Comment Re:'Cause data centers in the desert makes sense. (Score 2) 38
Electricity may be cheap in Saudi Arabia, but it's also 45 degrees Celsius for much of the year.
At least the AI actors won't complain about the heat
Comment Re:Netgear vs. Snowden (Score -1, Troll) 34
AmiMoJo is a frequent spewer of CCP and Russian propaganda. Just look at the most frequent contributors to /. and you'll see a bunch of them.
Comment Re:It has a Snapdragon CPU? (Score 1) 45
100% of x86-64 VR games run on a PC. The point here is to use your PC to Stream a video feed to your headset via SteamLink. In general these headsets are too underpowered to play PC games (i.e. all x86-64 games), all the releases for standalone HMDs are custom ports with adjusted graphics.
Very true. Been playing the Riven remake on an Oculus Rift and it's astoundingly beautiful. Playing on the Meta Quest was just sad in comparison. The headset Steamlink will make all the difference.
Comment Re:JUst look at some firewall logs (Score 1) 56
Chinese misinformation trolls are working overtime on this one
Comment Re:Is it really Microsoft's fault? (Score 1) 39
why was he even running Windows?
This is the "Fox News defense".
"It's not our fault because if someone's stupid enough to trust us, they deserve what they get."
Well to be fair, he is a "Murdoch"
Comment Re:We need a new word (Score 5, Insightful) 111
-- because a person has unfettered access to the digital content for an extended period of time.
Here's the problem. It isn't just a word, it's the fact that the seller wants the buyer to assume that the period is "forever". In many cases, the actual period can't even be determined at the time of sale. It would have to be changed to something like "You are purchasing the right to view this media item until we decide to stop paying royalties for it. Also, you need to keep paying a monthly fee, or you will then lose access to anything purchased through this service. We make no guarantees that this period will even be long enough for you to finish watching it, but it may end up being for your entire lifetime. We also make no guarantees that the membership fee will remain the same price, or even that membership will be available. Good luck!"
Once the proper words are filled in, it will be obvious that the consumer isn't even aware what they are paying for... and that is worthy of a class action suit.
Comment Chinese Flight Club is finally possible! (Score 1) 23
So the "authorities" can finally win in the Chinese version of Fight Club!
Comment Re:Going to embarrass the US (Score 1) 173
A New Yorker reporter was recently deported for reporting on the Columbia student protests. This unfriendly climate will kill tourism in America. Then it will have a ripple effect as future presidents and prime ministers go elsewhere to study, killing America's soft power among elites of other countries. And for what? It's not like legal student visa holders were causing a crime wave.
At least this shows Europe (Anti-tourism is spreading across Europe) a way forward in how to stop tourism
Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)
RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1
AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.
Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.
Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.
Comment Re:Finally (Score 1) 48
Yeah I never even looked at it, as I just assumed, as an Android user, I wouldn't be allowed to by almighty Apple.
Comment They're watching the Steam Deck (Score 1) 22
I'm sure they're watching the popularity of the Steam Deck very carefully.
Comment Re:Competition (Score 1) 268
He's... not wrong.
We should be really scared of people who are excited about finding ways to kill people we (or our allies) are in conflict with, but they're a necessary evil as those people exist on the other side of the conflict.
They are weapons, ideally to be controlled by more measured and compassionate people, and deployed in self-defense against people who aren't quite so restrained.
For instance, the people finding new ways to kill Russian troops in Ukraine. They're getting lots of people killed, but it's justified because Russia invaded and started indiscriminately killing a lot of innocent people.
Like the Training Day quote...
"To protect the sheep you gotta catch the wolf, and it takes a wolf to catch a wolf."
Comment Re:NIST is right and wrong (Score 1) 180
However, requiring mixed case and special characters? If you give that up you drastically reduce the difficulty of dictionary attacks. You double the size of the required table by using mixed case, triple it with special characters.
Nope. Most people, when they are "required" to use mixed case and special characters, do it in a way that can be easily brute forced with only a handful of extra attempts (1 = !, at = @, O = 0, etc.). The parts that preserve the difficulty of brute force are:
- 3. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept all printing ASCII [RFC20] characters and the space character in passwords.
- 4. Verifiers and CSPs SHOULD accept Unicode [ISO/ISC 10646] characters in passwords. Each Unicode code point SHALL be counted as a single character
when evaluating password length.
- 9. Verifiers SHALL verify the entire submitted password (i.e., not truncate it).
Web site have been having it both ways for years: they have been telling us to make harder password, while simultaneously making it harder for us to do so. In some cases, passwords were truncated or forced to lower case before being hashes, making them much much weaker than it seemed they were. And then when a password is compromised, the user is blamed.
Don't mix up the actual strength if voluntarily using complex passwords with the perceived strength of forcing someone else to do so.
Comment Re:Motive (Score 2, Informative) 51
... it would seem that Iran is more afraid of Trump than Harris.
Actually they're angry that Trump had Qassem Soleimani killed.
It's kind of funny. The Russians hack the Democrats, the Iranians hack Trump. The Russians and Iranians are practically allies. They should probably schedule some collaborative hacker meetings to make sure they're on the same page.
Slashdot Top Deals
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
