Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he’s learned about working remotely:
Torvalds admits that when he started, “I worried about missing human interaction — not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it.” Of course, just saying “‘don’t be social’ isn’t much of a great tip, is it?”…
Tag: etc
A Slashdotter’s Take On a Way To Use Smartphones To Defeat the Coronavirus Pandemic
Longtime Slashdot reader dbart writes: With the near ubiquitous use of smartphones in America, it’s sensible to seize upon this resource to help with the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s my take on a way to use smartphones to deal with the pandemic: America does not currently have a good coronavirus test — but they are in development. Once a test is available…
Coronavirus Reportedly Spreads To Venice, California
Twitter user Scott Bell is reporting that his uncle from Venice, California, has tested positive for the coronavirus. According to Bell, “he was skiing in the Italian alps with 6 other guys,” 4 of which, including his uncle, now have the coronavirus. One is reportedly in a coma and two others are sick. Bell says his uncle “has not present any…
Companies That Buy Data Derived From Scraping the Contents of Your Email Inbox
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy…
Google’s Heart-Warming Super Bowl Ad Called ‘Evil’
“I had an uneasy feeling about the Google commercial,” writes Larry Magid in his column for the San Jose Mercury News. “But I couldn’t put it into words until I read a blog post from tech strategic adviser Shelly Palmer.” In the post Palmer describes Google’s Super Bowl ad as “a three-hanky, heart-tugging spot that has us eavesdropping on an elderly…
Tesla Posts Its First Annual Profit
140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Tesla announced its 2019 Fourth Quarter results. “Expectations were high this quarter after Tesla destroyed earnings expectations with surprisingly high profits last quarter. Today, Tesla announced that it made $7.384 billion in revenue and it reported surprising profits of $2.14 per share (Non-GAAP) in Q4 2019 — over expectations for both revenue and earnings. The automaker continues to improve…
Linux Kernel Developers and Commits Dropped in 2019
Phoronix reports that on New Year’s Day, the Linux kernel’s Git source tree showed 27,852,148 lines of code, divided among 66,492 files (including docs, Kconfig files, user-space utilities in-tree, etc). Over its lifetime there’s been 887,925 commits, and around 21,074 different authors: During 2019, the Linux kernel saw 74,754 commits, which is actually the lowest point since 2013. The 74k commits…
Earth’s Magnetic North Pole Changes Time Zones, Just Keeps Drifting
pgmrdlm tipped us off to an unprecedented scientific phenomenon. Forbes writes: Earth’s magnetic north pole has been moving East at an unusually fast pace, heading from the Canadian Arctic toward Russia. The rapid change of the magnetic poles has caused concern over navigation, GPS systems, military operations, etc. The northern magnetic pole has been drifting toward Russia at a speed of…
Cranberries: More than a holiday side dish
Fun facts about this floating fruit, the blueberry’s bitter cousin. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/lifeform-of-the-week-cranberries-at-their-bitter-best…
Anisotropic radio-wave scattering in the solar corona
Solar radio emission is produced in the turbulent medium of the solar atmosphere, and its observed properties (source position, size, time profile, polarization, etc.) are significantly affected by the propagation of the radio waves from the emitter to the observer. Scattering of radio waves on random density irregularities has long been recognized as an important process for the interpretation of radio…