Distro formerly known as Zinc cuts the fat, rather than just replacing it

The latest version of Teejeetech's take on Ubuntu offers what many users wish Canonical did – natively packaged Firefox and the choice of whether to use Snap, Flatpak, or neither.…

Tech columnist and venture investor MG Siegler, commenting on the new iPad Pro: I love the iPad for the things it's good at. And I love the MacBook for the things it's good at. What I want is less a completely combined device and more a single device that can run both macOS and iPadOS. And this new iPad Pro, again equipped with a chip faster than any MacBook, can do that if Apple allowed it to. At first, maybe it's dual boot. That is, just let the iPad Pro load up macOS if it's attached to the Magic Keyboard and use the screen as a regular (but beautiful) monitor -- no touch. Over time, maybe macOS is just a "mode" inside of iPadOS -- complete with some elements updated to be touch-friendly, but not touch-first. Steven Sinofsky, the former head of Microsoft's Windows division, chiming in: It is not unusual for customers to want the best of all worlds. It is why Detroit invented convertibles and el caminos. But the idea of a "dual boot" device is just nuts. It is guaranteed the only reality is it is running the wrong OS all the time for whatever you want to do. It is a toaster-refrigerator. Only techies like devices that "presto-change" into something else. Regular humans never flocked to El Caminos, and even today SUVs just became station wagons and almost none actually go off road :-) Two things that keep going unanswered if you really want macOS on an iPad device: 1. What software on Mac do you want for an iPad device experience? What software will get rewritten for touch? If you want "touch-enabled" check out what happened on the Windows desktop. Nearly everything people say they want isn't features as much as the mouse interaction model. People want overlapping windows, a desktop of folders, infinitely resizable windows, and so on. These don't work on touch very well and certainly not for people who don't want to futz. 2. Will you be happy with battery life? The physics of an iPad mean the battery is 2/3rds the size of a Mac battery. Do you really want that? I don't. The reason the iPad is the 5.x mm device is because the default doesn't have a keyboard holding the battery. This is about the realities. The metaphors that people like on a desktop, heck that they love, just don't work with the blunt instrument of touch. It might be possible to build all new metaphors that use only tough and thus would be great on an iPad but that isn't what they tried. The device grew out of a phone. It's only their incredible work on iPhone that led to Mx silicon and their tireless work on the Mac-centric frameworks that delivered a big chunk (but not all) the privacy, reliability, battery life, security, etc. of the phone on Mac. [...]

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Webcam art installation quickly descends into public Chatroulette

Doomed internet cesspits Omegle and Chatroulette should have been warning enough of what happens when a webcam is placed between random strangers, yet the Portal art project linking New York City to Dublin didn't last a week before being shut down.…

schwit1 shares a report: Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday announced that it was closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn't alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers. Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole. The discovery of nearly 900 fraudulent papers in 2022 at IOP Publishing, a physical sciences publisher, was a turning point for the nonprofit. "That really crystallized for us, everybody internally, everybody involved with the business," said Kim Eggleton, head of peer review and research integrity at the publisher. "This is a real threat." The sources of the fake science are "paper mills" -- businesses or individuals that, for a price, will list a scientist as an author of a wholly or partially fabricated paper. The mill then submits the work, generally avoiding the most prestigious journals in favor of publications such as one-off special editions that might not undergo as thorough a review and where they have a better chance of getting bogus work published.

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LLMs running on a dedicated card: The final frontier as hacker makes it so

Consider your wish for an AI digital assistant that runs locally and offline officially granted. Not by a major industry player, naturally – your personal data is too enticing – but by a guy on GitHub who built one to run on a Raspberry Pi. …

Back in February I wrote about AMD having quietly funded the effort for a drop-in CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs built atop the ROCm library. This was an incarnation of ZLUDA that originally began as a CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs using oneAPI Level Zero. While AMD discontinued funding ZLUDA development earlier this year, this CUDA implementation for AMD GPUs is continuing to see some new code activity...

The Department of Justice says it is considering whether to prosecute Boeing over two deadly crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft. From a report: The aviation giant breached the terms of an agreement made in 2021 that shielded the firm from criminal charges linked to the incidents, the DOJ said. Boeing has denied that it violated the agreement. The crashes - one in Indonesia in 2018, and another in Ethiopia in 2019 - killed a total of 346 people. The plane maker failed to "design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said. Boeing said it was looking forward to the opportunity to respond to the Justice Department and "believes it honoured the terms of that agreement." Under the deal, Boeing paid a $2.5bn settlement, while prosecutors agreed to ask the court to drop a criminal charge after a period of three years. The DOJ said Boeing has until 13 June to respond to the allegations and that what it said would be taken into consideration as it decides what to do next.

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Another push for backup buyers uneasy about Broadcom buy

Data protection outfit Veeam has confirmed it is to add support for the open source virtualization platform Proxmox, bringing more backing behind the VMware alternative.…

Sutskever leaves behind mysterious message on next venture

Co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever, has announced he is leaving the company and posted a mysterious message about what might be next.…

While Tokyo pours billions into revitalizing chipmaking sector, it might want to check out the grid

Japan reckons it may need to generate 50 percent more electricity by 2050 because of growing local demand from chipmaking and datacenters running AI. The move follows a warning by DigitalBridge that it may run out of power within two years.…

In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr (D-N.J.) made their case for why Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act has "outlived its usefulness." Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects online platforms from liability for user-generated content, allowing them to moderate content without being treated as publishers. "Unfortunately, Section 230 is now poisoning the healthy online ecosystem it once fostered. Big Tech companies are exploiting the law to shield them from any responsibility or accountability as their platforms inflict immense harm on Americans, especially children. Congress's failure to revisit this law is irresponsible and untenable," the lawmakers wrote. The Hill reports: Rodgers and Pallone argued that rolling back the protections on Big Tech companies would hold them accountable for the material posted on their platforms. "These blanket protections have resulted in tech firms operating without transparency or accountability for how they manage their platforms. This means that a social-media company, for example, can't easily be held responsible if it promotes, amplifies or makes money from posts selling drugs, illegal weapons or other illicit content," they wrote. The lawmakers said they were unveiling legislation (PDF) to sunset Section 230. It would require Big Tech companies to work with Congress for 18 months to "evaluate and enact a new legal framework that will allow for free speech and innovation while also encouraging these companies to be good stewards of their platforms." "Our bill gives Big Tech a choice: Work with Congress to ensure the internet is a safe, healthy place for good, or lose Section 230 protections entirely," the lawmakers wrote.

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Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan just announced the stable release of XWayland 24.1 as the newest feature release for this X.Org Server code allowing X11 clients to work within the confines of Wayland compositors...

The networking subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel. As usual it's a big update with some 90,083 new lines of code and 37,889 lines removed...

Saturday's power failures toppled border-check system offline

A power outage affecting one of the IT systems used to process imports to the UK has caused delays to perishable goods crossing the border, which businesses have described as a "disaster."…

It's been the better part of two months since the last AMDVLK driver update while today the AMDVLK 2024.Q2.1 driver has been christened...

Multimodal models promise machines can do more – if you let them

In the future, "Google will do the Googling for you" – or so suggests Liz Reid, VP of search.…

The little computer that could gets ready for an IPO

Raspberry Pi Ltd is considering an Initial Public Offering and today published figures showing just how important commercial customers have become to the company.…

The big batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates for the Linux 6.10 merge window were sent out today that includes the new "Panthor" driver for newer ARM Mali/Immortalis graphics processors and the usual hearty assortment of Intel and AMD graphics driver changes...

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek just released Mir 2.17 as the newest version of this open-source Wayland compositor that can be used for building Wayland-based shells and has shown some interesting potential with the likes of Miracle-WM and Miriway...

'A series of large ocean waves caused by a sudden and powerful disturbance,' according to ChatGPT

International Monetary Fund managing director Dr Kristalina Georgieva has warned of a "tsunami" hitting the global labor market as businesses adopt AI technologies.…