178390830
submission
Qbertino writes:
Heise, a (the) German IT news publisher reports (English version by Google Translate) that the German state of Brandenburg is getting the worlds highest wind turbine, with an overall height of 300m designed to capture so-called 3rd level winds at higher altitudes. The article also has a short 3D animation illustrating construction and size relative to regular modern wind turbines.
177054541
submission
Qbertino writes:
Heise.de reports (Google Translate link for English version) that a racing drone developed by the Dutch Delft University of Technology has beaten three human DCL champions in a first for autonomous racing drones. Video footage in the article.
177053923
submission
Qbertino writes:
German public news Tagesschau reports on an ESA video-game that helps a future moon-lander guidance AI spot craters. Games already have helped collect visual data on millions of craters. University Darmstadt developed the game called IMPACT that is to help ESA efforts to establish a base on the moon. An older article from August 2024 has some further details on the project.
176987301
submission
Qbertino writes:
This afternoon the political parties CDU and SPD agreed on their final coalition contract to form a Government that includes the founding of a German Federal Ministry of Digital Affairs and Modernisation. German public news Tagesschau.de writes:
Praise for the Ministry of Digital Affairs
The digital association Bitkom welcomed the planned establishment of a Ministry for Digitalization and State Modernization. It called it a “milestone for Germany” and a long-overdue signal for progress.
If properly structured, the ministry could bring together digital policy issues at the federal level under one roof and thus become a true driver of digitalization.
“More than ever, we must now become competitive, innovative, and digitally capable of action.
As a German IT expert I can say: Well, that's about effing time. Halle-flippin-luja. I'm cautiously optimistic that the upcoming Friedrich Merz government won't botch this completely. Let's hope they do first things first: National OIDC-type Ident/Auth/Auth, Signature and Encryption with optional anonymity and strict enforcement of open human-readable formats for official documents and notices. We'll see.
175207873
submission
Qbertino writes:
The Villach (Austria [Mozart, not Kangaroos}) production plant of the German chipmaker Infineon has achieved two major breakthroughs in microchip production. 300mm wafers are being introduced into regular production with an added capability of production-ready gallium nitride microchips. Video Newsreporthere (German, turn on subtitles).
164277356
submission
Qbertino writes:
The German IT news site heise reports (article in German) that digital art pioneer, SF author ("The Mind Net") and cyberspace avantgardist Herbert W. Franke has died at age 95. His wife recounted on his twitter account: "Herbert loved to call himself the dinosaur of computer art. I am [...] devastated to announce that our beloved dinosaur has left the earth. He passed away knowing there is a community of artists and art enthusiasts deeply caring about his art and legacy."
Among much pioneering work he founded one of the worlds first digital art festivals "Ars Electronica" in Austria in 1979.
157776069
submission
Qbertino writes:
The Free Open Source 3D production software Blender has been released in version 3.0 (official showreel) with more new features, improvements and performance optimizations as well as further improved workflows. In recent years Blender has received an increasing rate of attention from the 3D industry, with various larger businesses such as Epic, Microsoft, Apple and most recently Intel joining the blender foundation and donating to its development fund. Blender has seen an increasing rise in usage in various industries, such as animated feature film production, architecture and game development.
143382014
submission
Qbertino writes:
Heise.de, a Germann tech news publisher, reports that Wind has replaced Coal (Source in German) as main source of power in Germany.
"[...] The share of renewable energies in the amount of electricity generated and fed into the grid domestically rose from 42.3 percent in 2019 to 47.0 percent last year. At 25.6 percent, wind power was the first renewable energy source to have the highest share of the amount of electricity fed into the grid in a given year, replacing coal as the most important energy source. In 2020, 5.4 percent more electricity was generated from wind power than in 2019, when the share had been 22.8 percent. [...]" (Sidenote: Paragraph translated by deepL in seconds, find it quite feasible as a German and English native speaker. Color me impressed.)
This is not much to brag about yet, because Coal is still buffering large parts of the Nuclear Fission exit Germany is doing, but it's a good milestone. By and large the article concludes that Germany's exit from Nuclear Fission is going in the right direction.
137610364
submission
Qbertino writes:
The German "Cyberbunker" Trial (UK Times, maybe paywalled) , Dutch english article (not paywalled), starts these days. Defendants are on trial for hosting cybercriminal activity on their servers inside a cold-war bunker in the rhine-mosel region of Germany. It's the largest trial of this kind in German history and is unusual, because the operators of the hosting service themselves are on trial for being active partners in crime with their hosting customers including illegal services offering, among other, drug markets and child porn exchange. Investigations took 5 years before authorities took action a year ago and arrested a international team of 8 people who are now on trial. Prosecuters believe to have a case which is set to take 15 months until the end of 2021 simply due to the sheer mass of material they've gatherd to make a case. The defendants, which include adolescents at the time of crime, face up to 15 years in prison should they be convicted.
124495168
submission
Qbertino writes:
The German ditial news site t3n has a report (German article) on Simon Weckert, an artist from Berlin who uses a cart filled with 99 smartphones in Google Maps car navigation mode to clear out streets in Berlin city. They trick Maps into thinking there's an full-stop traffic jam in progress and lead other cars around it. It's pretty hilarious and a fun project. Nice idea too. Video presentation here.
115365022
submission
Qbertino writes:
The VW ID.3 (VW German Minisite and Configurator) is a compact car with a design losely based on the very sucessful VW Golf line. The base model costs less than 30 000 Euros ($33000 US) with ranges of 330, 420 and 550 km. Along with the car comes a new corporate identity with a newly designed logo reminiscent of the dawn of VW signaling VWs transition into the electric era it anounced with fanfare a while back. VW also isn't to shabby about giving credit where credit is due: "Without Elon Musk my job would be considerably harder." VW Chief Strategist Michael Jost was quoted a few days ago (Business Insider Germany).
114661168
submission
Qbertino writes:
A few weeks ago on PHPday in Verona (Italy) Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP, gave an enlightening talk on PHP and its history. 25 years of PHP (video of the talk) is ripe with details on PHP, the design choices behind the webs favorite server-side templating language and with explenations on why what you may think of an inconsistent mess actually makes perfect sense just the way it is. Very insightful, fun, interesting and a must-watch for PHP lovers and haters alike.
102966864
submission
Qbertino writes:
The German Web industry magazine T3N (think of it as the German Techcrunch) has an article about a test circuit and a test vehicle — a modified Mercedes Benz limosine of the time — that was set up by the German tire manufacturer Continental in order to test tires in a precisely reproducable set of tests. Hence the self-driving mechanism provided by a wire in the test track to send and recieve signals from the car and to record data on the testruns on magnetic tape and other hightech stuff from the time. Here's a short video, errm, film clip showing the setup in action, driverless seat included. Todays AI is nowhere to be seen of course, but the entire setup itself seems pretty impressive and sophisitcated.
101654314
submission
Qbertino writes:
I do PHP for a living. The problem I have is the classic catch-22: PHP is used at every streetcorner which accounts for an abundance of jobs and work to do. However, I'm growing increasingly frustrated with the ignorant and clueless in the vincinity of PHP. Crappy code and baaaaad application setups is one thing, but people refusing to fix them or simply not even understanding the broader implications of bad applications or attempting SEO with gadgets while refusing to fix 3.5 MB per pagecall are just minor tidbits in a history of increasingly unnerving run-ins with knuckledragers in the "web agency" camp. My strong suspicion is, that this also correlates directly with the prominence of server-side done with PHP in these teams. Will I leave the larger part of this backwards stuff behind if I move to another server-side PL such as Java or Kotlin for professional work in the broader web area? Do I have a chance to do quality work on quality projects using PHP or are those slim compare to other PLs? In short, should I ditch PHP?
99229603
submission
Qbertino writes:
Roughly put for the kicks of it I'm doing a BsC in Media-CompSci and have to do my exams in paper-coding. I find this patently absurd in 2018. Not that I'd expect an IDE — it's an exam after all — but being able to use a screen and a keyboard with a very simple editor should be standard at universities these days IMHO. What do you think and what are your recent experiences with exams at universities? Have you needed to paper-code for an exam sometime recently? Is this still standard? What's the point despite annoying students? Did I miss something?
