The Cross Heads

Intel’s CEO hasn’t turned the company around, and now he’s no longer CEO

In a surprise move, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has stepped down as head of the company after less than four years, as reported by Reuters and other outlets. The change caps a chaotic year for Intel, which is poised to report its first annual financial loss since 1986 and announced layoffs of at least 15,000 […]

December 2, 2024 | CEO, foundry, idm 2.0, Intel, pat gelsinger, Policy, Tech | No comments

The best shopping deals Ars Technica could find for Cyber Monday

I hope everyone survived the weekend shopping experience and no one was eaten by ravening bands of deal-hunting nomads as they trekked through Macy’s, or whatever people who actually go outside on Black Friday have to endure. Things are mostly quiet here at the Ars Orbiting HQ—the gift shop on the mess deck is still […]

December 2, 2024 | Amazon, black friday, cyber monday, sales, Shopping | No comments

Supermassive black hole binary emits unexpected flares

“In addition to stars, gas clouds can also be disrupted by SMBHs and their binaries,” they said in the same study. “The key difference is that the clouds can be comparable to or even larger than the binary separation, unlike stars, which are always much smaller. “ Looking at the results of a previous study […]

December 1, 2024 | astronomy, astrophysics, black hole binary, black holes, Science, supermassive black hole | No comments

How should we treat beings that might be sentient?

What’s needed, Birch argues, when faced with such staggering uncertainty about the sentience stature of other beings, is a precautionary framework that outlines best practices for decision-making regarding their care. And in The Edge of Sentience, he provides exactly that, in meticulous, orderly detail. Over more than 300 pages, he outlines three fundamental framework principles […]

November 30, 2024 | Biology, consciousness, ethics, neurobiology, Science, sentience | No comments

Code found online exploits LogoFAIL to install Bootkitty Linux backdoor

Researchers have discovered malicious code circulating in the wild that hijacks the earliest stage boot process of Linux devices by exploiting a year-old firmware vulnerability when it remains unpatched on affected models. The critical vulnerability is one of a constellation of exploitable flaws discovered last year and given the name LogoFAIL. These exploits are able […]

November 29, 2024 | Biz & IT, bootkitty, Linux, logofail, Security, uefi, unified extensible firmware interface | No comments

The best shopping deals Ars Technica could find for Black Friday

The leaves have turned, the turkey has been eaten, the parades are over, and the football has been watched—the only thing left to do is to try to hide from increasingly uncomfortable family conversations by going out and shopping for things! It’s the holiday tradition that not only makes us feel good, but also (apocryphally) […]

November 29, 2024 | Amazon, black friday, cyber monday, sales, Shopping | No comments

Vintage digicams aren’t just a fad. They’re an artistic statement.

Today’s young adults grew up in a time when their childhoods were documented with smartphone cameras instead of dedicated digital or film cameras. It’s not surprising that, perhaps as a reaction to the ubiquity of the phone, some young creative photographers are leaving their handsets in their pockets in favor of compact point-and-shoot digital cameras—the […]

November 29, 2024 | digicams, digital photography, syndication, Tech | No comments

The upside-down capacitor in mid-‘90s Macs, proven and documented by hobbyists

Brown notes that the predecessor Mac LC and LC II had the correct connections, as did the LC 475, which uses the same power supply scheme. This makes him “confident that Apple made a boo-boo on the LC III,” or “basically the hardware equivalent of a copy/paste error when you’re writing code.” Making sure rehabbers […]

November 29, 2024 | Apple, Macintosh, Tech | No comments

Flour, water, salt, GitHub: The Bread Code is a sourdough baking framework

One year ago, I didn’t know how to bake bread. I just knew how to follow a recipe. If everything went perfectly, I could turn out something plain but palatable. But should anything change—temperature, timing, flour, Mercury being in Scorpio—I’d turn out a partly poofy pancake. I presented my partly poofy pancakes to people, and […]

November 28, 2024 | algorithms, baking, bread, Computer science, Culture, Features, frameworks, sourdough, tiktok, YouTube | No comments

Rocket Report: A good week for Blue Origin; Italy wants its own launch capability

NASA taps Falcon Heavy for another big launch. A little more than a month after SpaceX launched NASA’s flagship Europa Clipper mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket, the space agency announced its next big interplanetary probe will also launch on a Falcon Heavy, Ars reports. What’s more, the Dragonfly mission the Falcon Heavy will launch […]

November 28, 2024 | blue origin, china, human spaceflight, italy, launch, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex | No comments

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