sombragris writes: Slackware, the oldest GNU/Linux distribution which is still actively maintained, turned 25 this week. The latest stable version, Slackware 14.2, was released two years ago, but the development version (-current) is updated on a fast pace. Today the development version offers kernel 4.14.55, gcc 8.1.1, glibc 2.27. mesa 18.1.4, xorg 1.20, and the Xfce and KDE desktop environments as default, with many more available as third-party packages. Other points of note are that Slackware is systemd-free, opting instead for a simple BSD-style init.

Since its first release ever, this has been a distro with a strong following due to its hallmarks of simplicity, speed, ease of maintenance and configuration. Happy birthday Slackware!

According to Droid Life, Verizon is no longer activating 3G-only phones. Instead, they will only accept 4G LTE-equipped phones going forward. Here's what Verizon had to say about the matter: "For several years we've been been publicly saying that our 3G CDMA network will remain available through the end of 2019. Virtually all traffic on our network is on our 4G LTE network. To facilitate a smooth transition to 4G LTE capable products and services, we are no longer allowing devices that are not 4G LTE capable to be activated on our network." From the report: Now, as is noted in the statement above, Verizon has committed to shutting down its 3G CDMA network by the end of 2019. They also stopped selling 3G devices some time ago, I believe, and even started selling LTE-only flip phones to replace them. [...] On a related note, an earlier leak suggested that Verizon may stop some older LTE devices from being activated too. The documentation there said that CDMA devices as well as devices that do not support HD Voice or VoLTE will not be accepted.

Thousands of miles of buried fiber optic cable in densely populated coastal regions of the United States may soon be inundated by rising seas, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon. From a report: The study, presented Monday at a meeting of internet network researchers, portrays critical communications infrastructure that could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years, according to the study's senior author, Paul Barford, a UW-Madison professor of computer science. "Most of the damage that's going to be done in the next 100 years will be done sooner than later," says Barford, an authority on the "physical internet" -- the buried fiber optic cables, data centers, traffic exchanges and termination points that are the nerve centers, arteries and hubs of the vast global information network. "That surprised us. The expectation was that we'd have 50 years to plan for it. We don't have 50 years."

The study, conducted with Barford's former student Ramakrishnan Durairajan, now of the University of Oregon, and Carol Barford, who directs UW-Madison's Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, is the first assessment of risk of climate change to the internet. It suggests that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities, according to the report, are New York, Miami and Seattle, but the effects would not be confined to those areas and would ripple across the internet, says Barford, potentially disrupting global communications.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom), Adam Fisher paints quite a different picture of life at now-workforce behavior preachers Google and Facebook, revealing that the tech giants' formative days were filled with the kind of antics that run afoul of HR protocols. Google was not a normal place, begins an excerpt in Vanity Fair that includes some juicy quotes attributed to Google executive chef Charlie Ayers about Google's founders ("Sergey's the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.") And in Sex, Beer, and Coding, Wired runs an excerpt about Facebook's wild early days, which even extended to the artwork gracing its office ("The office was on the second floor, so as you walk in you immediately have to walk up some stairs, and on the big 10-foot-high wall facing you is just this huge buxom woman with enormous breasts wearing this Mad Max-style costume riding a bulldog. It's the most intimidating, totally inappropriate thing. [...] That set a tone for us. A huge-breasted warrior woman riding a bulldog is the first thing you see as you come in the office, so like, get ready for that!" So, what changed? "When Sheryl Sandberg joined the company is when I saw a vast shift in everything in the company," said Ayers about Google. Sandberg later became Facebook's grown-up face.

MrBrklyn (Slashdot reader #4,775) writes: Artix Linux, the young systemd free OS based on arch, is reaching a critical point in it's development and calling for new packagers.
Here's more from the ongoing thread on the project's forum: You don't have to be an expert in the occult arts for that; an elementary grasp of Linux in general and how PKGBUILD works should be enough for basic contributions. Help and training will be provided, free of charge!

An anonymous reader shares a report: After several big feature pull requests of new "i915" Intel DRM driver features landing in DRM-Next for Linux 4.19, the Intel open-source developers have sent in what they believe to be their last batch of feature changes for queuing this next kernel cycle. Feature activity has dwindled compared to the earlier pull requests, but this latest gathering of patches does include Intel GVT vGPU huge-page support for guests, continued Panel Self Refresh (PSR) fixes/clean-ups, GMBUS improvements for HDCP v2.2 compliance, GEM memory management improvements, and other display code improvements.

lkcl writes: Phoronix and The Register have an insightful look into an effort by ARM that is reminiscent of Microsoft's "Get The Facts" campaign. RISC-V's design is a revamp of the RISC concept that is intended from the ground up to fix the mistakes and learn from the lessons of the past 30 years. Power efficiency is 40% better than ARM or Intel. Compressed instructions reduce I-cache misses by 20-25%, which is roughly comparable to the same performance that would be achieved by doubling the Instruction Cache size. Yet despite El Reg's insightful analysis,
all is not as it seems: on further investigation, some of ARM's criticism has merit, whilst some of it is clear out-and-out FUD from ARM that, being so critically dependent on free software, had its own employees complain so much that the site was pulled.

Also we cannot help but wonder which "Big Chip" company offered seven-figure salaries to try to shut down the IIT Madras Shakti Project. Most interesting however is the fact that ARM -- a $40 billion dollar company -- is rattled by RISC-V enough to use underhanded tactics, whilst Intel on the other hand is actually investing.

hackingbear writes: A team of scientists from China, the U.S., and U.K. successfully turned nitrogen, the dominant gas in Earth's atmosphere, into a metallic fluid by subjecting it to the extreme pressure and temperature conditions found deep inside the Earth and other planets. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications .

"Our findings could inform the efforts to create forms of energetic nitrogen polymers as well as superconducting, metallic states of a sister diatomic molecule, hydrogen or H2, which could revolutionize the energy sector if reliably synthesized," according to team member Nicholas Holtgrewe. The project was funded by by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation, the (U.S.) Army Research Office, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Science, the British Council Researcher Links Program, and other sources. According to EurekAlert, "The researchers found that the temperature at which nitrogen transitions from insulating to metallic decreases as the pressure increases -- starting at about 1,180,000 times normal atmospheric pressure (120 gigapascals) and 2,720 degrees Celsius (3,000 kelvin)." "This means that, theoretically, nitrogen would remain in its diatomic state in the Earth's mantle but would disassociate into a fluid metal in or just above the core, which potentially has implications for our understanding of the planet's deep nitrogen cycle," said team member Sergey Lobanov.

This week NASA's Dawn space probe swooped within 22 miles of the surface of Ceres, the dwarf planet that's the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. NASA's JPL reports: In more than three years of orbiting Ceres, Dawn's lowest altitude before this month was 240 miles (385 kilometers), so the data from this current orbit bring the dwarf planet into much sharper focus... "[T]he results are better than we had ever hoped," said Dawn's chief engineer and project manager, Marc Rayman, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Dawn is like a master artist, adding rich details to the otherworldly beauty in its intimate portrait of Ceres."
EarthSky reports NASA captured an up-close glimpse of those tantalizing bright spots on Ceres: The spots, evaporate deposits composed of sodium carbonate, are thought to be left over from when water came up to the surface from deeper below and then evaporated in the extremely tenuous and sporadic water vapor "atmosphere." That water could be either from a shallow sub-surface reservoir or from a deeper reservoir of salty brines percolating upward through fractures. The deposits in Occator Crater are the largest and brightest of these deposits. As with many discoveries in planetary science, they were completely unexpected, and show that Ceres is not just an inert ball of rock and ice.
Slashdot reader thegameiam adds: Ceres may have more fresh water than exists on Earth. Perhaps this would make colonization of the asteroid belt more of a possibility?

The new tallest building on the San Francisco skyline -- and the tallest building in America west of the Mississippi -- includes a nine-story electronic sculpture that's been called the tallest piece of public art on Earth. It uses 11,000 LED bulbs reflected off the tower-topping aluminum panels -- each pixel created by a set of red, green, blue and white lights controlled by 8-bit PIC microcontrollers. "On a clear night, the show is visible for 30 miles," reports IEEE Spectrum.

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry shares their article about "the technology involved in the light show at the top of Salesforce Tower. Electrical engineer and artist Jim Campbell explains it all -- and how the window-washer problem stumped him for nearly a year." "[O]n the 62nd floor, a central PC-based computer runs Ubuntu Linux, sending instructions to a communications control system that splits the data and sends it at 11 Mbit to the 32 enclosures using a custom communications protocol... We will capture images throughout the day, sending them to Amazon's cloud, and run some algorithms designed to identify visual interesting-ness. For example, at its simplest, when we look at the sky, if it's all blue, it's boring, if it's all white, it's boring, if it has white and blue it is likely to be interesting. We'll chose the best half hour of the day at each camera, based on movement and color, to display...."

And finally, when the main display shuts down late at night, another system designed by Campbell will kick in. In this static display, a set of 36 white LEDs will create a three-dimensional constellation of lights that will look like stars. "It's quieter, it has a random aspect to it," he says.
"Since construction started, the tower has emerged as an icon of the new San Francisco -- techie, ambitious, perhaps a little grandiose," writes the New Yorker, capturing the moment when Campbell finally unveiled his four-year project -- while fighting stomach flu and a chest cold, on a night which turned out to be prohibitively foggy. The executive vice-president of Boston Properties told him cheerily, "Jim! Look on the brighter side. We've got every night for the rest of our lives."

"There was a long silence from the people on the terrace. The fog was thick. At last, someone exclaimed, 'Woo-hoo!,' and a volley of cheers followed." Although the colors they were seeing came from the celebratory fireworks and not from Jim's light sculpture.

Are there any San Francisco-area Slashdotters who want to weigh in on the Salesforce Tower?

In the last decade, we have discovered thousands of planets outside our solar system and have learned that rocky, temperate worlds are numerous in our galaxy. The next step will involve asking even bigger questions. Could some of these planets host life? And if so, asks NASA, will we be able to recognize life elsewhere if we see it? From a blog post on NASA's website: A group of leading researchers in astronomy, biology and geology has come together under NASA's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or NExSS, to take stock of our knowledge in the search for life on distant planets and to lay the groundwork for moving the related sciences forward.

"We're moving from theorizing about life elsewhere in our galaxy to a robust science that will eventually give us the answer we seek to that profound question: Are we alone?" said Martin Still, an exoplanet scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington. In a set of five review papers published last week in the scientific journal Astrobiology, NExSS scientists took an inventory of the most promising signs of life, called biosignatures. The paper authors include four scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. They considered how to interpret the presence of biosignatures, should we detect them on distant worlds. A primary concern is ensuring the science is strong enough to distinguish a living world from a barren planet masquerading as one.

AOL discontinued AIM, its 20-year-old iconic instant messaging service, last December, months after cutting third-party access to it. Now Motherboard reports a a small team of developers has resurrected it with a private server. From the report: The new chat service is called AIM Phoenix, and it works by running the messages through a private Dynamic DNS run by Wildman Productions, a non-profit group of hobbyist programers. This isn't a new AIM client, it literally uses the old software running on a new server, so it looks and feels exactly like AIM. It's simple to set up. First, you download an old version of AIM from the AIM Phoenix website, register for a new username, tweak the settings to reroute through Wildman Productions' server, and then open yourself up the nostalgic glory of Web 2.0. The old versions of AIM are touchy on new machines and I had to play with a few different versions before I got 5.0 working on my Windows 10 machine.

An anonymous reader writes: Linux 4.18 development is going strong with recent 4.18-rc1 release. This kernel cycle has dropped 107,210 lines of code so far but Linux 4.18 is adding many new features. The kernel is coming in lighter as a result of the LustreFS code being removed and other code cleanups. On the feature front, Phoronix reports, "ew AMDGPU support improvements, mainlining of the V3D DRM driver, initial open-source work on NVIDIA Volta GV100 hardware, merging of the Valve Steam Controller kernel driver, merging of the BPFILTER framework, ARM Spectre mitigation work, Speck file-system encryption support, removal of the Lustre file-system, the exciting restartable sequences system call was merged, the new DM writecache target, and much more."

Mike Bouma writes: Pixelglass, known for their "Giana Sisters SE" game, has released a worthy new game for the Amiga 500, called "Worthy." Here's a description of this cute action puzzler: "Assume the role of a fearless boy and collect the required number of diamonds in each stage in order to win the girl's heart! Travel from maze to maze, kill the baddies, avoid the traps, collect beers (your necessary 'fuel' to keep you going), find the diamonds, prove to her you're WORTHY!" Time to dust off that classic Amiga or alternatively download a digital copy and use an UAE emulator for your platform of choice. Have a look at the release trailer.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In her Bard College commencement speech, ex-Google VP and former U.S. CTO Megan Smith revealed to graduates that she gave President Obama a computing history lesson on the same day he learned to code in 2014. "I walked into the Oval Office to do coding with President Obama, and, interestingly, Prince William had just stepped out," Smith explained (YouTube). "They had just had a meeting. I said to President Obama, you know what you and I are about to do is related to Prince William, and he said, how's that. Well, the Prince's wife Kate, her mother and grandmother were codebreakers at Bletchley Park, where they cracked the Nazi Enigma codes...." [Presumably Smith meant to say Kate's great-aunt, not mother — Carole Middleton wasn't born until 1955.]

To be fair to the President, Smith once confessed to not knowing much about computing history herself, explaining in a 2012 Official Google Blog post that she and other visiting tech luminaries were embarrassingly clueless about who Ada Lovelace was in a 2011 visit to England. "Last year, a group of us were lucky enough to visit the U.K. Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, as part of the Silicon Valley Comes to the U.K. initiative," Smith wrote. "While there, we asked about some of the paintings on the wall. When we got to a large portrait of a regally dressed woman, our host said 'and of course, that's Lady Lovelace'... You can imagine our surprise when we learned she was considered by some to be the world's first computer programmer -- having published the first algorithm intended for use on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine." One imagines Smith might also have been surprised to learn that many programmers older than Smith were already very aware of Lady Ada at that time thanks to the Department of Defense, who tried in vain to make Ada a household name for decades, but had little success popularizing the Ada programming language, which was named after Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.

jrepin writes: KDE unveils the final release of Plasma 5.13, the free and open-source desktop environment. Members of the Plasma team have focused on optimizing startup and minimizing memory usage. Plasma Browser Integration is a suite of new features which make Firefox, Chrome and Chromium-based browsers work with your desktop. For example, downloads are now displayed in the Plasma notification popup, and the Media Controls Plasmoid can mute and skip videos and music playing from within the browser. Browser tabs can be opened directly using KRunner via the Alt-Space keyboard shortcut. System Settings design has been improved further. Window manager gained much-improved effects for blur and desktop switching. Wayland work continued, with the return of window rules, and initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing. You can view the changelog here.

To celebrate its 14th birthday, Phoronix.com used a 15-inch MacBook Pro to run system benchmarking tests on the following operating systems:

- Windows 10 Pro

- The latest macOS 10.13 High Sierra

- Windows 10 Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) using Ubuntu 18.04

- Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.15 kernel, GCC 7.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.

- Clear Linux 22780 with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.

- Fedora Workstation 28 with updates is the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 8.1.1, and EXT4.

- OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the Linux 4.16 kernel, GCC 7.3.1, and default file-system configuration of Btrfs root file-system with XFS home partition.

The results? When it came to outright wins and losses, Clear Linux 22780 was the front-runner 59% of the time followed by macOS 10.13.4 finishing first 21% of the time and then Fedora Workstation 28 with winning 10% of the time.

For losses, to little surprise considering the I/O overhead, Windows 10 was in last place 38% of the time followed by Ubuntu 18.04 being surprisingly the slowest Linux distribution 30% of the time on this 2016 MacBook Pro.
The article also reminds readers that "For those looking for a Linux laptop, there are plenty of better options..."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today's controversy begins with a Reddit thread that noted FlightSimLabs' A320 add-on installing "cmdhost.exe" files in the "system32" and "SysWOW64" folders inside the Windows directory. The strange filename and location -- which seems designed to closely match those of actual Windows system files -- made some Reddit users suspicious, especially given FlightSimLabs history of undisclosed installations. FlightSimLabs responded on Facebook last Thursday by saying that the files came from third-party e-commerce service eSellerate and were designed to "reduce the number of product activation issues people were having." This system has been acknowledged in the FlightSimLabs forums in the past, and it apparently passes all major antivirus checks.

The "controversy" over these files might well have died down after that response. But then FlightSimLabs' Simon Kelsey sent a message to the moderators of the flightsim subreddit, gently reminding them of "Reddit's obligation as a publisher... to ensure that any libelous content is taken down as soon as you become aware of it." While ostensibly welcoming "robust fair comment and opinion," the message also warns that "ANY suggestion that our current or future products pose any threat to users is absolutely false and libelous." That warning extends to the company's previous password-extractor controversy, with Kelsey writing, "ANY suggestion that any user's data was compromised during the events of February is entirely false and therefore libelous." "I would hate for lawyers to have to get involved in this, and I trust that you will take appropriate steps to ensure that no such libel is posted," Kelsey concludes. A follow-up message from Kelsey reiterated the same points and noted that FlightSimLabs has reported specific comments and demanded they be removed as libelous.

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: A team of Russian researchers have put a new spin on technology that uses the beta decay of a radioactive element to create differences in voltage. The devices are made of stacks of isotope of nickel-63 sandwiched between a pair of special semiconducting diodes called a Schottky barrier. This barrier keeps a current headed one way, a feature often used to turn alternating currents into direct ones. Finding that the optimal thickness of each layer was just 2 micrometers, the researchers were able to maximize the voltage produced by every gram of isotope.

Nickel-63 has a half-life of just over 100 years, which in an optimized system like this adds up to 3,300 milliwatt-hours of energy per gram: ten times the specific energy of your typical electrochemical cell. It's a significant step up from previous nickel-63 betavoltaic devices, and while it isn't quite enough to power your smart phone, it does bring it into a realm of being useful for a wide variety of tasks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A California state bill that would have more heavily regulated the use of flamethrowers has now effectively fizzled out in a legislative committee. In light of this development, there's nothing to stop Boring Company customers in California from receiving the company's sold-out flamethrowers. On May 26, the day after the bill died in committee, CEO Elon Musk tweeted: "About to ship. @BoringCompany holding flamethrower pickup parties in a week or so, then deliveries begin. Check https://www.boringcompany.com/... for details." After Musk said he would be selling a flamethrower dubbed "Not a Flamethrower" to get around customs, Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) authored a bill that would have imposed more restrictions on their acquisition and use.

"I honestly thought it was a joke when I saw the news about this," the assemblyman said in a statement at the time. "This product, in the wake of California's deadliest wildfire year in state history, is incredibly insensitive, dangerous, and most definitely not funny." He added: "There are many times in which technology and inventions benefit society but are not made available to the public. We don't allow people to walk in off the street and purchase military grade tanks or armor-piercing ammunition... I cannot even begin to imagine the problems a flamethrower would cause firefighters and police officers alike."