An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: While it doesn’t appear to be completely down like it was yesterday morning, we’re hearing many reports from Gmail users that the email service is having major issues right now. Some users are reporting that Gmail is particularly slow, while others are reporting constant error messages. One TechCrunch writer, meanwhile, noticed that emails…
Tag: Error
Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe
Natalie Wolchover writes via Quanta Magazine: As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c’s numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it’s measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It’s a pure number that shapes the universe to…
PHP 8.0 Brings Major (And Breaking) Changes to a 25-Year-Old Language
“PHP version 8.0 has arrived, bringing with it a major update to the 25-year-old programming language…” writes Tech Republic. New language features include the nullsafe operator and attributes (commonly known as annotations in other languages) to add metadata to classes — and more: The JIT compiler is designed to bring performance improvements to web applications by turning code into instructions for…
Astra Likely To Run Additional Global Vaccine Test, CEO Says
AstraZeneca is likely to conduct an additional global trial to assess the efficacy of its Covid-19 vaccine, according to the company’s chief executive officer, after current studies raised questions over its level of protection. From a report: The new trial would be run instead of adding an arm to an ongoing U.S. trial and would evaluate a lower dosage that performed…
Mac Certificate Check Stokes Fear That Apple Logs Every App You Run
Last week, Apple released macOS Big Sur and the rollout was anything but smooth. The mass upgrade caused the Apple servers responsible for checking if a user opens an app not downloaded from the App Store to slow to a crawl. Apple eventually fixed the problem, “but concerns about paralyzed Macs were soon replaced by an even bigger worry — the…
Kickstarter Mistakenly Emails Responses To Complaints From Seven Years Ago
The BBC reports:
Crowdfunding website Kickstarter has surprised some of its users by replying to complaints they made seven years ago. Users who received responses to long-expired projects from 2013 took to Twitter to congratulate the company on its response times. Kickstarter said the emails were “auto-generated in error… The emails folks received yesterday was due to an unfortunate human error while…
New approach to circuit compression could deliver real-world quantum computers years ahead of schedule
A major technical challenge for any practical, real-world quantum computer comes from the need for a large number of physical qubits to deal with errors that accumulate during computation. Such quantum error correction is resource-intensive and computationally time-consuming. But researchers have found an effective software method that enables significant compression of quantum circuits, relaxing the demands placed on hardware development. …
What is a supernova?
A supernova is a star’s colossal explosion at the end of its life, potentially outshining its entire galaxy. Read about the causes and types of supernovae here. Source: https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/definition-what-is-a-supernova…
Applying particle physics methods to quantum computing
Borrowing a page from high-energy physics and astronomy textbooks, a team of physicists and computer scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has successfully adapted and applied a common error-reduction technique to the field of quantum computing. …
GitHub Denies Getting Hacked
GitHub has denied rumors today of getting hacked after a mysterious entity shared what they claimed to be the source code of the GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise portals. From a report: The “supposed” source code was leaked via a commit to GitHub’s DMCA section. The commit was also faked to look like it originated from GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. But in…