Tag: journal

The Future of iOS is 64-Bit Only — Apple To Stop Support For 32-Bit Apps

Your ability to run 32-bit apps on an iOS device is coming to an end. As several other Apple news sites have reported, Apple has updated the pop-up warning in the iOS 10.3 beta to say that the 32-bit app you’re running “will not work with future versions of iOS.” The warning goes on to say that the “developer of this app needs to update it to improve its compatibility.” From a ComputerWorld article (edited for clarity): In October 2014, Apple told developers that all new apps created after February 1, 2015 must have 64-bit support. Shortly after, Apple announced that all updates to apps must also be 64-bit compatible. Any 32-bit apps submitted to Apple after June 2015 would be rejected. Last September, Apple announced that it was going to remove apps from the App Store that did not “function as intended, don’t follow current review guidelines, or are outdated.” Presumably, this would include apps that did not meet the 64-bit requirement. Apple does not state which version of iOS will be 64-bit only, but since this is a major development, you can probably assume that this will happen in iOS 11. An announcement will likely be made during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this summer. The switch to 64-bit only support means that older iOS devices built on 32-bit architecture will not be able to upgrade to the new iOS. This includes the iPhone 5, 5c, and older, the standard version of the iPad (so not the Air or the Pro), and the first iPad mini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Future of iOS is 64-Bit Only — Apple To Stop Support For 32-Bit Apps

Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials

schwit1 quotes a report from Digital Trends: In this generation of self-starters and self-made women and men, do-it-yourself isn’t just an option, it’s a way of life. And if there’s not an app for that, chances are there’s a YouTube video for it. That was certainly the case for a woman named Cara Brookins, who is living proof that if you’re willing to learn, you absolutely can. In 2008, Brookins was in the midst of a family struggle, having left a husband she called “violent and abusive.” Looking to make a fresh start for herself, she took the idea of rebuilding quite literally, perhaps using the physical experience of constructing a house as an extension of her emotional and mental journey. Though she had no previous experience in construction or architecture, Brookins found a series of YouTube tutorials on building a home and got to work. Over the course of nine months, Brookins worked tirelessly with the help of her four children to build a new home for themselves. “I had rented this cabin for a Thanksgiving getaway, ” the mother of four told CBS News. “And driving there, we passed this house that had been ravaged by a tornado. It was this beautiful dream house and it was sort of wide open. You don’t often get the opportunity to see the interior workings of a house, but looking at these 2x4s and these nails, it just looked so simple. I thought, “I could put this wall back up if I really tried. Maybe I should just start from scratch.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Woman Built House From the Ground Up Using Nothing But YouTube Tutorials

LG’s UltraFine 5K Display Becomes Useless When It’s Within Two Meters of a Router

The LG UltraFine 5K Display was designed in part by Apple to work with the New MacBook Pro and as a replacement for the Thunderbolt Display, which was discontinued late last year. According to 9to5Mac, the display apparently wasn’t designed to work next to routers as it will flicker, disconnect, or freeze computers when it’s within two meters of a router due to electromagnetic interference. The Verge reports: In emails to 9to5Mac, LG acknowledged the problem — which LG says isn’t an issue for any of its other monitors — noting that routers “may affect the performance of the monitor” and that users should “have the router placed at least two meters away from the monitor” to avoid issues. Once the monitor was moved into a different room away from the router, 9to5Mac says the issues subsided. Despite the fact that it’s insane to require a router to be far away from what is likely the main computer in your home, there’s been no indication that LG is working on a fix for the issue, which may be more troublesome. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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LG’s UltraFine 5K Display Becomes Useless When It’s Within Two Meters of a Router

Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month

The Earth and the moon share more than an orbit around the Sun. Turns out that bits of atmosphere manage to travel the 240, 000 miles out to our nearest celestial neighbor, and have been for more than 2 billion years, according to data gathered by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft. In a study published on Monday to the journal Nature Astronomy , planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University observes that ionized oxygen particles escape from the upper atmosphere for five days every month to bombard the surface of the moon. Terada’s data suggests that oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere are first ionized by ultraviolet light and then accelerated into the magnetosphere , the planet’s magnetic envelope. The magnetosphere extends more than 370, 000 miles away from the Sun, fully enveloping the moon’s own orbit around the Earth. For five days every month when the moon passes through the magnetosphere, it is blasted with these ionized particles. The Osaka University team estimates that every square centimeter of the moon’s exposed surface is struck by approximately 26, 000 oxygen ions every second over the five day period. While this isn’t enough for the moon to develop a breathable atmosphere of its own, this discovery suggests that the moon’s surface could hold clues to Earth’s ancient atmosphere — much like ice cores being dug out of the Greenland and Antarctic permafrost. Source: Science News

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Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month

Ransomware Infects a Hotel’s Key System

An anonymous reader writes: A luxury hotel “paid “thousands” in Bitcoin ransom to cybercriminals who hacked into their electronic key system. The “furious” hotel manager says it’s the third time their electronic system has been attacked, though one local news site reports that “on the fourth attempt the hackers had no chance because the computers had been replaced and the latest security standards integrated, and some networks had been decoupled.” The 111-year-old hotel is now planning to remove all their electronic locks, and return to old-fashioned door locks with real keys. But they’re going public to warn other hotels — some of which they say have also already been hit by ransomware. UPDATE: The hotel’s managing director has clarified today that despite press reports, “We were hacked, but nobody was locked in or out” of their rooms. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ransomware Infects a Hotel’s Key System

Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

The discovery of “non-equilibrium matter” could re-write the rules of physics. Long-time Slashdot reader jasonbrown quotes ScienceAlert: For months now, there’s been speculation that researchers might have finally created time crystals — strange crystals that have an atomic structure that repeats not just in space, but in time, putting them in perpetual motion without energy. Now it’s official — researchers have just reported in detail how to make and measure these bizarre crystals. And two independent teams of scientists claim they’ve actually created time crystals in the lab based off this blueprint, confirming the existence of an entirely new form of matter. Both teams — one at Harvard and the other at the University of Maryland — have submitted their findings to peer-reviewed publications, according to the article, and “the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientist Investigate A Brand New Form of Matter: Time Crystals

Researchers create first viable hybrid human-pig embryo

Researchers have created a viable hybrid part-human, part-pig embryo for the first time in history. According to a study published in the journal Cell Thursday, researchers were able to successfully inject human stem cells into a pig embryo and grow tissue that would form the early stages of human organs like the heart, liver and neurons. Although it’s in the very early stages, experts believe the human-pig chimera could one day be used to grow transplantable human organs in farm animals. Adding to the promising scientific breakthroughs, a separate study published in the journal Nature earlier this week details how an international team of researchers successfully performed an interspecies organ transplant using a similar method to create a hybrid mouse-rat embryo. In that study, researchers grew a mouse pancreas inside a rat embryo, which was then transplanted into diabetic mice. As the Washington Post reports , the new pancreatic tissue cured the mice’s diabetes without being rejected by the host. The mice only required a few days of recovery and immunosuppressive treatments before they were able to resume normal, healthy lives. While the technology is moving forward, the ethics of harvesting human organs from animals — or even creating human-animal chimeras in general — is still a touchy subject. Aside from the symbolic and philosophical questions that come from mixing human and animal genetics, there is a fear that stem cells could one day be used to create an animal with a human brain. For now, however, the authors of the Cell study point out that the system is “highly inefficient, ” but the two papers together show the possible benefits of this sort of controversial research. Via: Washington Post Source: Cell , Nature

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Researchers create first viable hybrid human-pig embryo

The 32-Bit Dog Ate 16 Million Kids’ CS Homework

“Any student progress from 9:19 to 10:33 a.m. on Friday was not saved…” explained the embarrassed CTO of the educational non-profit Code.org, “and unfortunately cannot be recovered.” Slashdot reader theodp writes: Code.org CTO Jeremy Stone gave the kids an impromptu lesson on the powers of two with his explanation of why The Cloud ate their homework. “The way we store student coding activity is in a table that until today had a 32-bit index… The database table could only store 4 billion rows of coding activity information [and] we didn’t realize we were running up to the limit, and the table got full. We have now made a new student activity table that is storing progress by students. With the new table, we are switching to a 64-bit index which will hold up to 18 quintillion rows of information. The issue also took the site offline, temporarily making the work of 16 million K-12 students who have used the nonprofit’s Code Studio disappear. “On the plus side, this new table will be able to store student coding information for millions of years, ” explains the site’s CTO. But besides Friday’s missing saves, “On the down side, until we’ve moved everything over to the new table, some students’ code from before today may temporarily not appear, so please be patient with us as we fix it.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The 32-Bit Dog Ate 16 Million Kids’ CS Homework

Geek Avenges Stolen Laptop By Remotely Accessing Thief’s Facebook Account

An anonymous reader quotes Hot Hardware: Stu Gale, who just so happens to be a computer security expert, had the misfortune of having his laptop stolen from his car overnight. However, Gale did have remote software installed on the device which allowed him to track whenever it came online. So, he was quite delighted to see that a notification popped up on one of his other machines alerting him that his stolen laptop was active. Gale took the opportunity to remote into the laptop, only to find that the not-too-bright thief was using his laptop to login to her Facebook account. The thief eventually left her Facebook account open and left the room, after which Gale had the opportunity to snoop through her profile and obtain all of her private information. “I went through and got her phone numbers, friends list and pictures…” Given that Gale was able to see her phone numbers listed on Facebook, he sent text messages to all of those numbers saying that he was going to report her to the police. He also posted her info to a number of Facebook groups, which spooked the thief enough to not only delete her Facebook account, but also her listed phone numbers. In 2008 Slashdot ran a similar story, where it took several weeks of remote monitoring before a laptop thief revealed his identity. (The victim complained that “It was kind of frustrating because he was mostly using it to watch porn.”) But in this case, Gale just remotely left a note on the laptop — and called one of the thief’s friends — and eventually turned over all the information to the police, who believe an arrest will follow. Gale seems less confident, and tells one Calgary newspaper “I’m realistic. I’m not going to see that computer again. But at least I got some comic relief.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Geek Avenges Stolen Laptop By Remotely Accessing Thief’s Facebook Account

Female Shark Learns To Reproduce Without Males After Years Alone

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: A female shark separated from her long-term mate has developed the ability to have babies on her own. Leonie the zebra shark (Stegostoma fasciatum) met her male partner at an aquarium in Townsville, Australia, in 1999. They had more than two dozen offspring together before he was moved to another tank in 2012. From then on, Leonie did not have any male contact. But in early 2016, she had three baby sharks. Intrigued, Christine Dudgeon at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and her colleagues began fishing for answers. One possibility was that Leonie had been storing sperm from her ex and using it to fertilize her eggs. But genetic testing showed that the babies only carried DNA from their mum, indicating they had been conceived via asexual reproduction. Some vertebrate species have the ability to reproduce asexually even though they normally reproduce sexually. These include certain sharks, turkeys, Komodo dragons, snakes and rays. However, most reports have been in females who have never had male partners. In sharks, asexual reproduction can occur when a female’s egg is fertilized by an adjacent cell known as a polar body, Dudgeon says. This also contains the female’s genetic material, leading to “extreme inbreeding”, she says. “It’s not a strategy for surviving many generations because it reduces genetic diversity and adaptability.” Nevertheless, it may be necessary at times when males are scarce. “It might be a holding-on mechanism, ” Dudgeon says. “Mum’s genes get passed down from female to female until there are males available to mate with.” It’s possible that the switch from sexual to asexual reproduction is not that unusual; we just haven’t known to look for it, Dudgeon says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Female Shark Learns To Reproduce Without Males After Years Alone