"Long before the pandemic, software business GitLab operated fully remotely, building its developer tools without any physical office..." remembers Forbes. "The company went public on Thursday on Nasdaq under the ticker 'GTLB.' Priced at $77, shares of GitLab closed their first day of trading at $103.89, up 35%, giving GitLab a market cap of nearly $15 billion." In an interview, CEO Sid Sijbrandij (pronounced "see brandy") said that going public would help GitLab to remain a well-resourced, long-standing steward of the open-source project on top of which its business software is built. "This had to happen sometime," Sijbrandij says. "We knew we were ready, the markets were ready, so why not take the step today?" At its closing price on Thursday, GitLab's IPO has made Sijbrandij a new tech billionaire, with an equity stake valued at $2.3 billion; in addition, he also sold about $150 million worth of Gitlab shares as part of the company's offering. With revenue of $58 million in its previous quarter, up 69% year over year, on losses of $40 million, GitLab fits the mold of a classic high-growth, unprofitable business-to-business software provider — cloud players that have in recent years proven popular, and able to command high multiples, with Wall Street. While its losses have narrowed recently, GitLab still generates about $1.50 in new business for each $1 spent by customers previously on its tools, putting it in elite company in the category... The company was the first-ever on Nasdaq to livestream its entire IPO day, with about 18,000 people stopping by over the course of the broadcast, it says.... Sijbrandij also became known as one of remote work's leading evangelists, advocating a no-hybrid, radically transparent office culture he says is fairer and more productive. That purist view remains a hiring advantage, he tells Forbes now; it also helps explain the livestream, part marketing opportunity and part way to include GitLab employees and advocates across the globe. "It's always behind closed doors," Sijbrandij says of the IPO festivities and listing process. Originally from the Netherlands, Sijbrandij added his parents were two of the viewers. "It was awesome to share it with the world."

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Long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker writes: Everyone's favorite security focused operating system OpenBSD released version 7.0 Thursday. In addition to the usual bug fixes and performance enhancements, support for RISC-V processors has been added. It's 26 years old, and still chugging along. One interesting feature highlighted by Phoronix: Improving the ARM64 platform support with improved drivers for the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 but still not considered ready yet for end-users. OpenBSD 7.0 improvements on the Apple M1 include support for installing on a disk with a GPT and various Apple driver improvements for USB, GPIO, SPMI, NVMe storage, and other Apple M1 hardware components. Also check out the 7.0 Song: "The Style Hymn" (part of an archive of all the OpenBSD release songs).

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I have a thing. If they're forecasting rain, showers or even a thunderstorm, and it's not raining when I want to go out for a ride, I go out anyway. Worst that can happen is I get soaked, I reason. And I usually make it home in time. And often as soon as I walk in the door it starts to pour. That's exactly what happened today. I'm feeling very oxygenated and strong, writing this post in my bike clothes, and outside it's pouring cats and dogs. Amazing.

Long-time Slashdot reader phalse phace quotes USA Today: The dwindling populations of the American bumblebee and their complete disappearance from eight states has led to a call for the bee to be placed under the Endangered Species Act before they face extinction. Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon each have zero or close to zero American bumblebees left, according to a petition by the Center for Biological Diversity and Bombus Pollinators Association of Law Students... Over the last two decades, the American bumblebee population has decreased by 89% across the U.S. New York had a decline of 99% and they disappeared from the northern part of Illinois that has seen a 74% decrease in population since 2004, the petition said. Climate change, pesticides, disease, habitat loss and competition from honey bees are listed as driving the bee to extinction... The loss of the insect could cause serious repercussions to the environment and crop production due to them being essential pollinators in agriculture. If the American bumblebee is added to the endangered species list, it will join the rusty-patched bumblebee, and If granted federal protection, anyone found to have killed or harmed the bee could face up to $13,000 in fines.

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"Billy Mitchell always has a plan," said Billy Mitchell in the 2007 documentary about Donkey Kong high scores, The King of Kong. And he tweeted the phrase again Wednesday. GameSpot explains why. "Billy Mitchell, the professional gamer and hot sauce purveyor who rose to fame for setting several retro video game high scores, is preparing for a return to court." As reported by Axios, the U.S. appeals court gave Mitchell permission to proceed with his defamation suit against Twin Galaxies, the online video game leaderboard website. In case you missed the legal tussle, the whole saga began when Twin Galaxies and Guinness World Records stripped Mitchell of his several of world records for Pac-Man and Donkey Kong after he was accused of using emulation devices to earn his scores instead of authentic arcade machines, as was required for these world record attempts. While Guinness would later reverse its decision, Twin Galaxies has so far refused to reinstate Mitchell's records. Mitchell would file a defamation suit against Twin Galaxies in 2019, while the site itself fought back with an "anti-strategic lawsuit against public participation" — more commonly known as a SLAPP motion — response, a legal move designed to have frivolous lawsuits dismissed from court and prevent parties from being silenced, as spotted by Kotaku. This week's ruling by the State of California's Second court has stated that Mitchell and his legal team have enough material to continue the lawsuit. Whether Mitchell and his team actually stand a chance of winning the case is another matter entirely... Mitchell also tweeted the exact wording of the court's decision, starting with the words "Because Mitchell showed a probability of prevailing on his claims, the trial court properly denied the anti-SLAPP motion."

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We know what we have to do -- we should be campaigning like everything is at stake (it is) instead we're hearing weak statements like this. It's not his fault, btw -- the national Democrats are looking in the wrong direction. I don't know how they can do it, but they are. Where is the Lincoln Project, why aren't they turning out ads like this, every day, about abortion rights? This is the big problem that the Democrats keep making. To them campaigns are about elections, but they're really about everything, 365 days a year. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops. The campaign never stops.

Bloomberg reports: Even as the Covid-19 pandemic forced companies around the world to reimagine the workplace, researchers in Iceland were already conducting two trials of a shorter work week that involved about 2,500 workers — more than 1% of the country's working population. They found that the experiment was an "overwhelming success" — workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being. The Iceland research has been one of the few large, formal studies on the subject... [Workers] were helped by their organizations which took concerted steps like introducing formal training programs on time-management to teach them how to reduce their hours while maintaining productivity. The trials also worked because both employees and employers were flexible, willing to experiment and make changes when something didn't work. In some cases, employers had to add a few hours back after cutting them too much... Participants in the Iceland study reduced their hours by three to five hours per week without losing pay.

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"One of Python's long-standing weaknesses, its inability to scale well in multithreaded environments, is the target of a new proposal among the core developers of the popular programming language," reports InfoWorld: Developer Sam Gross has proposed a major change to the Global Interpreter Lock, or GIL — a key component in CPython, the reference implementation of Python. If accepted, Gross's proposal would rewrite the way Python serializes access to objects in its runtime from multiple threads, and would boost multithreaded performance significantly... The new proposal makes changes to the way reference counting works for Python objects, so that references from the thread that owns an object are handled differently from those coming from other threads. The overall effect of this change, and a number of others with it, actually boosts single-threaded performance slightly — by around 10%, according to some benchmarks performed on a forked version of the interpreter versus the mainline CPython 3.9 interpreter. Multithreaded performance, on some benchmarks, scales almost linearly with each new thread in the best case — e.g., when using 20 threads, an 18.1x speedup on one benchmark and a 19.8x speedup on another.

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Less than a month ago Bitcoin's price was $40,683. Last night it reached $61,369 — a gain of more than 50% in just 24 days. CNN attributes the October surge to "hopes that the Securities and Exchange Commission will soon approve a bitcoin futures exchange-traded fund." Bitcoin prices, which rose to nearly $62,000 Friday, are now only about 5% below their all-time high of just under $65,000 that they hit earlier this year. Investors are hoping that, in addition to approving a bitcoin ETF, U.S. financial agencies will continue to take a more measured approach to regulating cryptocurrencies. Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and SEC chief Gary Gensler have suggested that the US won't crack down on crypto as severely as China has done. "With recent confirmation from both the Fed's Powell and SEC's Gensler that although regulations are coming, there is no China style clampdown envisioned, this will provide comfort to the broader institutional market that [bitcoin] is here to stay," said Seamus Donoghue, vice president of strategic alliances at METACO, a digital asset infrastructure provider.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A judge in the U.K. has ruled that a man infringed on his neighbor's privacy by using Amazon's Ring doorbell without prior consent. According to The Guardian, Jon Woodard had installed a Ring doorbell camera on the front of his home and another security camera facing the side yard to help deter burglars after a string of car break-ins. However, Woodard failed to disclose the cameras to his neighbor, Dr. Mary Fairhurst. Fairhurst reported being "alarmed and appalled" when she realized Woodard had recordings featuring her and her voice available on his smartphone. Fairhurst eventually moved out of her home after the two had altercations about the cameras. Judge Melissa Clarke of Oxford county court ruled that Woodard had violated UK General Data Protection Regulation rules and the Data Protection Act of 2018, which states that "owners and residents of domestic premises must be consulted if domestic premises border the intended area to be viewed." Clarke also ruled that the video and audio captured by the Ring doorbell and cameras were Fairhurst's data and that the security devices contributed to harassment. On his part, Woodard maintained his only intention behind installing the cameras was to ward off would-be burglars. His overall fine could be up to [...] nearly $137,000. "Amazon told the Guardian that it strongly encourages its customers to respect their neighbor's privacy and 'comply with any applicable laws' when using a Ring product," adds Gizmodo. "As a general courtesy, if your cameras are pointed outwards toward someone else's property -- enough that your neighbor's faces and car license plates are occasionally in the frame -- you should let them know."

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"China launched a three-person crew into space in the early hours of Saturday," reports CNN, calling it "a major step for the country's young space program, which is rapidly becoming one of the world's most advanced..." They will dock at China's new space station, Tiangong (which means Heavenly Palace), six and a half hours after launch. They will live and work at the station for 183 days, or just about six months... "This will certainly be their longest mission, which is quite impressive when you consider how early it is in their human spaceflight regimen," said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow at the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy. This is the second crewed mission during the construction of the space station, which China plans to have fully crewed and operational by December 2022. The first crewed mission, a three-month stay by three other astronauts, was completed last month. Six more missions have been scheduled before the end of next year, including two crewed missions, two laboratory modules and two cargo missions. "For the Chinese, this is still early in their human spaceflight effort as they've been doing this for less than 20 years ... and for fewer than 10 missions," Cheng added. "In the past, the Chinese put up a crewed flight only once every two to three years. Now, they're sending them up every few months." "If the Chinese maintain this pace ... it reflects a major shift in the mission tempo for their human spaceflight efforts...." China successfully landed an exploratory rover on the moon last December and one on Mars in May. The first module of the Tiangong space station launched in April. Just last week, an international team of scientists released their findings from the moon rocks China brought back to Earth... "The European Space Agency, Russia, India, and Israel have suffered Moon or Mars probe failures in recent years; China succeeded with both on the first tries," David Burbach, associate professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College, told CNN via email. Though the US still has the world's leading space program, he said, "there's no doubt that China is the world's Number 2 space power today." China's ambitions span years into the future, with grand plans for space exploration, research and commercialization. One of the biggest ventures will be building a joint China-Russia research station on the moon's south pole by 2035 — a facility that will be open to international participation... Chinese astronauts have long been locked out of the International Space Station due to US political objections and legislative restrictions — which is why it has been a long-standing goal of China's to build a station of its own... One reason space research cannot be divorced from terrestrial politics, and why the issue is so complicated, is because "the Chinese space program is heavily influenced, and its human and lunar programs are overseen, by the Chinese military," Cheng said. "Cooperating with China in space means cooperating with the Chinese military."

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I've been doing a lot of support this last week. Noted that a lot of times the problem is web caching. Learn how to get your browser to do a hard reload. Always try that first. Once you have that mastered, it's amazing how much time you'll save.

"Unplanned thruster firings by a Russian spacecraft briefly knocked the International Space Station off-kilter Friday, the second such incident in less than three months," reports Space.com: The spacecraft involved today was the Soyuz MS-18, which is scheduled to bring cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, film director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild back to Earth early Sunday morning (Oct. 17)... "Within 30 minutes, flight controllers regained attitude control of the space station, which is now in a stable configuration," NASA officials wrote in an update this afternoon. "The crew was awake at the time of the event and was not in any danger." The orbiting lab briefly tilted from its normal orientation this morning by 57 degrees, according to the Russian news agency Interfax, which cited communications between Novitskiy and Vladimir Solovyov, the flight director of the station's Russian segment. Space station managers don't yet know what caused the anomalously long firing... It's also unclear why the MS-18's thrusters stopped firing, though the station's handlers have some ideas. "We think — and we haven't got confirmation — we think the thrusters stopped firing because they reached their prop[ellant] limit," NASA flight director Timothy Creamer told agency astronauts shortly after the thrusters shut down, according to The New York Times. "Moscow is checking into it and doing their data analysis."

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Epic tells The Verge that it's "open to games that support cryptocurrency or blockchain-based assets" on its game store, unlike its competitor Valve which has banned games that feature blockchain technology or NFTs from Steam. From the report: When we asked about allowing games that featured NFTs, Epic told us there'd be some limitations, but that it's willing to work with "early developers" in the "new field." Epic says that the games would have to comply with financial laws, make it clear how the blockchain is used, and have appropriate age ratings. It also says that developers won't be able to use Epic's payment service to accept crypto; they would have to use their own payment systems instead. Epic's CEO Tim Sweeney has said that the company isn't interested in touching NFTs, but that statement now appears to only apply to its own games. Epic tells The Verge that it will clarify the rules as it works with developers to understand how they plan to use blockchain tech in their games.

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"In our new paper, published in Nature, we report the discovery of the first known exoplanet to survive the death of its star without having its orbit altered by other planets moving around -- circling a distance comparable to those between the Sun and the Solar System planets," writes one of the study's authors, Dimitri Veras, in an article for The Conversation. From the report: This new exoplanet, which we discovered with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, is particularly similar to Jupiter in both mass and orbital separation, and provides us with a crucial snapshot into planetary survivors around dying stars. A star's transformation into a white dwarf involves a violent phase in which it becomes a bloated "red giant," also known as a "giant branch" star, hundreds of times bigger than before. We believe that this exoplanet only just survived: if it was initially closer to its parent star, it would have been engulfed by the star's expansion. When the Sun eventually becomes a red giant, its radius will actually reach outwards to Earth's current orbit. That means the Sun will (probably) engulf Mercury and Venus, and possibly the Earth -- but we are not sure. Jupiter, and its moons, have been expected to survive, although we previously didn't know for sure. But with our discovery of this new exoplanet, we can now be more certain that Jupiter really will make it. Moreover, the margin of error in the position of this exoplanet could mean that it is almost half as close to the white dwarf as Jupiter currently is to the Sun. If so, that is additional evidence for assuming that Jupiter, and Mars, will make it. So could any life survive this transformation? A white dwarf could power life on moons or planets that end up being very close to it (about one-tenth the distance between the Sun and Mercury) for the first few billion years. After that, there wouldn't be enough radiation to sustain anything. [...] The new white dwarf exoplanet was found with what is known as the microlensing detection method. This looks at how light bends due to a strong gravitational field, which happens when a star momentarily aligns with a more distant star, as seen from Earth. The gravity from the foreground star magnifies the light from the star behind it. Any planets orbiting the star in the foreground will bend and warp this magnified light, which is how we can detect them. The white dwarf we investigated is one-quarter of the way towards the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, or about 6,500 light years away from our Solar System, and the more distant star is in the centre of the galaxy.

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