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."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechRadar: Thanks to new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) research, which was part-funded by Lamborghini, we could soon see the end of difficult-to-source and often problematic rare metal materials featuring in the batteries of future electric vehicles. The MIT study's aim was to replace cobalt and nickel, typically used as a cathode in today's lithium-ion battery technology, with organic materials that could be produced at a much lower cost. This would also reduce the impact on the planet and conduct electricity at similar rates as cobalt batteries. [...] The research, which has been running for six years, has culminated in a novel organic material that could be a direct replacement for cobalt and nickel. According to details recently released by MIT, this material consists of many layers of TAQ (bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone), an organic small molecule that contains three fused hexagonal rings.

It's a complicated subject for those not donning lab coats for a living, but these TAQ layers can extend outward in every direction, forming a structure similar to graphite. Within the molecules are chemical groups called quinones, which are the electron reservoirs, and amines, which help the material to form strong hydrogen bonds, which ensure they don't dissolve into the battery electrolyte (something that has previously blighted organic cathode compounds), thus extending the lifetime of the battery. It comes as no surprise that Lamborghini has licensed the patent on this technology, seeing as it funded the research and has a certain Lanzador high performance electric vehicle in the pipeline.

Researchers say that tests of the material revealed that its conductivity and storage capacity were comparable to that of traditional cobalt-containing batteries. Also, batteries with a TAQ cathode can be charged and discharged faster than existing batteries, which could speed up the charging rate for electric vehicles. This speedy rate of charge and discharge could help give something like Lamborghini's Lanzador a performance edge, while super-fast charging capabilities will negate the need for lengthy charging stops -- something the Italian marque's discerning clientele will likely be opposed to. However, Lamborghini is also part of the wider Volkswagen Group and seeing that the primary materials needed to manufacture this type of cathode are already commercially available and produced in large quantities as commodity chemicals, we may see the battery tech filter down to more affordable EVs in the future.

According to analyst Min-Chi Kuo, Apple may have sold somewhere between 160,000 to 180,000 Vision Pro headsets during the past weekend. "This already far exceeds Kuo's earlier production figures of 60,000 to 80,000 units targeting the initial release on February 2, which is no wonder that the Vision Pro was sold out immediately after pre-orders opened," notes Engadget. From the report: While this sounds like positive news, Kuo pointed out that with shipping times remaining unchanged within the first 48 hours, this might indicate a quick drop in demand after the heavy users and hardcore fans were done pre-ordering. In contrast, iPhone orders would usually "see a steady increase in shipping times 24 to 48 hours after pre-orders open." But of course, the Vision Pro isn't meant for the average consumer in its current state, especially given the lack of some mainstream apps like YouTube, Spotify or Netflix. Not to mention the eye-watering $3,499 base price either, though Apple may later release a cheaper model in the ballpark of $1,500 to $2,500, according to an earlier report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

Kuo added that even with the device being sold out based on the upper initial production figure of 80,000 units, that only accounts for about 0.007 percent of Apple's 1.2 billion active users, which makes the Vision Pro "a very niche product" in the eyes of Cupertino. That is to say, the tech giant will need to somehow drum up and sustain demand for the headset before its global launch, which is rumored to take place some time before this year's WWDC -- likely in June. Meanwhile, Apple is also busy setting up demo areas at its US flagship stores, in the hopes of making a few more sales with their 25-minute sessions.

"Some of the most convenient fast-charging stations — mostly those located off major highways — have become gridlocked, especially on busy weekends," complains the opinion editor for California's Tribune newspaper in San Luis, Obispo. Drivers are reporting waits of half an hour or more — sometimes much more. One driver who posted on Reddit waited three hours to charge in Kettleman City on Thanksgiving weekend, turning a five-and-a-half-hour trip into a 10-and-a-half-hour ordeal... Look, it's one thing to spend 30 or 40 minutes charging a battery, which is a given when you take an EV on a road trip. But having to wait in a long line just to get to an open charging bay? What's happening now is "potentially a nightmare for drivers as more EVs hit the road," described GreenBiz transportation writer Vartan Badalian [after a March visit to New York State]...

Badalian, the transportation writer, has an idea on how to deal with gridlock. "As you approach a full charging location, your EV (of any make) connects to the charging location and enters itself into a virtual queue, with entry to the queue dependent upon close geographical proximity. Drivers then park in an available normal parking spot, and only when prompted, proceed to plug in and charge. If a driver attempted to charge before their turn, the chargers would simply not communicate with the vehicle..."

If only that would work. Unfortunately, plug-in chargers have a tough enough time fulfilling their basic task of delivering electricity. Here's how bad it is: A survey of non-Tesla chargers conducted in the Bay Area in 2022 found that 27% of chargers were not working. This would be a good time to point out that Tesla superchargers have a much better performance record than other types of chargers, and that Tesla is opening "select" supercharger stations to other types of vehicles. Also, efforts are being made to increase the reliability of public chargers; the U.S. Department of Transportation just awarded $149 million in grants for the repair and replacement of broken chargers. The biggest share, $64 million, is going to California. In other words, hope is on the horizon. For now, though, we seem to be relying on a haphazard honor system.

How hard would it be to use some orange cones to designate a "waiting lane"? That way drivers pulling in could get an immediate read on how long they might have to wait... Also, limit drivers to an 80% charge, and require them to drive away within, say, five minutes after the charger has stopped. That might be hard to enforce, but peer pressure can be a powerful incentive. The point is, somebody has to step up and make charging stations more driver-friendly, and the obvious choice is whoever is in charge of the chargers.

In 2003, Hans Reiser answered questions from Slashdot's readers...

Today Wikipedia describes Hans Reiser as "a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer... Prior to his incarceration, Reiser created the ReiserFS computer file system, which may be used by the Linux kernel but which is now scheduled for removal in 2025, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4."

This week alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822), spotted a development on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Hans Reiser (imprisoned for the murder of his wife) has written a letter, asking it to be published to Slashdot." Reiser writes: I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don't post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

I am very sorry for my crime — a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

A detailed apology for how I interacted with the Linux kernel community, and some history of V3 and V4, are included, along with descriptions of what the technical issues were. I have been attending prison workshops, and working hard on improving my social skills to aid my becoming less of a danger to society. The man I am now would do things very differently from how I did things then.
Click here for the rest of Reiser's introduction, along with a link to the full text of the letter...

The letter is dated November 26, 2023, and ends with an address where Reiser can be mailed. Ars Technica has a good summary of Reiser's lengthy letter from prison — along with an explanation for how it came to be. With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document...

It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics... Reiser asks that a number of people who worked on ReiserFS be included in "one last release" of the README, and to "delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited." He says prison has changed him in conflict resolution and with his "tendency to see people in extremes...."

Reiser writes that he understood the difficulty ahead in getting the Linux world to "shift paradigms" but lacked the understanding of how to "make friends and allies of people" who might initially have felt excluded. This is followed by a heady discussion of "balanced trees instead of extensible hashing," Oracle's history with implementing balanced trees, getting synchronicity just right, I/O schedulers, block size, seeks and rotational delays on magnetic hard drives, and tails. It leads up to a crucial decision in ReiserFS' development, the hard non-compatible shift from V3 to Reiser 4. Format changes, Reiser writes, are "unwanted by many for good reasons." But "I just had to fix all these flaws, fix them and make a filesystem that was done right. It's hard to explain why I had to do it, but I just couldn't rest as long as the design was wrong and I knew it was wrong," he writes. SUSE didn't want a format change, but Reiser, with hindsight, sees his pushback as "utterly inarticulate and unsociable." The push for Reiser 4 in the Linux kernel was similar, "only worse...."

He encourages people to "allow those who worked so hard to build a beautiful filesystem for the users to escape the effects of my reputation." Under a "Conclusion" sub-heading, Reiser is fairly succinct in summarizing a rather wide-ranging letter, minus the minutiae about filesystem architecture.

I wish I had learned the things I have been learning in prison about talking through problems, and believing I can talk through problems and doing it, before I had married or joined the LKML. I hope that day when they teach these things in Elementary School comes.

I thank Richard Stallman for his inspiration, software, and great sacrifices,

It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well.


It both is and is not a response to Brennan's initial prompt, asking how he felt about ReiserFS being slated for exclusion from the Linux kernel. There is, at the moment, no reply to the thread started by Brennan.

In a country experiencing extreme cold — and where almost 1 in 4 cars are electric — a roadside assistance company says it's still gas-powered cars that are experiencing the vast majority of problems starting.

Electrek argues that while extreme cold may affect chargers, "it mainly gets attention because it's a new technology and it fails for different reasons than gasoline vehicles in the cold." Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles (via TV2 — translated from Norwegian) ["13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars, while the remaining 87 percent are fossil cars..."]

To be fair, this data doesn't adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.

"Researchers at the University of Sydney Nano Institute have developed a small silicon semiconductor chip that combines electronic and photonic (light-based) elements," reports SciTechDaily.

"This innovation greatly enhances radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth and the ability to accurately control information flowing through the unit." Expanded bandwidth means more information can flow through the chip and the inclusion of photonics allows for advanced filter controls, creating a versatile new semiconductor device. Researchers expect the chip will have applications in advanced radar, satellite systems, wireless networks, and the roll-out of 6G and 7G telecommunications and also open the door to advanced sovereign manufacturing. It could also assist in the creation of high-tech value-add factories at places like Western Sydney's Aerotropolis precinct.

The chip is built using an emerging technology in silicon photonics that allows the integration of diverse systems on semiconductors less than 5 millimeters wide. Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Ben Eggleton, who guides the research team, likened it to fitting together Lego building blocks, where new materials are integrated through advanced packaging of components, using electronic 'chiplets'.... Dr Alvaro Casas Bedoya, Associate Director for Photonic Integration in the School of Physics, who led the chip design, said the unique method of heterogeneous materials integration has been 10 years in the making. "The combined use of overseas semiconductor foundries to make the basic chip wafer with local research infrastructure and manufacturing has been vital in developing this photonic integrated circuit," he said. "This architecture means Australia could develop its own sovereign chip manufacturing without exclusively relying on international foundries for the value-add process...."

The photonic circuit in the chip means a device with an impressive 15 gigahertz bandwidth of tunable frequencies with spectral resolution down to just 37 megahertz, which is less than a quarter of one percent of the total bandwidth.

The Washington Post looks at "a small but growing group of commercial medium-to-heavy-duty truck drivers who use electric trucks."

"These drivers — many of whom operate local or regional routes that don't require hundreds of miles on the road in a day — generally welcome the transition to electric, praising their new trucks' handling, acceleration, smoothness and quiet operation. "Everyone who has had an EV has no aspirations to go back to diesel at this point," said Khari Burton, who drives an electric Volvo VNR in the Los Angeles area for transport company IMC. "We talk about it and it's all positivity. I really enjoy the smoothness ... and just the quietness as well." Mike Roeth, the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency, said many drivers have reported that the new vehicles are easier on their bodies — thanks to both less rocking off the cab, assisted steering and the quiet motor. "Part of my hypothesis is that it will help truck driver retention," he said. "We're seeing people who would retire driving a diesel truck now working more years with an electric truck."

Most of the electric trucks on the road today are doing local or regional routes, which are easier to manage with a truck that gets only up to 250 miles of range... Trucking advocates say electric has a long way to go before it can take on longer routes. "If you're running very local, very short mileage, there may be a vehicle that can do that type of route," said Mike Tunnell, the executive director of environmental affairs for the American Trucking Association. "But for the average haul of 400 miles, there's just nothing that's really practical today."
There's other concerns, according to the article. "[S]ome companies and trucking associations worry this shift, spurred in part by a California law mandating a switch to electric or emissions-free trucks by 2042, is happening too fast. While electric trucks might work well in some cases, they argue, the upfront costs of the vehicles and their charging infrastructure are often too heavy a lift."

But this is probably the key sentence in the article: For the United States to meet its climate goals, virtually all trucks must be zero-emissions by 2050. While trucks are only 4 percent of the vehicles on the road, they make up almost a quarter of the country's transportation emissions.
The article cites estimates that right now there's 12.2 million trucks on America's highways — and barely more than 1% (13,000) are electric. "Around 10,000 of those trucks were just put on the road in 2023, up from 2,000 the year before." (And they add that Amazon alone has thousands of Rivian's electric delivery vans, operating in 1,800 cities.)

But the article's overall message seems to be that when it comes to the trucks, "the drivers operating them say they love driving electric." And it includes comments from actual truckers:

• 49-year-old Frito-Lay trucker Gary LaBush: "I was like, 'What's going on?' There was no noise — and no fumes... it's just night and day."

• 66-year-old Marty Boots: Diesel was like a college wrestler. And the electric is like a ballet dancer... You get back into diesel and it's like, 'What's wrong with this thing?' Why is it making so much noise? Why is it so hard to steer?"

It's "a free and open-source, software-defined storage platform," according to Wikipedia, providing object storage, block storage, and file storage "built on a common distributed cluster foundation". The charter advisory board for Ceph included people from Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.

And Nite_Hawk (Slashdot reader #1,304) is one of its core engineers — a former Red Hat principal software engineer named Mark Nelson. (He's now leading R&D for a small cloud systems company called Clyso that provides Ceph consulting.) And he's returned to Slashdot to share a blog post describing "a journey to 1 TiB/s". This gnarly tale-from-Production starts while assisting Clyso with "a fairly hip and cutting edge company that wanted to transition their HDD-backed Ceph cluster to a 10 petabyte NVMe deployment" using object-based storage devices [or OSDs]...) I can't believe they figured it out first. That was the thought going through my head back in mid-December after several weeks of 12-hour days debugging why this cluster was slow... Half-forgotten superstitions from the 90s about appeasing SCSI gods flitted through my consciousness...

Ultimately they decided to go with a Dell architecture we designed, which quoted at roughly 13% cheaper than the original configuration despite having several key advantages. The new configuration has less memory per OSD (still comfortably 12GiB each), but faster memory throughput. It also provides more aggregate CPU resources, significantly more aggregate network throughput, a simpler single-socket configuration, and utilizes the newest generation of AMD processors and DDR5 RAM. By employing smaller nodes, we halved the impact of a node failure on cluster recovery....

The initial single-OSD test looked fantastic for large reads and writes and showed nearly the same throughput we saw when running FIO tests directly against the drives. As soon as we ran the 8-OSD test, however, we observed a performance drop. Subsequent single-OSD tests continued to perform poorly until several hours later when they recovered. So long as a multi-OSD test was not introduced, performance remained high. Confusingly, we were unable to invoke the same behavior when running FIO tests directly against the drives. Just as confusing, we saw that during the 8 OSD test, a single OSD would use significantly more CPU than the others. A wallclock profile of the OSD under load showed significant time spent in io_submit, which is what we typically see when the kernel starts blocking because a drive's queue becomes full...

For over a week, we looked at everything from bios settings, NVMe multipath, low-level NVMe debugging, changing kernel/Ubuntu versions, and checking every single kernel, OS, and Ceph setting we could think of. None these things fully resolved the issue. We even performed blktrace and iowatcher analysis during "good" and "bad" single OSD tests, and could directly observe the slow IO completion behavior. At this point, we started getting the hardware vendors involved. Ultimately it turned out to be unnecessary. There was one minor, and two major fixes that got things back on track.
It's a long blog post, but here's where it ends up:

• Fix One: "Ceph is incredibly sensitive to latency introduced by CPU c-state transitions. A quick check of the bios on these nodes showed that they weren't running in maximum performance mode which disables c-states."

• Fix Two: [A very clever engineer working for the customer] "ran a perf profile during a bad run and made a very astute discovery: A huge amount of time is spent in the kernel contending on a spin lock while updating the IOMMU mappings. He disabled IOMMU in the kernel and immediately saw a huge increase in performance during the 8-node tests." In a comment below, Nelson adds that "We've never seen the IOMMU issue before with Ceph... I'm hoping we can work with the vendors to understand better what's going on and get it fixed without having to completely disable IOMMU."

• Fix Three: "We were not, in fact, building RocksDB with the correct compile flags... It turns out that Canonical fixed this for their own builds as did Gentoo after seeing the note I wrote in do_cmake.sh over 6 years ago... With the issue understood, we built custom 17.2.7 packages with a fix in place. Compaction time dropped by around 3X and 4K random write performance doubled."

The story has a happy ending, with performance testing eventually showing data being read at 635 GiB/s — and a colleague daring them to attempt 1 TiB/s. They built a new testing configuration targeting 63 nodes — achieving 950GiB/s — then tried some more performance optimizations...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The Biden administration has updated the roadmap for solar development to 22 million acres of federal lands in the US West. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory have determined that 700,000 acres of federal lands will be needed for solar farms over the next 20 years, so BLM recommended 22 million acres to give "maximum flexibility" to help the US reach its net zero by 2035 power sector goal. The plan is an update of the Bureau of Land Management's 2012 Western Solar Plan, which originally identified areas for solar development in six states -- Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.

The updated roadmap refines the analysis in the original six states and expands to five more states -- Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. It also focuses on lands within 10 miles of existing or planned transmission lines and moves away from lands with sensitive resources. [...] BLM under the Biden administration has approved 47 clean energy projects and permitted 11,236 megawatts (MW) of wind, solar, and geothermal energy on public lands, enough to power more than 3.5 million homes. Ben Norris, vice president of regulatory affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), said in response to BLM's announced Western Solar Plan updates: "The proposal ... identifies 200,000 acres of land near transmission infrastructure, helping to correct an important oversight and streamline solar development. Under the current policy, there are at least 80 million acres of federal lands open to oil and gas development, which is 100 times the amount of public land available for solar. BLM's proposal is a big step in the right direction and recognizes the key role solar plays in our energy economy."

According to Bloomberg (paywalled), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly raising billions to develop a global network of chip fabrication factories, collaborating with leading chip manufacturers to address the high demand for chips required for advanced AI models. The Verge reports: A major cost and limitation for running AI models is having enough chips to handle the computations behind bots like ChatGPT or DALL-E that answer prompts and generate images. Nvidia's value rose above $1 trillion for the first time last year, partly due to a virtual monopoly it has as GPT-4, Gemini, Llama 2, and other models depend heavily on its popular H100 GPUs.

Accordingly, the race to manufacture more high-powered chips to run complex AI systems has only intensified. The limited number of fabs capable of making high-end chips is driving Altman or anyone else to bid for capacity years before you need it in order to produce the new chips. And going against the likes of Apple requires deep-pocketed investors who will front costs that the nonprofit OpenAI still can't afford. SoftBank Group and Abu Dhabi-based AI holding company G42 have reportedly been in talks about raising money for Altman's project.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, have developed what they are calling the world's first functioning graphene-based semiconductor. This breakthrough holds the promise to revolutionize the landscape of electronics, enabling faster traditional computers and offering a new material for future quantum computers. The research, published on January 3 in Nature and led by Walt de Heer, a professor of physics at Georgia Tech, focuses on leveraging epitaxial graphene, a crystal structure of carbon chemically bonded to silicon carbide (SiC). This novel semiconducting material, dubbed semiconducting epitaxial graphene (SEC) -- or alternatively, epigraphene -- boasts enhanced electron mobility compared with that of traditional silicon, allowing electrons to traverse with significantly less resistance. The outcome is transistors capable of operating at terahertz frequencies, offering speeds 10 times as fast as that of the silicon-based transistors used in current chips.

De Heer describes the method used as a modified version of an extremely simple technique that has been known for over 50 years. "When silicon carbide is heated to well over 1,000C, silicon evaporates from the surface, leaving a carbon-rich surface which then forms into graphene," says de Heer. This heating step is done with an argon quartz tube in which a stack of two SiC chips are placed in a graphite crucible, according to de Heer. Then a high-frequency current is run through a copper coil around the quartz tube, which heats the graphite crucible through induction. The process takes about an hour. De Heer added that the SEC produced this way is essentially charge neutral, and when exposed to air, it will spontaneously be doped by oxygen. This oxygen doping is easily removed by heating it at about 200C in vacuum. "The chips we use cost about [US] $10, the crucible about $1, and the quartz tube about $10," said de Heer. [...]

De Heer and his research team concede, however, that further exploration is needed to determine whether graphene-based semiconductors can surpass the current superconducting technology used in advanced quantum computers. The Georgia Tech team do not envision incorporating graphene-based semiconductors with standard silicon or compound semiconductor lines. Instead, they are aiming for a paradigm shift beyond silicon, utilizing silicon carbide. They are developing methods, such as coating SEC with boron nitride, to protect and enhance its compatibility with conventional semiconductor lines. Comparing their work with commercially available graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs), de Heer explains that there is a crucial difference: "Conventional GFETs do not use semiconducting graphene, making them unsuitable for digital electronics requiring a complete transistor shutdown." He says that the SEC developed by his team allows for a complete shutdown, meeting the stringent requirements of digital electronics. De Heer says that it will take time to develop this technology. "I compare this work to the Wright brothers' first 100-meter flight. It will mainly depend on how much work is done to develop it."

U.S. lawmakers have banned the Defense Department from buying batteries produced by China's biggest manufacturers. "The rule implemented as part of the latest National Defense Authorization Act that passed on Dec. 22 will prevent procuring batteries from Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., BYD Co. and four other Chinese companies beginning in October 2027," reports Bloomberg. From the report: The measure doesn't extend to commercial purchases by companies such as Ford, which is licensing technology from CATL to build electric-vehicle batteries in Michigan. Tesla also sources some of its battery cells from BYD, which became the new top-selling EV maker globally in the fourth quarter. The four other manufacturers whose batteries will be banned are Envision Energy Ltd., EVE Energy Co., Gotion High Tech Co. and Hithium Energy Storage Technology Co.

The decision still requires Pentagon officials to more clearly define the reach of the new rule. It adds to previous provisions outlined by the NDAA that decoupled the Defense Department's supply chain from China, including restrictions on use of Chinese semiconductors. While the Defense Department bans apply strictly to defense procurement, industries and lawmakers closely follow the rules as a guide for what materials, products and companies to trust in their own course of business.

Geoffrey.landis writes: The Japan SLIM spacecraft has successfully landed on moon, but power problems mean it may be short mission. The good news is that the landing was successful, making Japan only the fifth nation to successfully make a lunar landing, and the ultra-miniature rover and the hopper both deployed. The bad news is that the solar arrays aren't producing power, and unless they can fix the problem in the next few hours, the batteries will be depleted and it will die. But, short mission or long, hurrah for Japan for being the fifth country to successfully land a mission on the surface of the moon (on their third try; two previous missions didn't make it). It's a rather amazing mission. I've never seen a spacecraft concept that lands under rocket power vertically but then rotates over to rest horizontally on the surface.

Seagate this week unveiled the industry's first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). Tom's Hardware: The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly.

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the "world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors," according to the company. Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive's work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday said an energy breakthrough is necessary for future artificial intelligence, which will consume vastly more power than people have expected. Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI. "There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

In 2021, Altman personally provided $375 million to private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy, which since has signed a deal to provide energy to Microsoft in future years. Microsoft is OpenAI's biggest financial backer and provides it computing resources for AI. Altman said he wished the world would embrace nuclear fission as an energy source as well. Further reading: Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) announced the release of previously unseen images and documents related to Colossus, one of the first digital computers. The release marks the 80th anniversary of the code-breaking machines that significantly aided the Allied forces during World War II. While some in the public knew of the computers earlier (PDF), the UK did not formally acknowledge the project's existence until the 2000s.

Colossus was not one computer but a series of computers developed by British scientists between 1943 and 1945. These 2-meter-tall electronic beasts played an instrumental role in breaking the Lorenz cipher, a code used for communications between high-ranking German officials in occupied Europe. The computers were said to have allowed allies to "read Hitler's mind," according to The Sydney Morning Herald. The technology behind Colossus was highly innovative for its time. Tommy Flowers, the engineer behind its construction, used over 2,500 vacuum tubes to create logic gates, a precursor to the semiconductor-based electronic circuits found in modern computers. While 1945's ENIAC was long considered the clear front-runner in digital computing, the revelation of Colossus' earlier existence repositioned it in computing history. (However, it's important to note that ENIAC was a general-purpose computer, and Colossus was not.)

GCHQ's public sharing of archival documents includes several photos of the computer at different periods and a letter discussing Tommy Flowers' groundbreaking work that references the interception of "rather alarming German instructions." Following the war, the UK government issued orders for the destruction of most Colossus machines, and Flowers was required to turn over all related documentation. The GCHQ claims that the Colossus tech "was so effective, its functionality was still in use by us until the early 1960s." In the GCHQ press release, Director Anne Keast-Butler paid tribute to Colossus' place in the UK's lineage of technological innovation: "The creativity, ingenuity and dedication shown by Tommy Flowers and his team to keep the country safe were as crucial to GCHQ then as today."