ICT news

• The Fed Had Already Spotted Big Problems at SVB Before Its Collapse

  19-03-2023 23:43 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  And starting in 2021 — long before the run on Silicon Valley Bank — the Federal Reserve had "repeatedly warned the bank that it had problems," reports the New York Times:In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which oversaw Silicon Valley Bank, issued six citations. Those warnings, known as "matters requiring attention" and "matters requiring immediate attention," fl
  
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• Mysterious Streaks of Light Seen in the Sky Friday in California

  19-03-2023 22:43 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Mysterious streaks of light were seen in the sky in the Sacramento area Friday night," reports the Associated Press.
  The lights lasted about 40 seconds, remembered one witness who filmed the lights while enjoying a local brewery. The brewery then asked on Instagram if anyone could solve the mystery, the report continues:Jonathan McDowell says he can. McDowell is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. McDowell said Saturday in an interview with The Associated Press tha
  
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• Linux 6.4 AMD Graphics Driver Picking Up New Power Features For The Steam Deck

  19-03-2023 21:43 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.
  Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These
  
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• How College Students Built a Satellite With AA Batteries and a $20 Microprocessor

  19-03-2023 20:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  With all the space junk cluttering our orbits, Popular Science writes, "Lowering costs while also shortening satellite lifespans is important if space exploration and utilization is to remain safe and viable.
  "As luck would have it, a group of students and researchers at Brown University just made promising headway for both issues."Last year, the team successfully launched their breadloaf-sized cube satellite (or cubesat) aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for the comparatively low production cost
  
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• Ask Slashdot: When Should You Call Hardware a 'SoC'?

  19-03-2023 19:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader Prahjister knows what a system on a chip is. But that's part of the problem:
  I recently started hearing the term SoC at work when referring to digital signage hardware. This has really triggered me.... It is like when I heard people refer to a PC as a CPU.I tried to speak to my colleagues and dissuade them from using this term in this manner with no luck. Am I wrong trying to dissuade them for this?
  Maybe another question would be: Are there technical malapropisms that drive you
  
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• A Trillionth-of-a-Second Shutter Speed Camera Catches Chaos in Action

  19-03-2023 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader turp182 shares two stories about the new state-of-the-art in very-high-speed imaging. "The techniques don't image captured photons, but instead 'touch' the target to perform imaging/read structures using either lasers or neutrons."
  First, Science Daily reports that physicists from the University of Gothenburg (with colleagues from the U.S. and Germany) have developed an ultrafast laser camera that can create videos at 12.5 billion images per second, "which is at least a
  
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• Pressurised Natural Caves Could Offer a Home From Home On the Moon

  19-03-2023 17:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid quotes an intriguing new article from the Economist:
  Imagine a habitable colony on Mars or the Moon and the kinds of structures that come to mind are probably gleaming domes or shiny metallic tubes snaking over the surface. But with no Earth-like atmosphere or magnetic field to repel solar radiation and micrometeorites, space colonists would probably need to pile metres-thick rocks and geological rubble onto the roofs of such off-world settlements. More like a h
  
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• One AI Tutor Per Child: Is Personalized Learning Finally Here?

  19-03-2023 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:Like many, parents Sai Gaddam and his wife Priyanka Rai were concerned about how well schooling and education might serve their own children. Unlike many, PhD-educated computational neuroscientist Gaddam and MBA-trained marketer Rai took matters into their own hands and are now running a micro-school in Mumbai that's inspired by the Finnish model of early education. In One AI Tutor Per Child, Gaddam explains with examples why he's so excited about the poss
  
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• Is Amazon Building a New AI-Powered Web Browser?

  19-03-2023 15:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Gizmodo reports that Amazon "is thinking about releasing a web browser, a boring-sounding project that could have massive implications."The company has sent a survey to users asking detailed questions, including which features would "convince you to download and try" a "new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon...."The survey asked a variety of questions. Most telling was the last question: "Imagine that there is a new desktop/laptop browser from Amazon available to do. Select which of the followin
  
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• SVB Employees Blame Remote Work For Bank Failure

  19-03-2023 12:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader BonThomme shared this article from Axios:In a story in the Financial Times out Thursday, current and former Silicon Valley Bank employees cited the bank's commitment to remote work as one reason for its failure....
  The banking industry has led the return to office charge for a while, and SVB was an outlier in its commitment to something different. The company's career site touted its flexible culture. "If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it's that we ca
  
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• Unix Pioneer Ken Thompson Announces He's Switching From Mac To Linux

  19-03-2023 08:34 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  The closing keynote at the SCaLE 20x conference was delivered by 80-year-old Ken Thompson (co-creator of Unix, Plan9, UTF8, and the Go programming language).Slashdot reader motang shared Thompson answer to a question at the end about what operating system he uses today:
  I have, for most of my life — because I was sort of born into it — run Apple.
  Now recently, meaning within the last five years, I've become more and more depressed, and what Apple is doing to something that should all
  
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• 'Codon' Compiles Python to Native Machine Code That's Even Faster Than C

  19-03-2023 05:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Codon is a new "high-performance Python compiler that compiles Python code to native machine code without any runtime overhead," according to its README file on GitHub.Typical speedups over Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still.
  Its development team includes researchers from MIT's
  
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• Programming Pioneer Grady Booch on Functional Programming, Web3, and Conscious Machines

  19-03-2023 02:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  InfoWorld interviews Grady Booch, chief scientist for software engineering at IBM Research (who is also a pioneer in design patterns, agile methods, and one of the creators of UML).Here's some of the highlights:
  Q: Let me begin by asking something "of the moment." There has been an almost cultural war between object-oriented programming and functional programming. What is your take on this?
  Booch: I had the opportunity to conduct an oral history with John Backus — one of the pioneers of fu
  
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