Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

Peter Kernwein posted a photo:

​Een iconische foto is weer opgedoken nu supersterren Donald Trump en Mojtaba Khamenei de afgelopen weken tegenover elkaar staan in de VS-Iran oorlog. De twee rivalen kennen elkaar namelijk al jaren: toen Khamenei een baby was, lag hij al in de armen van Trump.

Afgelopen maandag dook de iconische foto ineens op die nu al de hele week viraal gaat. Het is onduidelijk waarom de foto, die genomen is op een liefdadigsheidsevent, niet eerder is uitgelekt. Mogelijk hebben beide partijen geprobeerd om de foto geheim te houden. Ook de reden waarom Trump aanwezig was op zo’n evenement, is voor velen een mysterie.

Destijds had niemand kunnen bedenken dat de twee ooit tegenover elkaar zouden komen te staan. “Ik weet nog dat, dat kleine guppietje in zijn armen lag”, vertelt de fotograaf, die de iconische foto ooit maakte, met een nostalgische blik in zijn ogen. “Ik had nooit kunnen bedenken dat die twee later weleens rivaaltjes zouden kunnen worden, laat staan dat ze maandenlang bommen op elkaar zouden gooien en de totale wereldeconomie zouden ontwrichten. Bijzonder om dat moment ooit vast te hebben kunnen leggen.”

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️ Qualifying updates from 3pm BST/4pm CEST
️ Russell ready to keep chasing down Antonelli at Spa
️ You can email Philip | Sign up for The Recap

After the heat of the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, temperatures are barely above 20C in Belgium this weekend.

Antonelli looking relaxed, Verstappen focused, as qualifying approaches.

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Air quality in North America has plummeted, affecting the health of millions of people across the continent

As smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires continues to spread across large parts of North America, bringing hazardous air to tens of millions of people, outdoor activities are being canceled, businesses disrupted and vulnerable residents are being kept indoors as officials warn the unhealthy conditions will likely persist.

Air quality alerts were issued across more than 20 US states as smoke from wildfires burning in south-central Canada, northern Ontario and parts of Minnesota drifted south. About 109 million Americans across the midwest, mid-Atlantic and north-east experienced unhealthy air this week.

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️Updates from the third round at Royal Birkdale
️Official leaderboard | Mail Scott with your thoughts

It’s the same old story for Rory McIlroy: he just can’t keep any momentum going this week. He follows that chip-in eagle on 9 with bogey at 11. Back to -1, and a second Claret Jug continues to hover out of reach. At least he’s got one. Jon Rahm has a strangely underwhelming record at the Open: a couple of high finishes in 2019 and 2023 without ever really looking likely to win. And it’s threatening to happen again. He carves his opening drive over the bushes to the right and out of bounds, and starts with a double-bogey six. His fume is internal, but it is real, registering eight-and-a-half out of ten on Bryson DeChambeau’s patented R&A-o-meter™.

Ryan Fox speaks to Sky. “The game plan was to be aggressive … I hit driver a lot … your strategy changes with the wind around here … I had a couple of interesting shots on the back nine and kinda got away with them … pretty happy with 62 in the end, that’s for sure … had a lot of fun with [Xander Schauffele] … he played really well too and we kind of fed off each other … was pretty happy to make par [on 18] from that fairway trap … I haven’t really put four rounds together [at the Open] … hopefully this is a sign … I’m in a pretty good place to give myself a chance so we’ll see what happens!”

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MPs and industry experts say potential reorganisation will waste time at critical moment for AI and economic growth

Andy Burnham’s plan to scrap the government’s technology department has triggered an angry backlash from MPs, Whitehall officials and tech experts.

The incoming prime minister has asked officials to draw up plans to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as part of a wider Whitehall shake-up.

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GORINCHEM (ANP) - Vrachtverkeer mag vanaf zaterdag einde van de middag niet meer over de Merwedebrug bij Gorinchem. Volgens Rijkswaterstaat blijkt uit onderzoek dat de boogconstructie van de brug, waar de snelweg A27 over loopt, op meerdere locaties minder sterk is dan eerder werd aangenomen.

Vanaf 17.30 uur geldt daarom een verbod voor vrachtverkeer op de brug.

De vooralsnog grootste natuurbrand van dit seizoen in Spanje woedt circa 65 kilometer ten noorden van Zaragoza vrijwel ongecontroleerd verder. Er zijn al meer dan 15.400 hectare afgebrand. De brand heeft volgens media een omtrek van 80 kilometer en er zijn zes dorpen geëvacueerd. Maar er staan meer gehuchten of dorpen op de lijst van plaatsen die mogelijk ontruimd moeten worden.

De brand brak woensdag uit in een dunbevolkt bergachtig gebied in een streek die Cinco Villas wordt genoemd. Het enige goede nieuws is volgens de vicepresident van de getroffen regio Aragón, María del Mar Vaquero, dat de brand zaterdag niet groter is geworden wat de omtrek betreft.

Brandweerchef Carlos Cacho ziet dit ook als een lichtpuntje. Hij zei dat met een gecompliceerde operatie in de nacht van vrijdag op zaterdag de brand niet significant groter is geworden. In de operatie is ook voorkomen dat het vuur een beschermd natuurgebied aan de noordkant, de Sierra de Santo Domingo, bereikt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to "initial operational capability" for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day.

FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million. Each satellite is equipped with multispectral imaging that can peer through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters -- about 16 by 16 feet. That capability was proven by a FireSat Protoflight satellite that launched in March 2025 and collected more than one million images, while showing it could detect low-intensity blazes invisible to existing satellites.

The "early adopter" organizations that will start using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal. As more satellites launch, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest imagery anywhere in the world on an hourly basis by 2029. Such imagery would eventually become available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched by the early 2030s. Detection of small wildfires before they burn out of control could prove extremely helpful. The Earth Fire Alliance has projected that even an hourly revisit rate by the FireSat constellation could help save more than $1 billion in fire damage costs and prevent nearly 22 million tons of carbon emissions, along with protecting 3,500 homes and 1.3 million acres of land.

To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company's AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as "another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool:

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool:

Het is nodig om tegen de oppervlakkigheid van Hollywood in te gaan, vond Simon Field. „Anders is er straks nog maar één soort film over.” De Brit had het lef zich hard te maken voor smaak, experiment en onderscheidend vermogen.

If there is a driving theme to The Java Story documentary, which debuted Friday on YouTube, it would be that even some of the most important and popular technologies come from humble beginnings. In this case, we're talking about a language that started life as a failed attempt at set-top box dominance and required a massive rewrite just days before its big conference debut. Today, Java consistently hovers near the top of the TIOBE programming language popularity index and remains widely used for large enterprise applications. But at one point in 1994, Sun Microsystems was just about to abandon the effort. Tim Lindholm, who was hired to polish up a virtual machine runtime for what would become Java, told The Register, “I was one of the last people hired before the whole thing fell apart.” It wouldn’t be the last time Java outlived its detractors. Java chronicled If the idea of a professionally produced documentary about a programming language sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen the ones on C++, Python or React. These were the work of tech job site Honeypot.io, which funded the documentaries to build a user base. In 2019, Honeypot was acquired by XING (which rebranded as New Work SE). However, founder Emma Tracey was more interested in the documentary side of things and bought the production shop back from New Work, reuniting the original gang and rebranding their efforts as Cult.Repo (short for Culture Repository). The Java Story is the first product of the newly liberated media company. The documentary features many of Java’s prime movers, including creator James Gosling and senior Oracle Java architects Mark Reinhold and Brian Goetz. While it may have taken a Hollywood-style effort to construct a Hero’s Journey around the plodding progress of Python, Java is a veritable Love Island of dramas, some of which were this documentary captured. The project that almost wasn’t Lindholm strayed into the computing field only as a result of the brutally cold winter of Minnesota, where he was living in a tent. He realized he would need someplace warmer and so scored an internship at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. There, he gained early experience with virtual machines thanks to the lab’s use of Prolog. His goal was not to be a programmer, but a mathematician. “Computer science was for people who couldn't be real mathematicians,” he said. But he learned the craft of implementing Prolog. “I learned to write to very high-quality virtual machines with things like garbage collection and embeddability,” he said. The VM experience led him to subsequent jobs at Xerox PARC and eventually Sun. When Lindholm arrived 1994, it was to work for an experimental “spin-in” subsidiary called FirstPerson. At the time, Sun made bank selling high-end workstations to engineers, but it wanted to build software for devices outside the typical workstation and PC market. FirstPerson’s chief concern was a bid from Time Warner to provide the interactive video-on-demand software for television set top boxes. Gosling wrote a language and runtime for the project, called Oak. The contract ultimately went to late bidder Silicon Graphics – a Sun rival commonly known as SGI. In a lesson of not always getting what you want, the Time Warner project struggled for a few years before the plug was pulled in 1997, which didn’t do the already-struggling SGI any financial favors. But at the time, Sun took the defeat hard, laying off most of the FirstPerson staff. Lindholm had been there for only a month and wasn’t overly invested in the set top box. “I'll do whatever comes next,” he recalled. Sun kept only 12 engineers to work on Oak, including Gosling and project manager Kim Polese. But for Lindholm, the future didn’t look promising. “We were like refugees in a bombed-out bunker,” he said. Those who were laid off tossed their office gear out into the hallways. Lindholm felt like “dead meat” at the Sun office, just waiting to get laid off himself. Pivot to the Web It was purely serendipitous that the project moved to the then-nascent web. One of the surviving engineers had been playing with the recently released Mosaic browser and suggested the World Wide Web should be Oak’s next target. This was a year before Windows 95 brought the internet and web browsing to the masses. The team built a Mosaic clone called WebRunner on Oak that would run animations. It would be the precursor to what would become Java applets. After that, events moved quickly, Lindholm recalled. Oak was renamed Java in early 1995, supposedly as a nod to the engineering team’s coffee consumption. “It took off like a friggin’ rocket. It was just crazy. We were all stressed,” he said. An early wave of web developers was rapidly discovering the limits of creating web pages using HTML, which, after all, is a markup language. Lindholm said that his job, alongside , was Gosling and the crew had assembled a rough prototype, but it fell to Lindholm, alongside fellow new hire and Lisp expert Frank Yellin “to make this thing actually work.” The pair were in charge of the commercial grade implementation, ensuring that the advanced concepts Gosling had outlined, such as threading and garbage collection, functioned in the real world. Lindholm and Yellin later co-authored the original JVM specification. Threading at the time was particularly new. There were no libraries they could use to implement the idea, and Lindholm knew relatively little about the concept. The company planned to introduce Java at the 1995 SunWorld convention, the precursor to JavaOne. But the runtime was crashing badly. After much sleuthing, Lindholm figured out Java’s threading model was “fundamentally broken. It was totally screwed up,” he said. The problem was that system interrupts were being issued while the SPARC processor was executing an instruction. This proved disastrous because the system could not recover the state that had been flushed from memory and would therefore “die horribly.” Lindholm realized you could only have the interrupts happen at certain points. So, three days before the conference, he rewrote the entire threads package. At the conference, when then Sun CEO Scott McNealy showed off Java, Lindholm sat in the audience dreading the worst. Thankfully, the rewrite worked. Before open source Lindholm was also in charge of the language’s first attempt at open source, years before Eric Raymond made the term common. The company offered the binary Java runtime as a free download, but the company gave away “the sources,” as Lindholm put it, to anyone who requested it. Thousands did. The documentary retells a story that the Java Internet domain was getting so much traffic – more than Sun.com itself – that the Java team ran a pirate T3 line into the office. Such were the days before the cloud. At the time, Lindholm viewed giving away the source as a good career move. Should he ever get the ax, perhaps some other company would pick up the code and run with it. They also found outsiders could fix bugs and even extend the software to other platforms. The “source” program wasn’t formalized, however. Sun did have Richard Stallman come to talk, but he seemed “too radical” for the Sun execs, Lindholm recalled. Sun would not actually decide to officially release Java as open source for another decade. Ironically enough, Java applets were only modestly adopted for the web, as other technologies such as ColdFusion and Netscape’s JavaScript project ended up doing the heavy lifting for Web programmers. But applets were a gateway to the real action, namely powering the back-end servers. The evil empire Then, Microsoft started paying attention. It saw the runtime as a potential threat to Windows itself, particularly for the fledgling Windows NT, which was starting to make headway into the enterprise. For today’s younger generation of IT pros, it is hard to overstate how aggressive and hyper-competent Microsoft could be at that time. In 1996, the company licensed Java for Windows, but then added some additional APIs and declined to support a few others (Anyone remember Microsoft’s J++?). Sun alleged that Microsoft’s changes were intended to undermine Java’s cross-platform compatibility and steer developers toward Microsoft’s Windows-specific implementation. The years-long court case zapped the development team's energy, diverting resources away from Java. “I spent days in deposition talking about this under oath,” Lindholm recalled. The disputes ended with Microsoft paying Sun nearly $2 billion through a series of settlements. “It was personal for us,” he said. A wild ride The documentary goes on to cover the following decades of the language’s growth through to the present day, including the over-engineered era of J2EE and Java EE 5, the glimmer of hope provided by the Spring framework, Sun’s implosion and subsequent acquisition by Oracle, and the flourishing of JVM languages following the release of OpenJDK. Java continued to be a success for Sun, even as its chief business of selling SPARC-based Internet servers fizzled thanks to the influx of low-cost Linux x86 boxes. Lindholm noted that the Java team grew so large that it took over Sun’s headquarters and eventually had to move into the old Apple headquarters. But Lindholm’s passion for Java evaporated by the early 2000s, swamped by the increasingly corporate environment, and so he left for Google, where he would spend the next 20 years until his retirement earlier this year. Looking back to his early involvement, Lindholm admitted “it was kind of a random thing. You can never tell what parts of your life will end up being really significant for whatever reason." Others agreed that Java has been a wild ride. As Java creator James Gosling said in the doc, “What excites me most about the future is the unknown. Lots of things happen, and mostly the interesting ones are the ones you could never predict." ®