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Comment Re:What about Trump? (Score 1) 184

He should get credit for Operation Warp Speed which did help accomplish the goal of getting the vaccines developed and through trials very quickly.

He keeps trying to take his justly deserved credit for it but his supporters just boo him when he talks about it.

This is the politicization of excellent science. Leave the orange orangutan out of this and let's think of the science.

Comment Re: Java is already dead. (Score 1) 80

Why does your CIO need a support package for a friggin language? We use gcc at my place. Do you think we get onto the hotline to Gnu HQ everytime we have a core dump??

JRE isn't just something that runs only on the server. When a serious bug comes around that cripples every workstation, your CIO won't give a flying fuck about "open" support at 3AM. They just want to know what the fuck you're ACTUALLY doing about the problem other than waiting on someone to clean the Cheeto dust from their fingers to fix a massive impact to business operations and revenue that will result in your boss being eventually fired.

One would think you're more interested in self-preservation. You wanna waive that unsupported "open" flag around? Do it at home, not at work.

Using tough language without specific cases is hardly "edgy". It sounds like inexperience to me. If Java was that bad, no companies, banks, etc would use it. OpenJDK is a thing with multiple stewards (including IBM, God help us).

Medicine

Coronavirus Vaccine Developed By University of Oxford Appears Safe and Trains the Immune System, Trials Involving More Than 1000 People Showed (bloomberg.com) 229

A coronavirus vaccine the University of Oxford is developing with AstraZeneca showed promising results in early human testing, a sign of progress in the high-stakes pursuit of a shot to defeat the pathogen. From a report: The vaccine increased levels of both protective neutralizing antibodies and immune T-cells that target the virus, according to the study organizers. The results were published Monday in The Lancet medical journal. BBC adds: Trials involving around 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and white blood cells that can fight coronavirus. The findings are hugely promising, but it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way. The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.
Iphone

Why Apple Went 64-Bit With the iPhone 5s 512

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Adrian Kingsley-Hughes says it's not just because Apple likes bragging about being first and because a 64-bit processor sounds cooler than 32-bits that Apple used the 64-bit A7 chip in the new iPhone 5s. A shift from a 32-bit processor to a 64-bit part paves the way for iPhones to be fitted out with 4GB+ of RAM down the line, but more importantly the move brings iOS and OS X apps much closer. The architecture for 64-bit apps on iOS will be almost identical to the architecture for OS X apps, making it easy to create a common code base that runs in both operating systems. 'Apple has slowly been bringing iOS-like features to Mac OS for years now: think of Launchpad and Gatekeeper,' writes Sascha Segan. 'The ultimate prize, of course, would be to bring the million-plus iOS apps to Macs. Apple could do that with an ARM-compatible virtual machine on Mac hardware, but it would want the VM, the OS and the associated apps to play nicely in the much larger memory space available on Macs. That means moving the whole system over to 64 bit.' By unifying iOS and Mac OS with Xcode developer tools in a 64-bit space, Apple could once again leap ahead of Microsoft and Google, says Segan. Microsoft hasn't yet been able to leverage its desktop strengths to achieve success as a mobile OS. The 64-bit chips for Android devices aren't ready, and neither is Android itself."
Google

Google Releases Street View Images From Fukushima Ghost Town 63

mdsolar writes in with news that Goolge has released Street View pictures from inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima disaster. "Google Inc. (GOOG) today released images taken by its Street View service from the town of Namie, Japan, inside the zone that was evacuated after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011. Google, operator of the world's biggest Web search engine, entered Namie this month at the invitation of the town's mayor, Tamotsu Baba, and produced the 360-degree imagery for the Google Maps and Google Earth services, it said in an e-mailed statement. All of Namie's 21,000 residents were forced to flee after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the town, causing the world's worst nuclear accident after Chernobyl. Baba asked Mountain View, California-based Google to map the town to create a permanent record of its state two years after the evacuation, he said in a Google blog post."

Comment Re:Does that mean (Score 3, Informative) 141

I have lived in Africa my whole life and that CIA plot thing is old. It's now a "plot by multi-national pharmaceutical companies". At least, it was during Thabo Mbeki's tenure as South African president (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_denialism#In_South_Africa). AIDS awareness is alive and well here.
Firefox

Firefox 15 Released: Silent Updates, Compressed Textures, Add-on Memory Leak Fix 393

Mozilla released Firefox 15 today, and it brings a number of interesting changes. First, the browser is finally switching to a "silent" update model, like Chrome. (No doubt in answer to endless complaints about their rapid release cycle.) In addition, Mozilla says they have "now plugged the main cause of memory leaks in Firefox add-ons." Add-ons commonly hold extra copies of sites in memory when they don't need to, and the browser now has a mechanism to detect this and reclaim the memory. Another significant improvement is the addition of native support for compressed textures in WebGL, which is a boost for high-res 3D gaming. Here are release notes for the desktop and mobile versions.
Handhelds

Ask Slashdot: Best Use For an Old Smartphone? 301

zaba writes "The original iPhone was a dream come true for me. Phone, camera, mp3 player and data all in one device. It had more cpu and memory than my first computer! Several generations of smartphones later, my wife and I have some random smartphones (some iPhone, some Android) lying around. Between privacy concerns, bad batteries, etc. these phones are not worthy of donation. So, I ask you, Slashdot readers, have you done anything fun with an old smartphone? Any suggestions/ideas?"
Censorship

Belgian ISP Ordered to Block The Pirate Bay; Telecomix and TPB Offer Workarounds 97

bs0d3 writes "Today a court in Belgium overruled an earlier judgment and ordered an ISP to block The Pirate Bay. The type of block to be used by the ISP is a simple DNS filter, which is similar to ones used before in Denmark. In Denmark the DNS block was extremely easy to circumvent, and the attention to The Pirate Bay actually increased Danish site traffic after the block. Today a hacktivist group called Telecomix, which is more recently known for helping to establish communications during the Internet blackout in Egypt, is offering their help. Their custom made 'censorship proof' DNS service is designed for situations just like this. ISP customers facing a block can simply use Telecomix's DNS server instead of the ISP-provided one to access blocked sites such as The Pirate Bay." The Pirate Bay also has suggestions for getting around the DNS block.
Networking

New Laser Data Transfer Rate Record Set At 26 Tbps 127

MasterPatricko writes "Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany have published a technique to push optical data transfer rates to new levels. The article says, 'The trick is to use what is known as a "fast Fourier transform" to unpick more than 300 separate colours of light in a laser beam, each encoded with its own string of information.'"

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