Popular programming language, at the top of its game, still struggles to please everyone. Feature The 30th anniversary of Python this week finds the programming language at the top of its game, but not without challenges.…
Source: LXer – Happy birthday, Python, you’re 30 years old this week: Easy to learn, and the right tool at the right time
“The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market,” reports ZDNet:
Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life? That’s a question savvy buyers are asking themselves. Not surprisingly, the most common answer seems to be “Nope…!”
Unless buyers check out a site like Everymac they won’t know what they’re missing. The bottom-of-the-line M1 MacBook Air has a Geekbench 5 multiprocessor score that is almost 2.5x that of the early 2020, top-of-the-line quad-core I7. For 80 percent of the price. And most users won’t need to spend the extra cash for the 16GB version since the memory management and page swapping is so efficient. The contrast is even more striking when comparing MacBook Pros. Not only is the 13″ MacBook Pro faster on the Geekbench 5 single and multiprocessor benchmarks than the top-of-the-line 16″ MacBook Pro Intel I9, it’s less than half the price. And it isn’t just a single benchmark. Search on “M1 MacBook Pro vs 16 MacBook Pro” on YouTube to see multiple videos testing real world workloads on both machines.
The article also makes a prediction: “The best deals on Intel ‘Books are yet to come, assuming Apple offers retailers price protection.
“There seems to be a large inventory of Intel based MacBooks, and they have to clear them out before the end of 2021.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Apple’s Powerful M1 MacBooks are Lowering The Resale Value of Older MacBooks
Zrythm 1.0.0-alpha.12.0.1 released this week as the interesting open-source, GTK-based digital audio workstation that has been moving closer to a 1.0 release…
Source: Phoronix – Zrythm DAW Sees New Release And Should Have “Almost No Crashes”
Automatic updates? ‘We have ideas on how to improve this,’ says founder. Linux Mint founder Clem Lefebvre has complained that too many users are slow to apply updates or run unsupported versions of the operating system.…
Source: LXer – Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions
Mozilla announced the latest release of Firefox 86 and it brings important features that make you more secure on the web.
Source: LXer – Firefox 86 Brings Total Cookie Protection and Multi-PIP Feature
“Bitcoin’s rally this year has hit a speed bump, putting it on track for the worst weekly slide in almost a year amid wider losses in risk assets,” reports Fortune:
The largest cryptocurrency slumped as much as 20% this week, the most since March, and was holding at about $46,925 as of 10:22 a.m. in Hong Kong. The wider Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, tracking Bitcoin, Ether and three other cryptocurrencies, is down 22% this week…
Bitcoin’s weakness in the face of market gyrations raises questions about its efficacy as a store of value and hedge against inflation, a key argument among proponents of its stunning fivefold rally over the past year. Detractors have maintained the digital asset’s surge is a speculative bubble and it’s destined for a repeat of the 2017 boom and bust.
While Bitcoin is often touted as the new “digital gold,” the yellow metal is winning out at the moment with spot gold holding at $1,768 per ounce, down less than 1% for the week.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Dropping Nearly 20%, Bitcoin Suffers Worst Weekly Drop in a Year
Nexcom’s semi-rugged “Neu-X302” embedded PC offers an 8th or 9th Gen Core CPU plus 4x USB 3.0, 2x GbE, 6x COM, and 2x M.2, plus SATA, VGA, and HDMI. Nexcom announced a variation on its 8th Gen Coffee Lake based Neu-X300 embedded computer that adds support for 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh and more serial […]
Source: LXer – Fanless Coffee Lake computer targets testing and analysis
Next step in Redmond’s ‘complete virtualization stack with Linux’. Patches submitted by Microsoft for the next version of the Linux kernel, 5.12, add the ability to boot the OS as the root partition on its Hyper-V hypervisor.…
Source: LXer – Linux as root partition on Hyper-V: Microsoft submits patches for kernel 5.12
The s0-called GameStonks saga had some help from automated bots hyping up “meme” stocks on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, according to an analysis by the cybersecurity firm PiiQ Media reviewed by Reuters.
Source: Gizmodo – Bots Reportedly Helped Fuel GameStonks Hype on Facebook, Twitter, and Other Platforms
First of all, how dare you, Sony.
Source: io9 – Sony Didn’t Want Tom Holland for Spider-Man, According to the Russo Brothers
Red Hat[he]#039[/he]s OpenShift 4.7 can help you manage your entire cloud application stack.
Source: LXer – Red Hat opens the door for both VMs and containers in its latest OpenShift release
There’s no doubt that pandemic fatigue is high. I get it. Heck, my area has restrictions right now. But it’s important to remember that there are ways that we can get together as a community while being safe and considerate of others. If you need an example, check out the more than 200,000 Buddhists that got together…
Source: Gizmodo – 200,000 Buddhists Gathered on a Giant Screen Via Zoom to Celebrate One of Their Holiest Holidays
Last week marked the 35th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda franchise. To celebrate the iconic series, I asked you all to create Zelda-themed images. You didn’t disappoint.
Source: Kotaku – ‘Shop Contest: The Legend Of Zelda 35th Anniversary, Winners!
There’s 29 hours left in a Kickstarter campaign to fund “an open source, Linux-based, highly modular, customizable portable computer kit that accommodates anything from a Raspberry Pi to a Ryzen x86 4×4 single-board computer and more,” writes READY!100:
Reminiscent of 1980s executive portable computers, the READY! 100 is fully modern with 12 input output ports and 4 antenna ports. Perfect for hackers, ham radio operators, and audio/video folks, it can even be used with external graphics cards.
Engadget hailed it as “a Raspberry Pi enclosure for cyberpunk enthusiasts.”
Thanks to their diminutive size and low-power consumption, single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi can come in all shapes and sizes. We’ve seen DIY enthusiasts like Guy Dupont put a $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W into the shell of a 2004 iPod Classic to create a device that can access Spotify. But few are as cool as this recent Kickstarter project we spotted from a Toronto-based company called Ready! Computer Corporation.
The company’s Ready! Model 100 is essentially a case for your single-board computer that includes a mechanical keyboard, stereo speakers, a touchscreen display and enough I/O ports to connect almost anything you need. The enclosure allows you to fit an SBC that’s about the size of a 4×4 Intel NUC board. Oh, and you can carry it around with a guitar strap.
Basically, it allows you to build the cyberdeck of your dreams.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Can ‘Ready’ Crowdfund a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Enclosure for Cyberpunk Enthusiasts?
Yet another vaccine is now part of our arsenal of weapons against the covid-19 pandemic. On Saturday, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization (EUA) to the one-dose shot developed by Johnson & Johnson. It joins the two-dose mRNA vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.
Source: Gizmodo – FDA Authorizes J&J Covid-19 Shot, Adding Millions of Doses to Total Vaccine Supply
Moto-branded smartwatches are staging another comeback, and they won’t rely on your Moto 360 nostalgia quite so much this time. As WatchSmarty and 9to5Google have noticed, a CE Brands (which runs eBuyNow) presentation has revealed a trio of Moto…
Source: Engadget – The next Moto smartwatches will include an Apple Watch clone
The SolarWinds drama just won’t stop. It’s a tale of Russian hackers—and potentially Chinese hackers—alleged email spying, and a gaping hole of security vulnerabilities that seems to get worse as more details come to light. Now, we can add yet another twist to the story: the laughably insecure password…
Source: Gizmodo – SolarWinds Officials Throw Intern Under the Bus for ‘solarwinds123’ Password Fail
Brave Browser had a privacy issue that leaked the Tor onion URL addresses you visited to your locally configured DNS server, “exposing the dark web websites you visit…”, writes Bleeping Computer.
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes their report: To access Tor onion URLs, Brave added a “Private Window with Tor” mode that acts as a proxy to the Tor network. When you attempt to connect to an onion URL, your request is proxied through volunteer-run Tor nodes who make the request for you and send back the returned HTML. Due to this proxy implementation, Brave’s Tor mode does not directly provide the same level of privacy as using the Tor Browser.
When using Brave’s Tor mode, it should forward all requests to the Tor proxies and not send any information to any non-Tor Internet devices to increase privacy. However, a bug in Brave’s “Private window with Tor” mode is causing the onion URL for any Tor address you visit to also be sent as a standard DNS query to your machine’s configured DNS server. This bug was first reported in a Reddit post and later confirmed by James Kettle, the Director of Research at PortSwigger. BleepingComputer has also verified the claims by using Wireshark to view DNS traffic while using Brave’s Tor mode.
Brave has since released an update which fixes the bug.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Brave Privacy Bug Exposed Tor Onion URLs To Your DNS Provider
Approved open-source projects to get no-cost subscriptions (if they haven’t already got one). Red Hat today further extended its olive branch to open-source groups with another freebie of sorts: this time, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Open Source Infrastructure.…
Source: LXer – Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff
Danny Elfman thought he had left rock behind. But in an interview with Inverse, he said he picked it up again as a pandemic hobby. And here we are, with a missed connection with an ogre.
Source: io9 – Danny Elfman Has a Missed Connection with an Ogre in the Video for ‘Love in the Time of Covid’