Following recent benchmarks looking at how the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is looking on Intel Xeon Emerald Rapids as well as the performance gains for AMD EPYC 9004 series on Ubuntu 24.04, I next turned to the Ampere Altra ARM64 server processor for seeing what the performance is looking like there with this Long Term Support Linux distribution release due out in just over one month.

Oracle has announced the general availability of OpenJDK Java 22...

Several readers shared the following report: Intermittent fasting, a diet pattern that involves alternating between periods of fasting and eating, can lower blood pressure and help some people lose weight, past research has indicated. But an analysis presented Monday at the American Heart Association's scientific sessions in Chicago challenges the notion that intermittent fasting is good for heart health. Instead, researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China found that people who restricted food consumption to less than eight hours per day had a 91% higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease over a median period of eight years, relative to people who ate across 12 to 16 hours. It's some of the first research investigating the association between time-restricted eating (a type of intermittent fasting) and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. The analysis -- which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal -- is based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected between 2003 and 2018. The researchers analyzed responses from around 20,000 adults who recorded what they ate for at least two days, then looked at who had died from cardiovascular disease after a median follow-up period of eight years. However, Victor Wenze Zhong, a co-author of the analysis, said it's too early to make specific recommendations about intermittent fasting based on his research alone.

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Gamma-ray burst watcher almost two decades past use-by date

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has dropped into safe mode after one of the spacecraft's three gyroscopes showed signs of degradation.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit, the social media platform gearing up for an initial public offering this week, said Nokia has accused it of infringing some of their patents. Nokia Technologies, the company's licensing business, sent Reddit a letter on Monday with the claims, and Reddit is evaluating them, according to a filing made Tuesday. Nokia's claims come as Reddit prepares for an initial public offering in an effort to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The company has been working toward a listing for years, and its public market debut this week is set to become a high-profile addition to the year's roster of newly and soon-to-be public companies. Reddit said in the filing: "On March 18, 2024, Nokia sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims. As we face increasing competition and become increasingly high profile, the possibility of receiving more intellectual property claims against us grows. In addition, various 'non-practicing entities,' and other intellectual property rights holders have asserted in the past, and may attempt to assert in the future, intellectual property claims against us and have sought, and may attempt to seek in the future, to monetize the intellectual property rights they own to extract value through licensing arrangements or other settlements."

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Announced last summer was the Ultra Ethernet Consortium started by the Linux Foundation along with AMD, Intel, Cisco, Meta, Microsoft, Broadcom, and other organizations. Ultra Ethernet aims for high performance networking for the likes of AI and HPC. The group announced today they've courted an additional 45 organizations to become members of this consortium and they are on track for their v1.0 specification in Q3...

Innovative Ethereum feature exploited as victims say goodbye to assets

Infosec researchers are noting rising cryptocurrency attacks and have encouraged wallet security providers to up their collective game.…

Following last week's main set of power management updates for Linux 6.9 that saw AMD P-State Preferred Core support and tuning for Intel Meteor Lake, a secondary set of power management subsystem changes were sent out today for this new kernel...

You know where plants are much cheaper to construct? Asia

Updated  Intel and TSMC face new hitches to their chip fabrication plants in Arizona with key suppliers encountering difficulties in building support facilities due to surging costs for building materials and labor.…

Ethiopia's biggest commercial bank is scrambling to recoup large sums of money withdrawn by customers after a "systems glitch." From a report: The customers discovered early on Saturday that they could take out more cash than they had in their accounts at the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE). More than $40m was withdrawn or transferred to other banks, local media reported. It took several hours for the institution to freeze transactions. Much of the money was withdrawn from state-owned CBE by students, bank president Abe Sano told journalists on Monday. News of the glitch spread across universities largely via messaging apps and phone calls. Long lines formed at campus ATMs, with a student in western Ethiopia telling BBC Amharic people were withdrawing money until police officers arrived on campus to stop them.

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Latest release of coffee-themed programming language aspires to simplicity with a dozen new features

Oracle released Java 22 (JDK 22) on Tuesday, sporting a dozen new features for Java developers.…

ChatGPT deems your work to be commendable, innovative, and comprehensive

Academics focused on artificial intelligence have taken to using generative AI to help them review the machine learning work of peers.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup has defended the widely used programming language in response to a Biden administration report that calls on developers to use memory-safe languages and avoid using vulnerable ones such as C++ and C. In a March 15 response to an inquiry from InfoWorld, Stroustrup pointed out strengths of C++, which was designed in 1979. "I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees," Stroustrup said. "On the other hand, they seem to have realized that a programming language is just one part of a tool chain, so that improved tools and development processes are essential." Safety improvement always has been a goal of C++ development efforts, Stroustrup stressed. "Improving safety has been an aim of C++ from day one and throughout its evolution. Just compare the K&R C language with the earliest C++, and the early C++ with contemporary C++. My CppCon 2023 keynote outlines that evolution," he said. "Much quality C++ is written using techniques based on RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), containers, and resource management pointers rather than conventional C-style pointer messes." Stroustrup cited a number of efforts to improve C++ safety. "There are two problems related to safety. Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples' notions of which aspects of safety are important differ. I and the C++ standard committee are trying to deal with that," he said. "Profiles is a framework for specifying what guarantees a piece of code requires and enable implementations to verify them. There are documents describing that on the committee's website -- look for WG21 -- and more are coming. However, some of us are not in a mood to wait for the committee's necessarily slow progress." Profiles, Stroustrup said, "is a framework that allows us to incrementally improve guarantees -- e.g., to eliminate most range errors relatively soon -- and to gradually introduce guarantees into large code bases through local static analysis and minimal run-time checks. My long-term aim for C++ is and has been for C++ to offer type and resource safety when and where needed. Maybe the current push for memory safety -- a subset of the guarantees I want -- will prove helpful to my efforts, which are shared by many in the C++ standards committee." Stroustrup previously defended the safety of C++ against the NSA, which recommended using memory-safe languages instead of C++ and C in a November 2022 bulletin.

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Ailing tech integrator takes a hard hit... share price down by up to 20% this morning

Atos' share price sank as much as 20 percent this morning on confirmation that Airbus is no longer interested in buying the big data and security (BDS) parts of the crumbling tech empire.…

The x86 cache updates for Linux 6.9 offer an improved memory bandwidth throttling heuristic such as used by Intel Resource Director Technology (RDT) and also AMD EPYC CPUs with the resctrl code...

Not the best looking street furniture in town

UK telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) says it can boost mobile services by sticking small cells on top of poles linked to its on-street fiber network cabinets.…

The Linux 6.9 kernel has a big rework to the CPU timer code that has been years in the making and has some power and performance benefits...

GPU-based system offers high performance off Parquet files

Analytics software startup Voltron Data claims to have completed the full TPC-H 100 terabyte scale factor on unsorted Parquet files directly from storage in less than an hour with only 6 TB of GPU memory.…

The Associated Press reports on the passing of astronaut Thomas P. Stafford, the commander of a dress rehearsal flight for the 1969 moon landing and the first U.S.-Soviet space linkup. He was 93. From the report: Stafford, a retired Air Force three-star general, took part in four space missions. Before Apollo 10, he flew on two Gemini flights, including the first rendezvous of two U.S. capsules in orbit. He died in a hospital near his Space Coast Florida home, said Max Ary, director of the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma. Stafford was one of 24 NASA astronauts who flew to the moon, but he did not land on it. Only seven of them are still alive. After he put away his flight suit, Stafford was the go-to guy for NASA when it sought independent advice on everything from human Mars missions to safety issues to returning to flight after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident. He chaired an oversight group that looked into how to fix the then-flawed Hubble Space Telescope, earning a NASA public service award. "Tom was involved in so many things that most people were not aware of, such as being known as the 'Father of Stealth,'" Ary said in an email. Stafford was in charge of the famous 'Area 51' desert base that was the site of many UFO theories, but the home of testing of Air Force stealth technologies. The Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 set the stage for Apollo 11's historic mission two months later. Stafford and Gene Cernan took the lunar lander nicknamed Snoopy within 9 miles (14 kilometers) of the moon's surface. Astronaut John Young stayed behind in the main spaceship dubbed Charlie Brown. "The most impressive sight, I think, that really changed your view of things is when you first see Earth," Stafford recalled in a 1997 oral history, talking about the view from lunar orbit. Then came the moon's far side: "The Earth disappears. There's this big black void." Apollo 10's return to Earth set the world's record for fastest speed by a crewed vehicle at 24,791 mph (39,897 kph). After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships. "We have capture," Stafford radioed in Russian as the Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft hooked up. His Russian counterpart, Alexei Leonov, responded in English: "Well done, Tom, it was a good show. I vote for you." [...] The 1975 mission included two days during which the five men worked together on experiments. After, the two teams toured the world together, meeting President Gerald Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. "It helped prove to the rest of the world that two completely opposite political systems could work together," Stafford recalled at a 30th anniversary gathering in 2005. Later, Stafford was a central part of discussions in the 1990s that brought Russia into the partnership building and operating the International Space Station.

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Could this be the first green shoot of enterprise vendors paying for long-term maintenance?

The Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) has stepped up to maintain Linux kernel version 4.14 - which went out of support in January - to the end of the year. But why that particular version?…