Wikipedia just turned 15 years old, but you wouldn’t know it from the nigh-on inescapable donation drives — the crowdsourced encyclopedia often seems as if it’s months away from extinction. The Wikimedia Foundation (its parent organization) may have a way to keep the site around for the long haul, however. It’s launching the Wikimedia Endowment , a “perpetual” support fund for Wikipedia and other Foundation efforts. The goal is to raise $100 million over the next 10 years, or enough to both improve its independence and give it room to grow. The Endowment may well be necessary. Wikipedia revolves around its free, no-ads approach to information, and there’s no guarantee that it’ll find enough people to chip in. This prevents it from having to turn to ads and otherwise compromise its relatively impartial stance. Moreover, the team is eager to add more videos and continue adapting to the mobile world — those expansions will cost money. The organization still has to be frugal (it’s not about to beat YouTube), but it shouldn’t be at risk of falling behind. [Image credit: Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images] Via: The Guardian Source: Wikimedia Endowment
An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Now, when we look to the stars, we know that potentially habitable worlds lurk throughout our galaxy, and our spaceflight capabilities can bring us there. But so far, it would only be a very long, lonely, one-way trip. This isn’t necessarily going to be the case forever, though, as physically feasible technology could get humans to another star within a single lifetime, and potentially groundbreaking technology might make the journey almost instantaneous. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave’s 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard says its upcoming spinoff of its technology divisions focused on software, consulting and data analysis will eliminate up to 30, 000 jobs. The cuts announced Tuesday will be within the newly formed Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which is splitting from the Palo Alto, California company’s personal computer and printing operation. “The new reductions amount to about 10 percent of the new company’s workforce, and will save about $2.7 billion in annual operating costs.” The split is scheduled to be completed by the end of next month. “The head of the group, Mike Nefkens, outlined a plan under which it is cutting jobs in what he called ‘high-cost countries’ and moving them to low-cost countries. He said that by the end of HP Enterprise’s fiscal year 2018, only 40 percent of the group’s work force will be located in high-cost countries.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
HughPickens.com writes: Brian Booker writes at Digital Journal that carbon dating suggests that the Koran, or at least portions of it, may actually be older than the prophet Muhammad himself, a finding that if confirmed could rewrite early Islamic history and shed doubt on the “heavenly” origins of the holy text. Scholars believe that a copy Koran held by the Birmingham Library was actually written sometime between 545 AD and 568, while the Prophet Mohammad was believed to have been born in 570 AD and to have died in 632 AD. It should be noted, however, that the dating was only conducted on the parchment, rather than the ink, so it is possible that the quran was simply written on old paper. Some scholars believe, however, that Muhammad did not receive the Quran from heaven, as he claimed during his lifetime, but instead collected texts and scripts that fit his political agenda. “This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran’s genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven, ” says Keith Small, from the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. “‘It destabilises, to put it mildly, the idea that we can know anything with certainty about how the Koran emerged, ” says Historian Tom Holland. “and that in turn has implications for the history of Muhammad and the Companions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
jones_supa writes: Even though the RTM version of Windows 10 is already out of the door, Microsoft will keep releasing beta builds of the operating system to Windows Insiders. The first one will be build 10525, which introduces some color personalization options, but also interesting improvements to memory management. A new concept is called a compression store, which is an in-memory collection of compressed pages. When memory pressure gets high enough, stale pages will be compressed instead of swapping them out. The compression store will live in the System process’s working set. As usual, Microsoft will be receiving comments on the new features via the Feedback app. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
DW100 writes: The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has been forced to reject a request for more IPv4 addresses for the first time as its stock of remaining address reaches exhaustion. The lack of IPv4 addresses has led to renewed calls for the take-up of IPv6 addresses in order to start embracing the next era of the internet. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
New submitter Adrian Harvey writes The New Zealand based commercial space company Rocket Lab has unveiled their new rocket engine which the media is describing as battery-powered. It still uses rocket fuel, of course, but has an entirely new propulsion cycle which uses electric motors to drive its turbopumps. To add to the interest over the design, it uses 3D printing for all its primary components. First launch is expected this year, with commercial operations commencing in 2016. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
itwbennett writes In the course of trying to find out how many servers and devices are still vulnerable to the Web security flaw known as FREAK, researchers at Royal Holloway of the University of London found something else of interest: Many hosts (either servers or other Internet-connected devices) share the same 512-bit public key. In one egregious example, 28, 394 routers running a SSL VPN module all use the same 512-bit public RSA key. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Wikipedia’s parent organization just joined the fight against dragnet government surveillance. Read more…