly for things to reach equilibrium again. It needs to evolve — quickly. Especially downtown. That means rebuilding the neighborhood's fabric, which won't be cheap or easy. Office-to-housing conversions are notoriously tricky and expensive. Demolishing non-historic commercial buildings that no longer serve a purpose in the post-pandemic world is all but banned. And, unlike New York after 9/11, San Francisco is a city that can't seem to stop getting in its own way. So what's the solution? The CEO of the Bay Area Council suggests public-private partnerships that "could help shift downtown San Francisco's focus from tech — with employees now accustomed to working from home — to research and development, biotech, medical research and manufacturing, which all require in-person workers." And last week San Francisco's mayor proposed more than 100 changes to streamline the permitting process for small businesses, and on Monday helped introduce legislation making it easier to convert office buildings to housing, expand pop-up business opportunities, and fill some empty storefronts. This follows a February executive order to speed housing construction. The editorial points out that "About 40% of office buildings in downtown San Francisco evaluated in a study would be good candidates for housing due to their physical characteristics and location and could be converted into approximately 11,200 units, according to research from SPUR and the Urban Land Institute San Francisco." But without some action, the editorial's headline argues that "Downtown San Francisco is at risk of collapsing — and taking much of the Bay Area with it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post: Steve Jobs never lived to be an old wise man. But running Apple and Pixar, tumbling and thriving, earned him a lot of wisdom in his 56 years. Now, a small group of his family, friends and former colleagues have collected it into "Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words," available free to the public online starting on April 11. Somewhere between a posthumous memoir and a scrapbook album, it is told through notes and drafts Jobs emailed to himself, excerpts of letters and speeches, oral histories and interviews, photos and mementos. (Some physical copies are being produced for Apple and Disney employees, but that format won't be for sale to the general public.) "Imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life," Jobs wrote in a June 2005 email to himself as he was preparing to give the Stanford commencement speech. "Your life will be a story. It will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heros and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything." The book, published by the Steve Jobs Archive, will be released on Apple Books and the Steve Jobs Archive website. The fact that it aesthetically resembles an Apple product — mostly gray and white, minimalist — is no coincidence: It was designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, Apple's former chief design officer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IEEE Spectrum reports on Codon, a Python compiler specifically developed to, as they put it, "turbocharge Python's Notoriously slow compiler." "We do type checking during the compilation process, which lets us avoid all of that expensive type manipulation at runtime," says Ariya Shajii, an MIT CSAIL graduate student and lead author on a recent paper about Codon. Without any unnecessary data or type checking during runtime, Codon results in zero overhead, according to Shajii. And when it comes to performance, "Codon is typically on par with C++. Versus Python, what we usually see is 10 to 100x improvement," he says. But Codon's approach comes with its trade-offs. "We do this static type checking, and we disallow some of the dynamic features of Python, like changing types at runtime dynamically," says Shajii. "There are also some Python libraries we haven't implemented yet...." Codon was initially designed for use in genomics and bioinformatics. "Data sets are getting really big in these fields, and high-level languages like Python and R are too slow to handle terabytes per set of sequencing data," says Shajii. "That was the gap we wanted to fill — to give domain experts who are not necessarily computer scientists or programmers by training a way to tackle large data without having to write C or C++ code." Aside from genomics, Codon could also be applied to similar applications that process massive data sets, as well as areas such as GPU programming and parallel programming, which the Python-based compiler supports. In fact, Codon is now being used commercially in the bioinformatics, deep learning, and quantitative finance sectors through the startup Exaloop, which Shajii founded to shift Codon from an academic project to an industry application. To enable Codon to work with these different domains, the team developed a plug-in system. "It's like an extensible compiler," Shajii says. "You can write a plug-in for genomics or another domain, and those plug-ins can have new libraries and new compiler optimizations...." In terms of what's next for Codon, Shajii and his team are currently working on native implementations of widely used Python libraries, as well as library-specific optimizations to get much better performance out of these libraries. They also plan to create a widely requested feature: a WebAssembly back end for Codon to enable running code on a Web browser.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It was 10 times brighter than any previously detected, reports the BBC, noting it illuminated much of the galaxy. RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv describes a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) whose light arrived late last year as one of the strongest ever observed. GRB 221009A was detected on October 9 last year (yes, that number is a date), so 5 and a bit months from event to papers published is remarkably quick, and I anticipate that there will be a lot more papers on it in the future. Stand-out points are : - it lasted for more than ten hours after detection (a space x-ray telescope had time to orbit out of the Earth's shadow and observe it) - it could (briefly) be observed by amateur astronomers. - it is also one of the closest gamma-ray bursts seen and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts. It's redshift is given as z= 0.151, which Wikipedia translates as occurring 1.9 billion years ago, at a distance of 2.4 billion light-years from Earth. Observations have been made of the burst in radio telescopes (many sites, continuing), optical (1 site ; analysis of HST imaging is still in work), ultraviolet (1 space telescope), x-ray (2 space telescopes) and gamma ray (1 sapce telescope) — over a range of 1,000,000,000,000,000-fold (10^15) in wavelength. It's brightness is such that radio observatories are expected to continue to detect it for "years to come". The model of the source is of several (3~10) Earth-masses of material ejected from (whatever, probably a compact body (neutron star or black dwarf) merger) and impacting the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds (Lorentz factor 9, velocity >99.2% of c). The absolute brightness of the burst is high (about 10^43 J) and it is made to seem brighter by being close, and also by the energy being emitted in a narrow jet ("beamed"), which we happen to be near the axis of. General news sites are starting to notice the reports, including the hilarious acronym of "BOAT — Brightest Of All Time". Obviously, with observations having only occurred for about 50 years. we're likely to see something else as bright within the next 50 years. The brightness of the x-rays from this GRB is such that the x-rays scattered from dust in our galaxy creates halos around the source — which are bright enough to see, and to tell us things about the dust in our galaxy (which is generally very hard to see). Those images are more photogenic than the normal imagery for GRBs — which is nothing — so you'll see them a lot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.