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• Windows 11 Tests Taskbar Icons That Scale Up and Down Like On a Mac

  04-04-2025 04:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is testing a new Windows 11 feature that resizes taskbar icons dynamically like on macOS, with options to shrink icons when the taskbar is full or keep them small at all times. The Verge reports: If you're on the beta, under Taskbar settings - Taskbar behaviors, you can now select options under Show smaller taskbar buttons: Always, Never, or When taskbar is full. The third option will scale down icons so that they all can fit and not get hidden away in a second menu. The behavior appea
  
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• Can AI Help Manage Nuclear Reactors?

  14-04-2025 13:34 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  America's Department of Energy launched a federally funded R&D center in 1946 called the Argonne National Laboratory, and its research became the basis for all of the world's commercial nuclear reactors.
  But it's now developed an AI-based tool that can "help operators run nuclear plants," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing comments from a senior nuclear engineer in the lab's nuclear science and engineering division:
  Argonne's plan is to offer the Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Au
  
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• An Electric Racecar Drives Upside Down

  14-04-2025 09:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Formula One cars, the world's fastest racecars, need to grip the track for speed and safety on the curves — leading engineers to design cars that create downforce. And racing fans are even told that "a Formula 1 racecar generates enough downforce above a certain speed that it could theoretically drive upside down," writes the automotive site Jalopnik.
  "McMurtry Automotive turned this theory into reality after having its Spéirling hypercar complete the impressive feat..."
  Admittedly,
  
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• The EFF's 'Certbot' Now Supports Six-Day Certs

  14-04-2025 06:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  10 years ago "certificate authorities normally issued certificate lifetimes lasting a year or more," remembers a new blog post Thursday by the EFF's engineering director. So in 2015 when the free cert authority Let's Encrypt first started issuing 90-day TLS certificates for websites, "it was considered a bold move, that helped push the ecosystem towards shorter certificate life times."
  And then this January Let's Encrypt announced new six-day certificates...
  This week saw a related announcement
  
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• Trump Denies Tariff 'Exception' for Electronics, Promises New Electronics Tariffs Soon

  14-04-2025 03:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Late Friday news broke that U.S. President Trump's new tariffs included exemptions for smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and other electronics. But Sunday morning America's commerce secretary insisted "a special-focus type of tariff" was coming for those products, reports ABC News. President Trump "is saying they're exempt from the reciprocal tariffs," the commerce secretary told an interviewer, "but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a mont
  
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• Palantir's 'Meritocracy Fellowship' Urges High School Grads to Skip College's 'Indoctrination' and Debt

  14-04-2025 01:44 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.)
  And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street:
  The company has launched what it refers to
  
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• After Meta Cheating Allegations, 'Unmodified' Llama 4 Maverick Model Tested - Ranks #32

  14-04-2025 00:28 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Remember how last weekend Meta claimed its "Maverick" AI model (in the newly-released Llama-4 series) beat GPT-4o and Gemini Flash 2 "on all benchmarks... This thing is a beast."And then how within a day several AI researchers pointed out that even Meta's own announcement admitted the Maverick tested on LM Arena was an "experimental chat version," as TechCrunch pointed out. ("As we've written about before, for various reasons, LM Arena has never been the most reliable measure of an AI model's pe
  
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• Three Million Child Deaths Linked To Drug Resistance, Study Shows

  13-04-2025 23:02 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "More than three million children around the world are thought to have died in 2022 as a result of infections that are resistant to antibiotics," reports the BBC, citing a study by two leading experts in child health that used data from sources including the World Health Organization and the World Bank:Experts say this new study highlights a more than tenfold increase in AMR-related infections in children in just three years. The number could have been made worse by the impact of the Covid pande
  
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• 33-year-old AmigaOS for Commodore Computers Gets an Unexpected Update

  13-04-2025 21:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "It is somewhat remarkable that work on AmigaOS 3.X continues in 2025," notes Tom's Hardware, "given that Commodore International released AmigaOS 3.0 in 1992..."
  AmigaOS 3.1 came in 1993. And now...Work continues on AmigaOS 3.2 with the stewards of this classic Motorola 680x0 friendly operating system, Hyperion Entertainment, releasing version 3.2.3 a few days ago.
  In a news bulletin on the official site, Hyperion highlighted that the third update for AmigaOS 3.2 includes two years of (more tha
  
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• How a Secretive Gambler Called 'The Joker' Beat the Texas Lottery

  13-04-2025 20:34 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  "Can you help me take down the Texas lottery?"That's what a London banker-turned-bookmaker asked "acquaintances" in 2023, reports the Wall Street Journal. The plan was to buy "nearly every possible number in a coming drawing" — purchasing $1 tickets for 25.8 million possible combinations, since "The jackpot was heading to $95 million. If nobody else also picked the winning numbers, the profit would be nearly $60 million."Marantelli flew to the U.S. with a few trusted lieutenants. They set
  
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• America's Dirtiest Coal Power Plants Given Exemptions from Pollution Rules to Help Power AI

  13-04-2025 19:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Somewhere in Montana sits the only coal-fired power plant in America that hasn't installed modern pollution controls to limit particulate matter, according to the Environmental Protecction Agency. Mining.com notes that it has the highest emission rate of fine particulate matter out of any U.S. coal-burning power plant.
  When inhaled, the finest particles are able to penetrate deep into the lungs and even potentially the bloodstream, exacerbating heart and lung disease, causing asthma attacks and
  
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• 'Linux Mint Debian Edition 7' Gets OEM Support

  13-04-2025 18:34 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 "will come with full support for OEM installations," according to their monthly newsletter, so Linux Mint "can be pre-installed on computers which are sold throughout the World. It's a very important feature and it's one of the very few remaining things which wasn't supported by Linux Mint Debian Edition."
  Slashdot reader BrianFagioli speculates that "this could be a sign of something much bigger."
  OEM installs are typically reserved for operating systems meant to shi
  
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• FreeDOS Celebrates More Than 30 Years of Command Prompts With New Release

  13-04-2025 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  When Microsoft announced it would stop developing MS-DOS after 1995, college student Jim Hall "packaged my own extended DOS utilities, as did others," according to the web site for the resulting "FreeDOS" project.
  Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and more than 30 years later he's "keeping the dream of the command prompt alive," writes Ars Technica. In a new article they note that last week the FreeDOS team released version 1.4, the first new stable update since 2022:
  The release has "a f
  
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• New Supercomputing Record Set - Using AMD's Instinct GPUs

  13-04-2025 13:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  "AMD processors were instrumental in achieving a new world record," reports Tom's Hardware, "during a recent Ansys Fluent computational fluid dynamics simulation run on the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory."
  The article points out that Frontier was the fastest supercomputer in the world until it was beaten by Lawrence Livermore Lab's El Capitan — with both computers powered by AMD GPUs:
  According to a press release by Ansys, it ran a 2.2-billion-cell axial turbin
  
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• Do Cognitive Abilities Predict Performance in Everyday Computer Tasks?

  13-04-2025 09:44 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "Researchers say that a person's intelligence plays a bigger role in their computer proficiency than previously believed," writes SciTechDaily, "so much so that practice alone may not be enough to ensure ease of use."
  A new study has found that general cognitive abilities, such as perception, reasoning, and memory, are more important than previously believed in determining a person's ability to perform everyday tasks on a computer... "It is clear that differences between individuals cannot be el
  
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• Torvalds Celebrates Git's 20th Anniversay. Is It More Famous Than Linux?

  13-04-2025 05:44 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary, GitHub hosted a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, writes Its FOSS News.
  Among the other revelations: He says his college-age daughter sent a texting saying he's better known at her CS lab for Git than for Linux, "because they actually use Git for everything there." Which he describes as "ridiculous" because he maintained it for just four months before handing it off to Junio Hamano who's been heading up development for more than 19 years now. "When it did what I ne
  
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• WSJ Says China 'Acknowledged Its Role in U.S. Infrastructure Hacks'

  13-04-2025 03:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Here's an update from the Wall Street Journal about a "widespread series of alarming cyberattacks on U.S. infrastructure."
  China was behind it, "Chinese officials acknowledged in a secret December meeting... according to people familiar with the matter..."The Chinese delegation linked years of intrusions into computer networks at U.S. ports, water utilities, airports and other targets, to increasing U.S. policy support for Taiwan, the people, who declined to be named, said... U.S. officials went
  
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• Original 1977 'Star Wars' Cut Will Be Shown at a Theater for First Time in Decades

  13-04-2025 00:41 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  
  Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news that in June "a rare screening of the original 1977 Star Wars movie — complete with Han shooting first — will be shown at a theater in London..."
  Petapixel reports:
  Subsequent alterations made to the film are well-documented: Han Solo being shot at by the bounty hunter Greedo first, rather than the original in which anti-hero Han killed Greedo without being shot at. Then there is the addition of a CGI Jabba the Hutt who was only mentio
  
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• Chrome To Patch Decades-Old 'Browser History Sniffing' Flaw That Let Sites Peek At Your History

  12-04-2025 23:41 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  Slashdot reader king*jojo shared this article from The Register:A 23-year-old side-channel attack for spying on people's web browsing histories will get shut down in the forthcoming Chrome 136, released last Thursday to the Chrome beta channel. At least that's the hope.
  The privacy attack, referred to as browser history sniffing, involves reading the color values of web links on a page to see if the linked pages have been visited previously... Web publishers and third parties capable of running
  
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• America's Justice Department Shuts Down Its Cryptocurrency Fraud Unit

  12-04-2025 22:41 via news.slashdot.org
  
  America's Justice Department "has shut down its unit that investigates cryptocurrency fraud," reports USA Today.
  A Monday night memo from U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the shut down was "effective immediately."Blanche directed the closure of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and ordered prosecutors to pivot to investigating transnational criminal organizations and terrorist groups that use crypto to engage in illicit transactions... In his four-page memo, Blanche said
  
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• For the First Time Astronomers Watch a Black Hole 'Wake Up' in Real-Time

  12-04-2025 21:41 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Black holes "often exhibit long periods of dormancy," writes Popular Science, adding that astronomers had never witnessed a black hole "wake up" in real time. "Until now..."
  In February of 2024 X-ray bursts were spotted coming out of a black hole named Ansky by Lorena Hernández-García at Chile's Valparaiso University, according to the article. And what astronomers have now seen "challenges prevailing theories about black hole lifecycles."Hernández-García and collabora
  
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• Germany's 'Universal Basic Income' Experiment Proves It Doesn't Encourage Unmployment

  12-04-2025 20:41 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  People "are likely to continue working full-timeeven if they receive no-strings-attached universal basic income payments," reports CNN, citing results from a recent experiment in Germany (discussed on Slashdot in 2020):Mein Grundeinkommen (My Basic Income), the Berlin-based non-profit that ran the German study, followed 122 people for three years. From June 2021 to May 2024, this group received an unconditional sum of €1,200 ($1,365) per month. The study focused on people aged between 21 an
  
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• AI Industry Tells US Congress: 'We Need Energy'

  12-04-2025 19:41 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  The Washington Post reports:The United States urgently needs more energy to fuel an artificial intelligence race with China that the country can't afford to lose, industry leaders told lawmakers at a House hearing on Wednesday. "We need energy in all forms," said Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who now leads the Special Competitive Studies Project, a think tank focused on technology and security. "Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly." It
  
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• Microsoft is Killing Skype - and Refusing Refunds for Prepaid International Calls

  12-04-2025 18:41 via slashdot.org
  
  Skype is shutting down after two decades on May 5th, notes the Washington Post.But the bigger problem for retired attorney Karen Griffin is that Microsoft won't refund the money they paid into a Skype account for cheap international phone calls:"They're no longer offering this service that I prepaid for, and now they're not giving me my money back," Griffin said. "There's a lot of people out there who are going to lose money...."
  To its credit, Microsoft gave Skype users a couple months' warning
  
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• FSF Urges US Government to Adopt Free-as-in-Freedom Tax Filing Software

  12-04-2025 18:34 via news.slashdot.org
  
  "A modern free society has an obligation to offer electronic tax filing that respects user freedom," says a Free Software Foundation blog post, "and the United States is not excluded from this responsibility."
  "Governments, and/or the companies that they partner with, are responsible for providing free as in freedom software for necessary operations, and tax filing is no exception."For many years now, a large portion of [U.S.] taxpayers have filed their taxes electronically through proprietary p
  
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• Trump Tariffs Add Exemptions Friday Night for Smartphones and Other Electronics

  12-04-2025 17:41 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Smartphones, computer monitors, semiconductors, and various other electronics will be exempt from U.S. President Trump's tariffs, reports CNN, "according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday."
  And several other products also received an exemption which "applies to products entering the United States or removed from warehouses as early as April 5, according to the notice."
  Roughly 90% of Apple's iPhone production and assembly is based in China, according to Wedbush Secu
  
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• Facebook Whistleblower Alleges Meta's AI Model Llama Was Used to Help DeepSeek

  12-04-2025 16:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  A former Facebook employee/whistleblower alleges Meta's AI model Lllama was used to help DeepSeek.
  The whistleblower — former Facebook director of global policy Sarah Wynn-Williams — testified before U.S. Senators on Wednesday. CBS News found this earlier response from Meta:In a statement last year on Llama, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote, "The alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open-source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing over
  
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• Leaving Money on the Table

  12-04-2025 14:05 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Abstract of a paper on NBER: There is much disagreement about the extent to which financial incentives motivate study participants. We elicit preferences for being paid for completing a survey, including a one-in-twenty chance of winning a $100 electronic gift card, a guaranteed electronic gift card with the same expected value, and an option to refuse payment. More than twice as many participants chose the lottery as chose the guaranteed payment. Given that most people are risk averse, this pat
  
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• Facebook Is Just Craigslist Now

  12-04-2025 09:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Facebook Marketplace has emerged as the dominant feature within the social media platform, amassing 1.2 billion monthly active buyers by 2023 and overtaking eBay as a peer-to-peer selling platform. According to recent data, approximately 16 percent of Facebook's monthly active users now access the site exclusively to participate in Marketplace.
  The feature's growth accelerated following the pandemic's supply chain disruptions and subsequent inflation, which increased demand for used goods. Faceb
  
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• Adobe Retreats from Bluesky After Massive User Backlash

  12-04-2025 06:30 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Adobe has deleted all its posts on Twitter-alternative Bluesky after a disastrous April 8 debut that drew over 1,600 angry comments from digital creators. The software giant's innocuous first post asking "What's fueling your creativity right now?" triggered immediate criticism targeting Adobe's controversial subscription model, continual price increases, and AI implementation.
  "Y'all keep raising your prices for a product that keeps getting worse," wrote one user, while another referenced Adobe'
  
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