A Collection of Fun Databases For Programming Exploration

Longtime Slashdot reader Esther Schindler writes: When you learn a new tool/technology, you need to create a sample application, which cannot use real in-house data. Why not use something fun for the sample application’s data, such as a Star Wars API or a data collection about World Cup contests? Esther Schindler, Slashdot user #16185, assembled a groovy collection of datasets that may be useful but also may be a source of fascinating internet rabbit holes. For those interested in datasets, Esther also recommends the Data is Plural newsletter and the website ResearchBuzz, which shares dataset descriptions as well as archive-related news and tools.

“Google Research maintains a search site for test datasets, too, if you know what you’re looking for,” adds Esther. There’s also, of course, Kaggle.com.

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120Hz ProMotion Rumored to Expand to Non-Pro iPhones in Two Years

Apple will expand ProMotion to the standard iPhone models in two years, according to Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants. ProMotion was first introduced on the iPhone 13 Pro models in 2021 and remains exclusive to Pro models for now. MacRumors reports: In a tweet today, Young provided a roadmap outlining various display-related technologies coming to future iPhones. Notably, the roadmap indicates that low-power LTPO display technology will be expanded to the standard iPhones in 2025, which Young said will enable ProMotion on these devices, allowing the display to ramp up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and video content when necessary.

ProMotion would also allow the display to ramp down to a more power-efficient refresh rate. iPhone 13 Pro models can ramp down to 10Hz, while iPhone 14 Pro models can go as low as 1Hz, allowing for an always-on display that can show the Lock Screen’s clock, widgets, notifications, and wallpaper even when the device is locked. All in all, the roadmap suggests that the so-called “iPhone 17” and “iPhone 17 Plus” will feature ProMotion, and likely an always-on display too. Young also claimed the “iPhone 17 Pro” will be the first iPhone to feature under-panel Face ID technology.

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Google Now Guarantees Some Flight Prices Or Your Money Back

For flights, Google already showed you whether the flight price you were looking at was high, low, or typical compared to historical prices. Now it’s going a step further by putting a guarantee on those predictions. Android Police reports: Now, whenever Google thinks a flight is priced as low as it’s going to go, it will put a “Price Guarantee” badge beside the price indicating it doesn’t think that price will drop any further. If you decide to book a flight with a price guarantee through Google and the price does go down, the company will reimburse you for the difference in price via Google Pay similar to the promotion it ran in 2019. The price guarantee was announced in a blog post today alongside new features for researching hotels.

“Now when you search for a hotel on mobile, you’ll be able to swipe through full-screen images of the hotel similar to how you might view a story on Instagram,” reports Android Police. “From that photo page, you can also quickly tap into reviews to see if a property is as good as it looks and learn more about the area where a potential hotel is located. There’s also a link to the hotel’s website right on the page when you’re ready to book.”

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Capita, Company Providing UK’s Nuclear Submarine Training, Says It’s Successfully Contained ‘Cyber Incident’

Capita, the United Kingdom’s largest outsourcing company, confirmed Monday that an IT outage which left staff locked out of their accounts on Friday was caused by “a cyber incident.” The Record reports: Staff attempting to login were erroneously told their usual passwords were “incorrect” according to reports, fueling speculation that a cyberattack was to blame, although not all of Capita’s 61,000 employees were affected. At the time, a Capita spokesperson said the company was investigating “a technical issue.”

In an update on Monday about the incident sent to the Regulatory News Service, the company confirmed it “experienced a cyber incident primarily impacting access to internal Microsoft Office 365 applications.” The nature of the incident has not been disclosed. While financially motivated ransomware attacks remain a prevalent threat for organizations in Britain, Capita also provides services to the British government that may be of interest to state-sponsored espionage groups.

Capita’s numerous contracts include several with the Ministry of Defence. Last year, a consortium it leads took control over engineering and maintenance support of training simulators for the Royal Navy’s nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines used as part of the U.K.’s nuclear deterrent. In its statement, Capita said: “Immediate steps were taken to successfully isolate and contain the issue,” which was “limited to parts of the Capita network.”

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Vandals Cut 2,000 Fiber Optic Cables in Connecticut, Knocking 16,000 Offline

“Connecticut police have charged two people with cutting more than 2,000 fiber optic cables” on March 24, reports the Associated Press — leaving more than 15,000 people without internet access.

Norwalk police said they arrested Asheville, North Carolina, residents Jillian Persons and Austin Geddings on Saturday during a surveillance operation. Both were charged with larceny and criminal mischief crimes, as well as interfering with police. Persons also was accused of giving a false statement to police. Both were detained on $200,000 bail….The outages caused by the cable cutting have since been restored, according to Optimum’s website.

The Stamford Advocate investigated how many people were affected:
Norwalk Deputy Police Chief Terry Blake said Sunday more than 40,000 customers in the area were left without internet service as a result of the vandalism. However, an Optimum spokesperson claimed at the time the outages only affected roughly 16,000 customers and the inflated numbers were inaccurate because of an issue with the company’s online outage map.

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Planned NFT-Based Private Club in San Francisco Stalled by Uncompleted Permitting Steps

Remember that entrepreneur planning an ostentatious NFT-based restaurant/members-only club in San Francisco? Seven months later it’s still “an empty husk of a building, hindered by construction delays and unfulfilled crypto dreams,” reports SFGate:

Last August, Joshua Sigel held a “groundbreaking” event at what he said would be the future home of Sho Restaurant, located atop Salesforce Park in San Francisco. He told the gathered media that construction of the proposed Japanese fine dining restaurant would begin in less than two months, once some permitting issues were resolved, with a targeted opening date of September or October of 2023.

Sigel maintained that he’d soon be offering 3,275 Sho Club NFT (non-fungible token) memberships — first via a private sale, then a larger public sale in late September — which would serve as the backbone of Sho Restaurant’s clientele. (Sigel is the CEO of Sho Group, which encapsulates Sho Restaurant and Sho Club.) There were to be 2,878 “Earth” NFT memberships, priced at $7,500 each; 377 “Water” NFT memberships, priced at $15,000 each; and 20 “Fire” NFT memberships; priced at $300,000 each. The NFTs are basically membership cards for the restaurant, spruced up with Web3 jargon…. Each membership tier comes with increasingly luxurious benefits, though restaurant reservations would also be available for nonmembers.

Seven months later, things don’t seem to be going very well for Sho Club or for Sho Restaurant. I recently walked over to Salesforce Park and peered inside the shell of the building that’s supposed to become a restaurant; I saw an empty space that looks almost exactly the same as it did in August. The mock-up design photos that journalists looked at during the “groundbreaking” in August remain strewn about on the floor. Permits for Sho Restaurant haven’t been issued, the result of Sho Restaurant designers not yet responding to a number of San Francisco Department of Building Inspection notes, among a host of permitting steps that haven’t been completed. Sho Club social media accounts have been radio silent since late September….

Sho Club appears to have sold around 100 NFT memberships, rather than 3,275, as Sigel originally projected. I repeatedly reached out to Sigel, to Sho Club, and its public relations representatives. No one replied to my questions.

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AM Radio to Be Dropped in All Ford New Models Except Commercial Vehicles

It’s not just the Ford Mustang that’s losing its AM radio. The Detroit Free Press reports:

“We are transitioning from AM radio for most new and updated 2024 models,” Ford spokesman Wes Sherwood told the Free Press. “A majority of U.S. AM stations, as well as a number of countries and automakers globally, are modernizing radio by offering internet streaming through mobile apps, FM, digital and satellite radio options. Ford will continue to offer these alternatives for customers to hear their favorite AM radio music, news and podcasts as we remove amplitude modulation — the definition of AM in this case — from most new and updated models we bring to market.” Commercial vehicles will continue to offer AM radio because of longstanding contract language, Sherwood said….

“In essence, EV motors generate a lot of electromagnetic interference that affects the frequencies of AM radio and make it difficult to get a clear signal,” said Mike Ramsey, an analyst with Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner Research Group, which specializes in digital transformation and innovation. “It could be shielded, but given the diminishing listening habits to AM, the automakers haven’t chosen to do it. Most of the content there is available through other means, including podcast and internet streaming. In my view, this isn’t that different from automakers discontinuing 8-track players, cassette players and CD players. Technology has advanced. The idea that it is a critical safety channel is a bit suspect given that almost all critical communication now is sent through mobile phones….”

Veteran analyst John McEloy, host of “Autoline After Hours” webcast and podcast said automakers don’t need to get rid of AM radio. “It’s happening because automakers would love to get rid of the cost of an AM radio,” he told the Free Press. “Some of them, like Ford, are using EVs as an excuse to get rid of it. GM shields its AM radios in its electric cars to they don’t get any interference.”
But the article also quotes a spokesperson for GM saying they’re “evaluating AM radio on future vehicles and not providing any further details at this time.”

Last month U.S. Senator Markey noted that seven more top automakers have already removed AM radio from their electric vehicles — BMW, Mazda, Polestar, Rivian, Tesla, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

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Steve Jobs Has a New ‘Memoir’, to Be Published More than 11 Years After His Death

An anonymous reader shares this report from the Washington Post:

Steve Jobs never lived to be an old wise man.

But running Apple and Pixar, tumbling and thriving, earned him a lot of wisdom in his 56 years. Now, a small group of his family, friends and former colleagues have collected it into “Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words,” available free to the public online starting on April 11. Somewhere between a posthumous memoir and a scrapbook album, it is told through notes and drafts Jobs emailed to himself, excerpts of letters and speeches, oral histories and interviews, photos and mementos. (Some physical copies are being produced for Apple and Disney employees, but that format won’t be for sale to the general public.)

“Imagine yourself as an old person looking back on your life,” Jobs wrote in a June 2005 email to himself as he was preparing to give the Stanford commencement speech. “Your life will be a story. It will be your story, with its highs and lows, its heros and villains, its forks in the road that mean everything.” The book, published by the Steve Jobs Archive, will be released on Apple Books and the Steve Jobs Archive website. The fact that it aesthetically resembles an Apple product — mostly gray and white, minimalist — is no coincidence: It was designed by LoveFrom, the firm founded by Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer.

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Space Scientists Reveal Brightest Gamma Explosion Ever

It was 10 times brighter than any previously detected, reports the BBC, noting it illuminated much of the galaxy.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv describes a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) whose light arrived late last year as one of the strongest ever observed. GRB 221009A was detected on October 9 last year (yes, that number is a date), so 5 and a bit months from event to papers published is remarkably quick, and I anticipate that there will be a lot more papers on it in the future. Stand-out points are :
– it lasted for more than ten hours after detection (a space x-ray telescope had time to orbit out of the Earth’s shadow and observe it)

– it could (briefly) be observed by amateur astronomers.
– it is also one of the closest gamma-ray bursts seen and is among the most energetic and luminous bursts.

It’s redshift is given as z= 0.151, which Wikipedia translates as occurring 1.9 billion years ago, at a distance of 2.4 billion light-years from Earth.
Observations have been made of the burst in radio telescopes (many sites, continuing), optical (1 site ; analysis of HST imaging is still in work), ultraviolet (1 space telescope), x-ray (2 space telescopes) and gamma ray (1 sapce telescope) — over a range of 1,000,000,000,000,000-fold (10^15) in wavelength. It’s brightness is such that radio observatories are expected to continue to detect it for “years to come”.
The model of the source is of several (3~10) Earth-masses of material ejected from (whatever, probably a compact body (neutron star or black dwarf) merger) and impacting the interstellar medium at relativistic speeds (Lorentz factor 9, velocity >99.2% of c). The absolute brightness of the burst is high (about 10^43 J) and it is made to seem brighter by being close, and also by the energy being emitted in a narrow jet (“beamed”), which we happen to be near the axis of.
General news sites are starting to notice the reports, including the hilarious acronym of “BOAT — Brightest Of All Time”. Obviously, with observations having only occurred for about 50 years. we’re likely to see something else as bright within the next 50 years.
The brightness of the x-rays from this GRB is such that the x-rays scattered from dust in our galaxy creates halos around the source — which are bright enough to see, and to tell us things about the dust in our galaxy (which is generally very hard to see). Those images are more photogenic than the normal imagery for GRBs — which is nothing — so you’ll see them a lot.

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Can Codon ‘Turbocharge Python’s Notoriously Slow Compiler’?

IEEE Spectrum reports on Codon, a Python compiler specifically developed to, as they put it, “turbocharge Python’s Notoriously slow compiler.”

“We do type checking during the compilation process, which lets us avoid all of that expensive type manipulation at runtime,” says Ariya Shajii, an MIT CSAIL graduate student and lead author on a recent paper about Codon.

Without any unnecessary data or type checking during runtime, Codon results in zero overhead, according to Shajii. And when it comes to performance, “Codon is typically on par with C++. Versus Python, what we usually see is 10 to 100x improvement,” he says. But Codon’s approach comes with its trade-offs. “We do this static type checking, and we disallow some of the dynamic features of Python, like changing types at runtime dynamically,” says Shajii. “There are also some Python libraries we haven’t implemented yet….”

Codon was initially designed for use in genomics and bioinformatics. “Data sets are getting really big in these fields, and high-level languages like Python and R are too slow to handle terabytes per set of sequencing data,” says Shajii. “That was the gap we wanted to fill — to give domain experts who are not necessarily computer scientists or programmers by training a way to tackle large data without having to write C or C++ code.” Aside from genomics, Codon could also be applied to similar applications that process massive data sets, as well as areas such as GPU programming and parallel programming, which the Python-based compiler supports. In fact, Codon is now being used commercially in the bioinformatics, deep learning, and quantitative finance sectors through the startup Exaloop, which Shajii founded to shift Codon from an academic project to an industry application.

To enable Codon to work with these different domains, the team developed a plug-in system. “It’s like an extensible compiler,” Shajii says. “You can write a plug-in for genomics or another domain, and those plug-ins can have new libraries and new compiler optimizations….” In terms of what’s next for Codon, Shajii and his team are currently working on native implementations of widely used Python libraries, as well as library-specific optimizations to get much better performance out of these libraries. They also plan to create a widely requested feature: a WebAssembly back end for Codon to enable running code on a Web browser.

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