Comment Re: There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 81
You know what you sound like? Exactly the type of victim that Broadcom build most of their business model on.
Comment Re:There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 81
Have you met young people that intentionally became Windows admins? Or the windows admins (the legitimate ones) you can hire out of, say, India? My guess is with your history, you probably have not.
No argument from me that you get dumb Unix admins as well.
Submission + - First Nuclear Clocks Start Ticking in Vienna and Beijing (phys.org)
necro81 writes: Two groups, one in Vienna and one in Beijing, have successfully demonstrated the world's first nuclear clocks. Standard atomic clocks, like the caesium clocks that define the second, operate by observing the transition of electrons between different orbits about the nucleus. The resulting radiation is usually in the microwave range, and can produce clocks accurate to one second in 100 billion years.
Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.
It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.
Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).
Nuclear clocks go a step further, and probe energy transitions within the nucleus itself. Nuclei can arrange their protons and neutrons into different configurations, called isomers. The isomer with the lowest energy is the one usually found; higher-energy ones are only metastable and decay quickly. Usually it takes serious energy — x-rays and gamma rays — to excite a nucleus into a higher-energy arrangement. It so happens that thorium-229 can be excited using UV light with a wavelength of 148 nm — just within the capabilities of some exotic lasers.
It's still been quite a challenge. For one thing, Th-229 is not found in nature; it must be extracted from the decay chain of uranium-235. The Beijing team used just a microgram mixed in a crystal of calcium fluoride.
Although these prototype nuclear clocks are not yet more accurate than existing atomic clocks (one second in millions, rather than billions, of years), they show the way towards what may be possible. Because the energy transition is in the nucleus, rather than the electron cloud, it is less susceptible to outside disturbances like magnetic fields. And the fundamental frequency is much higher (five orders of magnitude), which should yield more precise timing. This development could lead to smaller and more reliable time standards across the world (and solar system).
Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 24
What zApp is that?
There once was a product, called zApp, a portable GUI library over Windows and several Unixes/Linux. Unfortunately the Mac port never came.
Then they sold it to Roguewave, and they enshitificated it - especially the price.
Comment Re:Which 400 libs? (Score 1) 24
Have you tried asking AI?
Comment Re:There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 81
I had a very important word in there: "most". You may want to think about the implication of that word for a singular case. You clearly need to improve your reading comprehension skills.
Comment Re:Sure, way up north maybe (Score 1) 246
You can avoid most of the paint by just ignoring DST. Don't change you clocks. Helps if your work is flexible about hours, but you can always move some evening stuff to the morning and vise versa.
Try it, you will find that it's no real effort to remember everyone else's clocks are off by an hour.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 246
Look at Nepal, in the UTC+05:45 timezone. They aren't even the only ones who like to break technology with their non-whole-hour timezone.
The world seems to be moving towards trying to simplify time a bit, e.g. by discontinuing leap seconds. Personally I'd start a project to build a booster large enough to correct the Earth's orbit of the sun to a nice round 256 days, but since there doesn't seem to be much support for that at least we can stop bothering with DST.
Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 246
You make it sound like not having DST is terrible, but most of the world doesn't bother with it.
It's basically Europe, the US, and a few random others including half of Australia for some reason. Everyone else gets by just fine without DST, and much of the world gave it up when they stopped being colonies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Maybe it's time to think about the hours we do things in general. For example, in Japan most shops don't open until 10 or 11 AM, and stay open until 7-8 PM. That gives people the opportunity to visit them after work or school. Schools and employers set opening times based on local conditions, because there are vast differences between northern and southern climates. It turns out that everyone doing what makes sense for them works just fine.
With things line linear TV and radio becoming less relevant, times also matter less. It's a good thing, it gives us flexibility.
Comment Such a great technology (Score 2) 16
The cost for all the negative side-effects is already larger than any potential benefits can ever be.
Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 4, Funny) 37
Just because everyone was operating on the assumption that high energy cosmic neutrinos exist doesn't mean that it isn't worth proving that beyond all doubt. It wouldn't be the first time if the results was unexpected, or if it turned out a whole load of accepted physics were based on a faulty assumption.
Submission + - AI Male Agents paid more than their Female counterparts. (the-independent.com)
williamyf writes: If you tought the Gender Pay Gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again:
A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%
The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.
A recent study from the University of Limerick found out that, in a VR office setting, AI agents (not even humanoid robots) that presented themselves as "Male" were paid more per task AND perceives as more "human like" than their "female" counterparts, even though both were using the same underlying technology (LLM model, agent, guardrail and Harness). The pay-gap was aprox 10%
The study was done on 189 people. Small sample, but still, food for tought.
Comment Re: There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 81
Probably because people are stupid and inflexible. Well. Looks like Broadcom knows the idiots they are exploiting very well.
Comment Re:There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 81
And yet, you could have, at really small costs, made sure all your infrastructure also runs on Proxmox. May even have saved you money in the process because things would have done cleaner and that always pays off. An ounce of preparation
Comment Re:There are still VMWare customers? (Score 1) 81
Exactly. A small bit of foresight and preparation saves you a mountain of effort and cost later.
