ICT news

• Can This Company Use Earth's Heat to Suck Carbon from the Sky?

  26-02-2023 23:57 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post:Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky — or "direct air capture," as it is known by experts and scientists — is a bit like a time machine for climate change. It removes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it deep underground, almost exactly the reverse of what humanity has been doing for centuries by burning fossil fuels. Its promise? That it can help run back the clock, undoing some of what we have done to the atmosphere
  
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• Virologist Disputes WSJ Report on a Minority Opinion Suggesting Covid 'Lab Leak' Origin

  26-02-2023 22:18 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Three long-time Slashdot readers all submitted this story — schwit1, sinij, and DevNull127.
  DevNull127 writes: Four U.S. agencies have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated at the Wuhan market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reached the same conclusion. Then there's two more agencies (including America's CIA) that are "undecided."
  But there is one agency that decided — with "low confidence" — that the virus had somehow leaked from
  
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• Who Writes Linux and Open Source Software?

  26-02-2023 20:54 via news.slashdot.org
  
  From an opinion piece in the Register:Aiven, an open source cloud data platform company, recently analyzed who's doing what with GitHub open source code projects. They found that the top open source contributors were all companies — Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft....Aiven looked at three metrics within the GitHub archives. These were the number of contributors, repositories (projects) contributed to, and the number of commits made by the contributors. These were
  
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• Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Podcast About Computer Science?

  26-02-2023 19:45 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: They say "always be learning" — but do podcasts actually help? I've been trying to find podcasts that discuss programming, and I've enjoyed Lex Fridman's interviews with language creators like Guido van Rossum, Chris Lattner, and Brendan Eich (plus his long interviews with Donald Knuth). Then I discovered that GitHub, Red Hat, Stack Overflow, and the Linux Foundation all have their own podcast.There's a developer podcast called "Corecursive" th
  
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• 10,000 Dogs are Registered for Workplace Visits at Amazon

  26-02-2023 18:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In what might be mistaken for an early April Fools' joke, one month after Amazon confirmed it would layoff 18,000+ employees, Amazon News last week put out a whimsical story about 10,000+ of its employees' dogs who are registered to "work" at corporate offices as part of Amazon's Dogs at Work program. "This unique program," Amazon explains," pulls out all the stops to make sure dogs have everything they need for a successful work day, including decked out
  
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• Battery-Swapping EVs Are All the Rage in Taiwan

  26-02-2023 17:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An interesting profile of EV entrepreneur Horace Luke from Rest of World:
  During his time working for companies like Microsoft and HTC on projects like the Xbox gaming system and Android phones, Luke mulled over the idea of mobility. In 2011, he pitched the idea that would form the core of his company Gogoro: an electric vehicle that didn't have to take up space and time charging its batteries, but instead relied on a network of batteries that could be swapped at roadside stations, like filling
  
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• Microsoft .NET 8 Will Bolster Linux Support

  26-02-2023 16:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld:.NET 8, the next planned version of the Microsoft's open source software development platform, is set to emphasize Linux accommodations as well as cloud development and containers.A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a
  
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• Microsoft Tests ChatGPT's Ability to Control Robots

  26-02-2023 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  "We extended the capabilities of ChatGPT to robotics," brags a blog post from Microsoft's Autonomous Systems and Robotics research group, "and controlled multiple platforms such as robot arms, drones, and home assistant robots intuitively with language."
  They're exploring how to use ChatGPT to "make natural human-robot interactions possible... to see if ChatGPT can think beyond text, and reason about the physical world to help with robotics tasks."We want to help people interact with robots more
  
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• 'Dow Said it Recycled Our Shoes - But Instead They Went to an Indonesian Flea Market'

  26-02-2023 10:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Reuters reports that U.S. petrochemicals giant Dow and the Singapore government "said they were transforming old sneakers into playgrounds and running tracks.
  "Reuters put that promise to the test by planting hidden trackers inside 11 pairs of donated shoes. Most got exported instead."At a rundown market on the Indonesian island of Batam, a small location tracker was beeping from the back of a crumbling second-hand shoe store. A Reuters reporter followed the high-pitched ping to a mound of old s
  
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• GCC Gets a New Frontend for Rust

  26-02-2023 06:47 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader sleeping cat shares a recent FOSDEM talk by a compiler engineer on the team building Rust-GCC, "an alternative compiler implementation for the Rust programming language."
  "If gccrs interprets a program differently from rustc, this is considered a bug," explains the project's FAQ on GitHub.
  The FAQ also notes that LLVM's set of compiler technologies — which Rust uses — "is missing some backends that GCC supports, so a GCC Rust implementation can fill in the gaps for us
  
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• As Cold Fronts Hit America, Half a Million Lose Power

  26-02-2023 03:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  More than 126,000 Californians are without electricity, reports ABC News. But Reuters notes that meanwhile "more than 400,000 customers of Detroit based DTE Energy remained without power on Saturday, the Detroit News reported," suffering through "a separate storm that clobbered the U.S. Plains, Midwest and Great Lakes regions earlier this week" that finally moved over the Atlantic.
  And ABC News notes that as of Saturday morning, "more than 30 million Americans are under weather alerts in the Wes
  
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• Ransomware Attacks, Payments Declined In 2022: Report

  26-02-2023 00:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  CRN reports:Prominent incident response firm Mandiant disclosed Tuesday that it responded to 15 percent fewer ransomware incidents last year. The statistic was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Mandiant, which is owned by Google Cloud, confirmed the stat in an email to CRN.
  The WSJ report also included several other indicators that 2022 was a less successful year for ransomware. Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike told the outlet that the average ransom demand dropped 28 percent last year,
  
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