Apple is taking a different approach to social with its Vision Pro headset: making apps social right out of the box. This, according to Road to VR's Ben Lang, is what Meta should have done all along. Instead, it's pioneered a social experience on the Quest platform that involves "jumping through a fragmented landscape of different apps and different ways to actually get into the same space with your friends." From the report: Apple is taking a fundamentally different approach with Vision Pro by making social the expectation rather than the rule, and providing a common set of tools and guidelines for developers to build from in order to make social feel cohesive across the platform. Apple's vision isn't about creating a server full of a virtual strangers and user-generated experiences, but to make it easy to share the stuff you already like to do with the people you already know. This obviously leans into the company's rich ecosystem of existing apps -- and the social technologies the company has already battle-tested on its platforms.

SharePlay is the feature that's already present on iOS and MacOS devices that lets people watch, listen, and experience apps together through FaceTime. And on Vision Pro, Apple intends to use its SharePlay tech to make many of its own first-party apps -- like Apple TV, Apple Music, and Photos -- social right out of the box, and it expects developers to do so too. In the company's developer documentation, the company says it expects "most visionOS apps to support SharePlay." [...]

Perhaps most importantly, Apple is leaning on every user's existing personal friend graph (ie: the people you already text, call, or email), rather than trying to create a bespoke friends list that lives only inside Vision Pro. Rather than launching an app and then figuring out how to get your friends into it, with SharePlay Apple is focused on getting together with your friends first, then letting the group seamlessly move from one app to the next as you decide what you want to do.

Even apps that don't explicitly have multi-user experience built-in can be 'social' by default, by allowing one user to screen-share the app with others. Only the host will be able to interact with the content, but everyone else will be able to see and talk about it in real-time. It's the emphasis on 'social by default', 'things you already do', and 'people you already know' that will make social on Vision Pro feel completely different than what Meta is building on Quest with Horizon Worlds and its ecosystem of fragmented social apps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Zero-emission cars are soaring in popularity but running an electric vehicle is next to impossible in places with limited charging infrastructure. Stella Terra could change that. The khaki-green SUV uses solar panels on its sloping roof to charge its electric battery, meaning it can drive long distances powered entirely by the sun. Built by a team of students at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE), "the world's first off-road solar-powered vehicle" could help connect remote areas "where roads are less developed and energy grids are not as reliable," and assist with emergency aid and deliveries, says Thieme Bosman, events manager for the team.

The team tested the vehicle in Morocco earlier this month, driving more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) between the country's northern coast and the Sahara Desert in the south. "Morocco has a huge variety of landscapes and different surfaces in quite a short distance," says Bosman, adding that the car was tested "on every type of surface that a car like this could encounter." The road-legal car has a top speed of 145 kilometers (90 miles) per hour. On a sunny day, its battery range is around 710 kilometers (441 miles) on roads, and around 550 kilometers (342 miles) off-road, depending on the surface. In cloudy conditions, the team estimates the range could be 50 kilometers less. Bosman noted that the vehicle had proved to be one-third more efficient than expected on the trip, and that its lightweight design made it less liable to get stuck on rugged terrain, and put less stress on its suspension.

"Where the SUV market currently innovates on the previous models, we really start from scratch and design everything ourselves," says Bosman. Minimizing the vehicle's weight was essential, and the team of 22 students focused on making every element ultra-efficient. At just 2,645 pounds (1,200 kilograms), Stella Terra weighs around 25% less than the average mid-sized SUV. The aerodynamic design also reduces drag and uses "lightweight and robust" composite materials to cut weight, says Bob van Ginkel, technical manager for Stella Terra. "(One of) the benefits of the solar panels on top is that we can have a much smaller battery because we are charging while driving," van Ginkel adds. Bosman and his peers hope their concept SUV could be mass produced in the near future. "We aim to also inspire not only everyday people, but also the automotive industry, the Ford and Chryslers of the world, to think again about their designs and to innovate faster than they currently do," says Bosman.

"It's up to the market now, who have the resources and the power to make this change and the switch to more sustainable vehicles."

While the tech in virtual reality headsets has "undoubtedly gotten better," iFixit says "repair is getting left off of designers' priority lists." In a recent teardown video, the DIY repair site disassembled Meta's Quest 3 headset to find that it's not super repairable," giving it a repairability score of 4 out of 10 due the absence of manuals, OEM spare parts, and "any sign of repairability considerations whatsoever." The Register reports: As the iFixit team tore into the headset, the first major failure from a repairability perspective was the "extremely complicated procedure of replacing the lithium polymer battery pack." "Replacing the battery in the Quest 3 is as difficult as it was in the Quest 2, and far more difficult than the Quest Pro." That said, the batteries in the controllers are AAs rather than the lithium-ion cells of the Quest Pro, so it's a win there.

Faced with a multitude of screws and the lack of a service manual, iFixit stripped the headset back to its bare components, revealing the new time of flight sensor -- essential for hand and controller tracking as well as mapping out the space around the user -- and, beyond the fan, the mainboard. The Quest 3 is powered by a Snapdragon 8, the XR2 Gen2. According to iFixit: "Leaked benchmarks suggest that this newer SoC improves on the XR2+ found in the Quest Pro both in terms of performance and power efficiency."

However, it is the battery that disappoints. Although it is a standard unit so theoretically replaceable, iFixit noted: "It's taken me three Fixmats, a single tray of plastic, and very careful organizing of about 50 screws to get this far." Yikes. Not really a user-serviceable part at all. [...] Overall, the team gave the device a provisional 4 out of 10 in its teardown, principally due to the absence of manuals, OEM spare parts, and "any sign of repairability considerations whatsoever." But hey, at least you can swap out the AAs in the controllers when they die.

Malcolm Owen reports via AppleInsider: Writing in his "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman claims that Apple has a system that can update the operating system of iPhones before they get sold. Crucially, it can do so without opening the box. Consisting of a "pad-like device," store employees place unopened iPhone boxes onto it to trigger an update. The pad wirelessly turns on the iPhone, runs the software update, then turns it off again. While only iPhones are mentioned in the report, it's plausible that the idea could be extended to other products in Apple's catalog. It is claimed that consumers may benefit from the system at Apple Stores before the end of 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: New York residents eyeing a new 3D printer may soon have to submit a criminal background check if a newly proposed state bill becomes law. The recently introduced legislation, authored by state senator Jenifer Rajkumar, aims to snub out an increasingly popular loophole where convicted felons who would otherwise be prohibited from legally buying a firearm instead simply 3D print individual components to create an untraceable "ghost gun." If passed, New York would join a growing body of states placing restrictions on 3D printers in the name of public safety.

The New York bill, called AB A8132, would require a criminal history background check for anyone attempting to purchase a 3D printer capable of fabricating a firearm. It would similarly prohibit the sale of those printers to anyone with a criminal history that disqualifies them from owning a firearm. As it's currently written, the bill doesn't clarify what models or makes of printers would potentially fall under this broad category. The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a "device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model." "Three-dimensionally printed firearms, a type of untraceable ghost gun, can be built by anyone using a $150 three-dimensional printer," Rajkumar wrote in a memorandum explaining the bill. "This bill will require a background check so that three-dimensional printed firearms do not get in the wrong hands."

The NYPD has reported a 60% increase in seized ghost guns over the past two years. Meanwhile, on a national level, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reported a 1083% increase in ghost gun recoveries from 2017-2021, figures they say are likely underreported.

Four California dams are now being dismantled, reports the Arizona Republic: Sometime in January, work crews will start drilling a tunnel at the base of a concrete dam on the Klamath River, near the California-Oregon border. The tunnel will begin the process of drawing down the reservoir behind the dam, known as Copco-1, and prepare the site to remove the dam from the river. Time was, removing a dam in the West was unheard of. Dams were built to store water, generate electricity, manage the use of rivers for growers. But environmental activists started telling the story of how dams damage a river and its ecosystem, and Indigenous communities have told their stories of how dams took away traditional resources and food sources. And so, in recent years, we've seen more dams removed. In Arizona, the removal of a hydroelectric dam on Fossil Creek led to the restoration of a sparkling waterway and a habitat for fish, birds and other wildlife.
California's dam-removal project began in June, reports the Los Angeles Time, when the smallest of the four dams was torn down by crews using heavy machinery. "The other three dams are set to be dismantled next year, starting with a drawdown of the reservoirs in January." "The scale of this is enormous," said Mark Bransom, CEO of the nonprofit Klamath River Renewal Corp., which is overseeing dam removal and river restoration efforts. "This is the largest dam removal project ever undertaken in the United States, and perhaps even the world." The $450-million budget includes about $200 million from ratepayers of PacifiCorp, who have been paying a surcharge for the project. The Portland-based utility — part of billionaire Warren Buffett's conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway — agreed to remove the aging dams after determining it would be less expensive than trying to bring them up to current environmental standards.

The dams were used purely for power generation, not to store water for cities or farms. "The reason that these dams are coming down is that they've reached the end of their useful life," Bransom said. "The power generated from these dams is really a trivial amount of power, something on the order of 2% of the electric utility that previously owned the dams." An additional $250 million came through Proposition 1, a bond measure passed by California voters in 2014 that included money for removing barriers blocking fish on rivers.

Crews hired by the contractor Kiewet Corp. have been working on roads and bridges to prepare for the army of excavators and dump trucks. "We have thousands of tons of concrete and steel that make up these dams that we have to remove," Bransom said. "We'll probably end up with 400 to 500 workers at the peak of the work..."

In addition to tearing down the dams, the project involves restoring about 2,200 acres of reservoir bottom to a natural state.

"If we carry on the way we're going, we're going to have to concrete the whole planet just to store the data that we're generating," explains a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge in a new video.

Fortunately, "A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music," explains a Microsoft Research web page about "Project Silica". (Data is retrieved by a high-speed, computer-controlled microscope from a library of glass disks storing data in three-dimensional pixels called voxels): Magnetic storage, although prevalent, is problematic. Its limited lifespan necessitates frequent re-copying, increasing energy consumption and operational costs over time. "Magnetic technology has a finite lifetime," says Ant Rowstron, Distinguished Engineer, Project Silica. "You must keep copying it over to new generations of media. A hard disk drive might last five years. A tape, well, if you're brave, it might last ten years. But once that lifetime is up, you've got to copy it over. And that, frankly, is both difficult and tremendously unsustainable if you think of all that energy and resource we're using."

Project Silica aims to break this cycle. Developed under the aegis of Microsoft Research, it can store massive amounts of data in glass plates roughly the size of a drink coaster and preserve the data for thousands of years. Richard Black, Research Director, Project Silica, adds, "This technology allows us to write data knowing it will remain unchanged and secure, which is a significant step forward in sustainable data storage." Project Silica's goal is to write data in a piece of glass and store it on a shelf until it is needed. Once written, the data inside the glass is impossible to change.

Project Silica is focused on pioneering data storage in quartz glass in partnership with the Microsoft Azure team, seeking more sustainable ways to archive data. This relationship is symbiotic, as Project Silica uses Azure AI to decode data stored in glass, making reading and writing faster and allowing more data storage... The library is passive, with no electricity in any of the storage units. The complexity is within the robots that charge as they idle inside the lab, awakening when data is needed... Initially, the laser writing process was inefficient, but after years of refinement, the team can now store several TB in a single glass plate that could last 10,000 years. For a sense of scale, each plate could store around 3,500 movies. Or enough non-stop movies to play for over half a year without repeating. A glass plate could hold the entire text of War and Peace — one of the longest novels ever written — about 875,000 times.
And most importantly, it can store data in a fraction of the space of a datacenter...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Kirschey for sharing the article.

"Australian design student Alexander Burton has developed a prototype kit for cheaply converting petrol or diesel cars to hybrid electric," reports Dezeen magazine, "winning the country's national James Dyson Award in the process." Titled REVR (Rapid Electric Vehicle Retrofits), the kit is meant to provide a cheaper, easier alternative to current electric car conversion services, which Burton estimates cost AU$50,000 (£26,400) on average and so are often reserved for valuable, classic vehicles.

Usually, the process would involve removing the internal combustion engine and all its associated hardware, like the gearbox and hydraulic brakes, to replace them with batteries and electric motors. With REVR, those components are left untouched. Instead, a flat, compact, power-dense axial flux motor would be mounted between the car's rear wheels and disc brakes, and a battery and controller system placed in the spare wheel well or boot. Some additional off-the-shelf systems — brake and steering boosters, as well as e-heating and air conditioning — would also be added under the hood. By taking this approach, Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640) and make it compatible with virtually any car...

With REVR, people should be able to get several more years of life out of their existing cars. The kit would transform the vehicle into a hybrid rather than a fully electric vehicle, with a small battery giving the car 100 kilometres of electric range before the driver has to switch to the internal combustion engine... Borrowing a trick from existing hybrid vehicles, the kit uses a sensor to detect the position of the accelerator pedal to control both acceleration and braking. That means no changes have to be made to the car's hydraulic braking system, which Burton says "you don't want to have to interrupt".
Thanks to Slashdot reader FrankOVD for sharing the news.

"To meet the world's growing hunger for chips, a startup wants to upend the costly semiconductor fabrication plant with a nimbler, cheaper idea..." reports Fast Company, "an AI-enabled chip factory that can be assembled and expanded modularly with prefab pieces, like high-tech Lego bricks."

In other words, they want to enable what is literally a fast company... "We're democratizing the ownership of semiconductor fabs," says Matthew Putman, referring to chip fabrication plants. Putman is the founder and CEO of Nanotronics, a New York City-based industrial AI company that deploys advanced optical solutions for detecting defects in manufacturing procedures. Its new system, called Cubefabs, combines its modular inspection tools and other equipment with AI, allowing the proposed chip factories to monitor themselves and adapt accordingly — part of what Putman calls an "autonomous factory." The bulk of the facility can be preassembled, flat-packed and put in shipping containers so that the facilities can be built "in 80% of the world," says Putman.

Eventually, the company envisions hundreds of the flower-shaped fabs around the world, starting with a prototype in New York or Kuwait that it hopes to start building by the end of the year... Nanotronics says a single Cubefab installation could start at one acre with a single fab, and grow to a four-fab, six-acre footprint. Each fab could be built in under a year, the company says, with a four-fab installation estimated to cost under $100 million. Nanotronics declined to disclose how much it has raised for the project, but Putman says the company has previously raised $170 million from investors, including Peter Thiel and Jann Tallin, the Skype cofounder...

A single automated Cubefab will need only about 30 people to operate, "and they don't have to be semiconductor experts," says Putman. "AI takes away that need for that specialization that you would normally need in a fab." [...] Putman also hopes automation will help further reduce the environmental impact of an industry that's notoriously resource-intensive and produces thousands of tons of waste a year, much of it hazardous. "Because you have the AI fixing the material and the device before it's manufactured, you have less waste of the final material," he says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader tedlistens for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Philadelphia on Friday to announce the recipients of $7 billion in federal grants across 16 states for the development of seven regional hydrogen hubs, advancing a key part of a plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy. The announcement of the funding to boost manufacturing and blue-collar jobs was held in Pennsylvania -- a state that could decide the 2024 presidential election -- underscoring the power Biden wields as he spends the upcoming months doling out money flowing from his landmark pieces of legislation that remain largely unknown to large swaths of the American public.

The seven proposed hubs involving companies ranging from Exxon Mobil to Amazon were selected, with their projects spanning 16 states from Pennsylvania to California. The program is intended to jump-start the production of "clean hydrogen" along with the infrastructure needed to get it to industrial users like steelmakers and cement plants. "I'm here to announce one of the largest advanced manufacturing investments in the history of this nation," Biden said," He noted that the total investment will reach $50 billion when taking into account additional investments from private companies.

The hub selections will now kick off a long process that includes multiple phases, from design and development to permitting, financing and construction. "It's not guaranteed that someone selected is even going to make it through negotiations and get awarded the money," said Jason Munster, who was involved in analyzing the projects for the Department of Energy and is now a hydrogen consultant at CleanEpic. The hubs selected will serve the Middle Atlantic, Appalachian, Midwest, Minnesota and Plains states, the Gulf Coast, Pacific Northwest and California. The two largest projects include $1.2 billion each for Texas and California -- the former an oil giant and the other a green energy leader.

Keumars Afifi-sabet reports via TechRadar: Lenovo has the green light to see a portfolio of new enterprise-focused devices powered by Esper Foundation -- a custom Android operating system -- and bundled with a complementary mobile device management (MDM) platform. The firm's first device running Esper Foundation is the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70a, an all-in-one desktop PC fitted with an up to 12th-Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, alongside 16GB DDR4 RAM and up to 512GB SSD. It'll be followed by the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q, M90n-1 IoT, and the ThinkEdge SE30 v2 machines by the end of 2023. Esper Foundation is based on Android 11 and has customizable branding, peripheral compatibility, quarterly security patches, and three years of support. The MDM system, meanwhile, remotely deploys, manages, and updates devices from a single view.

By integrating a custom version of Android in its PCs, Lenovo is banking on the Esper Foundation OS appealing to businesses as an alternative to Windows, as well as Google's own ChromeOS. With platforms like Esper's, there may well be a means to find a rival to compete with Windows in the enterprise, particularly in highly niche industries such as the retail, hospitality, and healthcare industries -- at which Esper Foundation is directed. "This collaboration is another step forward in Lenovo's drive to meet changing customer demand across retail, hospitality, healthcare, and other industries," said Johanny Payero, Lenovo's director of global advanced solutions marketing and strategy. "Dedicated devices are proliferating across several key industries, and our new joint solution with Esper allows us to deliver the best of Android with the consistency and predictability of Lenovo's x86 devices."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It hasn't been a great time in recent quarters for PC companies, but with IDC, Gartner and Canalys all reporting data for Q3 2023, it shows an improving landscape. While shipments still declined between 7% and 9%, depending on whose data you look at, the decline was slowing. But perhaps the biggest surprise in these numbers was the fact Apple was the biggest loser this quarter, with numbers declining between 23% and 29%.

First, let's look at the overall numbers. IDC found the market dropped 7.6% year over year with 68.2 million PCs shipped, Gartner reported a 9% decline with 64.3 million units shipped and Canalys found the market down 7% with 65.6 million units shipped. In spite of that, the consensus was that the long PC market decline may be over, and we could be headed for better days with the holiday shopping season approaching in the final quarter. "There is evidence that the PC market's decline has finally bottomed out," Mikako Kitagawa, director analyst at Gartner, said in a statement.

When you look at individual manufacturers, Apple experienced by far the biggest decline, with IDC reporting -23.1%, Gartner reporting -24.2% and Canalys -29.1%. The only other company with double-digit reductions was Asus, with -10.7%, -11.5% and -10.7%, respectively. If you're looking for the only company in positive territory, that would be HP, with IDC and Gartner reporting an increase of 6.4% and Canalys only slightly different at 6.5%.

A Croatian energy company has discovered an underwater lake of superheated water that meets all the requirements for the construction of a 16MW geothermal power plant. The Next Web reports: The find was the result of a two-year study by state-run power company Bukotermal that sought to find suitable sites for the exploitation of the energy source, generated by heat from the Earth's core. The research verified the presence of a geothermal water source at Lunjkovec -- Kutnjak field, located in the Varazdin County, close to the border with Hungary. The underground lake, located at a depth of 2.4 kilometers, has an average temperature of 142.03 degrees Celsius.

To date, over 2.5 million euros has been invested in the project. However, according to Alen Pozgaj, CEO of Bukotermal, the total cost to build the plant would be around 50 million euros. The news comes just days after the Croatian Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development awarded five licenses for the exploration of geothermal waters to firms from Croatia, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. [...] For now, Bukotermal has a six-month timeframe to propose how it will exploit the newly discovered geothermal pool. The company plans to construct one or more geothermal power plants and heat utilization facilities at the site, with construction expected to start within two years time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed SB 244, or the Right to Repair Act, into law, making it easier for owners to repair devices themselves or to take them to independent repair shops. Because California is one of the world's largest economies, this iFixit-cosponsored bill may make it easier for people all over the US to repair their devices. The law, which joins similar efforts in New York, Colorado, and Minnesota, is tougher than some of its predecessors.

Manufacturers must make available appropriate tools, parts, software, and documentation for seven years after production for devices priced above $100. (Less expensive devices only have to have these materials available for three years.) [...] The bill is effective on electronics made and sold after July 1st, 2021. Though the bill is fairly sweeping, there are carve-outs for game consoles and alarm systems. Further reading: Cory Doctorow: Apple Sabotages Right-to-Repair Using 'Parts-Pairing' and the DMCA

An anonymous reader shares a report: StorageReview went through the remarkable journey of testing a $3 SSD from AliExpress. The Goldenfir-brand SSD was reportedly given to the storage site by one of its Discord users for testing. The good news is that Goldenfir is actually using an SSD controller for its NAND drive. The controller is a Yeestor YS9083XT, which the Chinese company announced as a SATA3.2 controller in 2019. [...] StorageReview tested the drive by putting it into a Lenovo SR635 1U server with an AMD Epyc 7742 processor and 512GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. StorageReview also decided to, admittedly "unfairly," put it up against Kingston's DC600M entry-level enterprise SATA drive. You can guess what happens next. With a 64GB file and the CrystalDiskMark benchmark, StorageReview reported that the "Kingston drive finished the entire test before this piece of turd [the $3 drive] could even build its test." With the VDBench workload benchmark filling up the entire drive, the $3 drive hit a wall at around 15,500 IOPS when running the 4K random read test, compared to the Kingston drive's approximately 80,000. The cheap SSD ultimately finished the test at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, compared to the Kingston's 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms.

Federal regulators have issued a preliminary "yellow" warning to Dominion Energy after cracks were discovered again in a backup emergency fuel line at their South Carolina nuclear plant. ABC News reports: Small cracks have been found a half-dozen times in the past 20 years in pipes that carry fuel to emergency generators that provide cooling water for a reactor if electricity fails at the V.C. Summer plant near Columbia, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It is the second most serious category and only seven similar warnings have been issued across the country since 2009, nuclear power expert David Lochbaum told The State newspaper after reviewing records from federal regulators.

A crack first appeared on a diesel fuel pipe in 2003, and similar pipes have had other cracks since then. During a 24-hour test of the system in November, a small diesel fuel leak grew larger, according to NRC records. The agency issued the preliminary yellow warning because of the repeated problems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity. The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants. The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses -- would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own. "Call us the un-utility," Mari McClure, Green Mountain's chief executive, said in an interview before the company's filing. "We're completely flipping the model, decentralizing it."

Green Mountain's plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years -- money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity. Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ExtremeTech: One of the world's most powerful supercomputers will soon be online in Europe, but it's not just the raw speed that will make the Jupiter supercomputer special. Unlike most of the Top 500 list, the exascale Jupiter system will rely on ARM cores instead of x86 parts. Intel and AMD might be disappointed, but Nvidia will get a piece of the Jupiter action. [...] Jupiter is a project of the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), which is working with computing firms Eviden and ParTec to assemble the machine. Europe's first exascale computer will be installed at the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, and assembly could start as soon as early 2024.

EuroHPC has opted to go with SiPearl's Rhea processor, which is based on ARM architecture. Most of the top 10 supercomputers in the world are running x86 chips, and only one is running on ARM. While ARM designs were initially popular in mobile devices, the compact, efficient cores have found use in more powerful systems. Apple has recently finished moving all its desktop and laptop computers to the ARM platform, and Qualcomm has new desktop-class chips on its roadmap. Rhea is based on ARM's Neoverse V1 CPU design, which was developed specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) applications with 72 cores. It supports HBM2e high-bandwidth memory, as well as DDR5, and the cache tops out at an impressive 160MB. The report says the Jupiter system "will have Nvidia's Booster Module, which includes GPUs and Mellanox ultra-high bandwidth interconnects," and will likely include the current-gen H100 chips. "When complete, Jupiter will be near the very top of the supercomputer list."

An anonymous reader writes: Amidst a winter marked by scarce gas supplies, the German government has opted to retain its lignite coal power plants on standby for another season. Originally, Germany had planned a phased shutdown of coal plants in exchange for a portion of the government's €40 billion coal phase-out fund. However, last year, disruptions in Russian gas supplies post-Ukraine war prompted an emergency decision to keep coal plants operational. This measure is now extended for the upcoming winter, maintaining 1.9 GWs of lignite capacity alongside the existing 45 GW of coal power plants.

The primary purpose of these lignite plants is to alleviate gas demand during peak times and stabilize prices. Despite the economic benefits, the move raises environmental concerns, given lignite's status as a major climate polluter. The government acknowledges this and plans to assess the additional carbon emissions resulting from keeping coal plants on standby, estimated to be between 2.5 and 5.6 tonnes of CO2.

The German government emphasized the persistence of the goal to ideally complete the coal phase-out by 2030 and meet climate targets.

Long-time Slashdot reader alaskana writes: In late 2022 it was revealed that early samples of what was to be the "Pentium 5" processor, codenamed Tejas and Jayhawk were in development and made it as far as being released to board partners for evaluation. A few of these samples made it (of course) onto Ebay and then — not surprisingly — into the hands of a YouTuber. To be fair, tech site Anandtech arguably got the first scoop on this P4 successor way back in 2004, but that story seemingly never gained much traction at that time.

They wrote that Intel Prescott CPUs "could hit 5GHz+ but had huge power and temperature numbers, but Tejas was expected to clock higher than Prescott — with Intel chasing the huge 10GHz CPU clocks within 10 years between 2000 and 2011 — but it ended up not happening at all."

In what was supposed to be a continuation of the "GHz is king" days of the early aughts, the Pentium 5 was in spirit a continuation of the "faster-is-better" philosophy of the P4 architecture, efficiency be damned. Speeds in excess of 7 GHz(!), and a pipeline upwards of 50 stages were rumored to be targeted by Intel, but reality (and physics) reared their ugly heads as always. WCCF Tech transcribed the remarks of Intel engineer Steve Fischer, who was involved with the project. "The thing had a pipeline depth of around 50 stages and an expected clock target at one point north of 7 GHz. I call the thing "the Death Star of processors" and half-jokingly reasoned that consumer acceptance of liquid-cooled chassis would not be a big deal."

Intel kicked off Project Tejas in 2003, expected in 2004 and later pushed into 2005 after issues forced Intel to redesign the chip. Before the company could do that, the Tejas Project was shelved on May 7, 2004. In the end efficiency and parallelization was to be the rule of future CPU development, but the fact that Intel had (at least briefly) had planned on taking the P4 paradigm just a wee bit further with a true Pentium 5 is a fascinating look into the past of a future that never was to be for the venerable Pentium line.