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Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

I have decided to develop zb, my experiment in user-friendly reproducible builds, into a full-fledged build tool. Although my previous blog post stated that I would not be developing this tool to production-readiness, a few things changed my mind: My personal projects need a dependency management solution, and I am loath to continue investing in […]

Leonard Cohen: The Anti-Rock Star

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Leonard Cohen never liked touring. “It’s like being dropped off in a desert,” he once said. “You don’t know where you live anymore.” By the time he hit his late 50s, he hated it so much that, after supporting his 1992 record, The Future, he moved into a Zen monastery and all but retired from […]

FTC: Vast Surveillance of Users by Social Media and Video Streaming Companies

ftc:-vast-surveillance-of-users-by-social-media-and-video-streaming-companies

A new Federal Trade Commission staff report that examines the data collection and use practices of major social media and video streaming services shows they engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens. The staff report is based on […]

Glass Antenna Turns windows into 5G Base Stations

glass-antenna-turns-windows-into-5g-base-stations

18 Sep 2024 3 min read Electronics inconspicuously attached to transparent conductive layers enable a window to double as a 5G cellular antenna. Since 5G began its rollout in 2018 or 2019, fifth-generation wireless networks have spread across the globe to cover hundreds of millions of users. But while it offers lower latency than precursor […]

JVM statistics cause garbage collection pauses (2015)

[ 2015-March-24 16:56 ] TL;DR: The JVM by default exports statistics by mmap-ing a file in /tmp (hsperfdata). On Linux, modifying a memory mapped file can block until disk I/O completes, which can be hundreds of milliseconds. Since the JVM modifies these statistics during garbage collection and safepoints, this causes pauses that are hundreds of […]

Quantum researchers cause controlled ‘wobble’ in the nucleus of a single atom

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Researchers from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands have been able to initiate a controlled movement in the very heart of an atom. They caused the atomic nucleus to interact with one of the electrons in the outermost shells of the atom. This electron could be manipulated and read out through the needle of […]

Pivotal Tracker will shut down

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The VMware Tanzu division is announcing the end-of-life (EOL) for the Pivotal Tracker offering, effective April 30, 2025. Customers with active Pivotal Tracker subscriptions may continue to use the offering through April 30, 2025, after which time the offering will sunset. You can export your data any time before April 30, 2025. It is recommended […]

Support for IPv6

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If your systems are IPv6-enabled or enabling IPv6 is on your roadmap, good news—starting yesterday and continuing over the course of the next few weeks, Backblaze will be “flipping the switch” and turning on IPv6 for our S3 Compatible API. While our IPv6 deployment isn’t completely done yet (we’re phasing the roll out through our […]