Slashdot reader yeokm1 recently installed Linux on a 1993 PC. But in a new blog post he lists every keyboard he's owned over the last 12 years -- to explain why he's now typing on a 5.3-pound Model M keyboard from 1987 that's older than he is, "with its legendary buckling-spring switch." It'll probably last me the decades to the day that keyboards should become obsolete... It is sad that with all the advancements in computing, the one piece of equipment that we use the most to interact with our computers has regressed technologically in the name of costs. We don't usually expect to be using 30-year-old hardware on a daily productive basis but the IBM Model M keyboard is that exception.

Today, I don't really care about fancy features like great aesthetics, RGB backlights, media keys and extra USB ports. I just need something that gives me great tactile feedback, be durable, enable me to easily swap keys to fit my Programmer Dvorak layout. The Model M fits my needs perfectly.
"Really can use this as a weapon," the blog post jokes. There's even a video "to show clicky sound difference" between two different versions of the Model M -- and in true geek fashion, he even removes the casing screws to see whether the inside had rivets or bolts.

The original submission drew a tip from long-time Slashdot reader Spazmania based on his own experiences with the Model M. "The thing I most like? There are little plastic caps on the keys. When they get dirty I can pop them off and run them through the dishwasher."

Any other Slashdot readers want to share their own experiences with Model M keyboards?

Following yesterday's report from Israeli publication CTech that Apple has decided not to use an Intel 5G modem called "Sunny Peak" in future iPhones, Intel has denied part of the report -- and the publication has updated its story to remove its central claim. From a report: "Intel's 5G customer engagements and roadmap have not changed for 2018 through 2020," a spokesperson told VentureBeat. "We remain committed to our 5G plans and projects." When asked whether this meant that Apple is a customer for an Intel 5G modem, the spokesperson said only that "the Intel 5G modem part of the story is inaccurate." The updated report explains that Sunny Peak was not in fact a 5G modem, and did not -- as initially claimed -- combine 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on one chip. Rather, the unannounced component is only a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip and was expected to include support for 802.11ad WiGig Wi-Fi, but it ran into engineering issues.

Japan's computer giant Fujitsu and RIKEN, the country's largest research institute, have begun field-testing a prototype CPU for a next-generation supercomputer they believe will take the country back to the leading position in global rankings of supercomputer might. From a report: The next-generation machine, dubbed the Post-K supercomputer, follows the two collaborators' development of the 8 petaflops K supercomputer that commenced operations for RIKEN in 2012, and which has since been upgraded to 11 petaflops in application processing speed. Now the aim is to "create the world's highest performing supercomputer," with "up to one hundred times the application execution performance of the K computer," Fujitsu declared in a press release on 21 June. The plan is to install the souped-up machine at the government-affiliated RIKEN around 2021. If the partners achieve those execution speeds, that would place the Post-K machine in exascale territory (one exaflops being a billion billion floating point operations a second). To do this, they have replaced the SPARC64 VIIIfx CPU powering the K computer with the Arm8A-SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) 512-bit architecture that's been enhanced for supercomputer use, and which both Fujitsu and RIKEN had a hand in developing. The new design runs on CPUs with 48 cores plus 2 assistant cores for the computational nodes, and with 48 cores plus 4 assistant cores for the I/O and computational nodes. The system structure uses 1 CPU per node, and 384 nodes make up one rack.

According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple's new 2018 iPhones will come in a plethora of colors. The 6.5-inch iPhone will be offered in black, white, and a (new) gold, while the entry-level 6.1-inch LCD iPhone will debut in "grey, white, blue, red and orange." 9to5Mac reports: That's a potential five new colors for the LCD model. It is very possible that when Kuo says "grey" and "white" he is referring to the Space Grey and Silver finishes as seen on the current iPhone X. We've mocked up the new finishes by tinting an iPhone X, but note the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone is not expected to have a dual-camera system. However, that still means Apple is looking to introduce four new options. It seems like the higher end models will add gold to the lineup...

The ~$700 6.1-inch LCD 2018 iPhone (which will mostly resemble an iPhone X's design from the front) will have a larger lineup including blue, red and orange. This harkens back to the iPhone 5c era when Apple rolled out a cheaper iPhone sibling in colorful chassis. We have heard some mumblings prior to today's report about Apple expanding the color options for the cheaper phone, but this is the first time someone reputable has reported specifics. It's not clear if the "red" color means PRODUCT(RED)... Kuo also says that the 6.5-inch OLED iPhone Model should be priced around $1,000 like the current iPhone X, and will feature dual SIM capabilities. Meanwhile, the 6.1-inch LCD iPhone X style device should retail for around $700. The other iPhone expected to be released later this year will be a spec-bump upgrade to the 5.8-inch iPhone X currently available.

In other Apple-related news, Intel will reportedly not provide the 5G modems for Apple's 2020 mobile devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Arm is teaming up with Samsung's foundry to manufacture the recently announced Cortex-A76 CPU, which the pair say will run at speeds above 3GHz. At that speed the Cortex-A76 will be more powerful than Qualcomm's best Cortex-A75 SoC, the Snapdragon 845, which tops out at 2.8GHz. At launch, Arm said Cortex-A76 chips would even challenge Intel's Core i7 on performance, meaning it could benefit not just smartphones but laptops too, such as "always connected" Windows 10 on Arm devices from HP and Lenovo, which use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835.

The collaboration will involve the Arm-designed chips being manufactured on Samsung's 7LPP (7nm Low Power Plus) and 5LPE (5nm Low Power Early) process technologies, combined with Arm's Artisan physical IP platform. However, it could still be some time before consumers see these high-powered Arm CPUs in devices. Initial production on the 7LPP process is set to begin in the second half of 2018. Samsung says 5LPE, the process technology after 7LPP, will allow greater area scaling and ultra-low power.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: As if they weren't already doing the absolute most, the die-hard fans of the rap group Insane Clown Posse have become accidental heroes for people concerned about facial recognition tech: According to Twitter user @tahkion, a computer science blogger for WonderHowTo, Juggalo makeup outmatches the machine learning algorithms that govern facial recognition technology.

In a series of follow-up tweets, @tahkion explained that facial recognition works by pinpointing the areas of contrast on a human face -- for instance, where a nose is located, or where the chin becomes the neck. As it happens, juggalo makeup often involves applying black paint below the mouth, but above the chin. That makes facial recognition vulnerable to misidentifying the placement of the jaw. Face-painting styles like "corpse" makeup also obscure the face. However, they don't create enough contrast to effectively confuse most facial recognition systems. Dramatic styles of feminine makeup, like heavy eyeliner, also are generally not enough to confuse facial recognition systems, @tahkion claims. However, facial recognition tech such as Apple's Face ID, which does not rely on visible light and uses depth perception, would not be tricked by juggalo makeup.

A Chinese court temporarily banned Micron Technology chip sales, cutting the U.S. company off from the world's largest semiconductor market. The news comes from Taiwanese rival United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). Bloomberg reports: In a patent ruling in favor of UMC, the Fuzhou Intermediate Peopleâ(TM)s Court of the Peopleâ(TM)s Republic of China issued a preliminary injunction stopping Micron from selling 26 products, including dynamic random access memory and Nand flash memory-related products, UMC said in a statement Tuesday. Micron said it hasnâ(TM)t been served with the injunction and wonâ(TM)t comment until it does.

The case is part of a broader dispute between the two companies centering on accusations that UMC acted as a conduit for the theft of Micronâ(TM)s designs in an attempt to help China grow its domestic chip industry and replace imports that rival oil in total value. A Chinese antitrust regulator is already investigating Micron and its Korean rivals, the companies have said. Local media has reported that authorities are looking into increases in chip prices.

MojoKid writes: In recent months, the cryptocurrency industry has taken a sharp downturn in valuations of virtually all major currencies, from Bitcoin to Ethereum. As a result, cryptocurrency mining itself has become significantly less lucrative for the average miner. In addition, demand on GPUs from the major OEM suppliers like NVIDIA and AMD, has fallen off dramatically as well. Cryptocurrency miner demand for graphics cards has fallen so much so, that pricing of board partner brands like EVGA, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte and others, has returned basically to MSRP levels. This is compared to the sharp price gouging that was going on earlier in 2018 and late last year, when demand was far out-stripping supply. In fact, reports are emerging now that another approximate 20 percent price drop could be coming to GPUs this month, especially as NVIDIA is expected to launch its next generation gaming graphics card very soon. Whether or not this is indicative of some sort of cryptocurrency bubble burst remains to be seen. However, for now, gamers and PC enthusiasts are likely breathing a sigh of relief, as better supply/demand dynamics are clearly in sight.

A new paper from the Center for Global Development says we are spending too much time discussing whether robots can take your job and not enough time discussing what happens next. The Verge reports: The paper's authors, Lukas Schlogl and Andy Sumner, say it's impossible to know exactly how many jobs will be destroyed or disrupted by new technology. But, they add, it's fairly certain there are going to be significant effects -- especially in developing economies, where the labor market is skewed toward work that requires the sort of routine, manual labor that's so susceptible to automation. Think unskilled jobs in factories or agriculture.

One class of solution they call "quasi-Luddite" -- measures that try to stall or reverse the trend of automation. These include taxes on goods made with robots (or taxes on the robots themselves) and regulations that make it difficult to automate existing jobs. They suggest that these measures are challenging to implement in "an open economy," because if automation makes for cheaper goods or services, then customers will naturally look for them elsewhere; i.e. outside the area covered by such regulations. [...] The other class of solution they call "coping strategies," which tend to focus on one of two things: re-skilling workers whose jobs are threatened by automation or providing economic safety nets to those affected (for example, a universal basic income or UBI). They conclude that there's simply not enough work being done researching the political and economic solutions to what could be a growing global crisis. "Questions like profitability, labor regulations, unionization, and corporate-social expectations will be at least as important as technical constraints in determining which jobs get automated," they write.

Longtime Slashdot reader TopSpin writes: The Sanmen 1 nuclear reactor in Zhejiang, China, has been synchronized to the power grid and is generating power. The reactor has been under construction for nine years and became the first AP1000 in the world to achieve criticality on June 21, 2018. The AP1000 design received final design certification from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005 and has a net output of 1.117 GWe. Three other AP1000 reactors are under construction in China at the Sanmen and Haiyang sites and two reactors are under construction in the U.S. at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia. On June 29, the Taishan 1 reactor became the first Areva Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR) design to generate power. Four EPR reactors are under construction in Finland, France, and China.

China's largest electric vehicle manufacturer, BYD, is opening a new battery factory that it claims will be the "largest in the world." Electrek reports: The factory is located in the western province of Qinghai and while it was "opened" this week, it is still under construction and BYD aims to complete it by the end of next year. BYD President and Chairman Wang Chuanfu said at the opening ceremony (via NDTV): "Electrification is a done deal as several countries have announced a deadline for the sale of internal combustion engine cars to end. Electric vehicles are on the cusp of another boom."

With a capacity of 24 GWh, this new battery factory should enable them to significantly increase production with a total battery production capacity of 60 GWh. BYD focuses on the production of prismatic LiFePO4 battery cells, different from most of the auto industry's NCA and NMC battery cells.

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: We've hit what I call Peak Screen. For much of the last decade, a technology industry ruled by smartphones has pursued a singular goal of completely conquering our eyes. It has given us phones with ever-bigger screens and phones with unbelievable cameras, not to mention virtual reality goggles and several attempts at camera-glasses. Tech has now captured pretty much all visual capacity. Americans spend three to four hours a day looking at their phones and about 11 hours a day looking at screens of any kind.

So tech giants are building the beginning of something new: a less insistently visual tech world, a digital landscape that relies on voice assistants, headphones, watches and other wearables to take some pressure off our eyes. This could be a nightmare; we may simply add these new devices to our screen-addled lives. But depending on how these technologies develop, a digital ecosystem that demands less of our eyes could be better for everyone -- less immersive, less addictive, more conducive to multitasking, less socially awkward, and perhaps even a salve for our politics and social relations. Who will bring us this future? Amazon and Google are clearly big players, but don't discount the company that got us to Peak Screen in the first place. With advances to the Apple Watch and AirPods headphones, Apple is slowly and almost quietly creating an alternative to its phones... If it works, it could change everything again.
Warning that screens are insatiable vampires for your attention, the piece argues we should be using our phones more mindfully -- and exploring "less immersive ways to interact with the digital world" like Google and Amazon voice assisants.

"The sooner we find something else, the better."

The new tallest building on the San Francisco skyline -- and the tallest building in America west of the Mississippi -- includes a nine-story electronic sculpture that's been called the tallest piece of public art on Earth. It uses 11,000 LED bulbs reflected off the tower-topping aluminum panels -- each pixel created by a set of red, green, blue and white lights controlled by 8-bit PIC microcontrollers. "On a clear night, the show is visible for 30 miles," reports IEEE Spectrum.

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry shares their article about "the technology involved in the light show at the top of Salesforce Tower. Electrical engineer and artist Jim Campbell explains it all -- and how the window-washer problem stumped him for nearly a year." "[O]n the 62nd floor, a central PC-based computer runs Ubuntu Linux, sending instructions to a communications control system that splits the data and sends it at 11 Mbit to the 32 enclosures using a custom communications protocol... We will capture images throughout the day, sending them to Amazon's cloud, and run some algorithms designed to identify visual interesting-ness. For example, at its simplest, when we look at the sky, if it's all blue, it's boring, if it's all white, it's boring, if it has white and blue it is likely to be interesting. We'll chose the best half hour of the day at each camera, based on movement and color, to display...."

And finally, when the main display shuts down late at night, another system designed by Campbell will kick in. In this static display, a set of 36 white LEDs will create a three-dimensional constellation of lights that will look like stars. "It's quieter, it has a random aspect to it," he says.
"Since construction started, the tower has emerged as an icon of the new San Francisco -- techie, ambitious, perhaps a little grandiose," writes the New Yorker, capturing the moment when Campbell finally unveiled his four-year project -- while fighting stomach flu and a chest cold, on a night which turned out to be prohibitively foggy. The executive vice-president of Boston Properties told him cheerily, "Jim! Look on the brighter side. We've got every night for the rest of our lives."

"There was a long silence from the people on the terrace. The fog was thick. At last, someone exclaimed, 'Woo-hoo!,' and a volley of cheers followed." Although the colors they were seeing came from the celebratory fireworks and not from Jim's light sculpture.

Are there any San Francisco-area Slashdotters who want to weigh in on the Salesforce Tower?

Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East reports: India's space program wants to go where no nation has gone before -- to the south side of the moon. And once it gets there, it will study the potential for mining a source of waste-free nuclear energy that could be worth trillions of dollars. The nation's equivalent of NASA will launch a rover in October to explore virgin territory on the lunar surface and analyze crust samples for signs of water and helium-3. That isotope is limited on Earth yet so abundant on the moon that it theoretically could meet global energy demands for 250 years if harnessed....

[A]ccomplishing feats on the cheap has been a hallmark of the agency since the 1960s. The upcoming mission will cost about $125 million -- or less than a quarter of Snap Inc. co-founder Evan Spiegel's compensation last year, the highest for an executive of a publicly traded company, according to the Bloomberg Pay Index... The upcoming launch of Chandrayaan-2 includes an orbiter, lander and a rectangular rover. The six-wheeled vehicle, powered by solar energy, will collect information for at least 14 days and cover an area with a 400-meter radius. The rover will send images to the lander, and the lander will transmit those back to ISRO for analysis. A primary objective, though, is to search for deposits of helium-3. Solar winds have bombarded the moon with immense quantities of helium-3 because it's not protected by a magnetic field like Earth is.
The European Space Agency points out that helium-3 isotope isn't radioactive and "would not produce dangerous waste products." And one former member of the NASA Advisory Council estimates that the moon-derived fuel could generate enough power to meet the world's energy demands for between two at least two centuries.

An anonymous reader quotes HotHardware: Every so often, a company will tap into our penchant for nostalgia. That is the case right now with Microsoft bringing back its iconic IntelliMouse, which was first introduced back in 1996... Microsoft continued to update the IntelliMouse for several years, up through 2003 when it released the IntelliMouse 3.0. The new 'Classic IntellMouse' for 2018 is based on that 15-year-old design with the same classic ergonomic look and feel, but with improved performance and features built around modern technology.

So, what exactly is different? "We improved two really important factors, the tracking sensor and the tactility and feel of the buttons. What we know our fans will see and feel is that it's the exact same shape and size of the IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 from 2003. However, underneath the hood it's all brand-new technology, brand new mechanical engineering and brand-new structures so it's a lot more rigid than the original. The build quality is really excellent," Microsft explains.
HardOCP notes that Microsoft has also released "a fantastic Rube Goldberg machine video unveiling the mouse."

Engineers at Penn State have created a battery that can self-heat, allowing for rapid charging regardless of the outside cold. The battery can reportedly provide a 15-minute rapid charge at all temperatures, even when the cold is as low as minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit. Popular Mechanics reports: Batteries have both positive and negative terminals. The scientists placed thin nickel foil with one end attached to the negative terminal and the other end creating a third terminal. When a temperature sensor attached to a battery detects that the battery is below room temperature, it then sends electrons flowing through the nickel foil. This heats the battery up until it's above room temperature again. When the sensor detects that the battery is above room temperature, that's the sign that charging that can begin again. Electric current flows into the battery, rapidly charging in a more efficient state. After 4,500 cycles of testing, the new battery only showed a 20 percent capacity loss, which could provide approximately 280,000 miles of driving and a lifetime of 12.5 years. This is compared to a conventional battery that "showed a 20 percent capacity loss after only 50 charges," reports Popular Mechanics. Penn State released a press statement with more details.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: We haven't heard many specifics about Google's video game plans, but what we have heard is that it's a three-pronged approach: 1) Some sort of streaming platform, 2) some sort of hardware, and 3) an attempt to bring game developers under the Google umbrella, whether through aggressive recruiting or even major acquisitions. That's the word from five people who have either been briefed on Google's plans or heard about them secondhand.

So what is this streaming platform, exactly? Like Nvidia's GeForce Now, the Google service would offload the work of rendering graphics to beefy computers elsewhere, allowing even the cheapest PCs to play high-end games. The biggest advantage of streaming, as opposed to physical discs or downloads, is that it removes hardware barriers for games. Whispers have been quieter about Google's hardware, whatever that may look like, but the rumors we've heard suggest that it will link up with the streaming service in some way. We're not sure whether Google is looking to compete with the technical specs of the next PlayStation and Xbox or whether this Google console will be cheaper and low-end, relying on the streaming service to pull weight. The streaming platform, which is code-named Yeti, was first reported by the website The Information earlier this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Seattle Times: A robot with true artificial intelligence is about to invade space. The large, round, plastic robot head is part of SpaceX's latest supply delivery to the International Space Station. Friday's pre-dawn liftoff also includes two sets of genetically identical female mice, 20 mousestronauts that will pick up where NASA's identical twin brother astronauts left off a few years ago. Super-caffeinated coffee is also flying up for the space station's java-craving crew.

As intriguing as identical space siblings and turbo-charged space coffee may be, it's the German robot -- named Cimon, pronounced Simon, after a genius doctor in science fiction's "Captain Future" -- that's stealing the show. Like HAL, the autonomous Cimon is an acronym: it stands for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion. Its AI brain is courtesy of IBM. German astronaut Alexander Gerst, who arrived at the orbiting lab a month ago, will introduce Cimon to space life during three one-hour sessions. Already savvy about Gerst's science experiments, the self-propelling Cimon will float at the astronaut's side and help, when asked, with research procedures. To get Cimon's attention, Gerst will need only to call its name. Their common language will be English, the official language of the space station.

A new card specification has been announced by the SD Association that should let you store your entire media collection on one SD card. Technically speaking, the new card specification should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes with faster transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second. The Verge reports: Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised as far back as 2009, but still hasn't been reached. In 2016, SanDisk unveiled a prototype 1 terabyte SD card that would make it the biggest in the world, but it's still not available to purchase. At the time, SanDisk said that the advancement was necessary to match ever-increasing data-heavy formats like 4K video and VR. However, creating SD cards with massive amounts of storage is cost-prohibitive. SanDisk's 512GB SD card used to cost $800, and though it's dropped in price, is still priced around $300.

Sample this: Me: So that's the marshmallow but you're going to eat it with this graham cracker and chocolate.
[My son looks at me like I am the dumbest person alive.]
Sebastian: No, I'm going to eat it with my MOUTH.
[End of play.] That's from "S'MORES. A Real-Life One-Act Play", a conversation between Hamilton impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda which his young son Sebastian. In that brief interaction, young Sebastian Miranda inadvertently hit upon a kind of ambiguity that reveals a great deal about how people learn and process language -- and how we might teach computers to do the same.

The misinterpretation on which the s'mores story hinges is hiding in the humble preposition with. Imagine the many ways one could finish this sentence: I'm going to eat this marshmallow with ... If you're in the mood for s'mores, then "graham cracker and chocolate" is an appropriate object of the preposition with. But if you want to split the marshmallow with a friend, you could say you're going to eat it "with my buddy Charlie." The Atlantic elaborates: Somehow speakers of English master these many possible uses of the word with without anyone specifically spelling it out for them. At least that's the case for native speakers -- in a class for English as a foreign language, the teacher likely would tease apart these nuances. But what if you wanted to provide the same linguistic education to a machine?

As it happens, just days after Miranda sent his tweet, computational linguists presented a conference paper exploring exactly why such ambiguous language is challenging for a computer-based system to figure out. The researchers did so using an online game that serves as a handy introduction to some intriguing work currently being done in the field of natural language processing (NLP). The game, called Madly Ambiguous , was developed by the linguist Michael White and his colleagues at Ohio State University. In it, you are given a challenge: to stump a bot named Mr. Computer Head by filling the blank in the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with ____________. Then the computer tries to determine which kind of with you intended. Playful images drive the point home. [Editor's note: check the article for corresponding images.]

In the sentence Jane ate spaghetti with a fork, Mr. Computer Head should be able to figure out that the fork is a utensil, and not something that is eaten in addition to the spaghetti. Likewise, if the sentence is Jane ate spaghetti with meatballs, it should be obvious that meatballs are part of the dish, not an instrument for eating spaghetti.