A new report from German data recovery company CBL found that devices using NAND chips from reputable brands are declining in quality, with reduced capacity and their manufacturers' logo removed. Furthermore, some USB sticks use the old trick of soldiering a microSD card onto the board. TechSpot reports: Most of the janky USB sticks CBL examined were promotional gifts, the kind given away free with products or by companies at conferences. However, there were some "branded" products that fell into the same inferior-quality category, though CBL didn't say if these were well-known mainstream brands or the kind of brands you've probably never heard of.

Technological advancements have also affected these NAND chips, but not in a good way. The chips originally used single-level cell (SLC) memory cells that only stored one bit each, offering less data density but better performance and reliability. In order to increase the amount of storage the chips offered, manufacturers started moving to four bits per cell (QLC), decreasing the endurance and retention. Combined with the questionable components, it's why CBL warns that "You shouldn't rely too much on the reliability of flash memory."

The report illustrates how some of the components found in the devices had their manufactures' names removed or obscured. One simply printed text over the top of the company name, while another had been scrubbed off completely. There's also a photo of a microSD card found inside a USB stick that had all of its identifying markings removed. It's always wise to be careful when choosing your storage device and beware of offers that seem too good to be true.

In a new video released today, Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot is shown performing "kinetically challenging" work, like moving some medium-weight car parts and precisely picking stuff up. Ars Technica reports: In the latest video, we're on to what looks like "phase 2" of picking stuff up -- being more precise about it. The old clamp hands had a single pivot at the palm and seemed to just apply the maximum grip strength to anything the robot picked up. The most delicate thing Atlas picked up in the last video was a wooden plank, and it was absolutely destroying the wood. Atlas' new hands look a lot more gentle than The Clamps, with each sporting a set of three fingers with two joints. All the fingers share one big pivot point at the palm of the hand, and there's a knuckle joint halfway up the finger. The fingers are all very long and have 360 degrees of motion, so they can flex in both directions, which is probably effective but very creepy. Put two fingers on one side of an item and the "thumb" on the other, and Atlas can wrap its hands around objects instead of just crushing them.

Atlas is picking up a set of car struts -- an object with extremely complicated topography that weighs around 30 pounds -- so there's a lot to calculate. Atlas does a heavy two-handed lift of a strut from a vertical position on a pallet, walks the strut over to a shelf, and carefully slides it into place. This is all in Boston Dynamics' lab, but it's close to repetitive factory or shipping work. Everything here seems designed to give the robot a manipulation challenge. The complicated shape of the strut means there are a million ways you could grip it incorrectly. The strut box has tall metal poles around it, so the robot needs to not bang the strut into the obstacle. The shelf is a tight fit, so the strut has to be placed on the edge of the shelf and slid into place, all while making sure the strut's many protrusions won't crash into the shelf.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vancouver Sun: A cryptocurrency firm has lost a bid to force B.C. Hydro to provide the vast amounts of power needed for its operations, in a court ruling that upholds the provincial government's right to pause power connections for new crypto miners. Conifex Timber Inc., a forestry firm that branched out into cryptocurrency "mining," had gone to the B.C. Supreme Court to have the policy declared invalid. But Justice Michael Tammen ruled Friday that the government's move in December 2022 to pause new connections for cryptocurrency mining for 18 months was reasonable and not unduly discriminatory.

B.C. Hydro CEO Christopher O'Riley had told the court in an affidavit that the data centers proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That's enough to power and heat more than 570,000 apartments, according to data on the power provider's website. Energy Minister Josie Osborne said when the policy was introduced that cryptocurrency mining consumes "massive amounts of electricity" by running banks of high-powered computers around the clock, but adds "very few jobs" to the local economy. In a statement released Monday, the company said it's "disappointed" with the court's ruling and is considering an appeal. "Conifex continues to believe that the provincial government is missing out on several opportunities available to it to improve energy affordability, accelerate technological innovation, strengthen the reliability and resiliency of the power distribution grid in British Columbia, and achieve more inclusive economic growth," said Conifex in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Science: As detailed in the new issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have developed a novel 3D-printing approach for creating cultures that grow and operate similar to brain tissue. While traditional 3D-printing involves layering "bio-ink" vertically like a cake, the team instead tasked their machine to print horizontally, as if playing dominoes. As New Atlas explains, researchers placed neurons grown from pluripotent stem cells (those capable of becoming multiple different cell types) within a new bio-ink gel made with fibrinogen and thrombin, biomaterials involved in blood clotting. Adding other hydrogels then helped loosen the bio-ink to solve for the 3 encountered during previous 3D-printed tissue experiments. According to Su-Chun Zhang, a research lead and UW-Madison professor of neuroscience and neurology, the resultant tissue is resilient enough to maintain its structure, but also sufficiently malleable to permit adequate levels of oxygen and nutrient intake for the neurons. "The tissue still has enough structure to hold together but it is soft enough to allow the neurons to grow into each other and start talking to each other," Zhang explains in a recent university profile.

Because of their horizontal construction, the new tissue cells formed connections not only within each layer, but across them, as well -- much like human neurons. The new structures could interact thanks to producing neurotransmitters, and even created support cell networks within the 3D-printed tissue. In these experiments, the team printed both cerebral cortex and striatum cultures. Although responsible for very different functions -- the former associated with thought, language, and voluntary movement; the latter tied to visual information -- the two 3D-printed tissues could still communicate, "in a very special and specific way," Zhang said. Researchers believe their technique isn't limited to creating just those two types of cultures, but hypothetically "pretty much any type of neurons [sic] at any time," according to Zhang. This means the 3D-printing method could eventually help study how healthy portions of the brain interact with parts affected by Alzheimers, examining cell signal pathways in Downs syndrome, as well as use tissue to test new drugs. "Our brain operates in networks," Zhang explained. "We want to print brain tissue this way because cells do not operate by themselves. They talk to each other. This is how our brain works and it has to be studied all together like this to truly understand it."

After declining to allow their iPad app to run on the Vision Pro before launch, YouTube now says it has an app on its roadmap. "We're excited to see Vision Pro launch and we're supporting it by ensuring YouTube users have a great experience in Safari," said YouTube spokesperson Jessica Gibby. "We do not have any specific plans to share at this time, but can confirm that a Vision Pro app is on our roadmap." The Verge reports: Gibby didn't give a date for this roadmap, so we'll have to wait and see what YouTube does here -- it could just tweak the iPad app, or it could do a lot more. One thing YouTube and Apple have not done yet is figure out support for the large library of 360 and VR video on YouTube right now -- YouTube has had 3D support since 2011 and 360 support since 2016, but none of it works on the Vision Pro. (Here I am interviewing Michelle Obama at the White House in 360 in 2016!)

I asked Apple if YouTube's 360 and 3D videos will ever work on the Vision Pro during our review, and Apple spokesperson Jackie Roy basically told me they aren't good enough, saying that "much of this content was created for devices that do not deliver a high-quality spatial experience. In some cases, this content could also cause motion discomfort. We've focused our efforts on delivering the best spatial media experience possible including spatial photos and videos, Apple Immersive Video, and 3D movies available on Apple TV." Tough! I asked YouTube if this new app will support VR and 360 video on the Vision Pro and have not heard back yet.

The "technology building blocks" for space solar are already available, reports Clean Technica. "It's just a matter of scaling, systems integration, and adjustments for space-hardiness."

And several groups are looking at it — including the U.S. Space Force To help push costs down, the California Institute of Technology has proposed a sandwich-type solar module that integrates solar harvesting along with conversion to a radio frequency into one compact package, accompanied by a built-in antenna. Last month researchers at the school wrapped up a months-long, in-space test of different types of solar cells. Another approach is illustrated by the Michigan startup Virtus Solis, an industry partner of the University of Bristol. Last June the company and the school received £3.3 million in funding from the UK Net Zero Innovation program, for developing an open-source model for testing the performance of large, centralized antennas in space. "The concept depends upon the use of gigascale antenna arrays capable of delivering over 2GW of power from space onto similar gigascale antenna arrays either at sea or on the ground," the school explained.

As for how such a thing would be launched into space, that's where the U.S. Space Force comes in. Last August, the Space Force awarded a small business contract to the U.S. startup Orbital Composites. The company is tasked with the mission of developing its patented "quantum antenna" and in-space fabrication tools for secure communications in space applications, including space-to-space as well as space-to-Earth and vice versa. The basic idea is to let 3D printing doing much of the work in space. According to Orbital, in-space fabrication would save more than 100 times the cost of applying conventional fabrication methods to large-scale orbiting antennas. "By harnessing the potential of In-Space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM), the company eyes the prospect of creating significantly larger space antennas," Orbital Composites explains. "By fabricating antennas in space, larger and more complex designs are possible that eliminate the constraints of launch and rocket fairings...."

If you're guessing that a hookup between Virtus and Orbital is in the works, that's a good guess. On February 1, at the SpaceCOM conference in Orlando, Florida, Virtus Solis let slip that it is working with Orbital Composites on a space solar pilot project. If all goes according to plan, the project will be up and running in 2027, deploying Virtus's robot-enabled fabrication system with Orbital's 3D printing. As of this writing the two companies have not posted details, but Space News picked up the thread. "The 2027 mission is designed to showcase critical power-generation technologies including in-space assembly of solar panels and transmission of more than one kilowatt to Earth," Space News explained. "The news release calls the 2027 mission "a precursor to large-scale commercial megawatt-class solar installations in space by 2030...."

To be clear, Orbital's press release about its new Space Force quantum antenna contract does not mention anything in particular about space solar. However, the pieces of the puzzle fit. Along with the Virtus and Grumman connections, in October of 2022 Orbital won a small business contract through SpaceWERX, the Space Force's innovative technologies funding arm, to explore the capabilities of ISAM systems.
"SpaceWERX comes under the umbrella of the U.S. Air Force's AFWERX innovation branch, which has developed a program called SSPIDR, short for Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstrations and Research Project," the article points out. (While Virtus believes most space-based solar power systems could deliver megawatt hours of electricity at prices comparable to today's market.)

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Drive: General Motors was one of the first to foray into plug-in hybrids, but it abandoned them amid the hype for electric vehicles. Now that automakers are running up against the current limits of EV demand though, they're looking for other ways to curb fleet emissions. In GM's case, that way is an about-face and return to PHEVs after completely dismissing their potential just a few years ago.

"Our forward plans include bringing our plug-in hybrid technology to select vehicles in North America," said GM CEO Mary Barra during a Q4 earnings call transcribed by Automotive News. Barra added that GM still aimed to eliminate its light-duty vehicles' emissions by 2035, but said that hybrids will fill in the gaps where needed "from a compliance perspective." She didn't specify which segments they may occupy, but going by GM's history, they'll probably be brilliantly engineered and utterly neglected by marketing...

GM's EV ambitions have been tempered by recalls and lukewarm product launches such as the GMC Hummer EV and aforementioned ">Blazer EV. Now, with EV demand potentially plateauing (at least for now), automakers are returning to the proven, less compromising option of hybrids.

An anonymous reader shared this report from USA Today: A nationwide analysis by USA TODAY shows local governments are banning green energy faster than they're building it.

At least 15% of counties in the U.S. have effectively halted new utility-scale wind, solar, or both, USA TODAY found. These limits come through outright bans, moratoriums, construction impediments and other conditions that make green energy difficult to build... In the past decade, about 180 counties got their first commercial wind-power project. But in the same period, more than twice as many blocked wind development. And while solar power has found more broad acceptance, 2023 was the first year to see almost as many individual counties block new solar projects as the ones adding their first project.

The result: Some of the nation's areas with the best sources of wind and solar power have now been boxed out. Because large-scale solar and wind projects typically are built outside city limits, USA TODAY's analysis focuses on restrictions by the county-level governments that have jurisdiction. In a few cases, such as Connecticut, Tennessee and Vermont, entire states have implemented near-statewide restrictions. While 15% of America's counties might sound like a small portion, the trend has significant consequences, says Jeff Danielson, a former four-term Iowa state senator now with the Clean Grid Alliance. "It's 15% of the most highly productive areas to develop wind and solar," he said. "Our overall goals are going to be difficult to achieve if the answer is 'No' in county after county...."

[T]he number of new wind projects opening annually peaked in the early 2010s, according to inventory data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and has slowed since then. Wind power is expected to grow 11% by 2025 from last year's levels. In the past 10 years, 183 counties saw their first wind project come online. However, USA TODAY's analysis found that in the same period, nearly 375 counties have essentially blocked new wind development. That's almost as many as the 508 counties — out of 3,144 total in the U.S. — currently home to an operational wind turbine....

Of the 116 counties implementing bans or impediments to utility-scale solar plants, half did so in 2023 alone. This surge in obstacles is unprecedented since green-energy technology gained broad acceptance...
The article points out that counties sometimes also limit the size of solar farms — making them impractical to build. "Other jurisdictions create shadow bans of sorts. Projects might not technically be banned, but officials simply reject all green energy plans on a case-by-case basis..."

"USA TODAY's findings were supported by research published in late January by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Energy developers reported one third of the wind and solar siting applications they had submitted in the past five years were canceled, while about half were delayed for six months or more. Zoning issues and community opposition were two of the top reasons."

The article also quotes an Ohio farmer who complained that "You live in the country, and you want to be away from all the hustle and bustle. I kind of look at it as if they're sticking a warehouse or a factory here." Last September, his county's commissioners banned all new large-scale wind and solar projects.

The non-profit Linux Foundation Energy hopes to develop energy-sector solutions (including standards, specifications, and software) supporting rapid decarbonization by collaborating with industry stakeholders.

And now they're involved in a new partnership with America's Joint Office of Energy — which facilitates collaboration between the federal Department of Energy and its Department of Transportation. The partnership's goal? To "build open-source software tools to support communications between EV charging infrastructure and other systems."

The Buildout reports: The partnership and effort — known as "Project EVerest" — is part of the administration's full-court press to improve the charging experience for EV owners as the industry's nationwide buildout hits full stride. "Project EVerest will be a game changer for reliability and interoperability for EV charging," Gabe Klein, executive director of the administration's Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, said yesterday in a post on social media....

Administration officials said that a key driver of the move to institute broad standards for software is to move beyond an era of unreliable and disparate EV charging services throughout the U.S. Dr. K. Shankari, a principal software architect at the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, said that local and state governments now working to build out EV charging infrastructure could include a requirement that bidding contractors adhere to Project EVerest standards. That, in turn, could have a profound impact on providers of EV charging stations and services by requiring them to adapt to open source standards or lose the opportunity to bid on public projects. Charging availability and reliability are consistently mentioned as key turnoffs for potential EV buyers who want the infrastructure to be ready, easy, and consistent to use before making the move away from gas cars.

Specifically, the new project will aim to create what's known as an open source reference implementation for EV charging infrastructure — a set of standards that will be open to developers who are building applications and back-end software... And, because the software will be available for any company, organization, or developer to use, it will allow the creation of new EV infrastructure software at all levels without software writers having to start from scratch. "LF Energy exists to build the shared technology investment that the entire industry can build on top of," said Alex Thompson of LF Energy during the web conference. "You don't want to be re-inventing the wheel."
The tools will help communication between charging stations (and adjacent chargers), as well as vehicles and batteries, user interfaces and mobile devices, and even backend payment systems or power grids. An announcement from the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation says this software stack "will reduce instances of incompatibility resulting from proprietary systems, ultimately making charging more reliable for EV drivers." "The Joint Office is paving the way for innovation by partnering with an open-source foundation to address the needs of industry and consumers with technical tools that support reliable, safe and interoperable EV charging," said Sarah Hipel, Standards and Reliability Program Manager at the Joint Office.... With this collaborative development model, EVerest will speed up the adoption of EVs and decarbonization of transportation in the United States by accelerating charger development and deployment, increase customizability, and ensure high levels of security for the nation's growing network.
Linux Foundation Energy adds that reliable charging "is key to ensuring that anyone can confidently choose to ride or drive electric," predicting it will increase customizability for different use cases while offering long-term maintainability, avoiding vendor-lock in, and ensuring high levels of security. This is a pioneering example of the federal government collaborating to deploy code into an open source project...

"The EVerest project has been demonstrated in pilots around the world to make EV charging far more reliable and reduces the friction and frustration EV drivers have experienced when a charger fails to work or is not continually maintained," said LF Energy Executive Director Alex Thornton. "We look forward to partnering with the Joint Office to create a robust firmware stack that will stand the test of time, and be maintained by an active and growing global community to ensure the nation's charging infrastructure meets the needs of a growing fleet of electric vehicles today and into the future."
Thanks to Slashdot reader ElectricVs for sharing the article.

James Cameron tells Vanity Fair's Nick Bilton that his experience with Apple's Vision Pro "was religious. I was skeptical at first. I don't bow down before the great god of Apple, but I was really, really blown away... I think it's not evolutionary; it's revolutionary. And I'm speaking as someone who has worked in VR for 18 years." He explained that the reason it looks so real is because the Apple Vision Pro is writing a 4K image into my eyes. "That's the equivalent of the resolution of a 75-inch TV into each of your eyeballs — 23 million pixels." To put that into perspective, the average 4K television has around 8 million pixels. Apple engineers didn't slice off a rectangle from the corner of a 4K display and put it in the Apple Vision Pro. They somehow compressed twice as many pixels into a space as small as your eyeball. This, to people like Cameron who have been working in this space for two decades, "solves every problem."

But even with all this wonder, with 23 million pixels that are so clear and crisp that you can't tell reality from a digital composite of it.... the more I've used the Apple Vision Pro over the past two weeks, the more one glaring problem revealed itself to me. It's not the weight (which is a problem but will come down over time), or the size (which will shrink with each iteration), or the worry that it will drive us to consume more content alone (almost half of Americans already watch TV alone). Or how tech giants like Meta, Netflix, Spotify, and Google are currently withholding their apps from the device. (Content creators may come around once the consumers are there, and some, like Disney, are already embracing the device, making 150 movies available in 3D, including from mega-franchises like Star Wars and Marvel.) And it's not even the price, because if Apple wanted to, the company could subsidize the cost of the Apple Vision Pro and it would have about as much financial impact as Cook losing a nickel between his couch cushions.

I'm talking about something that I don't see a solution for... I can see a day when we all can't imagine living without an augmented reality. When we're enveloped more and more by technology, to the point that we crave these glasses like a drug, like we crave our iPhones today but with more desire for the dopamine hit this resolution of AR can deliver. I know deep down that the Apple Vision Pro is too immersive, and yet all I want to do is see the world through it. "I'm sure the technology is terrific. I still think and hope it fails," one Silicon Valley investor said to me. "Apple feels more and more like a tech fentanyl dealer that poses as a rehab provider." Harsh words, but he feels what we all feel, a slave to our smartphone, and he's seen this play before and he knows what the first act is like, and the second act, and he knows how it ends.

• Political blogger Taegan Goddard says the Vision Pro "offers a glimpse of how we might use computers in the future. If you're skeptical — and many people are — you need to try it before drawing any conclusions. It's hard to explain unless you've worn it. But I can assure you, it's mind-blowing."

• Apple CEO Tim Cook tells Bilton "You can actually lay on your sofa and put the displays on your ceiling if you wish. I watched the third season of Ted Lasso on my ceiling and it was unbelievable!"

• Dan Ives, a senior analyst at the investment firm Wedbush Securities, tells Bilton, "We think a few years from now it'll resemble sunglasses and be less than $1,500."

"In the last few years, the U.S. has seen a boom in cryptocurrency mining," writes Ars Technica. But they add that the U.S. government "is now trying to track exactly what that means for the consumption of electricity. Specifically, a crucial branch of the U.S. Department of Energy.

"While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the U.S.'s electricity." That's roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years."

While there is some small-scale mining that goes on with personal computers and small rigs, most cryptocurrency mining has moved to large collections of specialized hardware. While this hardware can be pricy compared to personal computers, the main cost for these operations is electricity use, so the miners will tend to move to places with low electricity rates. The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the U.S., where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.

One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020. By the start of 2022, that figure was nearly 38 percent... The EIA decided it needed a better grip on what was going on... To better understand the implications of this major new drain on the U.S. electric grid, the EIA will be performing monthly analyses of bitcoin operations during the first half of 2024.
The Energy Information Agency identified 137 bitcoin mining operators, of which 101 responded to inquiries about their full-capacity power supply. "If running all-out, those 101 facilities would consume 2.3 percent of the US's average power demand," the article points out. And they add that in at least five instances, the Agency found bitcoin operators had "moved in near underutilized power plants and sent generation soaring again...

"These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners."

Linus Torvalds had "some robust exchanges" on the Linux kernel mailing list with a contributor from Google. The subject was inodes, notes the Register, "which as Red Hat puts it are each 'a unique identifier for a specific piece of metadata on a given filesystem.'" Inodes have been the subject of debate on the Linux Kernel Mailing list for the last couple of weeks, with Googler Steven Rostedt and Torvalds engaging in some robust exchanges on the matter. In a thread titled, "Have the inodes all for files and directories all be the same," posters noted that inodes may still have a role when using tar to archive files. Torvalds countered that inodes have had their day. "Yes, inode numbers used to be special, and there's history behind it. But we should basically try very hard to walk away from that broken history," he wrote. "An inode number just isn't a unique descriptor any more. We're not living in the 1970s, and filesystems have changed." But debate on inodes continued. Rostedt eventually suggested that inodes should all have unique numbers...

In response... Torvalds opened: "Stop making things more complicated than they need to be." Then he got a bit shouty. "And dammit, STOP COPYING VFS LAYER FUNCTIONS. It was a bad idea last time, it's a horribly bad idea this time too. I'm not taking this kind of crap." Torvalds's main criticism of Rostedt's approach is that the Google dev didn't fully understand the subject matter — which Rostedt later acknowledged.
"An inode number just isn't a unique descriptor any more," Torvalds wrote at one point.

"We're not living in the 1970s, and filesystems have changed."

Although hydrogen-dedicated renewable energy capacity is expected to increase by 45 GW between 2022 and 2028, the estimates are 35% lower than what the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasted a year ago. Reuters reports: There is growing political momentum for low-emission hydrogen but actual implementation has been held up by uncertain demand outlooks, a lack of clarity in regulatory frameworks, and a lack of infrastructure to deliver hydrogen to end users, the IEA said in an emailed response to questions. Slow progress on real-world implementation "is a consequence of barriers that could be expected in a sector that needs to build up new and complex value chains," the IEA said. Uncertainties have been exacerbated by inflation and sluggish policy implementation.

Expected renewable energy capacity for hydrogen production represents just 7% of the capacity pledged for the same period and one tenth the sum of government targets for 2030, IEA said in its report. Around 75% of expected capacity is based in three countries, with China taking the lion's share, followed by Saudi Arabia and the United States, the IEA says.

Jess Weatherbed reports via The Verge: Bullitt Group, the UK-based smartphone manufacturer behind the rugged handsets of Cat, Land Rover, and Motorola, has seemingly shut down. On Monday, Mobile World Live spotted several Bullitt Group employees on LinkedIn saying that the company folded on January 26th after a "critical planned restructuring" failed. The Telegraph reported earlier this month that the company was on the brink of insolvency. Bullitt Group has yet to issue an official statement confirming the closure. The manufacturer previously told The Telegraph that it planned to transfer its satellite connectivity business and all 100 of its employees to a new company owned by its creditors, though one former employee now claims the entire workforce has been laid off.

Founded in 2009, Bullitt found its niche producing mobile devices and accessories for other companies. The most notable are the hardy, rugged handsets like the Land Rover Explore and Motorola Defy series, though it also made more traditional smartphones like the Kodak Ektra. In recent years, the company placed greater focus on satellite connectivity projects like the Motorola Defy Satellite Link as it struggled to compete against larger phone providers like Apple and Samsung.

During Alphabet's Q4 2023 earnings call, Sundar Pichai announced that Google One is about to cross 100 million subscribers. From a report: The CEO said Google One is "doing incredibly well with strong user growth." Pichai highlighted how it "provides expanded storage, unlocks exclusive features in Google products, and allows [the company] to build a strong relationship with [its] most engaged users."

The consumer-facing subscription today includes storage (100 GB, 200 GB, 2 TB, 5 TB, 10 TB, 20 TB, and 30 TB tiers are available), which can be shared with up to five other accounts. You also get more Google Photos editing features, Workspace premium, VPN by Google One, dark web monitoring, 3-10% back on the Google Store, and additional customer support. In the US, pricing starts at $1.99 per month for 100 GB, while a popular 2 TB "Premium" plan is $99.99 annually.

Apple has lifted the embargo on the first wave of non-curated reviews of its Vision Pro headset, and the results are somewhat surprising. The initial "high" experienced upon first impressions, where reviewers laud the headset's "incredibly impressive displays" and "near perfect" tracking capabilities, has waned. In real-world conditions outside of Apple's heavily-regulated demos, the Vision Pro appears to suffer from limited productivity usecases, DRM'd apps, and half-baked features that suggest this device is still very much in the dev-kit stage. Above all, however, is the isolation experienced when using the Vision Pro. It offers very few options for wearers to socialize and share memories with one another in any meaningful way. Tim Cook may be right when he said headsets are inherently isolating.

"You're in there, having experiences all by yourself that no one else can take part it," concludes Nilay Patel in his review for The Verge. "I don't want to get work done in the Vision Pro. I get my work done with other people, and I'd rather be out here with them."

These are some of our favorite reviews of the Apple Vision Pro:

- The Verge: Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it's not
- The Wall Street Journal: Apple Vision Pro Review: The Best Headset Yet Is Just a Glimpse of the Future
- Washington Post: Apple's Vision Pro is nearly here. But what can you do with it?
- Tom's Guide: Apple Vision Pro review: A revolution in progress
- CNET: Apple Vision Pro Review: A Mind-Blowing Look at an Unfinished Future
- CNBC: Apple Vision Pro review: This is the future of computing and entertainment

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi's not-for-profit side expand by "at least a factor of 2X." And while it's "an understandable thing" that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, "while I'm involved in running the thing, I don't expect people to see any change in how we do things." CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for "when the IPO market reopens."

Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment. Upton denied or didn't quite deny IPO rumors in 2021, and Bloomberg reported Raspberry Pi was considering an IPO in early 2022. After ARM took a minority stake in the company in November 2023, Raspberry Pi was valued at roughly 400 million pounds, or just over $500 million. Given the company's gradual recovery from pandemic supply chain shortages, and the success of the Raspberry Pi 5 launch, the company's IPO will likely jump above that level, even with a listing in the UK rather than the more typical US IPO. Upton told The Register that "the business is in a much better place than it was last time we looked at it [an IPO]. We partly stopped because the markets got bad. And we partly stopped because our business became unpredictable." "It's a good thing, in that people care about us," Upton said in response to concerned hobbyists and tech enthusiasts. "What Raspberry Pi [builds] are the products we want to buy, and then we sell them to people like us," Upton said. "Certainly, while I'm involved in it, I can't imagine an environment in which the hobbyists are not going to be incredibly important."

The IPO is "about the foundation," Upton said, with that charitable arm selling some of its majority stake in the business entity to raise funds and expand. "We've not cooked up some new way for a not-for-profit to do an IPO, no," he noted. [He told Ars that Raspberry Pi's business arm has had both strategic and private investors in its history, along with a majority shareholder in its Foundation (which in 2016 owned 75 percent of shares), and that he doesn't see changes to what Pi has built. He also noted that the foundation was previously funded by dividends from the business side.]

"We do this transaction, and the proceeds of that transaction allow the foundation to train teachers, run clubs, expand programs, and ... do those things at, at least, a factor of 2X. That's what I'm most excited about." Upton said there would be "no change" to the kinds of products Pi makes, and that makers are "culturally important to us." [...] "If people think that an IPO means we're going to ... push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. "Let's look at it in 15, 20 years' time."

Japan is aiming to phase out floppy disks and CD-ROMs, which until now were forms of physical media required for submitting some official documents to the government. Engadget reports: Back in 2022, Minister of Digital Affairs Taro Kono urged various branches of the government to stop requiring businesses to submit information on outdated forms of physical media. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is one of the first to make the switch. "Under the current law, there are many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media such as floppy disks regarding application and notification methods," METI said last week, according to The Register. After this calendar year, METI will no longer require businesses to submit data on floppy disks under 34 ordinances. The same goes for CD-ROMs when it comes to an unspecified number of procedures. There's still quite some way to go before businesses can stop using either format entirely, however.

Kono's staff identified some 1,900 protocols across several government departments that still require the likes of floppy disks, CD-ROMs and even MiniDiscs. The physical media requirements even applied to key industries such as utility suppliers, mining operations and aircraft and weapons manufacturers. There are a couple of main reasons why there's a push to stop using floppy disks, as SoraNews24 points out. One major factor is that floppy disks can be hard to come by. Sony, the last major manufacturer, stopped selling them in 2011. Another is that some data types just won't fit on a floppy disk. A single photo can easily be larger than the format's 1.4MB storage capacity.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering." In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners — six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies — or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in.

"I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'"
Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities... However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable."

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal.
One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies — including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun — tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want — or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge." Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them...

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not — or would not — pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans — and in solar's case, also leases — were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%.

The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free — or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge.
Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%." The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs — California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand.

It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales.
"Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."

"According to one study, homeowners are three times more likely than renters to own an electric vehicle," writes the Washington Post. But others still have options: Drivers who park on the street have found novel ways to charge their vehicles, using extension cords running over the sidewalk or even into the branches of a nearby tree... [S]ome municipalities explicitly allow over-the-sidewalk charging as part of a broader strategy to cut transportation emissions... In some areas, homeowners can also hire an electrician to run power under the sidewalk to a curbside charging port. But homeowners should check local rules and permitting requirements for curbside charging. In some highly EV-friendly cities, local governments will cover the costs. In Seattle, a pilot program is installing faster curbside charging to residents who opt in to the program...

If home charging simply isn't an option, some drivers rely on public charging — either using workplace chargers or charging occasionally on DC fast chargers, which can bring an EV battery from 0 to 80 percent in around 20 minutes. The problem is that public charging is more expensive than charging at home — although in most places, still less expensive than gas... For drivers who have access to Tesla superchargers, public charging might still be a solid option — but for non-Tesla drivers, it's still a challenge. Many fast chargers can be broken for days or weeks on end, or can be crowded with other drivers. The popular charging app PlugShare can help EV owners find available charging ports, but relying on public fast charging can quickly become a pain for drivers used to quickly filling up on gas. In those situations, a plug-in hybrid or regular hybrid car might be a better option.
And beyond that, "experts say that there are a key few steps that renters or condo owners can take to access charging," according to the article: The first is looking up local "right-to-charge" laws — regulations that require homeowners' associations or landlords to allow residents to install Level 1 or Level 2 charging. Ten states have "right-to-charge" laws on the books. In California and Colorado, for example, renters or homeowners have the right to install charging at their private parking space or, in some cases, in a public area at their apartment building. Other states, including Florida, Hawaii and New Jersey, have similar but limited laws. Residents can also reach out to landlords or property owners directly and make the case for installing charging infrastructure. All of this "puts a fair amount of onus on the driver," said Ben Prochazka, the executive director of the Electrification Coalition. But, he added, many EV advocacy groups are working on changing building codes in cities and states so that all multifamily homes with parking have to be "EV-ready."
Ingrid Malmgren, policy director at the EV advocacy group Plug In America, tells the newspaper that "communities all over the country are coming up with creative solutions. And it's just going to get easier and easier."