In 2014 consumer expert and Silicon Valley startup founder Nir Eyal wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. But five years later, the New York Times reports he’s offering consumers a new book about how to resist those habits — even while arguing that “addiction” is the wrong way to describe technology’s hold on people:…

Apple makes standing up for security and privacy part of its pitch, unless you are under the yoke of an authoritarian communist government. …read more Source:: ZDNet

Last week Infoworld reported on a reunion of more than 1,000 former employees of Sun Microsystems including all four founders of the company — Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy — at just their second reunion since the 2010 Oracle acquisition. Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a…

Apple’s latest iPhone 11 has new features and costs $100 more than last year’s iPhone XR. But it might not be worth buying. …read more Source:: CNet

A device that even DIY enthusiasts don’t usually think to DIY is the humble soldering iron. Yet, that’s exactly what one Hackaday.io user did by building a USB-powered soldering pen with better performance than a $5 Chinese soldering pen. The project draws inspiration from another Weller RT tip-based soldering pen by [vlk], although this project…

The Transaction Processing Performance Council is a many-decades-old nonprofit that defines transaction processing and database benchmarks and shares its performance results with the industry. Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear says they’ve just released some surprising news: The TPC organization reported on October 5 that OceanBase, an open-source relational database from Ant Financial, a business unit of…

A senior editor at the Experimental Aircraft Association tells the long and storied history of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator, remembering how he’d used version 1.0 of the product “when I was about 12 years old (nearly 40 years ago)” before working on it when he was a Microsoft employee for more than 10 years, until it…

ugen (Slashdot reader #93,902) writes: Something I discovered today, while trying to change a MAC address on a new MacBook Air (as I did for years on other MacBooks): ifconfig en0 ether “new mac” no longer works. It appears that this is a change made sometime last year, applicable to all Apple newer MacBooks. Implications…

High volume commodity products are a foundation of hacking, we’ve built many projects around popular form factors like NEMA 17 stepper motors, 608 bearings, and 280 DC motors. Their high volume led to lower cost, which further increased popularity, and the cycle repeats. A similar thing happened to a style of single-cylinder diesel engine in…

When the curtain comes down on Joaquin Phoenix and his bleak Batman spin-off, you may not want to stick around. …read more Source:: CNet