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Comment Re:That just sounds like nonsense (Score 1) 50

AIX is a niche OS, and sadly, because it had potential. Since POEWR9 systems can run Ubuntu Jammy (or later they claim), AIX is caught in competition, though anyone running POWER9 ought to be running AIX and keep Ubuntu in a VM or partition, eh?

PowerPC is pretty much the only modern IBM platform my little brother does not program in. And he is unapologetic, claiming he's busy enough. This I doubt.

Comment Re:That just sounds like nonsense (Score 1) 50

Since the lowering head count and firing stuff was explicitly stated in the announcement, the sad claims of some subterfuge are more Marxist-analog complaint, class warfare at its heart.

IBM wants to shed employees that do not appear, to management, to be the best allocation of resources towards new and different goals. Wow, when you put it hat way, it seems to dastardly and intended to cause maximum harm to society and humankind. Or not. I vote for not.

But this is /. and so is a haven for the Marxist theories, the refuge of those failed, failing, or suffering any indignity such as unmet want, denied desires, or perceived injustice.

Be aware you are wasting your negative mod points. You failed to understand the /. faqs, or you're just trying to be mean. Confession, I do the latter too often.

Submission + - New Drug Kills Cancer 20,000x More Effectively With No Detectable Side Effects (scitechdaily.com) 2

fahrbot-bot writes: SciTechDaily is reporting that researchers at Northwestern University have redesigned the molecular structure of a well-known chemotherapy drug, greatly increasing its solubility, effectiveness, and safety.

For this study, the scientists created the drug entirely from scratch as a spherical nucleic acid (SNA), a nanoscale structure that incorporates the drug into DNA strands surrounding tiny spheres. This innovative design transforms a compound that normally dissolves poorly and works weakly into a highly potent, precisely targeted treatment that spares healthy cells from damage.

When tested in a small animal model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive and hard-to-treat blood cancer, the SNA-based version showed remarkable results. It entered leukemia cells 12.5 times more efficiently, destroyed them up to 20,000 times more effectively, and slowed cancer progression by a factor of 59, all without causing noticeable side effects.

“In animal models, we demonstrated that we can stop tumors in their tracks,” said Northwestern’s Chad A. Mirkin, who led the study. “If this translates to human patients, it’s a really exciting advance. It would mean more effective chemotherapy, better response rates and fewer side effects. That’s always the goal with any sort of cancer treatment.”

Comment Re:specification & testing (Score 1) 51

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

Comment Book Scanner Recommendations? (Score 4, Interesting) 39

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

Comment Re:Replacing cast-iron bicycle with a titanium one (Score 1) 53

To be fair there's a common way to compile Lua to JVM bytecode so it's likely just a Java front-end, not using the basic interpreter.

Back in the day there was a craze to port Lua, Ruby, Perl, Groovy(!), to run as Java front-ends. Not many got put into production outside of Lua.

However the real point here is that it's now "tell me why I shouldn't use Rust" time.

Moving ABI might be a reasonable objection for a small team but Cloudflare has over a hundred engineers on this so it's not a problem.

They get speed and memory safety in exchange for learning "The Rust Way". Seems like a good engineering tradeoff.

IMO Rust is still for the top 20% of engineers so Java's "solid middle" is still quite safe.

Comment Re:Solid electrolyte, but not metal anode ... (Score 1) 74

I thought that until I learned that they need weekly maintenance tending.

Somebody would need to build an automated battery watering system for homeowners who go away for a long vacation and forget to water their houseplants.

At some point it's too Rube Goldberg to be usable. Now, a few square miles of grid-scale ... somebody could make a business case where land is cheap and sun and water are plentiful.

Submission + - Here Come the Robot Swarms (wsj.com)

fjo3 writes: Forget teaching robots to think like humans. A field called swarm robotics is taking inspiration from ants, bees and even slime molds—simple creatures that achieve remarkable feats through collective intelligence.

Unlike traditional robots that take orders from a central computer, swarm robots work like ant colonies. No single robot is in charge, but the swarm accomplishes complex tasks through simple interactions between neighbors. Each robot interacts only with those nearby, sometimes communicating with sounds or chemical signals in particles they release.

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