news aggregator

How the MITS Altair 8800, a $264 RAM board, and some BASIC changed the world

This week marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of several empires. On July 22, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed a deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.…

The "is" package was infected with cross-platform malware after a scam targeting maintainers

The popular npm package "is" was infected with cross-platform malware, around the same time that linting utility packages used with the prettier code formatter were infected with Windows-only malware.…

Physicists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory superheated gold to over 33,000F using giant lasers and X-rays -- far exceeding the limits set by long-standing physics models. From the report: In an experiment presented today in Nature, researchers, for the first time ever, demonstrated a way to directly measure the temperature of matter in extreme states, or conditions with intensely high temperatures, pressures, or densities. Using the new technique, scientists succeeded in capturing gold at a temperature far beyond its boiling point -- a procedure called superheating -- at which point the common metal existed in a strange limbo between solid and liquid. The results suggest that, under the right conditions, gold may have no superheating limit. If true, this could have a wide range of applications across spaceflight, astrophysics, or nuclear chemistry, according to the researchers. The study is based on a two-pronged experiment. First, the scientists used a laser to superheat a sample of gold, suppressing the metal's natural tendency to expand when heated. Next, they used ultrabright X-rays to zap the gold samples, which scattered off the surface of the gold. By calculating the distortions in the X-ray's frequency after colliding with the gold particles, the team locked down the speed and temperature of the atoms. The experimental result seemingly refutes a well-established theory in physics, which states that structures like gold can't be heated more than three times their boiling point, 1,948 degrees Fahrenheit (1,064 degrees Celsius). Beyond those temperatures, superheated gold is supposed to reach the so-called "entropy catastrophe" -- or, in more colloquial terms, the heated gold should've blown up. The researchers themselves didn't expect to surpass that limit. The new result disproves the conventional theory, but it does so in a big way by far overshooting the theoretical prediction, showing that it's possible to heat gold up to a jaw-dropping 33,740 degrees F (18,726 degrees C). [...] The team is already applying the technique to other materials, such as silver and iron, which they happily report produced some promising data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CISPE cites recent channel changes, but the deal was decided on different matters

+COMMENT Trade group Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has filed a formal appeal before the European General Court to seek annulment of the European Commission's decision to approve Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.…

Sometimes, one small tweak can make a very big difference.

There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever.…

G-Cloud on track for $50 billion revenue as AI creates a new generation of Google-eyed youth

Google’s parent company Alphabet has increased its capex budget for the year by $10 billion and now expects to spend $85 billion this year, and more in 2026.…