An anonymous reader writes: Samsung's announcement today of the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6+ was a disappointment to a lot of power users. The phones both use a 3,000 mAh, non-removable battery. This is presumably part of Samsung's quest for thinner and thinner phones, but it's bad news for those who prize function over form — particularly from a phone line that is ostensibly made for power users. So, those of you who have the pulse of the mobile industry: what's my best bet for a high end phone that doesn't compromise on battery life? Are there any devices on the horizon that are likely to have big batteries? I'm also wondering if I should just get a cheap phone to tide me over to the next generation of flagships. My current device is old and doesn't have the fast/quick-charge tech that modern ones do — does that work as advertised?

ckwu writes: The designs of pacemakers, watches, and other wearable gadgets have to be tailored around existing battery shapes, such as cylinders, coin cells, and rectangles. But a team of researchers hopes their fully printable, flexible lithium-ion batteries will one day free designers from these constraints. Battery shapes are now limited because of the need to contain liquid electrolytes. Two years ago, the researchers designed a printable, solid-state electrolyte composed of alumina nanoparticles and lithium combined with polymer that can be cured by ultraviolet light. In this latest work, they used a stencil printing technique to print full battery cells with the electrolyte and other printable materials for the electrodes. They printed batteries on paper and the curved surface of a glass mug. These printed Li-ion batteries can power small LEDs but still need a lot of improvements because they don't last long before needing recharging.

MojoKid writes: Sometimes it's the enterprise sector that gets dibs on the coolest technology, and so it goes with a trio of TCO-optimized, high-performance solid state drives from Samsung that were just announced, all three of which are based on three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory technology. The fastest of bunch can read data at up to 5,500 megabytes per second. That's the rated sequential read speed of Samsung's PM1725, a half-height, half-length (HHHL) PCIe card-type NVMe SSD. Other rated specs include a random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS, random write performance of up to 120,000 IOPS, and sequential writes topping out at 1,800MB/s. The PM1725 comes in just two beastly storage capacities, 3.2TB and 6.4TB, the latter of which is rated to handle five drive writes per day (32TB) for five years. Samsung also introduced two other 3D V-NAND products, the PM1633 and PM953. The PM1633 is a 2.5-inch 12Gb/s SAS SSD that will be offered in 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, and 3.84TB capacities. As for the PM953, it's an update to the SM951 and is available in M.2 and 2.5-inch form factors at capacities up to 1.92TB.

An anonymous reader writes: One of the biggest problems virtual reality headsets have yet to overcome is the headaches they cause in a subset of users. For a lot of users, this is caused by needing to rapidly switch your focus between objects that are (virtually) near and far away. "Trying to focus on 'far away' objects on that stereoscopic screen means keeping a fixed focal distance but changing the 'vergence' angle of your eyes—in essence, going a little cross-eyed for a moment." Fortunately, researchers at Stanford have figured out a partial solution.

They "created a prototype headset (PDF) that includes a translucent LCD panel sitting about 1cm in front of a standard, opaque LCD. With some GPU pre-processing, this 'light field stereoscope' headset can display nearby objects on the front LCD and farther-away objects on the rear, creating what the researchers call a '4D' image that layers a basic virtual light field on top of the usual stereoscopic left/right eye 3D separation." This provides an easy, low-tech way to let the eyes focus more easily, and alleviate the strain that causes headaches.

jan_jes writes: Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak (donut-shaped) fusion reactor. The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned (abstract). The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design.

An anonymous reader writes: After the Fukushima meltdown, all of Japan's nuclear power plants were shut down, the last in late 2013. This week the government plans on starting up reactor No.1 at the Sendai nuclear power plant. Energy prices have risen 30% since 2011, and it is hoped that the plant will soon be producing a surplus of electricity. Not everyone is happy about the plant restarting. This weekend, about 2,000 protesters marched around the plant and voiced their opposition. "Past arguments that nuclear plants were safe and nuclear energy was cheap were all shown to be lies," said writer Satoshi Kamata, one of the demonstration organizers. "Kyushu Electric is not qualified to resume operations because it has not completed an anti-quake structure to oversee a possible accident as well as a venting facility."

An anonymous reader writes: When shops mostly ran on mainframes, it was relatively easy to do capacity planning because systems and programs were mostly monolithic. But today is very different; we use a plethora of technologies and systems are more distributed. Many applications are decentralized, running on multiple servers either for redundancy or because of multi-tiering architecture. Some companies run legacy systems alongside bleeding-edge technologies. We're also seeing many innovations in storage, like compression, deduplication, clones, snapshots, etc.

Today, with many projects, the complexity make it pretty difficult to foresee resource usage. This makes it hard to budget for hardware that can fulfill capacity and performance requirements in the long term. It's even tougher when the project is still in the planning stages. My question: how do you do capacity planning and performance management for such decentralized systems with diverse technologies? Who is responsible for capacity planning in your company? Are you mostly reactive in adding resources (CPU, memory, IO, storage, etc) or are you able to plan it out well beforehand?

New submitter pRobotika writes: Designing the behavior of robot swarms is difficult; the larger the group, the more tricky it is to predict its dynamics and the causes of errors. Buzz is a new open-source programming language specifically for robot swarms. It's designed for ease of use and is inspired by well-known programming languages such as JavaScript, Python and Lua. Buzz also includes a number of constructs specifically designed for swarm-level development. The “swarm” construct allows a developer to split the robots into multiple groups and assign a specific task to each. Swarms can be created, disbanded, and modified dynamically. The “neighbors” construct captures an important concept in swarm systems: locality. In nature, individuals interact directly and only with nearby swarm-mates. Interactions include communication, obstacle avoidance or leader following. The neighbors construct provides functions to mimic these mechanisms.

MojoKid writes: MIT researchers have developed HERMES, an advanced robot that is capable of manipulating objects and environments in nearly the same way as humans do. But this isn't just a project design of a robot only mimicking the actions of its human controller; it can also learn and make precise movements that weren't possible with prior robots. The HERMES robot is controlled by a human operator who wears a remote controller exoskeleton. Movements carried out by the human operator are directly transferred to the humanoid robot with human-like reflexes and haptic feedback in return to the human. This means that HERMES can successfully perform actions such as picking up objects, delicately pouring coffee into a cup and even punching through walls should the need arise. HERMES was developed to help out in emergency situations that would otherwise be too dangerous for human responders.

jjslash writes: High-end GPU parts from Nvidia and AMD are plenty fast, these days. While top-end cards from both can provide playable performance at 4K, many games dip down to and below 30fps. Folks looking to achieve smooth 4K gameplay will undoubtedly be eyeing dual GTX 980 Ti or Fury X cards to realize their PC gaming machine's full potential. TechSpot puts both cards to the test in SLI and Crossfire modes, at stock and overclocked speeds in over 10 games to see who gets the bragging rights. As it turns out, AMD has a tiny advantage in average frame rates. The two split wins on frame time, but AMD won by bigger margins. When the cards get overclocked, Nvidia is the clear winner, and power consumption favors Nvidia as well.

An anonymous reader writes: A new project at MIT aims to put humans in real-time control of a humanoid robot. Operators strap into a vest that contains control circuitry and a pair of arm-like joysticks. As the operator grasps the ends and moves his arms, the robot mimics his arm movements in real time. A demonstration shows the robot crushing cans and punching through drywall. The operator is also given a pair of goggles that shows what the robot is currently "seeing," and the vest provides haptic feedback about what the robot is "feeling." According to a video MIT posted, the goal is to give robots human reflexes for tasks like keeping balance and basic maneuvering. The need for such technology was evident earlier this summer at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where robots tasked with inspection and repair duties couldn't help but fall down as they moved throughout the testing grounds.

Zothecula writes: Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have grown underwater chimney-like structures capable of generating enough electricity to power a light bulb. The team linked several of these chimneys to get the required electricity. Their findings indicate that the seafloor equivalents of these chemical gardens might just have contributed the electricity needed for the Earth's first organisms to develop.

judgecorp writes: The Mobyl Data Center, designed for the US Department of Defense, puts a data center in a rugged suitcase-sized box, and it will shortly be available commercially. The box includes up to 88 Xeon cores a maximum of 176 GB of RAM, and 2.8 TB of SSD storage with 12TB of hard disk as an option. The system uses credit-card sized MobylPC server units, sealed in epoxy, and rated to survive 300g of shock, but apparently proprietary to the vendor, Arnouse Digital Devices Corp.

jfruh writes: Security researcher Christopher Domas has demonstrated a method of installing a rootkit in a PC's firmware that exploits a feature built into every x86 chip manufactured since 1997. The rootkit infects the processor's System Management Mode, and could be used to wipe the UEFI or even to re-infect the OS after a clean install. Protection features like Secure Boot wouldnt help, because they too rely on the SMM to be secure.

msm1267 writes: Samy Kamkar has built a new device called Rolljam that is about the size of a wallet and can intercept the codes used to unlock most cars and many garage doors. The device can be hidden underneath a vehicle and when the owner approaches and hits the unlock button on her key or remote, the device grabs the unique code sent by the remote and stores it for later use. The device takes advantage of an issue with the way that vehicles that use rolling codes for unlocking produce and receive those codes. Kamkar said that the device works on most vehicles and garage doors that use rolling, rather than fixed codes.

bigwophh writes: Last year, Elon Musk hinted at a new product that Tesla Motors was working on in its research lab. What Musk described seemed creepy at the time, especially considering that he had just recently shown off "The D" at an evening press event. "By the way, we are actually working on a charger that automatically moves out from the wall and connects like a solid metal snake," said Musk. We didn't think much else about this intriguing contraption given the precious little details that Musk provided at the time. But fast forward seven months and we now have video of the serpent-like charger in action.

Marvell is the parent company. Kinoma is the company Marvell bought in 2011 that "provides an open-source, cross-platform ECMAScript stack aimed at developing software for Internet of Things products and other embedded devices." They'll sell you a little hardware, too, which makes sense when you realize that parent company Marvell is big-time in the hardware business and will happily help you produce your IoT product -- for a fee, of course. Slashdot interviewed Peter Hoddie at last year's OSCON, so please consider this video an update. And before you ask: Peter says Kinoma is open source, from the bottom to the top -- to which we reply, "we like it like that."

prisoninmate writes with news that certain complaints about the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment may not be KDE's fault at all: Apparently, KDE Plasma 5 runs just fine, and the issue is related to a serious Intel Graphics Driver Stack bug. The good news is that a workaround for the bug is already available, and it requires you to modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf file from your Linux kernel-based operating system, by switching back to the older UXA acceleration method instead of the default SNA method used in many distros.

jan_jes writes: A new "yolk-and-shell" nanoparticle created by researchers at MIT and Tsinghua University in China could boost the capacity and power of lithium-ion batteries. The researchers have created an electrode made of nanoparticles with a solid shell, and a "yolk" inside that can change size again and again without affecting the shell. The new findings, which use aluminum as the key material for the lithium-ion battery's negative electrode, or anode, are reported in the journal Nature Communications. The use of nanoparticles with an aluminum yolk and a titanium dioxide shell has proven to be "the high-rate champion among high-capacity anodes." The linked article goes into much more detail about the (serendipitous) discovery.

judgecorp writes: A proposed revision to the data center efficiency standard will delight the infantile by adding WEE to PUE. Seriously, PUE is widely used to compare data center efficiency, but critics say it is unfairly biased to sites in the Northern Hemisphere which can use evaporative cooling, and ignores the environmental impact of water use by data centers. Simply adding the evaporative energy of water to a measure based on electrical energy will face a lot of opposition however — on various grounds including science and marketing.