VW is reportedly struggling with the ID.3's software

Volkswagen’s ID.3 rollout might have hit a snag. Germany’s Manager Magazin sources claim the EV’s underlying software has been rushed and rife with bugs, including dropouts and other issues. Test drivers are supposedly finding up to 300 errors per…

Source: Engadget – VW is reportedly struggling with the ID.3’s software

Two Private Satellites Dock In Space In Historic First For Orbital Servicing

schwit1 quotes Space.com: In a historic first for satellite operations, a commercial spacecraft “helper” has docked with a working communications satellite to provide life-extension services. The companies involved in the meetup — Northrop Grumman and Intelsat — hailed the operation, which took place Tuesday (Feb. 25), as the beginning of a new era that will see robotic spacecraft giving new life to older satellites that are low on fuel or require repairs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Two Private Satellites Dock In Space In Historic First For Orbital Servicing

Nearly every top-selling smartphone in 2019 was an iPhone or Galaxy

It’s almost a cliché to say that Apple and Samsung dictate the tempo of the smartphone market, but there’s now more evidence to support that claim. Counterpoint Research has calculated that nine out of the top ten smartphones sold worldwide i…

Source: Engadget – Nearly every top-selling smartphone in 2019 was an iPhone or Galaxy

SpaceX Starship SN-1 Fails Pressure Test and Explodes

SpaceX envisions Starship as a 387-foot-tall (118 meters) spacecraft/booster that can carry up to 100 people to Mars. Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) tipped us off to this progress report from Space.com:
SpaceX’s new Starship prototype appeared to burst during a pressure test late Friday (Feb. 28), rupturing under the glare of flood lights and mist at the company’s south Texas facility. The Starship SN1 prototype, which SpaceX moved to a launchpad near its Boca Chica, Texas, assembly site earlier this week, blew apart during a liquid nitrogen pressure test according to a video captured by SPadre.com. A separate video posted by NASASpaceflight.com member BocaChicaGal clearly shows the Starship SN1’s midsection buckle during the test, then shoot upward before crashing back to the ground…

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has hinted that many of these prototypes will be needed to perfect the Starship vehicle… Musk unveiled the first full-size Starship prototype, called the Starship Mk1, in September 2019. That vehicle blew its top during cryogenic testing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – SpaceX Starship SN-1 Fails Pressure Test and Explodes

Byte's first batch of creator partners will split $250,000

Byte, the short-form video platform created by Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann, will soon start giving early creators a cut of its ad revenue. The company first revealed its plans for a Partner Program last month, publishing initial details of how it’ll p…

Source: Engadget – Byte’s first batch of creator partners will split 0,000

Uber's Sensible Solution for Drivers Concerned About Coronavirus: Just Don't Work, Duh

As the coronavirus outbreak rages on, an increasing number of tech giants have begun adopting additional safety measures to minimize their employees’ exposure, such as restricting travel or canceling prescheduled events. In that vein, Uber pushed out a memo to its global network of drivers Friday with some tips on how…

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Source: Gizmodo – Uber’s Sensible Solution for Drivers Concerned About Coronavirus: Just Don’t Work, Duh

Stealth Startup Plans Fundamentally New Kind of Computer with Circuit-Rearranging Processor

VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build “a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia.”
ZDNet reports:
The last thirty years in computing, said CEO Rodrigo Liang, have been “focused on instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for. The next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it flows through a system is really what’s going to drive performance.” It’s not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, “we are focused on the complete system,” he told ZDNet. “To really provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the entire system, to integrate across several layers of hardware and software….”

[One approach to training neural networks with very little labeled data] is part of the shift of computer programming from hard-coded to differentiable, in which code is learned on the fly, commonly referred to as “software 2.0.” Liang’s co-founders include Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, who says a programmable logic device similar to a field-programmable gate array could change its shape over and over to align its circuitry [to] that differentiated program, with the help of a smart compiler such as Spatial. [Spatial is “a computing language that can take programs and de-compose them into operations that can be run in parallel, for the purpose of making chips that can be ‘reconfigurable,’ able to change their circuitry on the fly.”]

In an interview in his office last spring, Olukotun laid out a sketch of how all that might come together. In what he refers to as a “data flow,” the computing paradigm is turned inside-out. Rather than stuffing a program’s instructions into a fixed set of logic gates permanently etched into the processor, the processor re-arranges its circuits, perhaps every clock cycle, to variably manipulate large amounts of data that “flows” through the chip…. Today’s chips execute instructions in an instruction “pipeline” that is fixed, he observed, “whereas in this reconfigurable data-flow architecture, it’s not instructions that are flowing down the pipeline, it’s data that’s flowing down the pipeline, and the instructions are the configuration of the hardware that exists in place.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Stealth Startup Plans Fundamentally New Kind of Computer with Circuit-Rearranging Processor

Samsung Blames the Coronavirus for the Galaxy S20’s Horrible Sales Numbers

As you all might have noticed, the coronavirus outbreak is affecting a lot of things in the tech world, from huge conferences to international and domestic travel, among others. Now, Samsung is also blaming coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, for the new Galaxy S20 line’s horrible initial sales numbers in South…

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Source: Gizmodo – Samsung Blames the Coronavirus for the Galaxy S20’s Horrible Sales Numbers

FDA allows new coronavirus testing tech before it gets emergency approval

The FDA is determined to step up the pace of coronavirus testing in the US to cope with the recent coronavirus outbreak, and it’s willing to greenlight technology at an early stage to make that happen. The regulator said it will allow new diagnostic…

Source: Engadget – FDA allows new coronavirus testing tech before it gets emergency approval

What Happens After 550 Times the Usual Dose of LSD?

“From the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs comes three case studies on people who benefited from LSD overdoses including one woman who took a dose of 55 milligrams of pure powdered LSD,” writes clovis (Slashdot reader #4,684).
CNN reports:
The 49-year-old woman, known as CB, had contracted Lyme disease in her early 20s, which damaged her feet and ankles and left her in “significant pain.” In September 2015, she took 55 milligrams of what she believed was cocaine but was actually “pure LSD in powder form.” The authors defined a normal recreational dose as 100 micrograms — equal to 0.1 milligrams. The woman blacked out and vomited frequently for the next 12 hours but reported feeling “pleasantly high” for the 12 hours after that — still vomiting, but less often. According to her roommate, she sat mostly still in a chair, either with her eyes open or rolled back, occasionally speaking random words. Ten hours later, she was able to hold a conversation and “seemed coherent.”
Her foot pain was gone the next day and she stopped using morphine for five days. While the pain returned, she was able to control it with a lower dose of morphine and a microdose of LSD every three days. After more than two years, in January 2018, she stopped using both morphine and LSD and reported no withdrawal symptoms, although the case report said she did experience an increase in anxiety, depression and social withdrawal.

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Source: Slashdot – What Happens After 550 Times the Usual Dose of LSD?

James Gunn Shares a Personal Note as The Suicide Squad Wraps Primary Filming

For a sequel to a movie as widely disliked as Suicide Squad, production of The Suicide Squad has been watched fairly closely. This is largely due to James Gunn, who signed on to direct the film in the wake of his firing—and before his rehiring—by Disney.

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Source: io9 – James Gunn Shares a Personal Note as The Suicide Squad Wraps Primary Filming

Google survey hints at big plans for Wear OS health tracking

Wear OS is struggling, in no small part due to its so-so health features — there’s a good reason Google bought Fitbit. However, Google has hinted that it intends to catch up. Droid Life has learned that an ongoing User Experience Research survey t…

Source: Engadget – Google survey hints at big plans for Wear OS health tracking

Filming of Matrix 4 Brings 'Excitement, Some Damage' to San Francisco

“It’s only been a few months since we learned that The Matrix 4 was actually a real movie that was going to actually happen, and was actually going to star Keanu Reeves, and now the movie is actually filming in San Francisco…” writes Cinema Blend. “However, making things real is apparently causing real damage in the city by the bay.”
NBC Bay Area reports:
Filming of “The Matrix 4” brought helicopters, explosions and cars flipping in the air to San Francisco over the weekend, but it also resulted in some damage. The heat from the explosions was so intense it melted the covers of a couple building lamps and melted the plastic cover of an advertising street sign. Workers who replaced the plastic said it cost about $2,000…
Filming of “The Matrix 4” in San Francisco wraps up on Sunday.

BGR reports that a few locals shared their own videos of the filming online, including one Twitch social media analyst who found prop cars at the old Transbay terminal that “smelled freshly burnt.”

One YouTube user also shared footage of what they describe as “Keanu Reeves or Stunt Double Jumping off building in San Francisco.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Filming of Matrix 4 Brings ‘Excitement, Some Damage’ to San Francisco

After first coronavirus death in the US, first possible outbreak reported

a close up of Trump's face, with his mouth twisted.

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 29: U.S. President Donald Trump pauses during a news conference at the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House February 29, 2020 in Washington, DC. Department of Health in Washington State has reported the first death in the U.S. related to the coronavirus. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

Health officials in Washington state reported three grim new features of the coronavirus situation in the US Saturday. They reported the country’s first death, the first case in a healthcare worker, and the first possible outbreak.

In a press briefing held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, health officer at Public Health of Seattle and King County, announced that there are three new presumptive cases of COVID-19 in the county, including the person who died. All of the cases appear to be from undetected spread of the new coronavirus in the community. The cases were identified because the state just recently gained the ability to do its own testing.

Two of the cases are linked to a long-term care facility called Life Care in Kirkland, Washington, east of Seattle. One of the cases is in a healthcare worker at the facility, a woman in her 40s who is said to be in “satisfactory” condition. She has no known travel outside of the US. The other is a resident of the facility, a woman in her 70s. She is in serious condition.

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Source: Ars Technica – After first coronavirus death in the US, first possible outbreak reported

'Shop Contest: Tom Nook On Vacation, Winners!

Vacations! We all want one, but most of us can’t really take one. Animal Crossing’s Tom Nook, on the other hand, has plenty of bells to spend on some rest and relaxation. So I asked you fine folks to create some images of what he did on his long vacation.

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Source: Kotaku – ‘Shop Contest: Tom Nook On Vacation, Winners!

Revive your RSS feed in the Linux terminal with Newsboat

Psst. Word on the web is that RSS died in 2013. That[he]#039[/he]s when Google pulled the plug on Google Reader. Don[he]#039[/he]t believe everything that you hear. RSS is alive. It[he]#039[/he]s well. It[he]#039[/he]s still a great way to choose the information you want to read without algorithms making the decision for you. All you need is the right feed reader.

Source: LXer – Revive your RSS feed in the Linux terminal with Newsboat