All software construction involves essential tasks, the fashioning of the complex conceptual structures that compose the abstract software entity, and accidental tasks, the representation of these abstract entities in programming languages and the mapping of these onto machine languages within space and speed constraints. Most of the big past gains in software productivity have come from removing artificial barriers that have made the accidental tasks inordinately hard, such as severe hardware constraints, awkward programming languages, lack of machine time. How much of what software engineers now do is still devoted to the accidental, as opposed to the essential? Unless it is more than 9/10 of all effort, shrinking all the accidental activities to zero time will not give an order of magnitude improvement.

In recent years, OpenStreetMap has emerged as the de facto standard for global electrical grid data. However, many developing countries are still lagging behind. This gap limits rural energy access and slows down climate action:

In our paper Extracting Profits from the Public, we explain how utilities are forcing regular ratepayers to pay for the discounts enjoyed by some of the nation’s largest companies and identify ways policymakers can limit the costs to the public. 

The Submarine Cable Map is a free and regularly updated resource from TeleGeography.

“The term ‘they aren’t listening’ typically means the council didn’t agree with them,” Guequierre said. He added the council considered the neighbors’ concerns about stormwater runoff and added traffic from the apartment complex but said sometimes people “arrive at different conclusions.”

SpaceX especially wants Apple to cooperate instead of pursuing the C-3 constellation because the H-block and AWS-4 spectrum, that SpaceX is now acquiring from EchoStar, is not supported by any current phones (EchoStar’s Band 66 and Band 70 used different frequency pairings). Thus support from device manufacturers will be needed to get the new capabilities enabled by this spectrum into consumers’ hands in the near term. Of course if Apple doesn’t come around, then there’s always the possibility that SpaceX will announce a “Starlink phone” as Apple executives worried about in the May article.

Porsche is using Apple Vision Pro to showcase the internals of the new 911 Turbo S.

The study found 95 percent of the world exhibits “no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise.” The researchers projected that observed sea level rise will work out to about six inches by 2100. That’s not insignificant. Six more inches of sea level could cause problems in many places. But they’ll be manageable problems, not calamities the instant-doomsday crowd says are coming. Bear in mind there’s money in crying doomsday – government grants, foundation funding, tenure, book contracts.

Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE) is the culmination of an unprecedented design and engineering effort, spanning half a decade, that combines the unique strengths of Apple silicon hardware with our advanced operating system security to provide industry-first, always-on memory safety protection across our devices — without compromising our best-in-class device performance. We believe Memory Integrity Enforcement represents the most significant upgrade to memory safety in the history of consumer operating systems.

The inescapable crop math of sustained crippling commodity prices and high input costs has many growers screaming for immediate relief. However, bailouts are Band-Aids over bullet holes, contend farmers desperate for fundamental change.

We provide a first?of?its?kind dataset of 5?D blur fields—for smartphone cameras, camera bodies equipped with a variety of lenses, etc. Finally, we show that acquired 5?D blur fields are expressive and accurate enough to reveal, for the first time, differences in optical behavior of smartphone devices of the same make and model.

Oracle’s new market cap, near a trillion dollars, up nearly 50% this week, driven largely by this one apparently non-binding deal with a party that doesn’t have the money to pay for the services, seems more bonkers than most.