Apple has stopped selling its Lightning-to-3.5mm headphone jack adapter in the U.S. and most countries, with limited stock remaining only in select European markets. The $9 accessory, introduced with iPhone 7 in 2016 (after the "courageous" move to stop including the headphone jack in iPhones), allowed users to connect traditional headphones to Lightning ...

Silicon Valley's venture-capital firms are having an easy time finding promising startups to back. The hard part is cashing out. From a report: Last year, U.S. venture firms returned $26 billion worth of shares back to their investors, the lowest amount since 2011, according to the data provider PitchBook. Startup investors say 2024 has continued the trend, ...

The goal? "Make C++ and Rust interoperability easily accessible and approachable to the widest possible audience." And the Rust Foundation's "Interop Initiative" is specifically focused on the goal of interoperability "within the same executable," through either inline embedding that allows "integrated compilation", or foreign function interfaces. To ...

Dr. Adam Rodman, a Boston-based internal medicine expert, helped design a study testing 50 licensed physicians to see whether ChatGPT improved their diagnoses, reports the New York TImes. The results? "Doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. "And, to the ...

The Tiobe index tries to track the popularity of programming languages by counting the number of search results for the language's name followed by the word "programming" (on 25 different search engines). And this month there were some surprises... By TIOBE's reckoning, compared to a year ago PHP has now fallen from #7 to #12, while Delphi/Object Pascal ...

A new six-episode Dune series premiers tonight on HBO and Max — a prequel to the Denis Villeneuve-directed Dune movies set 10,000 years before the birth f Paul Atreides. The Hollywood Reporter writes that it "draws on source material from the 2012 novel Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, the ...

Slashdot unixbhaskar writes: Linus has released a fresh Linux kernel for public consumption. Please give it a try and report any glitches to the maintainers for improvement. Also, please do not forget to express your appreciation to those tireless folks who did all the hard work for you. The blog OMG Ubuntu calls it "one of the most biggest kernel ...

This week Alphabet CEO Sundar Picahi assured investors that their long-term AI focus and investment (and a "commitment to innovation") "are paying off," reports the Associated Press. Alphabet's stock has already soared 20% this year, and it's "still thriving" as the company "navigates through a pivotal shift to AI and battles regulators..." Alphabet earned ...

On a small network of islands north of Seattle, Washington, San Juan County just completed its first full year of 32-hour workweeks, reports CNN. And Tuesday the county released a report touting "a host of positive outcomes — from recruiting to retention to employee happiness — and a cost savings of more than $975,000 compared to what the county would ...

Nyx is a new reusable space capsule that "safely and affordably carries cargo to and from space stations," according to the web page of its European-based manufacturer, The Exploration Company, "launching from any heavy launcher worldwide." And the company "just closed a large funding round to further its mission of building Europe's first reusable space ...

"Here's how Apple's next major product will work," writes Bloomberg's Mark Gurman: The company has been developing a smart home command center that will rival products like the Amazon Echo Hub and Google Nest Hub... The product will run many of Apple's core apps, like Safari, Notes and Calendar, but the interface will be centered on a customizable home ...

"Amazon is making it harder for disabled employees to get permission to work from home," reports Bloomberg, a move they say shows Amazon's "determination" to enforce a five-days-a-week return to the office. The company recently told employees with disabilities that it was implementing a more rigorous vetting process, both for new requests to work from home ...

A Michigan college student writing about the elderly received this suggestion from Google's Gemini AI: "This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are ...

A reusable uncrewed spaceplane was unveiled this week for delivering and returning cargo from the Chinese Tiangong space station. It was built by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute (part of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China). (See YouTube footage here...) Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: Like the ...

Last year 30,000 people moved into central Florida's Polk County — more than to any other county in America. Its largest city has just 112,641 people, living a full 35 miles east of the 3.1 million residents in the metropolitan area around Tampa. But the Associated Press says something similar is happening all over the country: "the rise of the ...

Chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe "and in any hypothetical ones beyond it" can be estimated by a new theoretical model, reports the Royal Astronomical Society. Since stars are a precondition for the emergence of life, the new research predicts that a typical observer [i.e., intelligent life] should experience a substantially larger ...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Even as Earth sets new heat records, humanity this year is pumping 330 million tons (300 million metric tons) more carbon dioxide into the air by burning fossil fuels than it did last year. This year the world is on track to put 41.2 billion tons (37.4 billion metric tons) of the main ...

Google's transistion to Safe Coding and memory-safe languages "will take multiple years," according to a post on Google's security blog. So "we're also retrofitting secure-by-design principles to our existing C++ codebase wherever possible," a process which includes "working towards bringing spatial memory safety into as many of our C++ codebases as ...

"The Pentagon's latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena," reports the Associated Press, "but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin. "The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a ...

Remember those 43 monkeys that escaped from a U.S. research lab? They've caught 35 of them — but haven't yet caught the other eight. But even worse... The Independent reports that now another animal escape has led to "reports of two large emus running riot..." The birds' owner, Sam Morace, took to social media to plead with locals for their patience, ...

Google appears to be working on an email-forwarding alias system, according to the blog Android Authority, giving users a new way to "shield" their main email address. The site performed a teardown on the newest Google Play Services' APK looking for work-in-progress code , and spotted "a whole boatload of strings referencing and in support of something ...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Kyiv Independent: The United States will partner with Ukraine to transition Ukraine's coal-fired plants to small modular nuclear reactors, and to use them to help decarbonize its steel industry, the countries announced on November 16 at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan... The ...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Bluesky might be on the rise, but Instagram and Threads boss Adam Mosseri wants you to know that Threads is still much bigger. In a post on Thursday, Mosseri said that Threads has gotten "more than 15 million signups in November alone," seemingly trying to throw some cold water over Bluesky crossing 15 ...

"NASA has emphasized the ISS crew is in no immediate danger," reports Space.com. "The leaking area in the Russian segment of the orbital complex has been ongoing for five years," and "there was a temporary increase in the leak rate that was patched earlier this year..." Former astronaut Bob Cabana emphasized that troubleshooting is ongoing during a brief ...

Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project developing "an open platform from the ground up that can serve as the de facto industry standard" for fast development of new features. Automakers have joined with tech companies and suppliers to speed up development (and adoption) of "a fully open software stack for the connected car" — hosted ...