Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment downsides (Score 1) 140

by Dark Coder (#61920753) Attached to: Systemd-Free Devuan 4.0 'Chimaera' Officially Released

systemd has its downsides.

1. hasn’t emulated NetworkManager’s rich network/netdev/interface setups, notable the many protocols sitting on top of other protocols such as VLAN over 802.1x, bridging, iSCSI.

2. still requires you to manually bring certain interface online. It will fail if you dont bring your interface online by some rc.local.

3. Has a strange failure when one drive failed in RAID-anything-non-zero. It is catastrophic.

4. Does not work with some ISP (looking at you, Comcast, Verizon, DirectTV) due to vendor-configured esoteric Juniper DHCP server settings. Must revert back to ISC dhclient.

5. you cannot apply SELinux to block raw network socket against PID 1.

6. You cannot detail libcap, seccomp, or apparmor in some daemon because they have rich backend plugins such as DB, LDAP, Samba.

so, I am sticking with s6 and NetworkManager and ISC dhclient until the above gets resolved.

Submission + - SPAM: Why is California's Cargo Port System So Messed Up?

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here's a thread about what I learned.

The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded.?

There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow.

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis.

If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed. WIth the yards so full, carriers / terminals are being highly restrictive in where and when they will accept empties.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Intel's Future Now Depends On Making Everyone Else's Chips

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the last year and a half, as the pandemic has everyone turned to their screens, demand has surged for devices (phones and laptops) and cloud services (Netflix and Zoom), all powered by a range of advanced semiconductors. Manufacturers have raced to squeeze more chips out of their fabs, but many were running near their limits before the pandemic. Still, Intel and its competitors didn’t rush to build new fabs—fabs are startlingly expensive, and without continued demand, semiconductor firms are loath to build more. But now, as the global pandemic continues to disrupt supply chains, chipmakers have decided that the current spike in demand isn’t going away. Intel’s $20 billion investment [to build two new chip factories in Chandler, Arizona] is only one example. Samsung announced in May that it would spend $151 billion over the next decade to boost its semiconductor capacity. TSMC made a similar announcement in April, pledging to invest $100 billion in the next three years alone.

The investments required to stay at the leading edge—where the most advanced chips are made—has whittled down the number of semiconductor competitors from more than 20 in 2001 to just two today. “There’s really only so much room at the leading edge, just because of the huge capital costs involved,” said Will Hunt, a research analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. That cost is driven by the price of the equipment that’s required to etch ever-smaller features onto chips. A few years ago, the industry began to use extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to shrink transistor sizes. EUV machines are marvels of physics and engineering, and one tool costs upwards of $120 million. To stay relevant, companies will need to buy a dozen or more annually for the next several years. For those sorts of investments to make sense, semiconductor manufacturers must produce and sell an enormous volume of chips. “When you have volume orders, then you can do yield experiments, you can improve your yield, and yield is everything because that’s how you cover your costs,” said Willy Shih, a professor of management at Harvard Business School. Which is why Intel, under [Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger], is doing something now that it historically has shunned. “We are now a foundry,” Gelsinger said at the Arizona groundbreaking. In the coming years, he said, Intel will "open the doors of our fab wide for the community at large to serve the foundry needs of our customers — many of them US companies that are dependent on solely having foreign supply sources today.”

But becoming a leading-edge foundry isn’t just about building fabs and telling customers you’ve got space to make their chips. Gelsinger will have to change Intel’s culture and, to some extent, its technology, both of which are deep-seated. “He has to turn a huge ship around,” said Robert Maire, president of Semiconductor Advisors. In the coming years, Intel has several challenges to master at once. As the company rolls out a new business model, it also needs to redouble its R&D efforts while still being careful with cash flow. (Intel has fallen so far behind that it now plans to outsource production of its most advanced chips—and a portion of the profits that accompany them—to TSMC.) The transition will demand intense focus. “The foundry business could be a distraction,” Shih said. At the same time, he added, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other companies are moving away from Intel’s standardized chips toward their own customized designs. If Intel doesn’t change with the times, it risks being left behind. “There will be many challenges, and there will be tests that will face them,” Shih said. “It’s going to be hard.”
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Bitcoin's Price Crashed 87% On Binance.US Thanks To a Bug

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bitcoin is on a tear, reaching an all time high price of $67,000 for 1 BTC on Wednesday, buoyed by a series of approvals for Bitcoin futures funds on the stock market. But on one major U.S. exchange, the price flash-crashed 87 percent to roughly $8,200 on Thursday due to a bug in a trading algorithm. The crash occurred during a massive sell-off on the Binance.US exchange that occurred around 7:42 a.m. ET, Bloomberg reported. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and its Binance.US exchange is meant to be compliant with U.S. regulations, although it is still banned in several states.

According to a Binance.US spokesperson, the crash was due to an issue with a trading algorithm being run by one "institutional trader," which may indicate an investment fund of some sort. "One of our institutional traders indicated to us that they had a bug in their trading algorithm, which appears to have caused the sell-off,” Binance.US told Bloomberg. “We are continuing to look into the event, but understand from the trader that they have now fixed their bug and that the issue appears to have been resolved.” It's entirely possible that some lucky traders were at the right place at the right time and managed to snap up some incredibly cheap BTC, but mostly it's yet another example of weirdness along the edges of the crypto ecosystem.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - AmigaOS receives various upgrades

Submitted by Mike Bouma
Mike Bouma writes: A-EON Technology Ltd has released Enhancer Software Release 2.1 for AmigaOS4.1 FE update 2, which itself was released on 23 December 2020. It's an OS enhancement package with large amounts of updated and upgraded OS components. Also earlier this year Hyperion released AmigaOS 3.2 for all classic Amigas, here's a roundup of new features by The Guru Meditation on youtube.

Submission + - UFOs Tamper With Nuclear Weapons, Claim 3 Former Air Force Officers (military.com)

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: At a recent National Press Club News Conference, four former Air Force veterans who worked with the U.S Air Force's nuclear weapons program claim UFOs tampered with U.S. nuclear facilities in the 1960s:

Schindele said he and his commander visited a missile launch site near Minot in September 1966, and eight airmen there told him that 10 missiles at silos in the vicinity all went down with guidance and control malfunctions when an 80- to 100-foot wide flying object with bright flashing lights had hovered over the site.

Salas, who was a first lieutenant stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana, in 1967, said he was on duty as a deputy missile combat crew commander deep in the underground nuclear missile control room. The site's flight security controller called from above ground and was panicked and shouting, Salas claims.

"He said there was a large glowing, pulsating red oval-shaped object hovering over the front gate," according to Salas' affidavit. As he woke his commander, he claims alarms went off showing nearly all 10 missiles shown in the control room had been disabled.

Robert Jacobs, a first lieutenant in the Air Force and stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, in 1964 also claimed to witness a UFO event when he was asked to set up a telescope video camera to capture an Atlas rocket test:

He claims the video showed a disc-shaped craft flew up to the dummy warhead as it traveled about 8,000 mph over the Pacific Ocean, circled it and shot it with several beams of light. "It went around the top of the warhead, fired a beam of light down on the top of the warhead," Jacobs said Tuesday. After circling, it "then flew out the frame the same way it had come in."

Submission + - Indianapolis Motor Speedway to host Autonomous Car Race on Saturday (jalopnik.com)

Submitted by Motard
Motard writes: Dallara Indy Lights racing cars outfitted as autonomous vehicles by Clemson University, and programmed by various international collegiate teams will participate in a 20 lap race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Saturday, Oct. 23rd 2021. The event will be livestreamed by the Indy Autonomous Challenge website.

9 teams representing 21 universities from 9 countries will compete for a $1M prize.

Submission + - Systemd-Free Devuan 4.0 'Chimaera' Officially Released (devuan.org)

Submitted by Luna
Luna writes: From the Devuan Web Site :

"Devuan Developers are delighted to announce the release of Devuan Chimaera 4.0 as the project's new stable release. This is the result of many months of painstaking work by the Team and detailed testing by the wider Devuan community."

This release is Based on Debian Bullseye (11.1) with Linux kernel 5.10 and lets you choose your init system : sysvinit, runit, and OpenRC.

Submission + - Former OnlyFans Employees Could Access Users' and Models' Personal Information (vice.com)

Submitted by samleecole
samleecole writes: Some former OnlyFans support staff employees still had access to users' data—including sensitive financial and personal information—even after they stopped working for the company used by sex workers to sell nudes and porn videos.

According to an inside source, depending on what a user is seeking help with, support tickets may contain their credit card information, drivers' licenses, passports, full names, addresses, bank statements, how much they have earned on OnlyFans or spent, Know Your Customer (KYC) selfies where the creator holds up an ID next to their face for verification, and model release forms. It's all accessible through Zendesk, the company's support system.

"It's a shame that they have this large company and feel they can play with people's lives like this," the former employee said. "There are already so many things they are in trouble for and privacy should not be one of them. Everyone on that platform, especially sex workers, need to have their information be safe and it isn't."

Submission + - Labor Shortage Hits U.S. Supply Chain (cnbc.com) 3

Submitted by AltMachine
AltMachine writes: These days, everything from the seemingly random shortages of items in the grocery store to the small-print warnings that your online purchases could experience shipping delays can all be traced back to a woefully out-of-whack supply chain due to COVID-19 and especially the delta variant. More than 70 container ships unable to unload goods at ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach isn’t just a nightly news story. It’s the reason why the patio furniture you ordered in June still hasn’t arrived. A shortage of truck drivers — a problem that existed pre-pandemic, but one that has only worsened since — means goods can’t get from the ports to warehouses to then find their way to retailers and consumers. “Our typical truck shipment was between $4,000 and $5,000 before the pandemic,” chief information officer Tony Costa at Bumble Bee Seafood says. “Now we’re seeing upwards of $19,000.” A survey of local chamber of commerce leaders by the U.S. Chamber reveals that 90% of these leaders say that labor shortages are limiting economic growth in local areas. In addition, international supply chain disruptions, especially those now hitting factories in Vietnam, are making it harder for the retailer to stock all it needs.

Submission + - Cracking open strong field quantum electrodynamics (phys.org)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: [Alternate Title: "Article I read 3 times and still don't completely understand."]

A newly published theoretical and computer modeling study suggests that the world's most powerful lasers might finally crack the elusive physics behind some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe—gamma ray bursts, pulsar magnetospheres, and more.

The international research team's modeling study shows that petawatt (PW)-class lasers—juiced to even higher intensities via light-matter interactions—might provide a key to unlock the mysteries of the strong-field (SF) regime of quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Probing SF-QED requires electromagnetic fields of an intensity many orders of magnitude beyond those normally available on Earth. Researchers have tried side routes to SF-QED, such as using powerful particle beams from accelerators to observe particle interactions with the strong fields that are naturally present in some aligned crystals.

For a more direct approach, the highest electromagnetic fields available in a laboratory are delivered by PW-class lasers. A 10-PW laser (the world's most powerful at this time), focused down to a few microns, can reach intensities close to 1023 watts per square centimeter. The associated electric field values can be as high as 1014 volts per meter. Yet studying SF-QED requires even higher field amplitudes than that—orders of magnitude beyond what can be achieved with those lasers.

To break this barrier, researchers have planned to call on powerful electron beams, accessible at large accelerator or laser facilities. When a high-power laser pulse collides with a relativistic electron beam, the laser field amplitude seen by electrons in their rest frame can be increased by orders of magnitude, giving access to new SF-QED regimes.

Though such methods are challenging experimentally, as they call for the synchronization in space and time of a high-power laser pulse and a relativistic electron beam at femtosecond and micron scales, a few such experiments have been successfully conducted, and several more are planned around the world at PW-class laser facilities.

Using a moving, curved plasma mirror for a direct look ...

Submission + - Human Footprints in North America Dated to Twenty Thousand Years Ago (nature.com) 1

Submitted by Opyros
Opyros writes: Fossil footprints in New Mexico have been dated to 21,000-23,000 years before present. As a result, human habitation of the Americas can be pushed back several thousand years.

The footprints were found in sedimentary rock at White Sands National Park, near the location of a long-vanished lake. Since the rock contains seeds of ditchgrass, it was possible to apply radiocarbon dating, leading to the remarkably early date. Until now, the oldest unequivocally dated signs of human presence in the New World were only 16,000 years old. Hence the great significance of the find.

Slashdot Top Deals

Quantity is no substitute for quality, but its the only one we've got.

Close