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Comment An entity in the US of A won't entertain this... (Score 0, Troll) 42

"It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily (...) to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and (...) to ensure that data is only processed in-house,"

Let Austria be ready for `retaliation` from the "mighty" USA.

Blackmail, sanctions and further, all that existing complex electronic gadgetry will immediately need some form of license to operate.

I think there's gonna some pain for the Armed Forces.

Comment It's not too late to "smell the coffee..." (Score 0) 178

..."I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle,"

If I were the graduate, I'd simply join an apprenticeship program, almost guaranteeing me a foot in the trades.

At a point in life, one has to realise that these aren't the nineties. The graduate would do well as an electrician, plumber or carpenter in my opinion.

Comment Always found Google Finance to be underwhelming... (Score 1) 12

Compared to what is out there, Yahoo, Investor, Bloomberg etc etc, I have always found Google's product to be underwhelming bigtime!

Issues:

* Its interface damn ugly!

* There's almost no structure to the "feedback" one gets once a query is submitted!

* The whole site has a dull color theme. Google thinks users of this product are teenagers with great eyesight!

They now embark on a new task...what's wrong with Google these days?

Comment What as a nation, do we do pretty well these days? (Score 3, Interesting) 18

... but two-way communication was lost the next day and the team was unable to recover the connection. From the limited data ground teams received before the satellite went dark, the craft's solar arrays were not correctly positioned toward the sun, which caused its batteries to drain.

Just asking...

Comment A state that can't solve age an age old matter!! (Score 1) 74

... "AI is already transforming different industries. But we haven't seen many examples of it being used in our industry."...

Why won't they solve homelessness before engaging in all this AI stuff?

A great state that just cannot provide housing to its less fortunate is just so depressing!

I guess I shouldn't blame them for the federal government has served as a mentor on the subject, sad!

Comment I still miss an MS Access equivalent (Score 1) 60

...The city aims to "no longer be dependent on American software solutions and acquire true digital sovereignty," according to an official statement.

While I applaud the city for this move, I miss an MS Access equivalent on Linux. In short, there's none that comes close.

There have been efforts in this direction though...

Gambas
Lazarus
Kexi

All these show promise, though more serious work is needed.

With Access, one could choose what backend to employ. It still remains an formidable solution for many small office database problems especially with the ability to program business logic into the frontend and report generation.

Comment Re:The other 40% are doing just fine (Score 1) 84

...If this were a problem you'd see it in the 40% of the market in Australia who are on Android...

I am now advised by inference, that Australia is [technically] an iOS shop, with the close to 60% share.

I agree with you though, that to put it another way, Apple think we're fools and have no brains!

Comment What exactly does the Pentagon do well these days? (Score 1) 128

"...The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget..."

Can anyone identify what the Pentagon/DoD does really well these days?

One major file they [mis]handled (with shame if i may add), is the way they left Afghanistan with "tails between their limbs"...a total shame for this "mighty" USA.

Just imagine...You spend 20 years fighting thugs in sandals, only to hand over to the same thugs 20 years later with billions spent and further billions in hardware left in their country!

I'll scream "shame...shame...shame..."

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Comment it's all sad, i can conclude... (Score 1) 77

"...With about 90% of schools now providing these devices, test scores hover near historic lows -- only 28% of eighth graders proficient in math and 30% in reading..."

bold mine...

An immigrant I hired a few years ago, who had to learn English from scratch, was surprised that his workmates, who'd spoken the language since "age zero", could not write a two paragraph composition of what may have taken place the night before!

And I agreed with him, sadly...and for those that attempted at a report, it was full of slang, grammatical errors and would hardly qualify for the least grade in my opinion.

We're going down folks...

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