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Comment Re:Yea, and it's the result of whole generations (Score 1) 224

JFC, a mouse is literally an extension of your hand. It should take all of 5 minutes to teach someone left-click, right-click, possibly middle-click and scroll with a 3-button.

Everybody used to have home computers, a phone/tablet is NOT a substitute if you have to write a Word paper or work on a spreadsheet. Or browse the web for more than say 20 minutes. Or respond to a lengthy email. Proper keyboard is needed for that.

Submission + - Thousands of Reddit communities 'go dark' in protest of new developer fees (npr.org) 7

Submitted by koavf
koavf writes: Thousands of sections of the popular online message board Reddit are "going dark" for two days starting Monday to protest controversial new fees the site is charging third-party developers.

Some of the largest communities on Reddit are being set to private for 48 hours, meaning they will not be publicly available. By doing this, Redditers aim to pressure company executives to reverse their decision to charge developers for access to the site, which until now has been free.

In a Reddit post about the boycott, organizers wrote that the charges are "a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit."

Submission + - Slashdot has broken user accounts that contain spaces in the username 6

Submitted by throwaway18
throwaway18 writes: It appears that slashdot user accounts with spaces in the username are currently broken.

The user profiles says "The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case."

There are reports that those users can't log in.

Submission + - Glitches, echoes, 'melting the servers' crash DeSantis' campaign Twitter launch (cnn.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: Twitter’s livestream event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis crashed and was delayed on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of users logged on to hear DeSantis announce his bid for the White House.

Sound from the livestream event — which was held on Twitter Spaces and hosted by owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks — cut in and out in the first minutes after starting.

“We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.

More than 500,000 Twitter users joined the event, which was ultimately ended and then restarted, delaying DeSantis’ announcement by nearly half an hour. When the event was relaunched using Sacks’ account, only around 250,000 users ultimately listened in.

Twitter has faced a variety of outages and technical issues since Musk took over the platform late last year. Shortly after acquiring the company, Musk laid off large numbers of technical and other staff and reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs.

In recent months, Twitter has faced multiple service outages that affected the ability of thousands of users to access the site, to view images and to read tweets on their timelines. Users have also previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.

Musk and Sacks admitted on Wednesday that the limited capacity of Twitter’s servers played into the issues it faced getting the DeSantis event underway. “I think you broke the internet there,” Sacks said when the event was relaunched. The pair added that Musk’s following of more than 140 million followers may have also contributed to the issue.

Twitter’s Spaces product was not necessarily built to host events with hundreds of thousands of listeners. Most other Spaces have — at most — several hundred listeners at a time. Spaces was described as a “prototype” and “janky” tool by a former Twitter employee familiar with its development.

“Spaces was largely a prototype, not a finished product,” the former employee told CNN. “It’s a beta test that never ended.”

They added that Spaces relies on a mix of Twitter’s technical infrastructure and Amazon Web Services servers, “things that aren’t intended to handle Twitter-scale traffic.”

Twitter acquired the video streaming platform Periscope in 2015. The former employee said Twitter Spaces had been built on Periscope’s existing infrastructure and not integrated with Twitter properly — which likely contributed to Wednesday’s technical problems.

Submission + - A Paralyzed Man Can Walk Naturally Again With Brain and Spine Implants (nytimes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Gert-Jan Oskam was living in China in 2011 when he was in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the hips down. Now, with a combination of devices, scientists have given him control over his lower body again. “For 12 years I’ve been trying to get back my feet,” Mr. Oskam said in a press briefing on Tuesday. “Now I have learned how to walk normal, natural.” In astudypublished on Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers in Switzerland described implants that provided a “digital bridge” between Mr. Oskam’s brain and his spinal cord, bypassing injured sections. The discovery allowed Mr. Oskam, 40, to stand, walk and ascend a steep ramp with only the assistance of a walker. More than a year after the implant was inserted, he has retained these abilities and has actually showed signs of neurological recovery, walking with crutches even when the implant was switched off. “We’ve captured the thoughts of Gert-Jan, and translated these thoughts into a stimulation of the spinal cord to re-establish voluntary movement,” Grégoire Courtine, a spinal cord specialist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne, who helped lead the research, said at the press briefing.

In the new study, the brain-spine interface, as the researchers called it, took advantage of anartificial intelligence thought decoderto read Mr. Oskam’s intentions — detectable as electrical signals in his brain — and match them to muscle movements. The etiology of natural movement, from thought to intention to action, was preserved. The only addition, as Dr. Courtine described it, was the digital bridge spanning the injured parts of the spine. [...] To achieve this result, the researchers first implanted electrodes in Mr. Oskam’s skull and spine. The team then used a machine-learning program to observe which parts of the brain lit up as he tried to move different parts of his body. This thought decoder was able to match the activity of certain electrodes with particular intentions: One configuration lit up whenever Mr. Oskam tried to move his ankles, another when he tried to move his hips.

Then the researchers used another algorithm to connect the brain implant to the spinal implant, which was set to send electrical signals to different parts of his body, sparking movement. The algorithm was able to account for slight variations in the direction and speed of each muscle contraction and relaxation. And, because the signals between the brain and spine were sent every 300 milliseconds, Mr. Oskam could quickly adjust his strategy based on what was working and what wasn’t. Within the first treatment session he could twist his hip muscles. Over the next few months, the researchers fine-tuned the brain-spine interface to better fit basic actions like walking and standing. Mr. Oskam gained a somewhat healthy-looking gait and was able to traverse steps and ramps with relative ease, even after months without treatment. Moreover, after a year in treatment, he began noticing clear improvements in his movement without the aid of the brain-spine interface. The researchers documented these improvements in weight-bearing, balancing and walking tests. Now, Mr. Oskam can walk in a limited way around his house, get in and out of a car and stand at a bar for a drink. For the first time, he said, he feels like he is the one in control.

Submission + - US Senators issued satellite phones (cbsnews.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Amid growing concerns of security risks to members of Congress, over 50 senators have been issued satellite phones for emergency communication, people familiar with the measures told CBS News. The devices are part of a series of new security measures being offered to senators by the Senate Sergeant at Arms, who took over shortly after the protest an the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The satellite phone technology has been offered to all 100 senators. CBS News has learned at least 50 have accepted the phones, which Senate administrative staff recommend senators keep in close proximity during their travels.

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee last month, Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson said satellite communication is being deployed "to ensure a redundant and secure means of communication during a disruptive event."

Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that "takes out communications" in part of America. Federal funding will pay for the satellite airtime needed to utilize the phone devices.

Submission + - Envisioning a Simplified Intel Architecture (intel.com)

Submitted by j3x0n
j3x0n writes: The long life of Intel® Architecture has resulted in a rich software ecosystem with an enormous installed base that extends from PCs to the cloud to mobile and from embedded devices to supercomputers and beyond.

Since its introduction over 20 years ago, the Intel® 64 architecture became the dominant operating mode. As an example of this evolution, Microsoft stopped shipping the 32-bit version of their Windows 11 operating system. Intel firmware no longer supports non UEFI64 operating systems natively. 64-bit operating systems are the de facto standard today. They retain the ability to run 32-bit applications but have stopped supporting 16-bit applications natively.

With this evolution, Intel believes there are opportunities for simplification in our hardware and software ecosystem.

Certain legacy modes have little utility in modern operating systems besides bootstrapping the CPU into the 64-bit mode. It is worth asking the question, “Could these seldom used elements of the architecture be removed to simplify a 64-bit mode-only architecture?”
 

Submission + - An Example of a Very Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects (vortex.com) 1

Submitted by Lauren Weinstein
Lauren Weinstein writes: All, I am doing something in this post that I’ve never done before over these many years. I’m going to share with you an example of what Google account recovery failure means to the people involved, and this is by no means the worst such case I’ve seen — not even close, unfortunately.

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