dreamer-of-rules - Slashdot User

Submission + - Birth of a Solar System Witnessed in Spectacular Scientific First (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right on Thursday July 17, 2025 @11:25AM

alternative_right writes: Around a Sun-like star just 1,300 light-years away, a family of planets has been seen in its earliest moments of conception.

Astronomers analyzed the infrared flow of dust and detritus left over from the formation of a baby star called HOPS-315, finding tiny concentrations of hot minerals that will eventually form planetesimals – the 'seeds' around which new planets will grow.

Submission + - Healthy babies born in Britain after scientists used DNA from three people to av (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right on Thursday July 17, 2025 @10:57AM

alternative_right writes: Eight healthy babies were born in Britain with the help of an experimental technique that uses DNA from three people to help mothers avoid passing devastating rare diseases to their children, researchers reported Wednesday.

Comment Re:coercitivity (Score 1) 65

by williamyf on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @05:12PM (#65525564) Attached to: Seagate's 30TB HAMR Drives Hit Market for $600

while it might not rely on thermal expansion are you sure about the 'gold target on the disk head'? In descriptions I've read from Seagate the laser is used to heat the specific bit being written. Takes 1 ns to heat up and cool down.

Yes. 100% sure, do not rely on the marketing materials, go to the whitepapers

Submission + - Linux reaches 5% on desktop (ostechnix.com) 1

Submitted by bobdevine on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @01:53PM

bobdevine writes: Linux desktops reach 5% of market share in the USA.
https://ostechnix.com/linux-re...

Comment NAS/ZFS rebuilding (Score 2) 65

by williamyf on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @10:55AM (#65524620) Attached to: Seagate's 30TB HAMR Drives Hit Market for $600

Please be aware that, at these capacities, rebuild times will be meassured in weeks. Please use at least N+2 equivalent redundancy, and. In the case of RAID6, do not exceed ~ 12 drives total per volume.

if you are concerned with IOPS, either for normal use or for rebuild scenarios, get HAMR+MACH.2 HDDs

Comment NAS and enterprise (Score 0) 65

by williamyf on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @10:49AM (#65524604) Attached to: Seagate's 30TB HAMR Drives Hit Market for $600

Please be aware that, while available for all to buy, these drives are for NAS and enterpeise use.

put'em in a normal case for DiY NAS, or in a portable enclosure, oninyour normal rig a lone "media drive" at your own peril.

they need certain mounting and ventilation standards to work reliably without shorteningtheir life.

Comment coercitivity (Score 5, Informative) 65

by williamyf on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @10:44AM (#65524594) Attached to: Seagate's 30TB HAMR Drives Hit Market for $600

TFA is wrong. The laser inthe disk head strikes a gold target on the disk head which in turn heats up the disk.

the disk is heated to change (lower) the coercitivity of the material. Any thermal expansion is an UNDESIRABLE side-effect.

Comment Re:Polysilicon production is not intermittent (Score 1) 246

by williamyf on Saturday July 12, 2025 @02:09PM (#65515500) Attached to: Much of the World's Solar Gear is Made Using Fossil Power in China

The point is intermittent power does not work well with heavy industry, so it's either fossil fuel or hydroelectric.

Or Atomic/Nuclear, which China also has. Radioactive waste is a problem, but CO2 and air particulates is not an issue there.

Comment Wish I had money to short that bubble... (Score 2) 25

by williamyf on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @12:50PM (#65507644) Attached to: Nvidia Hits $4 Trillion Market Cap, First Company To Do So

... But the market can stay irrational longer than one can stay solvent, so perhaps is better that I do not have that kind of money anyway.

Comment Public domain... Creative commons... live bands... (Score 1) 191

by williamyf on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @12:48PM (#65507632) Attached to: Restaurants, Bars Say They're Getting Squeezed by Rising Music Licensing Costs

Stop complaining and reinvent yourselves!

Comment Re:Apple should just cut foxconn out! (Score 1) 39

by williamyf on Thursday July 03, 2025 @12:16PM (#65493964) Attached to: Foxconn Mysteriously Tells Chinese Workers To Quit India and Return To China

They don't have anyone else to build their products.

Wrong, they also use pegatron, winstron and compal, but yes, foxxcon gets the lion's share of apple's bussienss.

Strange they do not have anything with celestica, as being canadian should slightly help with the geopolitics...

Comment Re:"known for making machines that spit out paper" (Score 1) 26

by williamyf on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @09:16PM (#65490194) Attached to: Xerox Buys Lexmark For $1.5 Billion As Print Industry Clings To Relevance

I also had one of their laser printers, Optra-something-something -- it was 1200 dpi when HP was nowhere near that, fucking fast (yeah, hilarious how the MCU in the laser printer was a gazillion times faster than the 286 in my machine) and it had Postscript 2 support, very cool to write postscript programs that ran on the machine and spit out the results on paper.

While in the uni, a friend was part of the bio-electronics group, they had a super-fast printer, connected to a 286 running OS/2 2.1 acting as a print server for the whole group. You made me remember. Fun times.

Comment Re: Back in the early 2000s (Score 2) 26

by williamyf on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @09:11PM (#65490188) Attached to: Xerox Buys Lexmark For $1.5 Billion As Print Industry Clings To Relevance

I don't think they were ever an upstart, wasn't Lexmark just the spinoff of IBMs printing business?

Lesxmark was the Spinoff of IBM's PERIPHERAL's business, and included amazing things like the M2 buckling spring keyboards. Then they specialized in printers. Having said that, their printer's division was small an scrapy in comparison with Canon, epson and HP

Comment Re:Lexmark (Score 4, Insightful) 26

by williamyf on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @09:09PM (#65490180) Attached to: Xerox Buys Lexmark For $1.5 Billion As Print Industry Clings To Relevance

They're another scam inkjet company. Why do people keep falling for this, over and over again?

They stoped selling inkjets in 2012... It seems they live in your head rent free.

Comment This is not your dad's Lexmark or my dad's Xerox (Score 1) 26

by williamyf on Tuesday July 01, 2025 @09:08PM (#65490178) Attached to: Xerox Buys Lexmark For $1.5 Billion As Print Industry Clings To Relevance

Xerox mostly operates in Enterprise printing now, and believe you me, campanies still print a lot. Lexmark operates both in consumer and entreprise printing, so a bunch of new customers for xerox.

The newly joined company will probably be able to do a best of breed product roadmap in HW and SW going forward.

Also, I do not know, and I am to lazy to ask, but there may be geography complimentarities (i.e. markets were Xerox is tronger but lexmark was weaker and Vice versa), that would allow a best of breed approach in each.*

Finally, economies of scale with suppliers kick in, and personnel may be made redundant, saving costs.

* An example I remeber vividly was the DEC-Compaq and Latter compaq-HP merger. For some reason, the DEC guys in colombia survived both, while the dec and compaq guys in Venezuela were Decimated. Seems like DEC was the stronger of the three in the colombian market, both in Servers and in User PCs. Those guys were hungry for sales.

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