Samsung is significantly falling behind in the rush to bring augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) devices to market, partially due to the company's "obsession" with foldable smartphones, The Korea Herald reports. MacRumors reports: Samsung's main competitors, including Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Sony, are developing or have already launched AR and VR devices amid massive industry-wide investments into the future of the technology, but it is unclear if Samsung is actively developing such devices at all. eBest Investment and Securities analyst Kim Gwang-soo said: "Big tech companies, rather than smartphone manufacturers, are leading XR devices because they have the necessary content and platforms. Google has an operating system Android, Microsoft has Xbox and Sony has PlayStation. It's risky for Samsung to roll out XR devices, so it has no choice but to stick to foldable smartphones."

The growth of Samsung's smartphone business has slowed down to just 0.9 percent year on year, but the company remains committed to the potential of foldable devices to reignite momentum. Samsung shareholders are said to be concerned by its perceived preoccupation with foldable devices, which is distracting the company's attention from the need to compete with future AR and VR devices from its main rivals.

Industry insiders claim that even if Samsung develops its own AR and VR devices, it lacks the content and platform to create a cohesive and compelling ecosystem. In an attempt to catch up in the race to make inroads into the AR and VR market, Samsung made a belated investment in DigiLens, a California startup that makes AR glasses. To stay relevant, market observers are warning that Samsung may need to find a partner that already has content or a platform in exchange for chip expertise, similar to the relationship between Qualcomm and Microsoft.

Firefox 96.0 is officially shipping today as the first update of 2022 for this open-source web browser. From a report: Firefox 96.0 has "significantly" reduced the amount of load placed on the browser's main thread and there is also "significant" improvements in noise suppression and auto-gain-control and improvements in echo cancellation. In addition to that performance work, there are also WebRTC improvements, an improved cookie policy to reduce the likelihood of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks, video quality degradation fixes, and other fixes. Over on developer.mozilla.org are some of the web developer changes with Firefox 96 including CSS color value function hwb() support for specifying the hue/whiteness/blackness, support for the CSS color-scheme property, the Web Locks API is enabled by default, image encoder support for WebP for exporting HTML5 canvas elements, and other additions.

A sugar additive used in several foods could have helped spread a seriously dangerous superbug around the US, according to a 2018 study. ScienceAlert reports: The finger of blame is pointed squarely at the sugar trehalose, found in foods such as nutrition bars and chewing gum. If the findings are confirmed, it's a stark warning that even apparently harmless additives have the potential to cause health issues when introduced to our food supply. In this case, trehalose is being linked with the rise of two strains of the bacterium Clostridium difficile, capable of causing diarrhea, colitis, organ failure, and even death. The swift rise of the antibiotic-resistant bug has become a huge problem for hospitals in recent years, and the timing matches up with the arrival of trehalose.

"In 2000, trehalose was approved as a food additive in the United States for a number of foods from sushi and vegetables to ice cream," said one of the researchers, Robert Britton from the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, back in January 2018. "About three years later the reports of outbreaks with these lineages started to increase. Other factors may also contribute, but we think that trehalose is a key trigger."

The C. difficile lineages Britton is referring to are RT027 and RT078. When the researchers analysed the genomes of these two strains, they found DNA sequences that enabled them to feed off low doses of trehalose sugar very efficiently. In fact, these particular bacteria need about 1,000 times less trehalose to live off than other varieties of C. difficile, thanks to their genetic make-up. [...] It's still not certain that trehalose has contributed to the rise of C. difficile, but the study results and the timing of its approval as an additive are pretty compelling. More research will now be needed to confirm the link. According to figures from the CDC, "C. difficile was responsible for half a million infections across the year and 29,000 deaths within the first 30 days of diagnosis," adds ScienceAlert.

The findings were published in the journal Nature.

DoorDash, the food delivery app based out of San Francisco, is requiring all its nondelivery employees, including CEO Tony Xu, to do a "dash" once a month -- and some employees are seemingly furious. SFGate reports: MarketWatch first reported that the WeDash program, which was launched when the service was founded, is making its return in January after being paused during the pandemic. A spokesperson for DoorDash confirmed its return to SFGATE. But a 1,500-comment thread on Blind, the anonymous social media platform for techies and other white-collar types, was started last week by one disgruntled DoorDash worker.

An engineer with a reported total compensation, or TC, of $400,000 a year griped about the responsibility of having to do a once-a-month delivery. "What the actual f--k?" the engineer wrote on the platform. "I didn't sign up for this, there was nothing in the offer letter/job description about this." While some people replied to the original post to say it would be a helpful opportunity to develop empathy and learn about the myriad frustrations of delivery workers, others sided with the original poster. "Not acceptable in anyway!" said one.

For employees unable to do deliveries, there are other programs in place to work with service employees and businesses. The program was launched, a spokesperson said, to "learn first-hand how the technology products we build empower local economies, which in turn helps us build a better product." Employees then gain "credits" through these services, which are reportedly built into an annual review. The money employees make during deliveries will be donated to a nonprofit, the spokesperson said.

Phoronix reports: The Linux 5.17 kernel when it kicks off next month is slated to introduce a new driver "x86-android-tablets" just for dealing with all the quirky/buggy x86 tablets out there.

Longtime Linux developer Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been responsible for numerous x86 laptop/tablet improvements in recent years along with other desktop-related improvements at Red Hat. He has now queued up into the x86 platform drivers tree the x86-android-tablets driver he wrote for dealing with the mess of x86 (mostly Android) tablets that don't behave properly out-of-the-box with Linux.

As part of the ACPI DSDT (Differentiated System Description Table), many x86 tablets have simply invalid entries and other problems that cause issue when trying to run mainline Linux on said hardware. Hans explains as part of the commit currently in the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch....

"This driver, which loads only on affected models based on DMI matching, adds DMI based instantiating of kernel devices for devices which are missing from the DSDT, fixing e.g. battery monitoring, touchpads and/or accelerometers not working."

This new x86-android-tablets driver will basically be a catch-all solution for overrides based on device matching. Hans ended the patch message with, "This is the least ugly option to get these devices to fully work and to do so without adding any extra code to the main kernel image (vmlinuz) when built as a module."

When The Matrix Resurrections premiered in San Francisco, the city's mayor "celebrated the appearance of her fair city in the film and cheered the film's economic contributions to the region," reports SFGate. "But there's a problem of aesthetics at play here... It is undeniably a dystopian hellscape where police rule the city and technology looms over all..." In the first section of the movie, the metaphor of the Matrix mirrors that of the tech industry depicted in the film. Tech is stereotypical here — lots of T-shirt-wearing men playing ping-pong and talking about how to design the next great video game. The most annoying character in the film, Jude (Andrew Caldwell), is a proxy for all annoying tech bros...
Meanwhile Politico writes that the original 1999 film The Matrix actually "changed politics, almost entirely by mistake," and calls the new Matrix Resurections "a sophisticated self-critique of the culture that swallowed it." In the past two decades, the idea of a "red pill" has taken on a life of its own in American culture, most prominently at first in an infamous misogynist subreddit, and then more broadly as a symbol of any kind of political awakening, almost always on the right. The idea has proliferated wildly throughout politics, and especially the darkest ideological corners of the internet, in which to be "red-pilled" means to realize that American society has been hopelessly debased by liberals, requiring a total rethink of its premises... Hugo Weaving, who memorably portrayed the original films' villain, lamented in a 2020 interview how people "will take something that they think is cool and they will repurpose it to fit themselves when the original intention or meaning of that thing was quite the opposite...." [T]he Wachowskis have been largely silent about the "meaning" of their creation — a movie franchise that not only became a ubiquitous cultural phenomenon, but predicted the cultural tenor of politics in the digital age with an eerie, oracular accuracy. We know they got it right, but what did they think about it?

Wednesday saw the release of "The Matrix Resurrections," a long-delayed sequel from one of the original writer/directors (Lana directed; Lilly sat it out) — and also an answer to that question. As a movie, it's everything its predecessors was, an impressive feat of visual-effects artistry, action choreography and original sci-fi worldbuilding. But even more, it's a two hour and 27-minute-long piece of cultural criticism. The film interrogates, to a jarringly specific degree, not just its own iconography, but how American culture has evolved around and bastardized it over the past two decades. "The Matrix Resurrections" is both wildly successful popcorn entertainment and a window into a long-misunderstood creative mind. But in refitting its entire premise to the social media age, it illustrates just how much the contours of American society have changed in the intervening decades....

The original "Matrix" was deeply of its time. Reeves' Neo a was a quintessential late 1990s corporate drone, captive to the professional ennui also depicted in films of the era like "Fight Club" and "Office Space." Its modern incarnation is a cry of protest against something else: society's willingness to trade individual agency for the neurological reward pellets of the Online. Visual metaphors abound, with Reeves disoriented by a procession of mirrors that serve as gateways to another world, another possible truth. "Your brain is hooked on this shit the Matrix has been feeding you for years," one character tells him. "They don't know you like I do.

"I know exactly what you need...."
The movie is streaming now on HBOMax for subscribers in their $15 ad-free tier — but, like, Dune, only during its 31-day theatrical run.

SFGate visits a San Francisco elementary school where there's absolutely no trace of warehouse that used to be there where Tim Burton kicked a hole in the wall during the arduous two-year filming of "The Nightmare Before Christmas".

At least one animator remembers Burton at the time was directing Batman Returns, and only stopped by every month or so to check on the film's progress and "actually got to witness, proof positive, how the crew suffered to create his vision...."

Slashdot reader destinyland shares SFGate's report: Disney initially had reservations about the film, releasing it under the Touchstone banner with a PG rating that was uncommon for an animated feature at the time. Nonetheless, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" became a sleeper hit — Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is annually remodeled with a seasonal overlay inspired by the film, and it clocks in at #7 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the best Christmas movies of all time. It was immortalized in a Blink-182 song, and Roger Ebert went as far as to compare the originality of the worlds captured in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" to the planets in the "Star Wars" franchise....

[A] team of 120 animators, puppet fabricators, camera operators, and more moved into San Francisco Studios — later renamed Skellington Productions — in July of 1991, with production expected to begin later that October. The 35,000-square-foot warehouse on 375 7th Street was outfitted with 19 soundstages where 227 puppets — many of them duplicates of the main characters — were painstakingly assembled and animated. Passersby in SoMa likely had no idea the studio existed, and if they did, they were completely unaware of what was going on inside.

Unlike studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks, where each animator is usually seated at a computer in a cubicle, these soundstages were massive and sectioned off with thick black curtains, said animator Justin Kohn, who lived in a Sausalito apartment next to Smitty's Bar during filming and still resides in Marin. "It was like visiting this crazy museum," he said. "You'd part the curtain, and it was like visiting a whole new world with clouds and stars everywhere." Set pieces were built no larger than two feet tall and wide so an animator could easily reach inside and move the puppets around. Each character had to be posed 24 times for every second of animated footage, while many of the scenes required 20-30 lighting instruments on top of that to create lifelike visual effects. "It was the most sophisticated stop motion ever done in the world up until that point," said Kohn...

All the while, they wondered if the hours of tedious work would pay off. When the film was completed, most of the sets and puppets were thrown away, with animators taking home some of them as keepsakes — Kohn still has a Jack Skellington puppet and the sleigh displayed in an office.

Microsoft has notified earlier this month a select group of Azure customers impacted by a recently discovered bug that exposed the source code of their Azure web apps since at least September 2017. The vulnerability was discovered by cloud security firm Wiz and reported to Microsoft in September. The issue was fixed in November, and Microsoft has spent the last few weeks investigating how many customers were impacted. The Record reports: The issue, nicknamed NotLegit, resides in Azure App Service, a feature of the Azure cloud that allows customers to deploy websites and web apps from a source code repository. Wiz researchers said that in situations where Azure customers selected the "Local Git" option to deploy their websites from a Git repository hosted on the same Azure server, the source code was also exposed online.

All PHP, Node, Ruby, and Python applications deployed via this method were impacted, Microsoft said in a blog post today. Only apps deployed on Linux-based Azure servers were impacted, but not those hosted on Windows Server systems. Apps deployed as far back as 2013 were impacted, although the exposure began in September 2017, when the vulnerability was introduced in Azure's systems, the Wiz team said in a report today. [...] The most dangerous exposure scenarios are situations where the exposed source code contained a .git configuration file that, itself, contained passwords and access tokens for other customer systems, such as databases and APIs.

votsalo writes: The California Coastal Commission approved dropping rodenticide on Farallon Islands. "The rocky outcrop of sea stacks and islands west of the Golden Gate is home to 300,000 breeding seabirds, as well as five species of seals and sea lions," reports SFGate. "That unique biodiversity, however, also includes more than 1,000 mice per acre, a population that has exploded in recent years." The mice "were first introduced by sailors over a century ago." Dr. Jane Goodall argued against the poison at the hearing, but the Commission decided 5-3 to airdrop 3,000 pounds of poison by helicopters. ["The agency plans on dropping the poisoned bait in the winter months when bird numbers are lowest," the report adds.]

SFGate pan's Disney's efforts at "hyping up its mega-expensive, hyper-immersive Star Wars hotel in Walt Disney World" — the Galactic Starcruiser — as its March 1st opening approaches: Guests must book two nights — which will set you back nearly $5,000 for two people or $6,000 for a family of four — and will spend most of their time inside the spaceship resort, much like a cruise. There's an "excursion" into the Galaxy's Edge part of Disney World, while the remainder of the stay includes interactions with characters, lightsaber training (more on that later) and exclusive restaurants...

The look and feel of the hotel has been criticized as looking plastic and cheap, and reception to one sneak peek video was so bad, it has since disappeared from Disney's YouTube channel.

The video showed actor Sean Giambrone of "The Goldbergs" being given a tour of some of the ship's features, which look pretty bare and antiseptic for the Star Wars universe, and listening to a strange musical performance. (Another user uploaded the deleted video here.) The promo prompted one Twitter user to comment, "Bro this isn't Star Wars, this is 'Space Conflicts.'" Fans responded similarly to a demo of Disney Parks Chairman Josh D'Amaro testing out the vaunted lightsaber training. Instead of a flashy, super realistic adventure, the training consisted of a standard light-up lightsaber and some lasers...

Reservations booked up quickly when the hotel was announced but now, as the 90-day deadline to cancel approaches, people appear to be ducking out of their expensive commitments; a number of openings have begun popping up in March, April and June.

"In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined," writes Phoronix, citing patches sent out Monday "introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel."

This summer saw the earlier patch series posted for review and discussion around introducing Rust programming language support in the Linux kernel to complement its longstanding C focus. In the months since there has been more progress on enabling Rust for the Linux kernel development, Linus Torvalds is not opposed to it, and others getting onboard with the effort. Rust for the Linux kernel remains of increasing interest to developers over security concerns with Rust affording more memory safety protections, potentially lowering the barrier to contributing to the kernel, and other related benefits....

Miguel Ojeda sent out the "v2" patches for Rust support in the kernel. With these updated packages, the Rust code is now relying on stable Rust releases rather than the beta compiler state previously, new modularization options added, stricter code enforcements, extra Rust compiler diagnostics enabled, new abstractions for in-kernel use, and other low-level code improvements.

Red Hat is also now joining Arm, Google, and Microsoft in voicing their support for Rust code within the Linux kernel.
ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols also expects the first Rust code in Linux's kernel sometime in 2022: As Ryan Levick, a Microsoft principal cloud developer advocate, explained, "Rust is completely memory safe." Since roughly two-thirds of security issues can be traced back to handling memory badly, this is a major improvement. In addition, "Rust prevents those issues usually without adding any runtime overhead," Levick said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' auction of an NFT and the iMac he used to build the website has stirred up drama in the notoriously rigid Wikipedia community. The trouble began when Wales posted an announcement about the auction on his user talk page -- a kind of message board where users communicate directly with each other. Wikipedia has strict rules against self-promotion and some editors felt that Wales' announcement violated that rule. "Am I crazy? Jimbo has posted a thread on his user talk page promoting an auction of some of his stuff, which he has refused to confirm would not benefit him personally," editor Floquenbeam said on December 3.. "This is self-promotion 101, right? I've told him if he doesn't remove it, I will. That's policy, right? [...] Wales pushed back, saying he'd spoken to the WMF communications and legal departments and that they'd agreed a simple post about the auction on his user talk page would be fine.

The conversation went on like this for about a day before another editor shut it down, saying it was "past the point of productive discourse." The thread announcing the auction on Wales' talk page was removed but another thread remains where he's answering questions about the auction and NFTs from other users. An email thread on the Wikimedia-L listserv is more measured but still has some pedantic arguments that is common with Wikimedia drama. Some users are concerned that he's taking something from Wikimedia and could use the money to fund his commercial enterprise WT:Social. Another user said "The concept of NFT seems to go against the very principles of Wikipedia. On one hand, we share our work freely, both in terms of access and by using a copyleft license. On the other hand, this NFT takes something that was shared freely and then restricts it so that it can be sold." The NFT Wales is selling is a website that allows users to relive the moment of Wikipedia's creation. The site looks like Wikipedia did in its fledgling moments, and whoever wins the auction can edit it as they will.

The second big controversy among Wikipedia's editors was whether Wales had the right to auction off something like this and if he was even recreating the site correctly at the moment of its inception. The discussion devolved into a lengthy conversation about who owns the rights to what they edit on Wikipedia and the state of servers and timestamps from 2001. It's worth mentioning here that Wales' NFT is a recreation of a memory and not an actual editable bit of code that will be reflected on Wikipedia in any way. Eventually, all sides relented. "There is at least one good thing that should be coming out of this," editor Smallbones said. "The community has made it very clear that anything that is considered to be promotional or an advertisement, even if it is for a charitable cause, on any page in Wikipedia, posted by any editor -- even the most senior and most respected -- may be removed by any editor at any time."

On Monday JetBrains (creators of the Kotlin programming language and makers of the integrated development environment IntelliJ IDEA) made an announcement: a preview for a lightweight new multi-language IDE called Fleet using IntelliJ's code-processing engine with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.

By Friday they'd received an "overwhelming" number of requests, and announced the preview program had stopped accepting new requests. ("To subscribe for updates and the public preview announcement at jetbrains.com/fleet or follow @JetBrains_Fleet on Twitter.")

They'd received 80,000 requests in just the first 30 hours, reports Visual Studio magazine: Although JetBrains didn't even mention VS Code in its Nov. 28 announcement, many media pundits immediately characterized it along the lines of an "answer to Visual Studio Code," a "response to Visual Studio Code," a "competitor to Visual Studio Code" and so on...

"When you first launch Fleet, it starts up as a full-fledged editor that provides syntax highlighting, simple code completion, and all the things you'd expect from an editor," JetBrains said. "But wait, there's more! Fleet is also a fully functional IDE bringing smart completion, refactorings, navigation, debugging, and everything else that you're used to having in an IDE — all with a single button click."
"It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately..." boasts the Fleet web page, adding that Fleet "is designed to automatically detect your project configuration from the source code, maximizing the value you get from its smart code-processing engine while minimizing the need to configure the project in the IDE." And it also offers "project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes..."

Fleet also offers a collaborative environment allowing developers to work together — not just sharing the editor, but also terminals and debugging sessions. (There's even a diff view for reviewing changes.) "Others can connect to a collaboration session you initiate on your machine, or everyone can connect to a shared remote dev environment," explains Fleet's web page. "It supports a number of remote work scenarios and can be run locally on the developer's computer, in the cloud, or on a remote server," reports SD Times. (And Fleet's home page says soon it will even run in Docker containers configured with an appropriate environment for your project.)

SD Times adds that Fleet "currently supports Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, and JavaScript. The company plans to extend support to cover PHP, C++, C#, and HTML, which are the remaining languages that have IntelliJ IDEs." It's multi-platform — running on Linux, MacOS, or Windows — and Fleet's web page promises "a familiar and consistent user experience" offering one IDE for the many different technologies you might end up using.

And yes, there's a dark theme.

As wafer costs increase, so are the costs of GPUs. According to a post on the Board Forums, AMD says it's increasing the price of its RX 6000 series GPUs by 10 percent across the board. ExtremeTech reports: This pricing change will apparently occur in the next shipment of GPUs to its partners, which will apparently drive up the price of these GPUs by $20 to $40 USD. This news arrives just in time for the holiday shopping season, when demand for GPUs is expected to increase even more, as if that is even possible.

According to a translation of the board posting, AMD is citing TSMC wafer costs as the reason for the change, and as we reported earlier, sub-16nm prices, including 12nm, 7nm, and 5nm, are said to have increased roughly 10 percent, while TSMC's older nodes have gone up by as much as 20 percent. AMD seems to be passing this price increase along to its partners, who in turn are passing it along to us, the customer, or the scalper, as it were. Then the scalper passes it along to us, the gamers. Although, as Videocardz points out AMD also produces its CPUs at TSMC and there hasn't been a similar across-the-board increase, which is curious.

How many members of your team are so irreplaceable that if they were hit by a bus, your project would grind to a halt?

For PHP, that number is: two. (According to a post by PHP contributor Joe Watkins earlier this year that's now being cited in Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column.) "Maybe as few as two people would have to wake up this morning and decide they want to do something different with their lives in order for the PHP project to lack the expertise and resources to move it forward in its current form, and at current pace," Watkins wrote at the time, naming Dmitry Stogov and Nikita Popov as those two. Well, last week, Nikita Popov was thankfully not hit by a bus, but he did decide to move on from his role with PHP to instead focus his activities on LLVM.

Also thankfully, Watkins' article earlier this year opened some eyes to the situation at hand and, as he writes in a follow-up article this week, JetBrains (Popov's employer) reached out to him at the time regarding starting a PHP Foundation. This week, with Popov's departure, the PHP Foundation was officially launched with the goal of funding part/full-time developers to work on the PHP core in 2022. At launch, the PHP Foundation will count 10 companies — Automattic, Laravel, Acquia, Zend, Private Packagist, Symfony, Craft CMS, Tideways, PrestaShop, and JetBrains — among its backers, with an expectation to raise $300,000 per year, and with JetBrains contributing $100,000 annually. Alongside that, the foundation is being launched using foundation-as-a-service provider Open Collective, and just under 700 contributors have already raised more than $40,000 for the foundation.

One of the key benefits to creating a foundation, rather than sticking with the status quo, goes beyond increasing the bus factor — it diversifies the influences on PHP. Watkins points out that, for much of the history of PHP, Zend, the employer of Dmitry Stogov, has been a primary financial backer, and as such has had some amount of influence on the language's direction. Similarly, JetBrains had increased influence during its time employing Popov on PHP."To say they have not influenced the direction of the language as a whole would just not be true...." While Watkins says that everything has been above board and gone through standard processes to ensure so, influence is nonetheless indisputable, and that "The Foundation represents a new way to push the language forward..."

The current RFC process, JetBrains writes, "will not change, and language decisions will always be left to the PHP Internals community."
And in addition, Watkins adds, "It provides us the mechanism by which to raise the bus factor, so that we never face the problems we face today, and have faced in the past."

National Geographic reports: About a million years ago, an asteroid smacked into the normally tranquil surface of Mars. The impact released a fountain of debris, and some of the rocky fragments pierced the sky, escaping the planet's gravity to journey through the dark. Some of the rocks eventually found their way to Earth and survived the plunge through our planet's atmosphere to thud into the surface-including a hefty 15-pound shard that crashed into Morocco in 2011.... Determining what part of Mars these meteorites came from is a critical part of piecing together the planet's history — but it's proven to be a major scientific challenge.

Now, with the assistance of a crater-counting machine learning program, a team of researchers studying the depleted shergottites may have finally cracked the case: They concluded that these geologic projectiles came from a single crater atop Tharsis, the largest volcanic feature in the solar system. This ancient volcanic behemoth on Mars is adorned with thousands of individual volcanoes and extends three times the area of the continental United States. It was built over billions of years by countless magma injections and lava flows. It is so heavy that, as it formed, it effectively tipped the planet over by 20 degrees. If these meteorites do come from Tharsis, as the analysis published in Nature Communications suggests, then scientists have their hands on meteorites that can help identify the infernal forces that fueled the construction of this world-tipping edifice. "This could really change the game about how we understand Mars," says Luke Daly, a meteorite expert at the University of Glasgow who was not involved with the study.
Debris from meteor impacts tend to also form smaller craters — so the scientists trained their machine learning tools to scan orbital images of Mars to find appropriately-sized crazers (less than two thirds of a mile long). "It quickly found about 90 million, says Kosta Servis, a data scientist at Curtin University and co-author of the study..."

But after sifting through the data, "the team identified 19 large craters in volcanic regions on Mars that were surrounded by multiple secondary craters — a sign that these planetary scars could be as young as the 1.1-million-year-old crater they sought..." Out of those 19 craters, just two were excavated from youthful volcanic deposits by an impact event 1.1 million years ago: crater 09-00015 and Tooting crater. The latter (named after a district in London) looks to have been formed by a powerful oblique impact — the kind of collision that would propel a lot of Martian meteorites into space..."

Buoyed by their discovery, Lagain's team is hoping to identify the source craters of other Martian meteorites — including some of the very oldest, which could reveal more about Mars's waterlogged past.... Machine learning "is a really inventive way of trying to tackle this problem," says Lauren Jozwiak, a planetary volcanologist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory not involved with the study. "Boy, I hope this method works," she says, because if it does, "it would be really cool to take this and apply it to other planets."

North Dakota has just 266 electric cars, the fewest of any state in America, reports the Washington Post. But the state's biggest booster for electric cars may be: the coal industry: The thinking is straightforward: More electric cars would mean more of a market for the [lower carbon] lignite coal that produces most of North Dakota's electricity, and if a long-shot project to store carbon emissions in deep underground wells works out, it might even result in cleaner air as well. "EVs will be soaking up electricity," said Jason Bohrer, head of a coal trade group that has launched a statewide campaign to promote electric vehicles and charging stations along North Dakota's vast distances. "So coal power plants, our most resilient and available power plants, can continue to be online...."

In North Dakota, Wyoming, West Virginia — and in the nine other states where coal is the main fuel for electric power plants — electric cars will still rely on the combustion of ancient carbon-based deposits for their energy unless other sources of power come to the fore... [C]oal remains by far the main fuel for power plants worldwide, and a recent surge in its price suggests that demand is not waning. Without an intensive turn to carbon capture — a technically feasible but commercially unproven technology — electric vehicles may not be able to make that much of a difference in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... [A] carbon capture experiment at the Milton R. Young Generation Station adjacent to the BNI mine, devised by a partnership of scientists and the Minnkota Power Cooperative, could make coal more attractive in the clean-energy future — if it works. The idea, known as Project Tundra, is to scrub the carbon dioxide out of the plant's exhaust smoke, condense it and inject it into deep wells...

Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil... If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, "it's opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite [coal] industry a way to survive." His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital...

Clean-air advocates range from dubious to dismissive. The promise of electric vehicles wasn't that they would spur more coal mining — or oil extraction...

And unproven though it may be, critics contend, the publicity surrounding carbon capture has created a false sense of complacency that world-changing solutions are just around the corner.
The Post also reports that "the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture... "

Phoronix reports: System76's Pop!_OS Linux distribution already has their own "COSMIC" desktop that is based on GNOME, but moving ahead they are working on their own Rust-written desktop that is not based on GNOME or any existing desktop environment.

Stemming from a Reddit discussion over the possibility of seeing a KDE flavor of Pop!_OS, it was brought up by one of their own engineers they are working on their "own desktop". System76 engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Michael Murphy "mmstick" commented that System76 will be its own desktop. When further poked about that whether that means a fork from GNOME, the response was "No it is its own thing written in Rust."

Word of System76 making their "own" desktop not based on GNOME does follow some recent friction between Pop!_OS and GNOME developers over their approach to theming and customizations.
Or, as Murphy wrote (in response to a later comment): What are you expecting us to do? We have a desktop environment that is a collection of GNOME Shell extensions which break every GNOME Shell release. Either we move towards maintaining tens of thousands of lines of monkey patches, or we do it the right way and make the next step a fully fledged desktop environment equal to GNOME Shell.
In other comments Murphy clarified that essentially the gist of it would be an independent/distro-agnostic desktop environment, and that they'd be "using tooling that already exists (mutter, kwin, wlroots), but implementing the surrounding shell in Rust from scratch..." And he added later that "We already do our best to follow freedesktop specifications with our software. So there's no reason to think we'd do otherwise."

One of the most interesting exchanges happened when one long-time Reddit user questioned the need for another desktop. That user had posted, "Linux is great, choices are great, but our biggest problem is that in the pursuit of choices for the sake of choices we have a ton of projects that are 95% of the way to prime time readiness, but none that are fully there, because instead of fixing problems, everyone decides they just want to start over."

Murphy responded: "You have it backwards. Choice is the best part about open source. None of us would be here today if people weren't brave enough to take the next step with a new solution to an existing problem..."

ZDNet reports: JavaScript is now used by more than 16.4 million developers globally, says a survey of more than 19,000 coders — making it the world's most popular programming language "by a wide margin".

SlashData's 21st State of the Developer Nation Report examined global software developer trends across 160 countries during Q3 2021, covering programming languages, tools, APIs, apps and technology segments, as well as attitudes of developers themselves... While not necessarily a surprise in itself — JavaScript has, after all, been the world's most-used language for a number of years now — SlashData found that upwards of 2.5 million developers had joined the JavaScript community in the past six months alone. That's the same as the entire user base of Swift; or, the combined communities of Rust and Ruby.

The data for JavaScript also included language derivatives TypeScript and CoffeeScript.

Python might not be a close second, but its popularity is impressive nonetheless: according to SlashData, the language is now used by some 11.3 million coders, primarily within data science and machine learning, and IoT applications. The brainchild of Guido van Rossum, Python's popularity has exploded in recent years, overtaking that of Java, which is currently used by 9.6m developers. Java remains a go-to for mobile and desktop apps, SlashData's survey found. According to SlashData, Python added 2.3m developers to its community in the past 12 months. "That's a 25% growth rate, one of the highest across all the large programming language communities of more than 7M users," the report noted.

"The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python's popularity. More than 70% of ML developers and data scientists report using Python. For perspective, only 17% use R, the other language often associated with data science."
The survey concluded these are, in order, the 10 most popular programming languages:

1. JavaScript
2. Python
3. Java
4. C/C++ [Yes, it lumps them together]
5. PHP
6. C#
7. "Visual development tools"
8. Kotlin
9. Swift
10. Go

The report also found that Rust, although coming in at #14, grew faster than any other language in the past 24 months, "nearly tripling in size from just 0.4M developers in Q3 2019 to 1.1M."

"Intel is gearing up to go to a war with Nvidia," writes Slashdot reader labloke11. "They have their OneAPI and their GPU. It will be interesting... For me, I like competition." Phoronix reports: While Intel Alder Lake is dominating today's news cycle, Intel and Microsoft also announced today that they have brought oneAPI Level Zero and Intel OpenCL support to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) while employing Intel graphics hardware acceleration. Similar to NVIDIA bringing CUDA and their accelerated GPU support to WSL2 as well as similar efforts by AMD on the Radeon side, Intel and Microsoft are now having Intel graphics compute working within the Linux confines on Windows 11 or Windows 10 21'H2. Hardware-accelerated oneAPI Level Zero, OpenVINO, and OpenCL on Intel graphics hardware can now be enjoyed within the WSL2 environment when using the latest updates and drivers. Like with the rest of the WSL2 stack and capabilities from other GPU vendors, this is at a near-native level of performance. More information can be found via the Microsoft Command Line blog and Intel blog.