In Communications of the ACM,/em>, long-time FreeBSD contributor Poul-Henning Kamp mocks the idea that the free and open-source software has "come apart" and "will end in tears and regret." Economists and others focused on money — like my bank — have had a lot of trouble figuring out the free and open source software (FOSS) phenomenon, and eventually they seem to have reached the conclusion that it just makes no sense. So, they go with the flow. Recently, very serious people in the FOSS movement have started to write long and thoughtful opinion pieces about how it has all come apart and will end in tears and regret. Allow me to disagree... What follows is a humorous history of how the Open Source movement bested a series of ill-conceived marketing failures starting after the "utterly bad" 1980s when IBM had an "unimaginably huge monopoly" — and an era of vendor lock-in from companies trying to be the next IBM: Out of that utter market failure came Minix, (Net/Free/Open)BSD, and Linux, at a median year of approximately 1991. I can absolutely guarantee that if we had been able to buy a reasonably priced and solid Unix for our 32-bit PCs — no strings attached — nobody would be running FreeBSD or Linux today, except possibly as an obscure hobby. Bill Gates would also have had a lot less of our money... The essay moves on to when "that dot-com thing happened, fueled by the availability of FOSS operating systems, which did a much better job than any operating system you could buy — not just for the price, but in absolute terms of performance on any given piece of hardware. Thus, out of utter market failure, the FOSS movement was born." And ultimately, the essay ends with our present day, and the phenomenon of companies that "make a business out of FOSS or derivatives thereof..." The "F" in FOSS was never silent. In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista. But the FOSS movement has won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dream about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it is not coming back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991. One very big difference is that more people have realized that source code is a liability rather than an asset. For some, that realization came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases...

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Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from Windows Central Microsoft may have opened a can of worms with recent comments made by the tech giant's CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman. The CEO spoke with CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this week. In his remarks, Suleyman claimed that all content shared on the web is available to be used for AI training unless a content producer says otherwise specifically. The whole discussion was interesting — but this particular question was very direct. CNBC's interviewer specifically said, "There are a number of authors here... and a number of journalists as well. And it appears that a lot of the information that has been trained on over the years has come from the web — and some of it's the open web, and some of it's not, and we've heard stories about how OpenAI was turning YouTube videos into transcripts and then training on the transcripts." The question becomes "Who is supposed to own the IP, who is supposed to get value from the IP, and whether, to put it in very blunt terms, whether the AI companies have effectively stolen the world's IP." Suleyman begins his answer — at the 14:40 mark — with "Yeah, I think — look, it's a very fair argument." SULEYMAN: "I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding. "There's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'Do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts." Q: And what does that mean, when you say 'It's a gray area'? SULEYMAN: "Well, if — so far, some people have taken that information... but that's going to get litigated, and I think that's rightly so... "You know, look, the economics of information are about to radically change, because we're going to reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost. And this is just a very difficult thing for people to intuit — but in 15 or 20 years time, we will be producing new scientific cultural knowledge at almost zero marginal cost. It will be widely open sourced and available to everybody. And I think that is going to be, you know, a true inflection point in the history of our species. Because what are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than an intellectual production engine. We produce knowledge. Our science makes us better. And so what we really want in the world, in my opinion, are new engines that can turbocharge discovery and invention."

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Monday Boeing announced plans to acquire its key supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, for $4.7 billion, according to the Associated Press — "a move that it says will improve plane quality and safety amid increasing scrutiny by Congress, airlines and the Department of Justice. Boeing previously owned Spirit, and the purchase would reverse a longtime Boeing strategy of outsourcing key work on its passenger planes." But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared this report from Newsweek: More than a hundred Boeing whistleblowers have contacted the U.S. aviation watchdog since the start of the year, Newsweek can reveal. Official figures show that the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) whistleblowing hotline has seen a huge surge of calls from workers concerned about safety problems. Since January the watchdog saw a total of 126 reports, via various channels, from workers concerned about safety problems. In 2023, there were just 11.... After a visit from FAA Administrator Mike Whitaker to a Boeing factory earlier in the year, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun agreed to share details of the hotline with all Boeing employees. The FAA told Newsweek that the number of Boeing employees coming forward was a "sign of a healthy culture".... Newsweek also spoke to Jon Holden, president of the 751 District for the International Association of Machinists, Boeing's largest union which represents more than 32,000 aerospace workers. Holden said that numerous whistleblowers had complained to the FAA over Boeing's attempt to cut staff and reduce inspections in an effort to "speed up the rate" at which planes went out the door... Holden's union is currently in contract negotiations with Boeing, and is attempting to secure a 40% pay rise alongside a 50-year guarantee of work security for its members. CNN also reports on new allegations Wednesday from a former Boeing quality-control manager: that "for years workers at its 787 Dreamliner factory in Everett, Washington, routinely took parts that were deemed unsuitable to fly out of an internal scrap yard and put them back on factory assembly lines." In his first network TV interview, Merle Meyers, a 30-year veteran of Boeing, described to CNN what he says was an elaborate off-the-books practice that Boeing managers at the Everett factory used to meet production deadlines, including taking damaged and improper parts from the company's scrapyard, storehouses and loading docks... Meyers' claims that lapses he witnessed were intentional, organized efforts designed to thwart quality control processes in an effort to keep up with demanding production schedules. Beginning in the early 2000s, Meyers says that for more than a decade, he estimates that about 50,000 parts "escaped" quality control and were used to build aircraft. Those parts include everything from small items like screws to more complex assemblies like wing flaps. A single Boeing 787 Dreamliner, for example, has approximately 2.3 million parts... Based on conversations Meyers says he had with current Boeing workers in the time since he left the company, he believes that while employees no longer remove parts from the scrapyard, the practice of using other unapproved parts in assembly lines continues. "Now they're back to taking parts of body sections — everything — right when it arrives at the Everett site, bypassing quality, going right to the airplane," Meyers said. Company emails going back years show that Meyers repeatedly flagged the issue to Boeing's corporate investigations team, pointing out what he says were blatant violations of Boeing's safety rules. But investigators routinely failed to enforce those rules, Meyers says, even ignoring "eye witness observations and the hard work done to ensure the safety of future passengers and crew," he wrote in an internal 2022 email provided to CNN.

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IEEE Spectrum (the IEEE's official publication) asks the question. "How does an AI code generator compare to a human programmer?" A study published in the June issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering evaluated the code produced by OpenAI's ChatGPT in terms of functionality, complexity and security. The results show that ChatGPT has an extremely broad range of success when it comes to producing functional code — with a success rate ranging from anywhere as poor as 0.66 percent and as good as 89 percent — depending on the difficulty of the task, the programming language, and a number of other factors. While in some cases the AI generator could produce better code than humans, the analysis also reveals some security concerns with AI-generated code. The study tested GPT-3.5 on 728 coding problems from the LeetCode testing platform — and in five programming languages: C, C++, Java, JavaScript, and Python. The results? Overall, ChatGPT was fairly good at solving problems in the different coding languages — but especially when attempting to solve coding problems that existed on LeetCode before 2021. For instance, it was able to produce functional code for easy, medium, and hard problems with success rates of about 89, 71, and 40 percent, respectively. "However, when it comes to the algorithm problems after 2021, ChatGPT's ability to generate functionally correct code is affected. It sometimes fails to understand the meaning of questions, even for easy level problems," said Yutian Tang, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. For example, ChatGPT's ability to produce functional code for "easy" coding problems dropped from 89 percent to 52 percent after 2021. And its ability to generate functional code for "hard" problems dropped from 40 percent to 0.66 percent after this time as well... The researchers also explored the ability of ChatGPT to fix its own coding errors after receiving feedback from LeetCode. They randomly selected 50 coding scenarios where ChatGPT initially generated incorrect coding, either because it didn't understand the content or problem at hand. While ChatGPT was good at fixing compiling errors, it generally was not good at correcting its own mistakes... The researchers also found that ChatGPT-generated code did have a fair amount of vulnerabilities, such as a missing null test, but many of these were easily fixable. "Interestingly, ChatGPT is able to generate code with smaller runtime and memory overheads than at least 50 percent of human solutions to the same LeetCode problems..."

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They lived 378 days in a "mock Mars habitat" in Houston, reports Engadget. But today the four volunteers for NASA's yearlong simulation will finally emerge from their 1,700-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center that was 3D-printed from materials that could be created with Martian soil. And you can watch the "welcome home" ceremony's livestream starting at 5 p.m. EST on NASA TV (also embedded in Engadget's story). More det ails from NASA: For more than a year, the crew simulated Mars mission operations, including "Marswalks," grew and harvested several vegetables to supplement their shelf-stable food, maintained their equipment and habitat, and operated under additional stressors a Mars crew will experience, including communication delays with Earth, resource limitations, and isolation. One of the mission's crew members told the Houston Chronicle they were "very excited to go back to 'Earth,' but of course there is a bittersweet aspect to it just like any time you reach the completion of something that has dominated one's life for several years." Various crew members left behind their children or long-term partner for this once-in-a-lifetime experience, according to an earlier article, which also notes that NASA is paying the participants $10 per hour "for all waking hours, up to 16 hours per day. That's as much as $60,480 for the 378-day mission." Engadget points out there are already plans for two more one-year "missions" — with the second one expected to begin next spring... I'm curious. Would any Slashdot readers be willing to spend a year in a mock Mars habitat?

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New York City announced a "major citywide initiative" to increase "math achievement" among students, according to the mayor's office. 93 middle schools and 420 high schools will implement an "Illustrative Math" curriculum (from an education nonprofit founded in 2011) combined with intensive teacher coaching, starting this fall. "The goal is to ensure that all New York City students develop math skills," according to the NYC Solves web site (with the mayor's office noting "years of stagnant math scores.") Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: The NYC Public Schools further explained, "As part of the NYC Solves initiative, all high schools will use Illustrative Mathematics and districts will choose a comprehensive, evidence-based curricula for middle school math instruction from an approved list. Each curriculum has been reviewed and recommended by EdReports, a nationally recognized nonprofit organization." The About page for Illustrative Mathematics (IM) lists The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a Philanthropic Supporter [as well as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation], and lists two Gates Foundation Directors as Board members... A search of Gates Foundation records for "Illustrative Mathematics" turns up $25 million in committed grants since 2012, including a $13.9 million grant to Illustrated Mathematics in Nov. 2022 ("To support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and practices for improving students' math experience and outcomes") and a $425,000 grant just last month to Educators for Excellence ("To engage teacher feedback on the implementation of Illustrative Mathematics curriculum and help middle school teachers learn about the potential for math high-quality instructional materials and professional learning in New York City"). EdReports, which vouched for the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum (according to New York's Education Department), has received $10+ million in committed Gates Foundation grants. The Gates Foundation is also a very generous backer of NYC's Fund for Public Schools, with grants that included $4,276,973 in October 2023 "to support the implementation of high-quality instructional materials and practices for improving students' math experience and outcomes." Chalkbeat reported in 2018 on a new focus on high school curriculum by the Gates Foundation ("an area where we feel like we've underinvested," said Bill Gates). The Foundation made math education its top K-12 priority in Oct. 2022 with a $1.1 billion investment. Also note this May 2023 blog post from $14+ million Gates Foundation grantee Educators for Excellence, a New York City nonprofit. The blog post touts the key role the nonprofit had played in a year-long advocacy effort that ultimately "secured a major win" ending the city's curricula "free-for-all" and announced "a standardized algebra curriculum from Illustrative Mathematics will also be piloted at 150 high schools." As the NY Times reported back in 2011, behind "grass-roots" school advocacy, there's Bill Gates!

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Windows Recall was "delayed" over concerns that storing unencrypted recordings of users' activity was a security risk. But now Slashdot reader storagedude writes: The latest version of Microsoft's planned Windows Recall feature still contains data privacy and security vulnerabilities, according to a report by the Cyber Express. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont — whose work started the backlash that resulted in Recall getting delayed last month — said the most recent preview version is still hackable by Alex Hagenah's "TotalRecall" method "with the smallest of tweaks." The Windows screen recording feature could as yet be refined to fix security concerns, but some have spotted it recently in some versions of the Windows 11 24H2 release preview that will be officially released in the fall. Cyber Express (the blog of threat intelligence vendor Cyble Inc) got this official response: Asked for comment on Beaumont's findings, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company "has not officially released Recall," and referred to the updated blog post that announced the delay, which said: "Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks." "Beyond that, Microsoft has nothing more to share," the spokesperson added. Also this week, the blog Android Authority wrote that Google is planning to introduce its own "Google AI" features to Pixel 9 smartphones. They include the ability to enhance screenshots, an "Add Me" tool for group photos — and also "a feature resembling Microsoft's controversial Recall" dubbed "Pixel Screenshots." Google's take on the feature is different and more privacy-focused: instead of automatically capturing everything you're doing, it will only work on screenshots you take yourself. When you do that, the app will add a bit of extra metadata to it, like app names, web links, etc. After that, it will be processed by a local AI, presumably the new multimodal version of Gemini Nano, which will let you search for specific screenshots just by their contents, as well as ask a bot questions about them. My take on the feature is that it's definitely a better implementation of the idea than what Microsoft created.. [B]oth of the apps ultimately serve a similar purpose and Google's implementation doesn't easily leak sensitive information... It's worth mentioning Motorola is also working on its own version of Recall — not much is known at the moment, but it seems it will be similar to Google's implementation, with no automatic saving of everything on the screen. The Verge describes the Pixel 9's Google AI as "like Microsoft Recall but a little less creepy."

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"Images captured from space show the growth of Cuba's electronic eavesdropping stations," reported the Wall Street Journal this week, citing a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. But they added that the stations "are believed to be linked to China," including previously-unreported construction about 70 miles from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. (The Journal had previously reported China and Cuba were "negotiating closer defense and intelligence ties, including establishing a new joint military training facility on the island and an eavesdropping facility.") At the time, the Journal reported that Cuba and China were already jointly operating eavesdropping stations on the island, according to U.S. officials, who didn't disclose their locations. It couldn't be determined which, if any, of those are included in the sites covered by the CSIS report. The concern about the stations, former officials and analysts say, is that China is using Cuba's geographical proximity to the southeastern U.S. to scoop up sensitive electronic communications from American military bases, space-launch facilities, and military and commercial shipping. Chinese facilities on the island "could also bolster China's use of telecommunications networks to spy on U.S. citizens," said Leland Lazarus, an expert on China-Latin America relations at Florida International University... Authors of the CSIS report, after analyzing years' worth of satellite imagery, found that Cuba has significantly upgraded and expanded its electronic spying facilities in recent years and pinpointed four sites — at Bejucal, El Salao, Wajay and Calabazar... "These are active locations with an evolving mission set," said Matthew Funaiole, a senior follow at CSIS and the report's chief author. The CSIS web site shows some of the satellite images. "Pinpointing the specific targets of these assets is nearly impossible," they add — but since Cuba has no space program, "the types of space-tracking capabilities observed are likely intended to monitor the activities of other nations (like the United States) with a presence in orbit." While China's own satellites could also benefit from a North America-based groundstation for communications, the Cuban facilities "would also provide the ability to monitor radio traffic and potentially intercept data delivered by U.S. satellites as they pass over highly sensitive military sites across the southern United States." The think tank points out that one possibly-installed system would be within range to monitor rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "Studying these launches — particularly those of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy reusable first-stage booster rocket systems — is likely of keen interest to China as it attempts to catch up to U.S. leadership in space launch technology."

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"For two years, many unprofitable tech startups have cut costs, sold themselves or gone out of business," reports the New York Times. "But the ones focused on artificial intelligence have been thriving." Now, the AI boom that started in late 2022, has become the strongest counterpoint to the broader startup downturn. Investors poured $27.1 billion into AI startups in the United States from April to June, accounting for nearly half of all U.S. startup funding in that period, according to PitchBook, which tracks startups. In total, U.S. startups raised $56 billion, up 57% from a year earlier and the highest three-month haul in two years. AI companies are attracting huge rounds of funding reminiscent of 2021, when low interest rates pushed investors away from taking risks on tech investments... The startup downturn began in early 2022 as many money-losing companies struggled to grow as quickly as they did in the pandemic. Rising interest rates also pushed investors to chase less risky investments. To make up for dwindling funding, startups slashed staff and scaled back their ambitions. Then in late 2022, OpenAI, a San Francisco AI lab, kicked off a new boom with the release of its ChatGPT chatbot. Excitement around generative AI technology, which can produce text, images and videos, set off a frenzy of startup creation and funding. "Sam Altman canceled the recession," joked Siqi Chen, founder of the startup Runway Financial, referring to OpenAI's chief executive. Chen said his company, which makes finance software, was growing faster than it otherwise would have because "AI can do the job of 1.5 people...." An analysis of 125 AI startups by Kruze Consulting, an accounting and tax advisory firm, showed that the companies spent an average of 22% of their expenses on computing costs in the first three months of the year — more than double the 10% spent by non-AI software companies in the same period. "No wonder VCs are throwing money into these companies," said Healy Jones, Kruze's vice president of financial strategy. While AI startups are growing faster than other startups, he said, "they clearly need the money." Startups receiving funding include CoreWeave ($1.1 billion), ScaleAI ($1 billion), and the Elon Musk-founded xAI ($6 billion), according to the article. "For investors who back fast-growing startups, there is little downside to being wrong about the next big thing, but there is enormous upside in being right. AI's potential has generated deafening hype, with prominent investors and executives predicting that the market for AI will be bigger than the markets for the smartphone, the personal computer, social media and the internet."

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General Motors will pay nearly $146 million in penalties to the U.S. government, reports the Associated Press, "because 5.9 million of its older vehicles do not comply with emissions and fuel economy standards." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a statement Wednesday that certain GM vehicles from the 2012 through 2018 model years did not comply with federal fuel economy requirements. The penalty comes after the Environmental Protection Agency said its testing showed the GM pickup trucks and SUVs emit over 10% more carbon dioxide on average than GM's initial compliance testing claimed. The EPA says the vehicles will remain on the road and cannot be repaired. The GM vehicles on average consume at least 10% more fuel than the window sticker numbers say, but the company won't be required to reduce the miles per gallon on the stickers, the EPA said... GM said in a statement that it complied with all regulations in pollution and mileage certification of its vehicles. The company said it is not admitting to any wrongdoing nor that it failed to comply with the Clean Air Act... The enforcement action involves about 4.6 million full-size pickups and SUVs and about 1.3 million midsize SUVs, the EPA said. The affected models include the Chevy Tahoe, Cadillac Escalade and Chevy Silverado. About 40 variations of GM vehicles are covered. GM will be forced to give up credits used to ensure that manufacturers' greenhouse gas emissions are below the fleet standard for emissions that applies for that model year, the EPA said. In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GM said it expects the total cost to resolve the matter will be $490 million. Because GM agreed to address the excess emissions, EPA said it was not necessary to make a formal determination regarding the reasons for the excess pollution. According to the article, David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, "said it's possible that GM owners could sue the company because they are getting lower gas mileage than advertised." The article also notes that in 2014, Hyundai and Kia "entered into a settlement in which they had to pay a $100 million civil penalty to end a two year investigation into overstated gas mileage on window stickers of 1.2 million vehicles."

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Business Insider: It's a political tale as old as time: put up a campaign poster in your yard, and thieves come to snatch it. But according to The Wall Street Journal, those fed up with front lawn looting are embracing a modern solution. Apple's geo-tracking AirTag devices are helping owners find their signs — and sometimes, even the people who stole them. The practice has already led to charges. In one example cited by the outlet, Florida politician John Dittmore decided to hide the coin-sized gadget on one of his posters after waking up to a number of thefts in May... [Two teenagers were charged with criminal mischief and the theft of nine signs.] In other cited cases, stolen signs don't end up with teens, but in the homes of electoral opponents. After Chris Torre became the victim of poster snatching, AirTags led him to the residence of Renee Rountree, the Journal said. Both were running for a seat on the Isle of Wight County Board of Supervisors in Virginia. Her son-in-law was charged with a misdemeanor for stealing the property, while Rountree faced a misdemeanor for receiving stolen goods. In a December trial, she noted plans to return the signs. Rountree has since been ordered to 250 hours of community service. "I would like to think that this will have a huge deterrent effect," the trial's judge said in the court's transcript, quoted by WSJ.

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"After approximately seven years in development, the Eclipse Foundation's Theia IDE project is now generally available," writes ADT magazine, "emerging from beta to challenge Microsoft's similar Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor." The Eclipse Theia IDE is part of the Eclipse Cloud DevTools ecosystem. The Eclipse Foundation calls it "a true open-source alternative to VS Code," which was built on open source but includes proprietary elements, such as default telemetry, which collects usage data... Theia was built on the same Monaco editor that powers VS Code, and it supports the same Language Server Protocol (LSP) and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) that provide IntelliSense code completions, error checking and other features. The Theia IDE also supports the same extensions as VS Code (via the Open VSX Registry instead of Microsoft's Visual Studio Code Marketplace), which are typically written in TypeScript and JavaScript. There are many, many more extensions available for VS Code in Microsoft's marketplace, while "Extensions for VS Code Compatible Editors" in the Open VSX Registry number 3,784 at the time of this writing... The Eclipse Foundation emphasized another difference between its Theia IDE and VS Code: the surrounding ecosystem/community. "At the core of Theia IDE is its vibrant open source community hosted by the Eclipse Foundation," the organization said in a news release. "This ensures freedom for commercial use without proprietary constraints and fosters innovation and reliability through contributions from companies such as Ericsson, EclipseSource, STMicroelectronics, TypeFox, and more. The community-driven model encourages participation and adaptation according to user needs and feedback." Indeed, the list of contributors to and adopters of the platform is extensive, also featuring Broadcom, Arm, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, Samsung, Google, Gitpod, Huawei and many others. The It's FOSS blog has some screenshots and a detailed rundown. ADT magazine stresses that there's also an entirely distinct (but related) project called the Eclipse Theia Platform (not IDE) which differs from VS Code by allowing developers "to create desktop and cloud IDEs using a single, open-source technology stack" [that can be used in open-source initiatives]. The Eclipse Theia platform "allows developers to customize every aspect of the IDE without forking or patching the code... fully tailored for the needs of internal company projects or for commercial resale as a branded product."

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In 1994, college student Jim Hall created FreeDOS (in response to Microsoft's plan to gradually phase out MS-DOS). After celebrating its 30th anniversary last week, Hill wrote a new article Saturday for OpenSource.net: "What I've learned about Open Source community over 30 years." Lessons include "every Open Source project needs a website," but also "consider other ways to raise awareness about your Open Source software project." ("In the FreeDOS Project, we've found that posting videos to our YouTube channel is an excellent way to help people learn about FreeDOS... The more information you can share about your Open Source project, the more people will find it familiar and want to try it out.") But the larger lesson is that "Open Source projects must be grounded in community." Without open doors for new ideas and ongoing development, even the most well-intentioned project becomes a stagnant echo chamber... Maintain open lines of communication... This can take many forms, including an email list, discussion board, or some other discussion forum. Other forums where people can ask more general "Help me" questions are okay but try to keep all discussions about project development on your official discussion channel. The last of its seven points stresses that "An Open Source project isn't really Open Source without source code that everyone can download, study, use, modify and share" (urging careful selection for your project's licensing). But the first point emphasizes that "It's more than just code," and Hall ends his article by attributing FreeDOS's three-decade run to "the great developers and users in our community." In celebrating FreeDOS, we are celebrating everyone who has created programs, fixed bugs, added features, translated messages, written documentation, shared articles, or contributed in some other way to the FreeDOS Project... Here's looking forward to more years to come! Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and back in 2000 he answered questions from Slashdot's readers — just six years after starting the project. "Jim isn't rich or famous," wrote RobLimo, "just an old-fashioned open source contributor who helped start a humble but useful project back in 1994 and still works on it as much as he can." As the years piled up, Slashdot ran posts celebrating FreeDOS's 10th, 15th, and 20th anniversary. And then for FreeDOS's 25th, Hall returned to Slashdot to answer more questions from Slashdot readers...

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The Los Angeles Times reports that "multiple projects seeking to remove carbon dioxide from the air have been launched across Los Angeles County: When completed, Project Monarch and its wastewater component, Pure Water Antelope Valley, will purify up to 4.5 million gallons of water each day and capture 25,000 tons of atmospheric CO2 each year. (The typical gasoline-powered automobile spews 4.6 tons of carbon each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency).... But the Palmdale project isn't the only new carbon-capture development in L.A. County. On Friday, officials from CarbonCapture Inc. gathered in Long Beach to introduce the first commercial-scale U.S. direct air capture, or DAC, system designed for mass production. The unit, which resembles a shipping container, can remove more than 500 tons of atmospheric CO2 per year... The L.A.-based company also announced that it will mass-produce up to 4,000 of its DAC modules annually at a new facility in Mesa, Arizona. It joins similar efforts from L.A.-based Captura, which is working to remove CO2 from the upper ocean; L.A.-based Avnos, which produces water while capturing carbon; and L.A.-based Equatic, which is working to remove atmospheric CO2 using the ocean... [Equatic's] San Pedro facility pumps seawater through a series of electric plates that separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen as well as acidic and alkaline streams of liquid. The alkaline, or base, stream is exposed to the atmosphere, where it mineralizes CO2 into carbonates that are then dissolved and discharged back into the ocean for permanent storage, operators say Additionally, the hydrogen produced by the process is carbon-negative, making it a source of renewable energy that can be used to fuel the CO2 removal process or sold to other users, said Edward Sanders, chief operating officer at Equatic. Equatic announced this month that it will partner with a Canadian carbon removal project developer, Deep Sky, to build North America's first commercial-scale ocean-based CO2 removal plant in Quebec, following the success of its effort in Los Angeles as well as another facility in Singapore. While the San Pedro facility can capture about 40 tons of CO2 per year, the Quebec facility will capture about 100,000 tons per year, Sanders said. Meanwhile, two new projects by direct air capture company Heirloom were announced this week in Louisiana. Those projects are "expected to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from the air per year," according to the Associated Press, "and store it deep underground... part of "a slew of carbon removal and storage projects that have been announced in Louisiana." Heirloom estimates that they will eventually remove 320,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year... The company uses limestone, a natural absorbent, to extract carbon dioxide from the air. Heirloom's technology reduces the time it takes to absorb carbon dioxide in nature from years to just three days, according to the company's press release. The carbon dioxide is then removed from the limestone material and stored permanently underground. In May America's Energy department also announced $3.5 billion in funding for its carbon-capture program — four large-scale, regional direct air capture hubs "that each comprise a network of carbon dioxide removal projects..." The hubs will have the capacity to capture and then permanently store at least one million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere annually, either from a single unit or from multiple interconnected units. And Shell Canada has a pair of carbon capture projects in Alberta it expects to have operational toward the end of 2028, according to the CBC: The Polaris project is designed to capture about 650,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from the Scotford complex. That works out to approximately 40 per cent of Scotford's direct CO2 emissions from the refinery and 22 per cent of its emissions from the chemicals complex.

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game of Asteroids An anonymous reader shared this report from The Hill: An asteroid the size of a football stadium threaded the needle between Earth and the moon Saturday morning — the second of two astronomical near misses in three days. Near miss, in this case, is a relative term: Saturday's asteroid, 2024 MK, came within 180,000 miles of Earth. On Thursday, meanwhile, asteroid 2011 UL21 flew within 4 million miles. But the Saturday passage of 2024 MK — which scientists discovered only two weeks ago — coincides with a sobering reminder of threats from space. Sunday is Asteroid Day, the anniversary of the 1908 explosion of a rock from space above a Russian town — the sort of danger that, astronomers warn, is always lurking as the Earth hurtles through space... In 2013, for instance, an asteroid about 62 feet across that broke apart nearly 20 miles above Siberia released 30 times as much energy as the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima. While most of the impact energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, the detonation triggered a shock wave that blew out windows and injured more than a thousand people. The article points out that if Saturday's asteroid had hit earth, the impact would have "the equivalent impact energy in the hundreds of megaton approaching a gigaton," Peter Brown of Canada's Western University told the Canadian Broadcasting Service. (For comparison, most hydrogen bombs are in the 50-megaton range.) Brown said "It's the sort of thing that if it hit the east coast of the U.S., you would have catastrophic effects over most of the eastern seaboard. But it's not big enough to affect the whole world." Meanwhile, the article adds that last Thursday's asteroid — "while it was comfortably far out in space" — was the size of Mt. Everest. "At 1.5 miles in diameter, that asteroid was about a quarter the size of the asteroid that struck the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out all dinosaurs that walked, as well as the majority of life on earth." But the risk of a collision like that "is very, very low." NASA has estimated that a civilization-ending event (like the collision of an asteroid the size of Thursday's with the Earth) should only happen every few million years. And such an impact from an asteroid half a mile in diameter or bigger will be almost impossible for a very long time, according to findings published last year in The Astronomical Journal. NASA's catalog of large and dangerous objects like 2011 UL21 is now 95 percent complete, MIT Technology Review reported.

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It's been adapted into a graphic novel, a videogame, a radio play, and an opera, according to Wikipedia — which also describes years of trying to adapt Neuromancer into a movie. "The landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel has been on Hollywood's wishlist for decades," writes Gizmodo, "with multiple filmmakers attempting to bring it to the big screen." (Back in 2010, Slashdot's CmdrTaco even posted an update with the headline "Neuromancer Movie In Your Future?" with a 2011 story promising the movie deal was "moving forward....") But now Deadline reports it's becoming a 10-episode series on Apple TV+ (co-produced by Apple Studios) starring Callum Turner and Brianna Middleton: Created for television by Graham Roland and JD Dillard, Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly (Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets. More from Gizmodo: "We're incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+," Roland and Dillard said in a statement. "Since we became friends nearly 10 years ago, we've looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that's come after it and we're looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson's definitive 'cyberpunk' world." The novel launched Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy of novels (building on the dystopia in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome"), also resurrecting the "Molly Millions" character from Johnny Mnemonic — an even earlier short story from 1981...

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USENIX, the long-running OS/networking research group, also publishes a magazine called ;login:. Today the magazine's editor — security consultant Rik Farrow — stopped by Slashdot to share some new research. rikfarrow writes: Caching means using faster memory to store frequently requested data, and the most commonly used algorithm for determining which items to discard when the cache is full is Least Recently Used [or "LRU"]. These researchers have come up with a more efficient and scalable method that uses just a few lines of code to convert LRU to SIEVE. Just like a sieve, it sifts through objects (using a pointer called a "hand") to "filter out unpopular objects and retain the popular ones," with popularity based on a single bit that tracks whether a cached object has been visited: As the "hand" moves from the tail (the oldest object) to the head (the newest object), objects that have not been visited are evicted... During the subsequent rounds of sifting, if objects that survived previous rounds remain popular, they will stay in the cache. In such a case, since most old objects are not evicted, the eviction hand quickly moves past the old popular objects to the queue positions close to the head. This allows newly inserted objects to be quickly assessed and evicted, putting greater eviction pressure on unpopular items (such as "one-hit wonders") than LRU-based eviction algorithms. It's an example of "lazy promotion and quick demotion". Popular objects get retained with minimal effort, with quick demotion "critical because most objects are not reused before eviction." After 1559 traces (of 247,017 million requests to 14,852 million objects), they found SIEVE reduces the miss ratio (when needed data isn't in the cache) by more than 42% on 10% of the traces with a mean of 21%, when compared to FIFO. (And it was also faster and more scalable than LRU.) "SIEVE not only achieves better efficiency, higher throughput, and better scalability, but it is also very simple."

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America's Justice Department "is pushing for Boeing to plead guilty to a criminal charge," reports Reuters, "after finding the planemaker violated a settlement over fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people, two people familiar with the matter said on Sunday." Boeing previously paid $2.5 billion as part of the deal with prosecutors that granted the company immunity from criminal prosecution over a fraud conspiracy charge related to the 737 MAX's flawed design. Boeing had to abide by the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement for a three-year period that ended on Jan. 7. Prosecutors would then have been poised to ask a judge to dismiss the fraud conspiracy charge. But in May, the Justice Department found Boeing breached the agreement, exposing the company to prosecution. A guilty plea could "carry implications for Boeing's ability to enter into government contracts," the article points out, "such as those with the U.S. military that make up a significant portion of its revenue..." The proposal would require Boeing to plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in connection with the fatal crashes, the sources said. The proposed agreement also includes a $487.2 million financial penalty, only half of which Boeing would be required to pay, they added. That is because prosecutors are giving the company credit for a payment it made as part of the previous settlement related to the fatal crashes of the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines flights. Boeing could also likely be forced to pay restitution under the proposal's terms, the amount of which will be at a judge's discretion, the sources said. The offer also contemplates subjecting Boeing to three years of probation, the people said. The plea deal would also require Boeing's board to meet with victims' relatives and impose an independent monitor to audit the company's safety and compliance practices for three years, they said. "Should Boeing refuse to plead guilty, prosecutors plan to take the company to trial, they said..." the article points out. "Justice Department officials revealed their decision to victims' family members during a call earlier on Sunday."

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A new study "has found direct evidence linking a key chemical ingredient of plastic bottles to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes," reports the Independent: The study, published in the journal Diabetes, found that the chemical BPA used to make food and drink packages, including plastic water bottles, can reduce sensitivity to the hormone insulin which regulates the body's sugar metabolism. The findings, to be presented at the 2024 Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association, call for the US Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider the safe limits for exposure to BPA in bottles and food containers. Previous studies have already shown that the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) used to make plastic and epoxy resins could disrupt hormones in humans. While research has linked BPA to diabetes, no previous study has directly assessed if administration of this chemical to humans increases this risk in adults. The researchers administered the dosage considered safe by America's FDA to about 20 individuals — and discovered they became less responsive to insulin after 4 days. The article includes this warning from the researchers: "These results suggest that maybe the U.S. EPA safe dose should be reconsidered and that healthcare providers could suggest these changes to patients." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

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