news aggregator

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI now in competition regulator's sights

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 12:31
Has recent CEO, board shenanigans given rise to a merger situation? CMA is asking for a friend

The UK's competition regulator wants to know if recent changes at OpenAI and its evolving relationship with Microsoft are cause for concern.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 11:43
This is release 0b11111111 (0xFF) – what could possibly go wrong?

The 255th version of systemd is here, banishing support for split and unmerged /usr directories but enriching its UKI boot support.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 11:01
Yearning for the pre-web internet can be misplaced... it certainly wasn't user-friendly

Long before the internet became our world, there was a mishmash of online services such as AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy. Except for being faster, there's less difference between then and now than you might think. …

Categories: Linux fréttir

Openreach hits halfway mark in quest to hook up 25M premises with fiber broadband

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 10:14
12.5 million teased with speedy internet, only 4 million take the bait

Openreach claims it has reached the halfway point in its goal of rolling out fiber broadband to 25 million UK premises by the end of 2026.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Nikon Makes Special Firmware For NASA To Block Galactic Cosmic Rays In Photos

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-08 10:00
In an exclusive interview with PetaPixel, astronaut Don Pettit reveals the changes that Nikon makes to its firmware especially for NASA. From the report: Galactic cosmic rays are high-energy particles that originate from outside the solar system that likely come from explosive events such as a supernova. They are bad news for cameras in space -- damaging the sensor and spoiling photos -- so Nikon made special firmware for NASA to limit the harm. Pettit tells PetaPixel that Nikon changed the in-camera noise reduction settings to battle the cosmic rays -- noise is unwanted texture and blur on photos. Normal cameras have in-camera noise reduction for exposures equal to or longer than one second. This is because camera manufacturers don't think photographers need noise reduction for shorter exposures because there's no noise to reduce. But in space, that's not true. "Our cameras in space get sensor damage from galactic cosmic rays and after about six months we replace all the cameras but you still have cameras with significant cosmic ray damage," explains Pettit. "It shows up at fast shutter speeds, not just the slow ones. So we got Nikon to change the algorithm so that it can do in-camera noise reduction at shutter speeds of up to 500th of a second." Pettit says Nikon's in-camera noise reduction "does wonders" for getting rid of the cosmic ray damage and that "trying to get rid of it after the fact is really difficult." That's not the only special firmware feature that Nikon makes for NASA; photographers who shoot enough photos know that the file naming system resets itself eventually which is no good for the space agency's astronauts. "The file naming system on a standard digital system will repeat every so often and we can't have two pictures with the same number," explains Pettit. "We'll take half a million pictures with the crew on orbit and so Nikon has changed the way the RAW files are numbered so that there will be no two with the same file number." The report notes that NASA started using Nikon film cameras in 1971, shortly after the Apollo era; "in part because Nikon is so good at making custom modifications that help the astronauts." Previously, the agency used boxy, black Hasselblad cameras.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Linux fréttir

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 08:29
Cover-up saved the culprit after a battery of tests diagnosed the problem

On Call The steady process of time means that The Register has once again arrived at Friday and the timeslot we reserve for On Call – our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support trials and tribulations.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Hubble Space Telescope is back in the game after NASA fixes gyro glitch

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 07:34
No repair mission required – for now

The Hubble Space Telescope is expected to resume science operations on Friday, after a gyroscope glitch forced NASA to suspend astronomical observations for weeks.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Light Can Be Reflected Not Only In Space But Also In Time

Slashdot - Fri, 2023-12-08 07:00
Anna Demming reports via Scientific American: [A]lthough so far there's no way to unscramble an egg, in certain carefully controlled scenarios within relatively simple systems, researchers have managed to turn back time. The trick is to create a certain kind of reflection. First, imagine a regular spatial reflection, like one you see in a silver-backed glass mirror. Here reflection occurs because for a ray of light, silver is a very different transmission medium than air; the sudden change in optical properties causes the light to bounce back, like a Ping-Pong ball hitting a wall. Now imagine that instead of changing at particular points in space, the optical properties all along the ray's path change sharply at a specific moment in time. Rather than recoiling in space, the light would recoil in time, precisely retracing its tracks, like the Ping-Pong ball returning to the player who last hit it. This is a "time reflection." Time reflections have fascinated theorists for decades but have proved devilishly tricky to pull off in practice because rapidly and sufficiently changing a material's optical properties is no small task. Now, however, researchers at the City University of New York have demonstrated a breakthrough: the creation of light-based time reflections. To do so, physicist Andrea Alu and his colleagues devised a "metamaterial" with adjustable optical properties that they could tweak within fractions of a nanosecond to halve or double how quickly light passes through. Metamaterials have properties determined by their structures; many are composed of arrays of microscopic rods or rings that can be tuned to interact with and manipulate light in ways that no natural material can. Bringing their power to bear on time reflections, Alu says, revealed some surprises. "Now we are realizing that [time reflections] can be much richer than we thought because of the way that we implement them," he adds. [...] The device Alu and his collaborators developed is essentially a waveguide that channels microwave-frequency light. A densely spaced array of switches along the waveguide connects it to capacitor circuits, which can dynamically add or remove material for the light to encounter. This can radically shift the waveguide's effective properties, such as how easily it allows light to pass through. "We are not changing the material; we are adding or subtracting material," Alu says. "That is why the process can be so fast." Time reflections come with a range of counterintuitive effects that have been theoretically predicted but never demonstrated with light. For instance, what is at the beginning of the original signal will be at the end of the reflected signal -- a situation akin to looking at yourself in a mirror and seeing the back of your head. In addition, whereas a standard reflection alters how light traverses space, a time reflection alters light's temporal components -- that is, its frequencies. As a result, in a time-reflected view, the back of your head is also a different color. Alu and his colleagues observed both of these effects in the team's device. Together they hold promise for fueling further advances in signal processing and communications -- two domains that are vital for the function of, say, your smartphone, which relies on effects such as shifting frequencies. Just a few months after developing the device, Alu and his colleagues observed more surprising behavior when they tried creating a time reflection in that waveguide while shooting two beams of light at each other inside it. Normally colliding beams of light behave as waves, producing interference patterns where their overlapping peaks and troughs add up or cancel out like ripples on water (in "constructive" or "destructive" interference, respectively). But light can, in fact, act as a pointlike projectile, a photon, as well as a wavelike oscillating field -- that is, it has "wave-particle duality." Generally a particular scenario will distinctly elicit just one behavior or the other, however. For instance, colliding beams of light don't bounce off each other like billiard balls! But according to Alu and his team's experiments, when a time reflection occurs, it seems that they do. The researchers achieved this curious effect by controlling whether the colliding waves were interfering constructively or destructively -- whether they were adding or subtracting from each other -- when the time reflection occurred. By controlling the specific instant when the time reflection took place, the scientists demonstrated that the two waves bounce off each other with the same wave amplitudes that they started with, like colliding billiard balls. Alternatively they could end up with less energy, like recoiling spongy balls, or even gain energy, as would be the case for balls at either end of a stretched spring. "We can make these interactions energy-conserving, energy-supplying or energy-suppressing," Alu says, highlighting how time reflections could provide a new control knob for applications that involve energy conversion and pulse shaping, in which the shape of a wave is changed to optimize a pulse's signal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Linux fréttir

Polish train maker denies claims its software bricked rolling stock maintained by competitor

TheRegister - Fri, 2023-12-08 06:30
Says it was probably hacked, which isn't good news either

A trio of Polish security researchers claim to have found that trains built by Newag SA contain software that sabotages them if the hardware is serviced by competitors.…

Categories: Linux fréttir

Pages

Subscribe to netserv.is aggregator