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Comment Luckily enthusiast PCs are mostly toys not tools (Score 0) 69

by couchslug (#66295400) Attached to: Memory Prices Climb 500% In 12 Months

Utility computing can go many years without a hardware refresh, and intensive tasks need not be shared where they degrade performance on a main machine.

Gaming is completely discretionary and parts may be bought at leisure if one already owns a usable machine.

I buy multiple business class PC cheap after liquidations push them onto Ebay. Linux frees me from needing Windows, a few applications excepted which can run in VMs on Linux hosts or on a cheap secondary PC I remote into (KVM switches are also an option).

Owning multiple used PCs (because ever being one-deep on hardware invites downtime) and not discarding working hardware makes life easy. They take up little space hung on walls (my server hangs on a few cents worth of lag hooks) or stacked on shelves or hung from them to leave shelves free for other use.

Home lab enthusiasts solve the business hardware use and space problems with trivial effort making their systems worth a look. They're a friendly supportive community.

Other strategies include not caring about cosmetics where a few scratches or replaceable minor hardware usefully lower prices. Thinkpad enthusiasts were building notebooks from wrecks back when new ones were too expensive. My first A31 was assembled from bartered ewaste along with two old HP servers reused as desktops.

When you have a techy problem, respond techfully! If you really do need a peformant machine to make a living be glad they're still cheap compared to gearing up for vehicle mechanics, serious woodwork, welding professionally etc.

 

Submission + - NYT: Civilization underpinned by a Faberge Egg

Submitted by BenBoy
BenBoy writes: NYT discusses the ease with which the US could be rendered literally powerless for a year or more:

“If you knock out nine total substations among those three grids, you can black out the entire United States.” According to Wellinghoff, which nine substations were taken offline didn’t matter as long as each one was among the 10 most important in its region, and you could black out the three interconnections individually as well: “I mean, it’s not like there are particular substations. You just have to figure out what are the top 10 critical ones in each of those interconnects. Which, to do that, it’s probably something that a bunch of 12-year-olds with the internet could do pretty easily. All you have to do is look at a map of the grid and figure out where most of the wires go into the substations — that’s a critical substation.”

Comment The decline of competence (Score 1) 62

Being so utterly tech-ignorant in 2026 should be shameful, but the adult choice to be incompetent is completely normalized.

The death of competence was inevitable because the majority of humanity are not intelligent and intelligence is not a choice.

People don't know what right looks like, and PBS is a bastion of old people who should be removed from the levers of power because they're unable to learn.

Submission + - Linux Kernel 7.2 Has Been Officially Released (9to5linux.com)

Submitted by prisoninmate
prisoninmate writes: Linux blog 9to5Linux reports: "Highlights of Linux 7.2 include cache-aware load-balancing support, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture.

Linux kernel 7.2 also introduces a “Fair(er)” GPU scheduler, support for the ‘zerocopy’ library to Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions on the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enables large folios by default for the Btrfs file system.

Linux 7.2 also brings Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R processor series, improvements to the kernel’s swap subsystem, support for multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) to the khugepaged kernel thread, and support for compressed files to the SMB filesystem."

Submission + - I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can't do middle school math (sfstandard.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters(opens in new tab) urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

Submission + - Swarms of tiny robots remove microplastics from soil and water (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Scientists from the Czech Republic have created microscopic cleanup robots that successfully removed microplastics from both soil and aquatic environments in the lab. Details of their work are published in the journal npg Asia Materials.

To build the robots, researchers started with microscopic MXene particles made of ultrathin, stacked layers. The material has a large surface area and surface chemistry that help it attract and hold plastic. They then coated the particles with magnetic nickel nanoparticles so rotating magnetic fields could drive the tiny robots.

Then came the testing phase. The team placed swarms of these microbots into water and soil samples contaminated with plastic. The externally generated magnetic fields made the robots spin and tumble through the liquid and squeeze through tiny water-filled gaps in the soil.

Submission + - Freenet: Apps Without Platforms

Submitted by Sanity
Sanity writes: Earlier this year Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database, with application state instead distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

Submission + - Smart Glasses are now Cheap (rnz.co.nz)

Submitted by hadleyburg
hadleyburg writes: Radio New Zealand reports that "Privacy experts warn of gaps in NZ law, as camera glasses hit Kmart shelves".

Historically there has been an appreciation of "street photography" where unwitting members of the public are photographed on the street, in a candid fashion, capturing a feeling at a particular moment. It can capture history and create art.

But as the photography of the public has become more pervasive, with smart phones, and now cheap smart glasses, issues of privacy start to be weighed up against the rights of the artist.

Submission + - New flapping robot swims and flies like a diving bird (mit.edu)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and leap back into the air to fly away.

Inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can swim underwater, then flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like diving birds, reports MIT News.

The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is designed to help scientists study the mechanics that enable diving birds to fly through air and water.

The new robot roughly resembles a bird, with a body, two wings, and a tail. The body contains a battery and waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which in turn pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies. The wings are made of thin membranes that are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles to help wick away water. And the tail is motorized, enabling it to change its angle to help the robot fly up or dive down.

The paper appears in the journal Science, and, more accessibly, from MIT Libraries.

Comment Mod parent up not down! (Score 1) 66

This is Slashdot where expecting high tech literacy used to be standard. (Note the OP UID.)

I do similar and find using multiple OS quite convenient rather than burdensome. I don't "switch", I "add" instead and have done so since I was new to Slashdot at the turn of this century.

An OS is just a tool to run applications and the more one chooses the be comfortable with the more choices they have. Learning Linux hasn't been difficult for decades.

With VMs and other options it's trivial to have any or many OS at hand (one reason the "home lab" enthusiasts often have rackfulls of SFF and tiny PCs easily remoted into from their main machine or any other).

Submission + - Roseville, CA Study Finds 71% Error Rate for Flock Cameras (businessinsider.com)

Submitted by Cognitive Dissident
Cognitive Dissident writes: According the Business Insider, a study by Roseville, CA has found a 71% error rate in Flock License Plate Reader reports to the city police department. And the errors go far beyond the ALPR.

Business Insider filed public-records requests to obtain email correspondence, data, meeting notes, contracts, and other records that reveal the extensive back-and-forth between Roseville and Flock over repeated errors by Flock's system. The cameras regularly missed vehicles, captured blurry images, misread license plate characters and states, and sent delayed alerts to police about vehicles possibly connected to crimes, the records show.

But this is not a unique situation, as the story goes on to give more examples of very high error rates and the serious consequences of those errors in many other communities across the country.

Submission + - This 'adversarial' pattern can prevent surveillance cameras from detecting you (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: Bill Swearingen has spent the past year running largely the same test, over and over again. The goal was to produce a computer-generated pattern that could block the surveillance cameras lining America’s streets from detecting it.

Some 31 million tests later, Swearingen says he can now produce patterns on-demand that, when applied to clothing and objects, prevent some of the most commonly deployed license plate readers and surveillance cameras from detecting whatever the pattern covers, from people to vehicles.

His project, which he calls noRecognition, allows people to escape the automatic detection and algorithmic surveillance used across the U.S. and beyond.

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