Month: February 2021

Enlarge / Without significant additional work, the new interface probably won't please all of VLC's existing userbase. (credit: CC-BY-2.0 Guilhelm Vellut / Flickr)

Last week, we mentioned that the extremely popular open source video player VLC is getting a brand-new interface in its upcoming 4.0 release, expected to debut later this year. VLC 4.0 isn't ready for prime time use yet—but because the program is open source, adventurous users can grab nightly builds of it to take a peek at what's coming. The screenshots we're about to show come from the nightly build released last Friday—20210212-0431.

Goodbye file-opener, hello media jukebox

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  On the left, we have the version of VLC that ships with Ubuntu Focal—3.0.9.2. On the right, we see version 4.0.0-dev, current as of February 12. [credit: Jim Salter ]

When opening up the 4.0 dev version of VLC, the first change that leaps out is an interface shift from "file opener" to "media browser." In older versions of VLC—from its beginnings in 2001 all the way through the 3.x version being distributed now—it opens to a blank player window, with VLC's iconic traffic cone displayed in the center. The new VLC instead opens to a media-browser interface, showing thumbnails of all videos present in the user's Videos folder.

This is the view associated with the Video view displayed along the new version's top menu bar; it also presents Music, Browse, and Discover. Music offers a similar view into the user's Music folder, Discover presents a network browser looking for shares and streams present on the user's LAN, and Discover does not appear to have been fully implemented yet.

Enlarge / Parler's logo. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado)

Parler.com is getting back online after being kicked off Amazon's hosting service, with the controversial social network saying it no longer relies on "Big Tech" for its Web infrastructure. A Parler announcement today said its relaunched website is "built on sustainable, independent technology and not reliant on so-called 'Big Tech' for its operations."

Amazon cut off Parler's Web-hosting service on January 10, a few days after a Trump-incited mob stormed the US Capitol, saying that "Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety." Parler sued Amazon in response but a federal judge denied Parler's request for a preliminary injunction that would have forced Amazon to reinstate its services.

Now, Parler is using hosting services from a company called SkySilk. Parler said its site is available this week only to users who already had accounts. New users, on the other hand, will be able to sign up next week.

Enlarge / Wind turbines can apparently operate in Antarctica, so it's not clear what Texas' problem is. (credit: Tien Lai, NSF)

This morning, as the jet stream brought frigid air south to the central United States, Texas residents found themselves facing rolling blackouts as statewide grid struggled to meet demand amidst a large shortfall in generating capacity. As the day wore on, many saw these blackouts extend for ever longer periods of the day, and grid authorities are expecting problems to extend into at least Tuesday. As of noon local time on Monday, the Southwest Power Pool, which serves areas to the north of Texas, also announced that demand was exceeding generating capacity.

The shortfalls appear to be widespread, affecting everything from wind turbines to nuclear plants. One source of trouble may be an increased competition for natural gas, which is commonly used for heating in the United States.

Coming up short

Texas is unusual in that almost the entire state is part of a single grid that lacks extensive integration with those of surrounding states. That grid is run by an organization called ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, a non-profit controlled by the state legislature.

Some 66 million years ago, a catastrophic event occurred that wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. An errant asteroid from the asteroid belt has been deemed the most likely culprit. However, in a new paper published in Scientific Reports, Harvard astronomers offer an alternative: a special kind of comet—originating from a field of debris at the edge of our solar system known as the Oort cloud—that was thrown off course by Jupiter's gravity toward the Sun. The Sun's powerful tidal forces then ripped pieces off the comet, and one of the larger fragments of this "cometary shrapnel" eventually collided with Earth.

The most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the "Alvarez hypothesis," after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary (the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Since then, scientists have identified a likely impact site: a large crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s. The impactor that created it was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere. This in turn had a devastating effect on global climate, leading to mass extinction.

Enlarge / Health care workers wearing personal protective equipment stand in a tent with patient beds at an Ebola Treatment Center in Coyah, Guinea, on Thursday, Sept. 10, 2015. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Two unrelated Ebola outbreaks have erupted in two countries that have already faced some of the worst of the deadly viral disease.

Health officials in Guinea on Sunday declared an Ebola outbreak in Gouéké in N’Zerekore prefecture, located in the southeast area of the country. Officials have linked seven people to the outbreak so far, including three deaths. Six people fell ill with an Ebola-like illness after attending a funeral. Three of those cases have been confirmed, and two of the six have died.

The outbreak marks the first time Ebola has been found in Guinea since 2016, when the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded ended. The outbreak, which spanned 2014 to 2016, tallied more than 28,600 cases and over 11,000 deaths. Guinea was one of the three hardest-hit countries in the outbreak.

Enlarge / Facebook co-founder, chairman, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs after testifying before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, April 10, 2018, in Washington, DC. (credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees close to him, "we need to inflict pain" on Apple for comments by Apple CEO Tim Cook that Zuckerberg described as "extremely glib."

This and other insights into an ongoing rift between the two companies appeared in a report in The Wall Street Journal this weekend. The article indicates that based on first-hand reports, Zuckerberg has taken Cook and Apple's public criticisms of Facebook's privacy policies, whether direct or indirect, as personal affronts.

For example, Cook publicly responded to Facebook's 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal by saying such a scandal would never happen to Apple because Apple does not treat its customers like products. When asked what he would do in Zuckerberg's position, he said, "I wouldn't be in this situation," calling Facebook's approach "an invasion of privacy." This was one of the comments that has led Zuckerberg to see Apple as an opponent.