Now that we all basically walk around with digital cameras all the time (courtesy of our phones), we may be in the habit of snapping pictures without thinking about it. That’s not a bad thing—it’s really handy to have that tool to capture unexpected moments, or a receipt that you need, but will probably end up losing.
Source: LifeHacker – Take Free Photography Classes from Nikon Through the End of the Year
David Prowse as Darth Vader and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia filming the original “Star Wars.” [credit:
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images ]
David Prowse, who played Darth Vader in the first three Star Wars films, has died at the age of 85. Prowse’s agent confirmed the news to the Hollywood Reporter on Saturday evening.
Prowse was a body builder who stood six feet, seven inches tall when he won the Vader role for the original 1977 Star Wars. Prowse also played Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
In 2016 interview, Prowse said that George Lucas offered him a choice between playing Darth Vader or Chewbacca. Prowse chose Vader, and the Chewbacca role went to Peter Mayhew, who died last year.
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Source: Ars Technica – David Prowse, the original Darth Vader, is dead at 85
Earlier this month we covered the news of Xilinx is looking to upstream their open-source “AI Engine” driver to the Linux kernel. This comes as Xilinx and AMD are working on Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) support for their FPGAs with AMD being in the process of acquiring the FPGA giant. Now more open-source code is looking to be included in the Linux kernel tree…
Source: Phoronix – Xilinx Continues Their Open-Source FPGA Upstreaming Push For The Linux Kernel
Despite being an unmaintained software that didn’t get any similar quality features that its rival LibreOffice was receiving over the period of 10 years, OpenOffice is still being downloaded more than 1.5 million times per month, as shown on the project’s page on SourceForge. Which is mind-boggling.
Source: LXer – OpenOffice Still Gets +1.5 Million Downloads Per Month, Despite Being Discontinued
As the holiday weekend winds down and we prepare to go back to work for these awkward weeks between holidays when it seems like everyone else is out of the office, but we’re all very much still here, we have another chance to catch something interesting in the night sky. First of all, there will be a full moon. And,…
Source: LifeHacker – How and When to Spot a Lunar Eclipse This Weekend
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (Digital Code) | $40 | Amazon
Source: Kotaku – Get Xenoblade Chronicles 2 for and Finally See What All the Xenofuss is About
Enlarge / Artist’s depiction of Falcatakely forsterae. (credit: Mark Witton)
Given the unusual attention granted to turkeys this week, let’s talk dinosaurs. Today’s birds are, of course, descendants of the only branch of the dino tree that made it through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. In the dinosaurs’ halcyon days, the early birds were a bit different, still retaining teeth and foreclaws among some subtler anatomical differences with their modern descendant. A new fossil find reveals an unexpected bird from that time—one with a whopping-great, toucan-like beak.
The fossil, named Falcatakely forsterae, comes from late Cretaceous rocks in Madagascar. Many of the early bird fossils we’ve discovered so far come from older, early-Cretaceous rocks in China, with the timeframe between then and the end-Cretaceous extinction more of a question mark. The new fossil is a nicely preserved head of a crow-sized bird with a strikingly long, tall, and narrow beak.
The early Chinese bird fossils don’t show much diversity in beak shape. That’s a big contrast with modern birds, which have a wild variety of beak shapes befitting their many different ecological niches. Pelicans, woodpeckers, and parrots have very different diets that require a beak adapted to the job. It had been thought that enlarged beaks may not have been possible until some anatomical shifting in the parts of the skull took place, meaning that the early birds were simply limited. But the new find shows that wasn’t entirely true. This species could have inhabited an ecological niche that was empty after the extinction—until a more modern bird drifted back into it much later.
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Source: Ars Technica – Cretaceous birds were thought to have small bills—except this one
In January of the year 2000, Pokémon was sued by stage magician Uri Geller for $97 million (over a Pokémon card with a similar name that carried the magician’s trademark bent spoon).
20 years later, Kotaku reports…
Spoon-bending magician Uri Geller gave Nintendo permission to use the character Kadabra on Pokémon cards today, after a 20 year legal dispute in which Geller claimed the Pokémon’s Japanese name and image were too close to his own.
“I am truly sorry for what I did 20 years ago,” Geller tweeted today. “Kids and grownups I am releasing the ban. It’s now all up to #Nintendo to bring my #kadabra #pokemon card back. It will probably be one of the rarest cards now! Much energy and love to all!”
As Screenrant explains, while Kadabra is a word associated with magic, the Pokémon’s Japanese name — variously written as Yungerer, Yungeller, and Yun Geller — seems to be a reference to Geller… Geller sued Nintendo over Kadabra in 2000, seeking damages and insisting the card stop being used in sets. “Nintendo turned me into an evil, occult Pokémon character. Nintendo stole my identity by using my name and my signature image,” Geller said at the time.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Uri Geller Finally Apologizes for Suing Pokemon 20 Years Ago
Enlarge / Look carefully into the spider’s two largest eyes and you can see internal structures similar to the ones that we’ve evolved. (credit: Emre Can Alagöz)
First, the confession: I’m an arachnophobe, spooked by the most harmless everyday spiders. Close encounters with the scarier sort—the goliath bird-eating spider in an undergraduate zoology class, the venomous redbacks sharing my tent on a research trip to Australia—well, let’s just say they taught me more about myself than about arachnids. And yet I’ve discovered a soft spot for one group of spiders: those undersized males faced with the daunting prospect of sex with a giant mate, often one with murder in mind. Think Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, only with spiders.
Why the sympathy? It’s not because these puny males risk their lives for love. It’s because they’ve evolved such a bizarre array of ways to achieve their ultimate goal of siring spiderlings with a monster of a mother.
Sexual size dimorphism—where one sex is bigger than the other—is nothing too much out of the ordinary: Picture a massive male orangutan, or the bull elephant seal towering over his harem. And many insects and other terrestrial arthropods have large females, because a bigger body can produce more eggs.
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Source: Ars Technica – The ungentle joy of spider sex
Toddler Baby Yoda Ugly Holiday Sweater | $12 | Target
Girls’ Baby Yoda Fair Isle Pullover Sweater | $14 | Target
Darth Vader Merry Sithmas Ugly Holiday Sweater | $21 | Target
Source: Gizmodo – Give the Whole Family a Merry Sithmas With 30% off Ugly Star Wars Holiday Sweaters
How to With John Wilson airs Fridays on HBO
At this point, it’s practically mandatory for any show set in New York to open with shots of landmarks like the Empire State Building, Central Park, or a row of honking yellow taxis in rush hour traffic. Anything quickly recognizable will suffice, as long as it represents life in the big city. (Looking for arty vibes? Search no further than Washington Square Park.) HBO’s docuseries How to With John Wilson doesn’t break from this tradition. In addition to a montage of New Yorkers on the street scored to tinkling jazz, How to gives us a shot of the World Trade Center, gleaming upwards from Lower Manhattan. There’s a key difference in how creator John Wilson shoots this image, though, one that reveals his off-kilter perspective. Instead of zooming overhead, he positions the World Trade Center in the background. Front and center instead: a grungy dumpster.
An opening that juxtaposes New York’s iconography with its garbage could look a tad obvious, like knockoff Banksy. But How to With John Wilson is one of the most consistently surprising shows on TV—original, not derivative. That early shot is as close to an easily-digestible statement of purpose as the show makes. Its brisk 25-minute installments are framed as tutorials, with the Queens-based Wilson carting his camera around the city attempting to learn how to accomplish various tasks by talking to people he encounters. (“How to Put up Scaffolding” and “How to Cover Your Furniture” are two episode titles.) These episodes aren’t instructive as much as wildly digressive; Wilson allows his chance encounters to unspool into intimate connections with strangers, often venturing into their homes as they divulge their pet projects, theories, and passions. The point is that no one ever knows what they’ll discover when they start asking questions. When he was younger, Wilson worked as a private investigator, and his output has a voyeuristic undercurrent. He’s brilliant at capturing public glimpses of private lives.
The elevator pitch for How to With John Wilson could’ve been something like “Nathan for You meets Humans of New York,” especially since Nathan Fielder serves as an executive producer and the show’s most high-profile champion. Nathan for You, which ran for four increasingly artful seasons on Comedy Central, was also hard to explain—it was a prank show, sort of, that satirized reality television and American business ethics. Fielder hosted in character, convincing real entrepreneurs to carry out ridiculous stunts meant to attract new customers.
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Source: Ars Technica – How to With John Wilson is the year’s best nature documentary
While consumer GPUs are reaching market with AV1 decode acceleration, there still is the matter of the various media APIs and multimedia software making use of it. In cases where that is missing or the user doesn’t yet have a supported Tiger Lake / Ampere / RDNA2 GPU, the dav1d decoder remains the fastest open-source CPU-based AV1 decoder. Similarly, SVT-AV1 remains the fastest CPU-based AV1 encoder available…
Source: Phoronix – SVT-AV1, Dav1d Speeding Along AV1 Into 2021
California’s state air quality mandates require each region to have a feasible plan for a 19% reduction in emissions by 2035. But “after a barrage of criticism from Silicon Valley businesses and Bay Area mayors, Metropolitan Transportation Commission planners have backed off a requirement to have employees from big companies work from home three days a week,” reports the Bay Area News Group.
Instead a compromise plan approved unanimously by commissioners last week “calls for big companies to have 60% of their employees take sustainable commutes — by transit, bike or carpooling — by 2035.”
Lawmakers, mayors and the business community railed against the remote work mandate, saying it would undercut the Bay Area’s economy and encourage large companies to re-locate to cheaper regions. Transit supporters said work-from-home requirements would cut train and bus use without clear proof it would reduce the mileage of vehicle trips and emissions. The new proposal calls for no more than 40 percent of a company’s workforce to commute by auto on an average workday by 2035. Farms and employers with fewer than 50 workers would be exempt.
The plan encourages companies to subsidize transit passes, bikes, on-site employee housing, and commuter shuttles, as well as helping workers afford housing in walkable, transit-rich communities. Many large tech companies like Google and Facebook already provide shuttles and subsidize transit for their workers. It also suggests companies discourage workers from single-vehicle commutes by reducing parking spaces and raising parking fees, compressing work schedules and eliminating personal desks in favor of shared work spaces.
The new proposal was designed with input from state lawmakers, the mayors of San Francisco and San Jose, county supervisors, and officials from the tech industry and transit groups, MTC commissioner Nick Josefowitz said. “This is a much more effective policy,” said Josefowitz, chief of policy at the regional think tank SPUR. “This is figuring out how to do it better with everybody at the table.” Gwen Litvak of the business coalition Bay Area Council said the work-from-home mandate would have hurt urban centers and businesses. “The compromise will help revitalize downtowns, and gives business critical flexibility to have workers carpool, use public transit, ride bikes or walk, or even work remotely, but by their own choice,” she said.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said the revisions better reflect how his city is evolving — from a suburban, car-centric culture to a city focused on developing a dense commercial and residential core supported by a robust transit network… Liccardo said part of Silicon Valley’s success springs from having talented employees working side-by-side, exchanging ideas and innovations. Remote work reduces some creative energy.
“We cannot impose mandates that contradict the laws of human nature and the laws of creative industry,” he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – What Happened After Silicon Valley Tried to Make Telecommuting Permanent
The latest bit of obscure hardware support set to arrive with Linux 5.11 are the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii U dongles for the Guitar Hero Live…
Source: Phoronix – Linux 5.11 Adds “Magic” To Support Guitar Hero Live PlayStation 3 / Wii U Dongles
It’s that special time of year when you can get great discounts on tech for your favorite sysadmin. Read More at Enable SysadminThe post Cyber Week 2020: 13 ideas for what to buy the sysadmin in your life appeared first on Linux.com.
Source: LXer – Cyber Week 2020: 13 ideas for what to buy the sysadmin in your life
KDE Plasma is my favorite desktop environment on Linux. In this video, I offer my Top 5 Reasons why I think KDE Plasma is the best desktop environment for me.
Source: LXer – 5 Reasons Why KDE Plasma Is The Best Desktop Environment
The Mediatek MT8167 SoC was announced four years ago already while for the Linux 5.11 kernel in early 2021 will finally be display support via the open-source Mediatek DRM driver…
Source: Phoronix – Mediatek DRM Driver Adding MT8167 Support In Linux 5.11
QAnon “was first championed by a handful of people who worked together to stir discussion of the ‘Q’ posts, eventually pushing the theory on to bigger platforms and gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key to Qanon’s spread and the originators’ financial gain…” reports NBC News, in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo .
“NBC News has found that the theory can be traced back to three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon and, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to help fund Qanon ‘research.'”
In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website’s message board. Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.
Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q’s mysterious posts…
Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the “anon” genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon [real name: Coleman Rogers] and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz’s blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News. “A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops,” Furber said in an email… As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well… Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a call for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon and PayPal accounts. Diaz’s YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter.
Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube “research” as her sole source of income. Diaz declined to comment on this story. “Because I cover Q, I got an audience,” Diaz acknowledged in a video that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it.
To reach a more mainstream audience (older people and “normies,” who on their own would have trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in her blog post she recommended they move to the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters and moderators show they created a new Reddit community… Their move to Reddit was key to Qanon’s eventual spread. There, they were able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups…
As Qanon picked up steam, growing skepticism over the motives of Diaz, Rogers, and the other early Qanon supporters led some in the internet’s conspiracy circles to turn their paranoia on the group. Recently, some Qanon followers have accused Diaz and Rogers of profiting from the movement by soliciting donations from their followers. Other pro-Trump online groups have questioned the roles that Diaz and Rogers have played in promoting Q, pointing to a series of slip-ups that they say show Rogers and Diaz may have been involved in the theory from the start.
Those accusations have led Diaz and Rogers to both deny that they are Q and say they don’t know who Q is.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Conspiracy Theorists Who’d First Popularized QAnon Now Accused of Financial Motives
It’s almost as if the little glowing story circles are following us everywhere. They’re on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter and now, even on Spotify.
Source: Gizmodo – There Are Now Stories Everywhere, Even on Spotify
