story

In 1997 Winamp forever changed the way we listen to music. This is his story 30 years later

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Perhaps the main topic of this article is a fond memory for you, perhaps you have not yet moved it to that section or perhaps you do not know what we are going to talk about, but if we think about keys in the history of the digitization of music and the mp3 format, we inevitably have to talk about Winamp’s own history. A software that came to your computer in one way or another to listen to your favorite mp3s and create your lists (eventually). Let’s forget the flat designhe material design and all the modern interfaces to remember this precedent of other players, which was not strictly the first either. Who created it and what motivations were there? Why was it losing prominence? If you know him, nostalgia will probably invade you for a little while; if you don’t know him, you may know some of the reasons for his decline. The original broth of Winamp and digital music The popularization of the Internet, the lowering of its rates and the digitization of music meant that the computer began to take on the role of source and player of our songs. Regarding this, it is impossible to ignore a chapter in this story in which piracy was the order of the day, with protagonists like KaZaA or eMule (perhaps more common and longer in time depending on the country). In any case, obtaining a significant number of songs in mp3 format made the players much more required and someone thought that what was offered so far (Windows Media Player, Real Player, etc.) did not satisfy the needs or did not give the option to do so, specifically Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev (former students of the University of Utah). They created the seed of the player, which was a very simple graphical interface to make the use of AMP more comfortable (Advanced Multimedia Productswhich is considered the first *.mp3 player) on Windows systems (a title bar and a menu bar with a few playback commands). In 1997, Frankel created Nullsoft, his company, and Winamp 1 was released. It was not the only alternative player created to listen to this music format, but it was the one that combined features such as creating playlists or random playback, all in an interface that used to be quite intuitive. It soon became popular, becoming among the most downloaded software in the last 10 years. What started out as free software ended with version 1.5, at which point the license freeware became sharewareso that users had a 14-day free trial after which they would be obliged to pay 10 dollars. The program became popular to the point that Frankel He earned $100,000 a month. And the success did not go unnoticed by what was a great company at the time, AOL, which bought the software from Nullsoft for $80 millionIn fact, the streaming service and the SHOUTcast protocol also remained. Versions 0.2 and 0.92 (right). Winamp version 2.0. Winamp version 3.0. The intention was to create a leading online radio platform like Pandora or Last.FM by unifying the catalogs of Winamp and Warner Music, but they did not achieve it (the existence of one and the absence of the other is the proof). This also coincided chronologically with the launch of the iPod and its song sales platform, iTunes, which although it was somewhat behind in the mp3 revolution, had its role in normalizing the purchase of mp3s to the detriment of piracy in the United States. AOL would eventually dismantle Nullsoft in December 2003, and Frankel left the new parent company in January 2004. In Rocknerd They quote Nullsoft’s Rob Lord regarding the AOL acquisition and what Winamp could have been if it hadn’t been managed by AOL the way it was. “There is no reason why Winamp is not where iTunes is now other than the mismanagement on AOL’s part that began immediately after the acquisition.” Rob Lord, Nullsoft A review of the versions Depending on how familiar Winamp is to you (whether you were a user from the beginning, a recent user or if you have never used it before), one interface or another will have remained in your retina, but the most popular ones may have been from 1.9 onwards, when many new functions and elements were added. on the blog Old Version (now disappeared) made their particular tribute to the app by showing some of the interfaces of these versions that allowed us to recover some images. As we mentioned before, the first version was 0.2 (April 1997), which already went beyond plain text to present an interface with the basic elements of a player (title, play buttons, bitrate, audio output mode, etc.). The dark gray background that would become a hallmark would come with 0.92, in addition to the top bar with yellow lines, and in 1.0 a graphic equalizer, the list editor, a frequency analyzer and the search bar would be added to this. Version 1.6 introduced another of the features that was best received: customization. In addition, they were expanding support for different formats, such as MIDI, *.wave and CDswhich arrived with version 1.91. This interface with the equalizer taking up much of it and the playlist screen may be quite familiar to you. With version 2.0 came the Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS) by default (until then it was a separate plug-in), which allowed you to create rhythm-dependent animations on demand. But it was** in 2002 when Winamp 3** arrived, after the purchase of AOL and completely rewritten at the code level, incorporating a multimedia library, a renewed interface and the only one adapted to Linux of all the existing ones (and video support since 2.9), although there was some rejection as it consumed too many system resources and was somewhat unstable. The interface of the latest version for Mac has nothing to do with those modules with gray backgrounds in versions starting from 2.0. With version 5 in December 2003, the … Read more

a story of love and hate

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To human beings we love to take sides and defend it. We love and hate football teams, foods, cars and clothes, but we also love and hate technology companies. If there are two companies that represent that history, they are Apple, traditionally loved by its users and with a very good image, and Microsoft, which despite its efforts has been massively hated. We do not enter here into value judgments about whether one or the other deserved that love or hate, but we simply expose that this feeling is clearly widespread. This story of love and hate has accompanied us for the last forty years, but now another similar story is beginning to take shape. Still incipient, but striking. It is, of course, how people are starting to hate OpenAI and love Anthropic. The similarities with Microsoft and Apple are striking, especially after the events of recent days and that triangle of loves and heartbreaks that the Pentagon, Anthropic and OpenAI have formed. Two very clear perceptions have ended up emerging from all this scandal. On the one hand, Anthropic has positioned itself as the company that defends ethics and morality. They have not given in to the demands of the Pentagon and they have stuck to their guns, which reputationally has been very positive for her. On the other hand, OpenAI has taken advantage of the moment to steal the government contract from its rival. The perception here is different, and OpenAI has come across as an opportunistic and unscrupulous company. So much so that the impact on popularity has been notable: last Saturday ChatGPT downloads plummeted while Claude’s managed to place her above her rival, who had always dominated that ranking. The effect has been clear: Anthropic has become the good one, the company to love. OpenAI, on the other hand, has become the focus of criticism. In fact, a ‘Cancel ChatGPT’ movement which encourages users to stop using OpenAI AI models. Betrayal, these users seem to say, is paid for. The narrative battle of the good guys and the bad guys Here we are witnessing a unique phenomenon of the evolution of the corporate identity of these companies. While Altman seems to have adopted Bill Gates’ style manual from the 90s —prioritizing aggressive growth, government alliances and market domination—, Dario Amodei positions himself as the “spiritual heir” of that Apple that boasted of “thinking differently”. Anthropic’s refusal to cross certain red lines has served to make the average user feel that by using Claude they are supporting a technology “with a conscience”, so to speak. The curious thing about this story and this rivalry is that Anthropic was precisely born from a split from OpenAI due to ethical differences. There is a certain narrative of purity versus business pragmatism here that again reminds us of the confrontation between Apple and Microsoft since the 80s. OpenAI seems to be the Windows of AI. Meanwhile, Anthropic appears to be the MacBook. These user tantrums usually have an expiration date because human beings we have a very bad memorybut OpenAI still faces clear risks. For example, that this perception of the company complicates talent retention or that Anthropic actually ends up assuming the role of “company that develops ethical AI.” For the latter that is also a risk, because any slip in that immaculate philosophy can be very expensive. In fact, it is already being talked about on networks how Amodei actually he is no saint and your company showed up in January to a competition for a project for swarms of autonomous drones controlled by voice and AI. Thus, we are reviving the assignment of ideological values ​​to technology. Each company wants to position itself differently, but for users everything is once again a matter of good and bad. Users loved Apple computers and hated (or supported) Microsoft computers. Now that debate seems to have moved to AI: we love Anthropic’s because it seems to be ethical, and we hate (or support) OpenAI’s because it is opportunistic. But be careful: this has only just begun. In Xataka | Microsoft had a Discord channel dedicated to AI. They closed it because everyone now calls them “Microslop” Image | Xataka with Freepik

An economic science fiction text has sunk Visa and Mastercard in the stock market. The reason is more disturbing than the story itself

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Citrini Research, a hedge fund American published this week a text written as if it were a macroeconomic memorandum from June 2028. It is not a prediction, its authors warn. It is a speculative exercise. A feasible scenario. It has achieved 24 million impressions, and counting. It is not an anecdotal tweet. The markets they have responded by sinking. Visa has fallen 4.4%. Mastercard, 6.3%. American Express, almost 8%. And Capital One, 8%. This deserves an explanation. And it’s not what it seems. Between the lines. The market reaction is not explained by the specific content of the Citrini Research report, which includes arguments as debatable as that AI agents will abandon cards to pay with stablecoins in Solana. Antonio Ortiz, technology analysts, has pointed it out precisely: part of the argument “it is from the first of Twitter AI-hype“. The idea that an agent will compare twenty food delivery apps vibecodeadas to find the cheapest one smells like a caricature of the future. But the panic is not irrational. It is precisely the panic of not knowing where the limit is. Why is it importantand. What has moved the market has not been so much the thesis about payments but the thesis about the destruction of value. And that is solid: many billions of dollars of market capitalization have been built on a single foundation: that humans are slow, impatient, forgetful and loyal out of inertia. That we do not compare prices. That we renew subscriptions that we do not use. And that we pay commissions that we do not negotiate. An AI agent has none of those weaknesses. And that changes everything. The backdrop. Citrini’s report comes at a time when the so-called “saaspocalypse“is no longer a metaphor. WSJ states that investors are terrified by the possibility that AI ends up doing the work that large software companies bill for today. ServiceNow, Salesforce, business management platforms… all built on the premise that companies need software for their employees to do their jobs. But… what happens when employees disappear? What if the software itself can be replicated in weeks with agentic coding tools? Citrini’s fiction begins exactly there, in early 2026, when a competent developer can reproduce the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS in a few weeks, and constructs a scenario of systemic collapse. The big question. The report’s most disturbing argument is that in every previous technological cycle, job destruction created new jobs that only humans could do. This time, AI is already occupying those new positions as well. If that’s true—if AI improves faster than workers can reorient themselves—the self-correcting mechanism that has always kept creative destruction from turning into outright destruction wouldn’t work. That is the scenario that the markets have discounted this week, even if only partially and speculatively thanks to a creepypasta financial. Yes, but. The scenario requires assuming a speed of adoption that is not guaranteed, a completely absent political response and a total absence of new economic sectors. None of the three conditions are set in stone. Furthermore, as Antonio points out, there is some collective hysteria in the reaction: each announcement or “scary story catches attention and moves investors.” Markets are trading in panic over the unknown. But there’s an important difference between saying “this scenario won’t happen” and saying “this scenario is impossible.” And that difference is exactly what has the market nervous. The alarm signal. The most striking thing this week is that a speculative text, written in economic science fiction format, has been enough to move billions in market capitalization. That says a lot about the state of certainty in the markets regarding AI: it is practically non-existent. Nobody really knows how much a company whose moat It is human friction in a world where that friction is disappearing. The canary is still alive. But investors have stopped trusting the canary. In Xataka | AI promised to revolutionize all sectors. It has only revolutionized programming while the rest is still waiting Featured image | Avery Evans

After a month of trying it the story is not so simple

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When someone considers buying the Plaud Note Pro An inevitable question arises almost immediately: why isn’t it just an application? The doubt is not capricious. In recent years we have seen how the concept of “AI device” has surrounded itself with very high expectations and discreet results, with examples such as Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit R1 that did not convince. In this context, any new gadget powered by artificial intelligence has to justify its existence very well. The Plaud Note Pro aspires to do this from a clear focus: it does not want to replace the mobile phone, but rather to solve a specific need, that of recording, transcribing and structuring conversations. On paper its proposal is simple, but when we talk about spending almost 200 euros it is advisable to go beyond the technical sheet. That’s why our partner Ana Boria He has used it for a full month, with real meetings and everyday scenarios, to see if specialization is enough of an argument. The real test starts when you press the record button In the new video from Xataka’s YouTube channelAna shares her experience from the first contact. “It’s much smaller than I thought; “I had not seen it in person and it is very small,” he comments as soon as he takes it out of the box. That compact size is not a minor detail, because it is part of its approach: to always be at hand. Hence, one of the first aspects that stands out is its compatibility with MagSafe to attach it to the iPhone. “If you don’t have MagSafe, it comes with an adapter so you can always carry it attached to your phone,” he explains in those first impressions. The real test comes when you start recording. First, in an impromptu meeting. “I thought he was going to make mistakes and, although there is a little thing wrong with the names, he has captured the concept perfectly,” he says after reviewing the transcript. Then you subject it to a more demanding environment, with noise and several interlocutors speaking at the same time. It is in these types of situations where a recorder with AI demonstrates whether it really adds value compared to a simple app. The video also goes into issues that go beyond precision. The Plaud Note Pro promises to detect and transcribe meetings in 112 languagesbut what is relevant is how it behaves in Spanish and what happens with unusual terms or proper nouns. Added to this is the privacy section, a logical concern when it comes to personal or professional conversations. On that point, Ana points out: “It complies with a lot of measures and legislation to protect that information.” There is also a key element that determines the experience: the minute system. “I got a notice that I have a few minutes of recording left,” explains Ana, introducing one of the practical limits of the device. “The Plaud Note Pro costs 189 euros and includes an initial free plan of 300 minutes per month (about 5 hours). If you record many classes or meetings, they run out quickly,” he details. From there, the video analyzes the different plans available and which may be the most reasonable depending on the usage profile. In the end, the conclusion turns on its own nature. “Its greatest strength is simplicity and specialization“, he summarizes in the final section of the video, just before making some comments about the actual battery life. If you want to know all the nuances, strengths and limitations that he has encountered after a month of real use, You have the complete analysis on the Xataka YouTube channel. In Xataka | The Humane AI Pin debacle is a problem for the industry: who will trust an AI clunker again now

AI saves us time but takes away the story

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A few days ago I surprised myself doing something that five years ago would have seemed sacrilege. I had in front of me one of those reports that you save to read on Sunday morning. 5,000 words, a prestigious signature and a great design. A text of those who ask for calm. And when I didn’t even have two sentences, I instinctively looked for the ‘summary’ button that now crown my browser. Nine lines. That was the whole summary. It was not for lack of interest, it was rather for that modern urgency that whispers to us that spending twenty minutes on a single idea is an inefficient thing. After a quarter of an hour I remembered almost nothing of those nine lines. I had the information, but I didn’t have the knowledge. We are turning reading into an administrative procedure. What started as a survival tool to deal with the deluge of work emails or some long-winded Reddit threads has colonized our capacity for wonder. In 2026, AI not only helps us write, it also is teaching us not to read. Or even worse: it is convincing us that the path is a hindrance to reaching the destination. It is the definitive victory of the TLDR about curiosity. The problem with outsourcing digestion is that we start from a false premise: that the substance of things is the only thing that matters. But in culture, information or in a simple conversation, substance is sometimes the least important thing. Ask an AI to summarize Don Quixote for you and it will tell you that it’s like a man from La Mancha who has read too much and confuses windmills with giants. You have the information, but you have not heard the conversations with Sancho on the roads. You have not felt the bitterness on the beach in Barcelona nor the lucidity of someone who regains their sanity to realize that the world, without its madness, is a gray place. Technology, in its efforts to eliminate friction (paradoxically, being the one who has blocked our notifications) is taking away the fabric of our experience. Silences and nuances are what fixes memory. The horny thing is What are we using that time for that we supposedly save by not reading?r. It is not to think deeply or to walk around without a cell phone and hit the coconut, but to consume even more summaries. It’s a loop infinity (pun intended) empty efficiency. We optimize the consumption of information to be able to ingest more information, which in turn we summarize in the next scroll. Thus we become archivists of a life that we did not get to witness. We save, synthesize and archive, but we do not inhabit anything. We are reaching a phase in which the true status, the intellectual luxury of our era, is not to be very smart or to be up to date with everything thanks to our AI agent, but in be able to sustain attention. Prestige belongs to those who can afford the extravagance of reading a text from beginning to end, of listening to a podcast without skipping the silences or set it to 1.75x. Or finishing watching a movie without having used your cell phone for two hours. Efficiency is a great metric for an assembly line or an AWS server, but If we let it guide the leisure of a human life, we are making ourselves a little miserable. We start by optimizing each minute to end up leaving everything in a list of three key points. Or in a nine-line summary. But life cannot be summarized. In Xataka | There is a generation working for free as a documentarian of their own life: they are not influencers but they act as if they were Featured image | Xataka

In 1995 ‘Toy Story’ forever changed the way animated films are made. He did it with rudimentary computers

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Seen today, ‘Toy Story’ It remains as fresh, fun and surprising as it was in its day. That the later films of Pixar have drawn, to a greater or lesser extent, from its aesthetics, its plot structure and its characters, demonstrates the extent to which the company’s first film was influential and foundational in many ways. And that is taking into account that, technologically, its creative process has lost all traces of sophistication, and today it is a relic of the past like the first attempts at other techniques such as the rotoscope or the stop motion. As an example, this video that dates back to the time of filming but which had not been seen much until recently, and in which Pete Docter, the film’s animation supervisor, describes the rudimentary techniques with which the characters in the film were brought to life, based on the recording of the original voice. Their explanations and images attest to the way almost intuitive that they had to animate, and how perhaps the image that many people have of computer animation as something completely automated and where there is no human participation is absolutely wrong. We must add to this that Docter, in addition to being an animator in ‘Toy Story’, would write the basic story of almost all Pixar moviesthe script for ‘Delverso’ and ‘Up’ and he would direct those same ones and ‘Monstruos SA’. That is to say, apart from knowledge about the creative procedure in the technical part, he is also a key name in the most primitive section of the genesis of the film, where the ideas, the design of the characters and the very threads of the story emerge. In the video he explains how, based on sound, they sketch a series of movements on paper, a procedure that obviously has much more to do with traditional animation than with nothing programmatic. From there they go to a stand-in of Woody, that is, a character “made only with geometric shapes”, to save time on technical issues. In those days it was unthinkable to animate in real time with finished characters. From there, and with extreme precision, it moves the elbow, wrist, fingers… and finally, separately, all the facial animations. The interesting thing is what Docter adds later and that makes clear his interest not only in the technical section of this type of animation, but also in its creative and expressive twists and turns: “If you can make this model act, function and communicate without any type of facial expressions, then you have done a good job.” It’s a perfect example of why ‘Toy Story’ still works and exciting: because it does not remain a technical exhibition in which it was a pioneer, becoming the first computer-animated feature film, but there is a traditional creative work supporting it all. The rendering that gave life to the toys The key to Toy Story’s animation is RenderMan, Pixar’s proprietary 3D rendering software that it developed since the mid-1980s. In addition to using it in its own films, the company makes it available to third parties, as it did, with the software still in its infancy, in films such as ‘The Abyss’ in 1989 (in the scene of the water tentacle that gave the film an Oscar) or ‘Terminator 2’ in 1991 and its liquid metal effects. What RenderMan does It is managing issues such as lighting and volumes realistically, even on computers as primitive as those available in the early 1990s. The success of ‘Toy Story’ made the tool ubiquitous in productions that played a historic part in the birth of computer special effects in cinema. Even today, ‘Toy Story 4’ has been made with an updated version of RenderMan which, of course, manages aspects such as light and shadow projections in an infinitely more realistic way than in the first film. The importance of RenderMan is essential to understand even the origin of the company, because Pixar was born as a division of Lucasfilm that ended up becoming a software company that made short films to advertise the power of its products. After winning an Oscar with the short ‘Tin Toy‘ -shot with the Menv software, also from Pixar-, the decision made by the co-founder of the company Ed Catmull – the original core along with John Lasseter and the screenwriters Andrew Stanton and the aforementioned Docter -, who always had the ambition to make the leap to the feature film, was to make a half-hour Christmas special. In it, a ventriloquist doll made an unlikely couple with the metal ‘Tin Toy’ doll. ‘Tin Toy’ was not short on ambition (things appeared in it that had literally never been seen on that scale, such as textures of different materials such as wood or fabric, or shadows of different intensity), and part of that ambition would be transferred to ‘Toy Story’. For example, Catmull – like the rest of the animators – would provide a character to the dolls that appear hidden under the sofa. It was an elephant, which he designed by introducing Bézier curves by hand, as coordinates, into the programming language. The primitive concept of the metal dummies and the ventriloquist did not prosper, but Pixar ended up with a contract with Disney for 26 million dollars to make three feature films. They decided to extend the story of the toys that come to life from the short, and once again we can see Pixar’s desire for technology and ingenious concepts to come together in the same way: since visually they could not afford sophisticated and realistic animations with the software they used, they would animate toys, which would intuitively have robotic and rigid gestures and behaviors if they came to life. The ventriloquist dummy became Woody because the CEO of Disney at the time, Michael Eisner, had a bad feeling for puppets. Small calculation errors The first problem that Pixar encountered after starting production in 1993 was the equipment they believed was necessary to complete … Read more

the endless story of Algarrobico

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There will come a day when they knock down the ugliest building, in the broadest sense of the word, ever perpetrated on the coast of Spain. In the Algarrobico beachin Carboneras, in the heart of the Cabo de Gata-Níjar Natural Park, has been standing for more than twenty years a mass of concrete that never opened its doors and ended up becoming the most recognizable symbol of the Spanish urban disaster. The impossible monument. The hotel with twenty floors and more than four hundred rooms was born in the years of the real estate boomwhen the construction fever seemed to recognize no legal or environmental limits, and ended up literally wedged on the sand of one of the most valuable virgin beaches in the Mediterranean. Today, rusted, cracked and abandoned, it is still there as a physical and moral anomaly: a building declared illegal by the courts, rejected by society and yet extraordinarily resistant to disappearing. An irreconcilable aberration. The contrast alone explains the scandal. Cabo de Gata-Níjar is one of the most unique natural spaces on the Iberian Peninsula: Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO, Ramsar spaceNatura 2000 Network and recurring candidate for national park due to the exceptional nature of its volcanic landscapes, its terrestrial and marine biodiversity and its Posidonia meadows, among the best preserved in the Mediterranean. In this setting of coves, dunes, cliffs and protected fauna, the Algarrobico bursts in like a foreign bodyvisible from kilometers away, causing disbelief in visitors and shame of others among those who know the story. What should have been a natural paradise ended up hosting one of the biggest environmental attacks on the Spanish coast. Licenses, false plans and nonsense. The origin of the problem dates back to the late nineties and early two thousand, when the promoter Azata del Sol got a license of works by the Carboneras City Council with the initial endorsement of the Junta de Andalucía. That authorization was based on an irregular modification of the Natural Resources Management Plan of Cabo de Gata, in which a plan was replaced without following the legal procedure or being published in the BOJA, de facto reclassifying it as developable. a protected soil. Years later, the Prosecutor’s Office would point out that, if there had been technical errors, the only legal route would have been a formal modification approved by the Andalusian Government Council. That administrative shortcut opened the door to a construction that should never have started. A judicial labyrinth. Since in 2006 a court ordered stop the works When the hotel was almost finished, the Algarrobico became a case endless judicial. More than a dozen rulings of the Supreme Court, resolutions of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia and repeated pronouncements have concluded that the hotel was built on protected land and must be demolished. However, each failure opened a new blocking path. The Supreme Court went so far as to point out that before demolishing it was necessary to formally cancel the municipal license, an obligation that the Carboneras City Council has failed to comply with for years despite judicial requirements. The result has been a dead end in which no one seemed to have the definitive key. Responsibilities. in this mess they have lived together for years the municipal inaction, the changing positions of the Junta de Andalucía and the repeated announcements of the central Government. Signed protocols, public commitments and political promises followed one another without the mass disappearing. Meanwhile, organizations like GreenpeaceEcologistas en Acción and WWF kept alive social and legal pressureeven taking the case to European bodies and denouncing that El Algarrobico was not an isolated anomaly, but rather the emblem of a model that left similar scars on many other Spanish coasts. The route of expropriation. The most relevant change came when the Government decided to activate the path of expropriation of the lands that invade the maritime-terrestrial public domain. In February 2025 it was declared public utility of those plots and the procedure to occupy them and proceed with the demolition began. The promoter Azata del Sol tried to stop the process with an appeal, but in August 2025 the Ministry for the Ecological Transition he rejected itclosing the administrative route and accelerating deadlines. The Administration maintains that there is no defenselessness, that the expropriation cause is clearly motivated and that the general interest of restoring a protected space justifies the action. With this decision, the Executive is getting closer to fulfilling its commitment to demolish at least the part of the hotel located in the first hundred meters of the coast. The never ending story. Although the rejection of the appeal brings the demolition closer, the procedure continues being complex. The determination of the fair price, the possibility of judicial appeals and the coexistence of two different avenues (state expropriation and the annulment of the municipal license, defended by the Board) keep the risk of new delays open. The Government can occupy the land for social interest, allocate an amount and continue, but the promoter still could come to the courts. At the same time, the Carboneras City Council, under pressure from the TSJA, has finally begun the review of the license, a process that, according to environmentalistscould run aground if there is no real political will. A symbol that transcends the building itself. Beyond deadlines and technicalities, El Algarrobico has become something more than an illegal hotel. It is the permanent reminder of a time when ethe implicit motto was “build it, something remains”, and how the lack of effective controls allowed to violate the law even in natural spaces of maximum value. Its demolition is not only an aesthetic or environmental issue, but a gesture of reparation institutional and credibility of the rule of law. As long as the building remains standing, it will continue to project the idea that illegality can endure indefinitely. Twenty years later, the outcome seems closer than ever, although the history of Algarrobico invites caution. If it finally falls, it will … Read more

Crucial was the gateway to the world of the PC for millions of users. AI has just put an end to its story

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Many users remember the moment when they decided to build or improve their first computer: the search for a fast SSDa RAM kit and the feeling that the PC world was within anyone’s reach. That vision, extended for almost thirty years, is now going through a turning point. The explosion of artificial intelligence has altered the balance of the memory business and has pushed suppliers like Micron to make decisions that would have seemed unthinkable a short time ago. Micron just announced that it will stop selling consumer products under the Crucial brand. The company announced that it will continue to ship memory modules and storage units until the end of its second fiscal quarter, in February 2026, and that it will maintain warranty service for devices already in the hands of users. In parallel, it will continue to operate its business catalog with Micron products for commercial customers. The announcement came accompanied by a precise explanation: the company wants to prioritize attention to segments where demand is growing more quickly. The message of Sumit Sadana, executive vice president of Micron Technology. “AI-driven growth in data centers has driven a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit Crucial’s consumer business to improve supply and support to our largest strategic customers in higher growth segments.” The brand that grew with the home PC. Since its launch in 1996, Crucial was presented as Micron’s branch dedicated to memory and storage upgrades for the home user. Over the years, the brand entered more categories, such as memory cards and external drives. Its constant presence in physical stores and online distributors helped establish it as a household name in the components market. That 29-year trajectory is what is now behind us with Micron’s decision. The pressure of AI on memory. The rise of AI computing has generated unprecedented demand for memory, especially from HBM, used in accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD and other companies. This type of components requires complex manufacturing processes and absorbs a large part of the manufacturers’ capacity, that concentrate resources on meeting business contracts. Fewer options for mounting and expanding PCs. After years of presence in the consumer channel, Crucial leaves a gap that mainly affects the variety of the available catalog. Although there are still alternatives, the departure of a supplier with such a constant presence means fewer options when choosing memory modules or storage units. The price of RAM memory, increasing. Crucical’s farewell occurs at a time when the price of RAM has skyrocketed 300% since September. And, at least according to data from the consultancy TrendForce, everything seems to indicate that the increase in the cost of computer modules is far from over. Images | Micron | Nathan Anderson In Xataka | The war to dethrone NVIDIA has just begun: Amazon and Google are already armed

The crazy story of the Galician woman who registered El Sol before a notary, sold plots online and then took eBay to court

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To the French monarch Louis XIV he was known as the sun kingthus, with a capital letter and all its absolutist pomp. Strictly speaking, that title, however, belongs to another person, and it is not even the priest king. Cuahtemocgreat governor of the Aztecs, nor the Egyptian emperor Amenhotep III. If there is a lady and sovereign of the Star King—or at least that is what she maintains—that is Angeles Durana Galician who one fine day in 2010 decided to do something that no one else had done in thousands of years of human history: she left her house in Salvaterra do Miño, in the Vigo region, and stood in the office of a notary to draw up an official record that she, and no one else but her, declared herself the legitimate and authentic owner of the sun. When the good notary heard her, he couldn’t help but laugh, but he had no choice but to consult with his professional association and, in fact, sign a record of what that lady said. Since then, the story of Ángeles Durán has taken on delirious overtones, worthy of a good astro-legal thriller.I solicited. I, owner of the Sun This is how Ángeles Durán has proclaimed herself, a Galician who in 2010 surprised the world by proclaiming herself the owner of the Sun. And no, we are not speaking figuratively. The news advanced it in its day The Voice of Galiciawhich recounted how Durán went to a notary in a neighboring town, in the Vigo region, to draw up a record that she was the legitimate owner of the axis of the Solar System. If that became news—and it did, so much so in fact that it jumped to foreign media— it was not so much because of the occurrence itself as because of the result. Durán left the office with a document that he later did not hesitate to use. pose for the cameras. “I am the owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, which is located in the center of the solar system, located at an average distance from the Earth of approximately 149,600,000 kilometers…”, proclaims the minutes of statements with the notary’s seal. The Galician newspaper explains that the official made him laugh upon hearing Durán’s claims, but he still consulted with his school and ended up attesting that the woman in front of him declared herself the legitimate possessor of the Sun. Since then many things have been said about Durán: that he is lawyer and psychologistwho at that time served as judicial expert and even, as published The Voice in 2022, who lives in Italy and is focused on preparing a book about the British royal family. One of the latest news that is known about her is that she is dedicated to composing “spicy and erotic songs” and who has released an album. What there is no doubt is that Durán dedicated time and effort to planning her strategy to proclaim herself the owner of the Sun. Whether more or less correct, the undeniable thing is that her request was based on a legal argument that she raised at the time and still maintained in 2019. before the cameras of Cuatro. Going back to Roman law The Galician law basically rested on two legs: a legal vacuum and a legal figure that dates back to Roman law. The first is related to the international agreement that establishes that no country can appropriate the planets. The key for Durán is in that nuance: that it affects the states would not imply, he maintains, that it extends to individuals. The second key is the usucapionwhich allows you to gain real rights to those elements that have been enjoyed for a certain time. And Durán had decades benefiting daily from the Sun’s rays. Like the other almost 8,000 million people who reside on this wide planet, true, but no one else had thought to raise it like this in a notary office. The law is made, the trap is made. At least that’s what Durán thought. “I have not bought the Sun because no one has sold it to me. What I have done is a deed for what is called usucapion,” I insisted in 2019 during an interview in which he assured that this figure can be used “by electromagnetic apprehension.” The truth is that Durán has not been the first to do something similar. Decades ago an American businessman, Dennis Hopeclaimed that he had found a legal loophole that allowed him to claim sovereignty of the Moon. His argument was very similar to that of the Galician: Hope was based on an old law from the 19th century, of the American pioneers, and that the Outer Space Treaty It does not affect individuals. The most curious thing is that the Sun is not the only property that Durán has claimed, although it is certainly the one that takes the cake in size, implications and impact. The Galician has made other equally curious visits to the General Registry of Intellectual Property. The World and The Country They have echoed how he came to record Tarzan’s cry or “the longest score in the world”, 24,000 million measures and related to telephony. “Every time you dial a number, notes are ringing and no one has recorded them,” explained in 2010: “If you mark 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you are making a few measures and all the possible combinations, all of them, I have registered in my name.” A little plot in the sun… Durán was not satisfied with proclaiming herself the owner of the Astro Rey. He decided to go one step further, cutting up the vast expanse of the star and selling plots on eBay. On the first day he managed to market nearly a hundred stellar plots. According to explained in his day10,000 solar portions were offered, each accompanied by its respective certificate. For one euro, anyone could get a piece of star. … Read more

The official story says that Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Conspiracy theory says he escaped through Galicia

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There is nothing simpler, more fruitful and irreversible than lighting the fuse of conspiracy theories. This is demonstrated wonderfully by the fact that perhaps, and with the permission of the Neil Armstrong moon walkbe the mother of them all: the death of Adolf Hitler. Although there are recent research which show that the Fuehrer He passed away in 1945 with the help of a sip of cyanide and a bullet. Throughout the last three quarters of a century, stories have circulated, each one more outlandish than the other, placing him after May 1945 as—watch the list—a hermit in a remote italian cave, pastor in the Swiss Alps, croupier in a french casino, family man in Argentina or wandering around Ireland or Colombia. One of these theories, however, is much closer to us. And it aims for an escape worthy of Hollywood with a stop in Galicia. A well studied death. In 2018 the coroner Philippe Charlier published in European Journal of Internal Medicine a study which aroused almost as much interest among historians and conspiracy theorists as among his own pathological colleagues. The reason: corroborated that Adolf Hitler died in 1945. The conclusion is valuable because between March and July 2017 Charlier and his colleagues achieved a milestone: the Russian secret services allowed them to analyze the supposed remains of the Fuehrer which are preserved in Moscow for independent examination. Their study concludes, first, that the teeth are real because they could be identified thanks to complicated dental history of Hitler. Second, the remains show blue stains that indicate that their owner may have ingested cyanide to end his life. The researchers did not find traces of gunpowder, but they did analyze a skull fragment attributed to the Fuehrer with a hole in the left side, probably made by a bullet. Both data confirm the most accepted version about the death of the Nazi leader: Hitler died on April 30, 1945 in his bunker with Eva Braun after consuming cyanide and shooting himself. End of the speculations, then? This is certainly true for Professor Charlier, who he even guaranteed to the AFP agency that he has no doubts about the authenticity of the teeth and that his study puts an end to any conspiracy theory. “Now we can stop them all. Hitler did not go to Argentina on a submarine, he is not hiding in a base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the Moon,” the coroner insisted: “Our study proves that he died in 1945.” Of course, not everyone shares his conviction. Over the decades, theories have circulated that the Nazi leader managed to escape the bunker and the Soviet siege and started a new life in places as remote as northern Italy, the Swiss Alps, eastern France and of course Argentina, perhaps the version that has achieved the most popularity among conspiracy theorists. Why’s that? Such conspiratorial fecundity is largely explained by the circumstances in which Hitler died and date back to 1945, practically the same day of his death. On May 1, 1945, Hamburg radio broadcast without going any further a version which is quite far from what is considered official today: the chain claimed that Hitler had fallen “fighting until his last breath” and with “the death of a hero.” Little to do with a suicide with cyanide and a gun. It didn’t take long for stories to spread about an alleged murder, a brain hemorrhage, euthanasia and of course a successful escape. The end of Fuehrer did not help extinguish those stories. As the BBC remindshistory tells us that Hitler’s body was burned and ended up in a ditch in the Chancellery garden opened by a bomb. Soviet counter-surveillance agents found his body there shortly after, on May 5. The state of Fuehrer It was such at that time that, to identify him clearly, they decided to use his jaw. During the process they had the help Käthe Heusermannwho had served as Hitler’s dentist’s assistant. The remains were moved from one point to another until in 1970 it was decided to cremate them and throw their ashes. Hitler on a walk through Galicia? At the root of the conspiracy theories surrounding the end of Hitler there is a lot of geostrategy and politics, such as explains to the BBC Luke Daly-Groves, a historian at the University of Leeds, who remembers that Stalin weakened his opponents every time he claimed that Hitler could have escaped to Spain or Argentina. “Their strategy was to associate the West with Nazism and make it appear that the British or Americans must be hiding it,” agrees Anthony Beevorauthor of ‘Berlin: the fall of 1945’. With that backdrop, one of the versions that is closest to us emerged: that the Fuehrer ended up in Galicia. What it tells us such a theory is that after simulating his suicide Hitler managed to escape from the bunker, get on board a plane in the templehof airport and fly to Barcelona, ​​from where he went to Galicia. Once in Vigo he managed to board a submarine and flee to Argentina, where he lived until 1960 and started a new life with Eva Braun. another version talks about how shortly after the episode of FührerbunkerIn May 1945, a German plane arrived in Lugo with Hitler on board. There are those who even goes further and places it in the monastery of Samos. Worthy of Hollywood… and History Channel. True, the story may seem like something out of a book Dan Brown or the script of a Hollywood thriller with uchronic overtones, but Vigo’s theory has more preaching than it may seem a priori. Good proof is that a few years ago he starred in a History Channel documentary that was based, in turn, on 700 documents declassified by the FBI shortly before. There are variants about the supposed stay of the Fuehrer in Galician lands, but it is usually pointed out that he ended up getting on a submarine with which he … Read more

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