Apple has announced a new operating system for its Vision Pro headset. Called visionOS, the operating system has been designed from the ground up for spatial computing and will have its own App Store where people can download Vision Pro apps and compatible iPhone and iPad apps. The Verge reports: The operating system is focused on displaying digital elements on top of the real world. Apple's video showed new things like icons and windows floating over real-world spaces. The primary ways to use the headset are with your eyes, hands, and your voice. The company described how you can look at a search field and just start talking to input text, for example. Or you can pinch your fingers to select something or flick them up to scroll through a window. The Vision Pro can also display your eyes on the outside of the headset -- a feature Apple calls "EyeSight."

It seems Apple envisions this in part as a productivity device; in one demo, it showed a person looking at things like a Safari window, Messages, and Apple Music window all hovering over a table in the real world. Apple also showed a keyboard hovering in midair, too. And the Vision Pro can also connect to your Mac so you can blow up your Mac's screen within your headset. It will also be a powerful entertainment device, apparently. You can make the screen really big by pinching a corner of a window (Apple demoed this with a clip of Foundation). You can display the screen on other backgrounds, including a cinema-like space or in front of Mt. Hood (Apple's suggestion!), thanks to a feature Apple calls Environments. You'll also be able to watch 3D movies on the device. And Disney is working on content for the headset, which could be a major way for people to get on board with actually using it to watch shows and movies -- Disney Plus will be available on day one, Disney CEO Bob Iger said during the show.

Apple Vision Pro will play games, too, and support game controllers; Apple showed somebody using the device with a PS5 DualSense headset. Over 100 Apple Arcade titles will be available to play on "day one," Apple said during its keynote. The Vision Pro also has a 3D camera, so you can capture "spatial" photos and video and look at those in the headset. And panorama photos can stretch around your vision while you're wearing the device. FaceTime is getting some "spatial" improvements, too; as described in Apple's press release, "Users wearing Vision Pro during a FaceTime call are reflected as a Persona -- a digital representation of themselves created using Apple's most advanced machine learning techniques -- which reflects face and hand movements in real time." You can learn more about Apple's first spatial computer here. A dedicated page for the Vision Pro headset is also now available on Apple.com.

This week the Linux Foundation announced the publication of The Open Source Opportunity for Microgrids: Five Ways to Drive Innovation and Overcome Market Barriers for Energy Resilience. "The research informs readers about microgrids — groups of distributed energy resources designed to improve energy resiliency, with the ability to operate as part of a larger electrical grid, or separately as an island."

The report highlights the current state of the microgrid market and explores the potential for open source technology to accelerate the adoption of microgrids worldwide... The report concludes that microgrids are an essential tool to improve energy resilience and advance decarbonization, and that the market faces a range of challenges that the open source ecosystem is well positioned to address.
Among other things, the report "examines how participation in relevant open source programs and activities can help address gaps and challenges," according to the announcement, "and accelerate the learning, development, and governance of microgrid initiatives." One focus of the report is "enabling market innovation toward energy resilience at scale, supporting the Energy sector to adopt proven open source-enabled business models, security benefits, and cost reductions demonstrated in the IT and Telecom industries."

And according to the foundation's senior vice president of research and communications, the report also "describes the opportunities for open source to accelerate the proliferation of microgrids as a mechanism for clean energy production and consumption."

ARM has joined the Linux Foundation's Open Programmable Infrastructure project, "a community-driven initiative focused on creating a standards-based open ecosystem for next-generation architectures and frameworks" based on programmable processor technologies like DPUs (Data Processing Units) and IPUs (Infrastructure Processing Units).

From the Linux Foundation's announcement: Launched in June 2021 under the Linux Foundation, the project is focused on utilizing open software and standards, as well as frameworks and toolkits, to enable the rapid adoption of DPUs. Arm joins other premier members including Dell Technologies, F5, Intel, Keysight Technologies, Marvell, Nvidia, Red Hat, Tencent, and ZTE. These member companies work together to create an ecosystem of blueprints and standards to ensure that compliant DPUs work with any server.

DPUs are used today to accelerate networking, security, and storage tasks. In addition to performance benefits, DPUs help improve data center security by providing physical isolation for running infrastructure tasks. DPUs also help to reduce latency and improve performance for applications that require real-time data processing. As DPUs create a logical split between infrastructure compute and client applications, the manageability of workloads within different development and management teams is streamlined.

"Arm has been contributing to the OPI Project for a while now," said Kris Murphy, Chair of the OPI Project Governing Board and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. "Now, as a premier member, we are excited that they're bringing their leadership to the Governing Board and expertise to the technical steering committee and working groups. Their participation will help to ensure that the DPU components are optimized for programmable infrastructure solutions."

"Across network, storage, and security applications, DPUs are already proving the power efficiency and capex benefits of specialized processing technology," said Marc Meunier, director of ecosystem development, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm and member of OPI Governing Board. "As a premier member of the OPI project, we look forward to contributing our expertise in heterogeneous computing and working with other leaders in the industry to create solution blueprints and standards that pave the way for successful deployments."

"The DPU market offers an opportunity for us to change how infrastructure services can be deployed and managed," Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. "With collaboration across software and hardware vendors representing silicon devices and the entire DPU software stack, the OPI Project is creating an open ecosystem for next generation data centers, private clouds, and edge deployments."

The Washington Post looks at a new study co-authored by Nels Johnson, senior practice adviser for renewable energy development at the Nature Conservancy nonprofit.

Its underlying point: the current way of building renewables will not work. "If we take the business-as-usual approach, land conflicts will probably prevent us from getting to these ambitious clean energy targets," said Jason Albritton, director of the Nature Conservancy's North American climate mitigation program and one of Johnson's co-authors... In its report, the Nature Conservancy describes two different futures in which the United States achieves net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In one future — call it "business as usual" — wind and solar farms are built haphazardly, with little consideration for land impacts. In the other future, developers use land more efficiently. Business as usual would require 266,410 square miles — an area around the size of Texas — to fit all the solar panels and wind turbines, plus batteries to store electricity when sunlight and wind are unavailable and long-distance transmission lines to bring power from rural areas to towns and cities.

The researchers used a statistical model to discover the suite of technologies that would minimize land impacts. A smarter strategy, they found, could slash that footprint by more than half, to 114,642 square miles — a little bigger than Arizona. That's still a lot of land, but it would reduce the opportunities for conflict, the researchers said. The model recommends building more solar and less wind, since photovoltaics produce more power with less land than turbines do... The study sees rooftop solar generating far less power than large solar farms. If one in three rooftops have solar panels by 2050 — a high-end assumption — rooftop solar would contribute 15 percent of U.S. solar power, according to the researchers. "It's an important part of the picture, but it will not ever be totally sufficient," Johnson said.

The researchers also found land savings by avoiding productive farmland and instead building on abandoned fields or rehabilitated mines, landfills and hazardous waste sites known as brownfields.

"If you live in San Jose, Dallas, or Vancouver, you may soon be sharing the sidewalk with an army of delivery robots," reports PC Magazine (citing a report from TechCrunch. Uber Eats is expanding its partnership with Serve Robotics to deploy up to 2,000 zero-emission bots: Currently covering Los Angeles and San Francisco, Serve Robotics has been working with more than 200 California restaurants to dish out meals via the Uber Eats platform... Serve's sidewalk robots run seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. They're capable of Level 4 autonomy, allowing them to operate routinely without human intervention, TechCrunch reports.

Uber is no stranger to driverless robots. Together with AI-powered partner Cartken, the firm recently expanded a food delivery pilot from Miami to Fairfax, Virginia, where bots now roam the sidewalks, dropping off meals and providing curbside pickup to locals.
Last week Uber also announced it was making robotaxis available via the Uber app in Phoenix.

TechCrunch argues this new expansion "validates Serve's goal to mass commercialize robotics for autonomous delivery" — while also signalling Uber's deeper commitment to autonomy.

Swiss start-up Sun-Ways has developed a concept to install solar panels between train tracks, using a specially built train to "unroll" the panels during the night when fewer trains are running. Fast Company reports: As wild as it all sound, Sun-Ways actually has two competitors. Greenrail and Bankset Energy, respectively located in Italy and England, are already testing similar concepts. But Sun-Ways stands out in two ways. For one, it uses standard-size panels, whereas the others use smaller panels that are placed on top of crossties. And unlike its competitors, Sun-ways doesn't require manual installation. It has a train for that!

Sun-ways is putting this idea to the test during a $560,000 pilot project in Western Switzerland. The pilot, which is slated for this summer, will trial a version of the mechanism using a regular train that's been retrofitted for the occasion. Running on a 140-foot stretch near the city of Neuchatel, the train will install about 60 solar panels, turning the gap between train tracks into a reflective black ribbon.

For now, 100% of the electricity generated by the solar panels will go straight to the grid to power nearby households. But eventually, the team is planning to use some of that electricity to power the very trains that run above the panels. According to Danichert, 5,000 kilometers of "solar rails" (which is the current length of the entire Swiss railroad network) can generate 1 gigawatt of energy per year, or enough energy to power about 750,000 homes. Considering there are over 1 million kilometers of railway tracks worldwide, the potential could be huge, even if the system can't be installed on every one of those tracks. But most importantly, it wouldn't take up any space from farmland or forests, and it wouldn't ruin any landscapes.

Shadow has decided to cut the price of its cloud storage service Shadow Drive. Users can now get 2TB of storage for $5.3 per month instead of $9.6 per month. From a report: As for the free tier, things aren't changing. Users who sign up get 20GB of online storage for free. Shadow is also the company behind Shadow PC, a cloud computing service that lets you rent a virtual instance of a Windows PC in a data center near you. It works particularly well to play demanding PC games on any device, such as a cheap laptop, a connected TV or a smartphone. Coming back to Shadow Drive, as the name suggests, Shadow Drive works a lot like Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive or Dropbox. Users can upload and download files from a web browser. They are stored in a data center based in France so that you can access them later.

North America has emerged as the fastest-growing market for new battery cell manufacturing factories, driven by incentives provided by the Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), according to a report by Clean Energy Associates. Electrek reports: CEA says that China is still the leading battery cell manufacturing hub, but its share will decline in "coming years." Europe has seen delays and cancellations of several planned battery factories, mostly due to high energy prices and other countries' pro-clean energy and EV manufacturing policies luring projects away. Global EV battery usage increased by 72% in just a year, from 2021 to 2022. And going forward, CEA forecasts an impressive two-year 186% growth rate on the 1,706 GWh of batteries produced in 2022.

The reason is obvious for the rapid increase in battery factories: The International Energy Agency's "Global EV Outlook 2023" reports that EV sales exceeded 10 million in 2022, and 14% of all new cars sold were electric in 2022 -- up from around 9% in 2021 and less than 5% in 2020. And battery and EV manufacturing are only going to continue to experience huge growth.

The US Department of Energy has announced that eight American companies working on nuclear fusion energy will receive $46 million in government funding to pursue pilot plants aimed at generating power from fusion reactions. Reuters reports: The Energy Department's Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program hopes to help develop pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade. "The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to partnering with innovative researchers and companies across the country to take fusion energy past the lab and toward the grid," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a release. The awardees are: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Focused Energy Inc, Princeton Stellarators Inc, Realta Fusion Inc, Tokamak Energy Inc, Type One Energy Group, Xcimer Energy Inc, and Zap Energy Inc

The funding, which comes from the Energy Act of 2020, is for the first 18 months. Projects may last up to five years, with future funding contingent on congressional appropriations and progress from the companies in meeting milestones.

Looking to launch fusion plants that use lasers or magnets, private companies and government labs spent $500 million on their supply chains last year, according to a Fusion Industry Association (FIA) survey. They plan to spend about $7 billion by the time their first plants come online, and potentially trillions of dollars mainly on high-grade steel, concrete and superconducting wire in a mature industry, estimated to be sometime between 2035 and 2050, the survey said.

Arm unveiled its upcoming flagship CPUs for 2024, including the Arm Cortex X4, Cortex A720, and Cortex A520. These chips, built on the Armv9.2 architecture, promise higher performance and improved power efficiency. Arm also introduced a new 'QARMA3 algorithm' for memory security and showcased a potential 14-core mega-chip design for high-performance laptops. Ars Technica reports: Arm claims the big Cortex X3 chip will have 15 percent higher performance than this year's X3 chip, and "40 percent better power efficiency." The company also promises a 20 percent efficiency boost for the A700 series and a 22 percent efficiency boost for the A500. The new chips are all built on the new 'Armv9.2' architecture, which adds a "new QARMA3 algorithm" for Arm's Pointer Authentication memory security feature. Pointer authentication assigns a cryptographic signature to memory pointers and is meant to shut down memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows by making it harder for unauthenticated programs to create valid memory pointers. This feature has been around for a while, but Arm's new algorithm reduces the CPU overhead of all this extra memory work to just 1 percent of the chip's power, which hopefully will get more manufacturers to enable it.

Arm's SoC recommendations are usually a "1+3+4" design. That's one big X chip, three medium A700 chips, and four A500 chips. This year the company is floating a new layout, though, swapping out two small chips for two medium chips, which would put you at a "1+5+2" configuration. Arm's benchmarks -- which were run on Android 13 -- claim this will get you 27 percent more performance. That's assuming anything can cool and power that for a reasonable amount of time. Arm's blog post also mentions a 1+4+4 chip -- nine cores -- for a flagship smartphone. [...]

Every year with these Arm flagship chip announcements, the company also includes a wild design for a giant mega-chip that usually never gets built. Last year the company's blueprint monster was a design with eight Cortex X3 chips and four A715 cores, which the company claimed would rival an Intel Core i7. The biggest X3-based chip on the market is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which landed in a few Windows laptops. That was only a four X3/four A715 chip, though. This year's mega chip is a 14-core monster with 10 Cortex X4 chips and four A720 chips, which Arm says is meant for "high-performance laptops." Arm calls the design the company's "most powerful cluster ever built," but will it ever actually be built? Will it ever be more than words on a page?

ASUS is extending its connector-less design to graphics cards and has showcased the first GPU, a GeForce RTX 40 design, which features now power plugs. From a report: Spotted during our tour at the ASUS HQ, the ROG team gave us a first look at an upcoming graphics card (currently still in the concept phase) which is part of its GeForce RTX 40 family. The graphics card itself was a GeForce RTX 4070 design but it doesn't fall under any existing VGA product lineup & comes in an interesting design.

So the graphics card itself is a 2.3 slot design that features a triple axial-tech cooling fan system and once again, it isn't part of any interesting GPU lineup from ASUS such as ROG STRIX, TUF Gaming, Dual, etc. The backside of the card features an extended backplate that extends beyond the PCB & there's a cut-out for the air to pass through. The card also comes with a dual-BIOS switch that lets you switch between the "Performance" & "Quiet" modes but while there's a "Megalodon" naming on the backplate, we were told that isn't the final branding for this card.

"Over the past 13 years, Tim Taylor and Christine Dennison have scoured the ocean floor using autonomous underwater robots," according to a history writer's commentary on CNN, "to discover and document the wrecks of seven US submarines lost in World War II." Taylor and Dennison are ensuring that more families of those lost know where their loved ones' deep-water graves reside. They are racing against time as underwater development threatens many of these wrecks... Budget constraints hinder the Navy from devoting resources to undertaking these kinds of searches, according to Taylor, and his team is showing how private groups can fill the gap.
A philanthropic private investment group funds the expeditions, the article points out, adding that Taylor and Dennison "hope to employ the special autonomous underwater technology they created to help others map the ocean floor for environmental and other purposes."

Their latest find was part of the 82-day battle of Okinawa in 1945: The USS Mannert L. Abele, which the explorers found 4,500 feet under the Pacific Ocean and 81 miles from the nearest landmass, was the first American ship sunk by an unusual type of rocket-powered Japanese kamikaze plane... Though the Abele managed to shoot down two aircraft and damage or fend off others, at six minutes in, a Japanese fighter plunged into the destroyer's engine room and exploded, cutting off all electrical power. Just a minute later, another, much more unusual, plane slammed into the destroyer's hull. The Abele had been struck by a unique rocket-propelled kamikaze plane called the MXY7 Ohka ("Cherry Blossom"), which due to its very short range had to be carried under the belly of a larger bomber until close to US ships, whereupon it was released to soar toward its target at immense speed.

The detonation of this manned missile's 1.3 tons of explosives caused the ship to seemingly break into two and begin sinking. In a matter of minutes, 84 sailors and officers had been killed. Japanese aircraft strafed the surviving crew as they jumped into the oil-slick water, but two smaller landing craft escorting the Abele shot down two more planes and beat off the rest, managing to rescue 255 crew members.

Nearly eight decades later, modern robotics technologies allowed Taylor and Dennison to find the destroyer's submerged hull. In the past, Taylor noted, it would have been practically inconceivable for a small, private team to have undertaken the cumbersome search process that, Taylor estimated, would have taken four to five times as long and cost significantly more money...

It was on their last remaining day of a more-than-month-long search, just before bad weather would force them to conclude the expedition, that they spotted the Abele's wreck.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: Japan and JAXA, the country's space administration, have spent decades trying to make it possible to beam solar energy from space. In 2015, the nation made a breakthrough when JAXA scientists successfully beamed 1.8 kilowatts of power, enough energy to power an electric kettle, more than 50 meters to a wireless receiver. Now, Japan is poised to bring the technology one step closer to reality.

Nikkei reports a Japanese public-private partnership will attempt to beam solar energy from space as early as 2025. The project, led by Naoki Shinohara, a Kyoto University professor who has been working on space-based solar energy since 2009, will attempt to deploy a series of small satellites in orbit. Those will then try to beam the solar energy the arrays collect to ground-based receiving stations hundreds of miles away.
Orbital solar arrays "represent a potentially unlimited renewable energy supply," the article points out -- running 24 hours a day.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution. The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores...

The air-powered generator, known as an "Air-gen," would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind... The device, the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair. The tiny holes allow the water in the air to pass through in a way that would create a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously. "We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air," Xiaomeng Liu, another author and a UMass engineering graduate student, said in a statement.

While one prototype only produces a small amount of energy — almost enough to power a dot of light on a big screen — because of its size, Yao said Air-gens can be stacked on top of each other, potentially with spaces of air in between. Storing the electricity is a separate issue, he added. Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient...

It could be embedded in wall paint in a home, made at a larger scale in unused space in a city or littered throughout an office's hard-to-get-to spaces. And because it can use nearly any material, it could extract less from the environment than other renewable forms of energy. "The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of humidity," Yao said. "It's an enormous source of clean energy. This is just the beginning in making use of that."
More information from the Boston Globe.

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

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: HP printers have received a lot of flak historically and recently for invasive firmware updates that end up preventing customers from using ink with their printers. HP also encourages printer customers to sign up for HP+, a program that includes a free ink-subscription trial and irremovable firmware that allows HP to brick the ink when it sees fit. Despite this, HP markets dozens of its printers with Dynamic Security and the optional HP+ feature as being in the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) registry, suggesting that these printers are built with the environment in mind and, more specifically, do not block third-party ink cartridges. Considering Dynamic Security and HP+ printers do exactly that, the International Imaging Technology Council (IITC) wants the General Electronics Council (GEC), which is in charge of the EPEAT registry, to revoke at least 101 HP printer models from the EPEAT registry, which HP has "made a mockery of."

For a printer to make the EPEAT registry, it's supposed to comply with the EPEAT Imaging Equipment Category Criteria, which is based on the 1680.2-2012 IEEE Standard for Environmental Assessment of Imaging Equipment (PDF). The IITC is hung up on section 4.9.2.1, which requires that registered products do not "prevent the use of nonmanufacturer cartridges and non-manufacturer containers" and that vendors provide documentation showing that the device isn't "designed to prevent the use of a non-manufacturer cartridge or non-manufacturer container." Well, as the IITC and consumers who found their inked bricked mid-print will tell you, that sounds an awful lot like what HP does with its Dynamic Security printers.

Diving deeper, the IITC's complaint claims that "in the last 8 weeks alone, HP has released 4 killer firmware updates targeting dozens of EPEAT-registered inkjet printers." "At least one of these recent updates specifically targeted a single producer of remanufactured cartridges while not having any impact on non-remanufactured third-party cartridges using functionally identical non-HP chips," the complaint reads. The trade group also claimed at least 26 "killer firmware updates" occurred on EPEAT-registered HP laser printers since October 2020. The complaint argues that the error message that users see -- "The indicated cartridges have been blocked by the printer firmware because they contain non-HP chips. This printer is intended to work only with new or reused cartridges that have a new or reused HP chip. Replace the indicated cartridges to continue printing" -- go against EPEAT requirements, yet HP markets dozens of Dynamic Security printers with EPEAT ecolabels. "The nonprofit trade association was founded in 2000 and says it represents 'toner and inkjet cartridge remanufacturers, component suppliers, and cartridge collectors in North America,'" notes Ars. "So its members stand to lose a lot of money from tactics like Dynamic Security. The IITC already filed a complaint to the GEC about HP in 2019 for firmware blocking non-HP ink, but there didn't seem to be any noticeable results."

"The group is biased regarding this topic, but its complaint still mirrors many problems and concerns that consumers and class-action lawsuits have detailed regarding HP printers' exclusive stance on ink. You can find the full complaint here."

Hyundai Motor and LG Energy have announced they will build a $4.3 billion electric battery plant as part of Hyundai's new electric vehicle assembly plant in southeast Georgia. From a report: The companies will split the investment, starting production as soon as late 2025. Hyundai Motor CEO Jaehoon Chang said in a statement that the battery plant would "create a strong foundation to lead the global EV transition," explaining the company wants to speed up efforts to produce electrified Hyundai and Kia vehicles in North America. "Hyundai Motor Group is focusing on its electrification efforts to secure a leadership position in the global auto industry," Chang said. The South Korean automaker said in 2022 it would invest $5.5 billion to assemble electric vehicles and batteries in Ellabell, just west of Savannah. The site is supposed to have 8,100 employees and is slated to begin producing vehicles in 2025.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's No. 1 bestselling printer is the HP Deskjet 2755e. It's not hard to see why. For just $85, you get a wireless color printer, scanner, and six months of free ink. It also comes with HP Plus, one of the most dastardly schemes Big Inkjet has ever unleashed. I'm not talking about how printers quietly waste their own ink, or pretend cartridges are empty when they're not, or lock out official cartridges from other regions. Heck, I'm not even talking about "Dynamic Security," the delightful feature where new HP firmware updates secretly contain malware that blocks batches of third-party cartridges while pretending to harden your printhead against hacks. No, the genius of HP's latest scheme is that it's hiding in plain sight, daring you to unwittingly sign away your rights. Take the free ink, and HP controls your printer for life.

First introduced in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, HP Plus was built around FOMO right from the start. You get just seven days to claim your free ink, starting the moment you plug a new printer into the wall. Act now, and it'll also extend your warranty a full year, give you an "Advanced HP Smart app," and plant trees on your behalf. Because why wouldn't you want to save the forest? Here's one reason, as detailed in a new complaint by the International Imaging Technology Council (IITC) that might turn into a false advertising fight: HP Plus comes with a firmware update that utterly removes your printer's ability to accept third-party ink. You have to buy "genuine" HP ink as long as you use the printer.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), investment in clean energy is set to surpass spending on fossil fuels in 2023, with solar projects expected to outpace oil production for the first time. Reuters reports: Annual investment in renewable energy is up by nearly a quarter since 2021 compared to a 15% rise for fossil fuels, the Paris-based energy watchdog said in its World Energy Investment report. Around 90% of that clean energy spending comes from advanced economies and China, however, highlighting the global divide between rich and poor countries as fossil fuel investment is still double the levels needed to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century.

Around $2.8 trillion is set to be invested in energy worldwide in 2023, of which more than $1.7 trillion is expected to go to renewables, nuclear power, electric vehicles, and efficiency improvements. The rest, or around $1 trillion, will go to oil, gas and coal, demand for the last of which will reach an all-time high or six times the level needed in 2030 to reach net zero by 2050.

Current fossil fuel spending is significantly higher than what it should be to reach the goal of net zero by mid-century, the agency said. In 2023, solar power spending is due to hit more than $1 billion a day or $382 billion for the year, while investment in oil production will stand at $371 billion. Investment in new fossil fuel supply will rise by 6% in 2023 to $950 billion, the IEA added.

The Tesla Model Y has become the world's best-selling car in the first quarter of 2023, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics, making it the first time an electric vehicle (EV) has achieved this milestone. Electrek reports: The Model Y has dethroned the Toyota Corolla as the world's best-selling car in Q1 and looks like it may well maintain this position for the full year. JATO Dynamics analyst Felipe Munoz compiled the data for Motor1, showing that the Model Y had 267,200 sales in Q1, according to data from 53 markets and projections/estimates for the rest of the world. This put it ahead of the Corolla at 256,400 sales for the same period and significantly ahead of the other top-five cars, the Hilux, RAV4, and Camry, all from Toyota.

While we don't know if this placing will continue for the rest of the year, Model Y sales have been continually growing, whereas Corolla sales are trending slightly downward. One model is new and based on new technology, and the other is an old standard -- though the current iteration of both models came out in a similar time frame, 2018 for the Corolla and 2019 for Model Y. And given Tesla's massive price cuts this year on Model Y, this will surely make the car accessible to more people compared to 2022.

Indeed, Model Y sales are already growing compared to last year. In 2022, Tesla had two of the top ten cars in the world, with Model Y achieving 759k sales. That gives it an average quarterly run rate of 189k, and this year's Q1 number is a significant increase from that. If Model Y continues at this rate or sales continue to grow at all for the rest of this year, it will exit 2023 with over 1 million sales. The only other vehicle in the world to sell 1 million units last year was the Toyota Corolla, at 1.12 million. So it might be close at year's end, but we think it's likely that Model Y will maintain its position. "The achievement is even more impressive given Model Y's pricing and availability," adds Electrek. "While the Model Y does have broad availability in the world's largest markets, the Corolla is available everywhere. And despite recent price cuts, the Model Y at ~$40k (after credits) is still significantly more expensive than a base-model Corolla at $21k."

In other EV news, Ford and Tesla announced a partnership that will allow Ford owners access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers across the U.S. and Canada starting early next year. "And, Ford's next-generation of EVs -- expected by mid-decade -- will include Tesla's charging plug, allowing owners of Ford vehicles to charge at Tesla Superchargers without an adapter, making Ford among the first automakers to explicitly tie into the network," reports CNBC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: I'm disappointed. I've been waiting for AMD and Nvidia to offer up more affordable options for this generation of GPUs that could really push 1440p into the mainstream, but what I've been reviewing over the past week hasn't lived up to my expectations. Nvidia and AMD are both releasing new GPUs this week that are aimed at the budget PC gaming market. After seven years of 1080p dominating the mainstream, I was hopeful this generation would deliver 1440p value cards. Instead, Nvidia has started shipping a $399 RTX 4060 Ti today that the company is positioning as a 1080p card and not the 1440p sweet spot it really should be at this price point.

AMD is aggressively pricing its new Radeon RX 7600 at just $269, and it's definitely more suited to the 1080p resolution at that price point and performance. I just wish there were an option between the $300 to $400 marks that offered enough performance to push us firmly into the 1440p era. More than 60 percent of PC gamers are playing at 1080p, according to Valve's latest Steam data. That means GPU makers like AMD and Nvidia don't have to target 1440p with cards that sell in high volume because demand seems to be low. Part of that low demand could be because a monitor upgrade isn't a common purchase for PC gamers, or they'd have to pay more for a graphics card to even support 1440p. That's probably why both of these cards also still ship with just 8GB of VRAM because why ship it with more if you're only targeting 1080p? A lower resolution doesn't need as much VRAM for texture quality. I've been testing both cards at 1080p and 1440p to get a good idea of where they sit in the GPU market right now. It's fair to say that the RTX 4060 Ti essentially offers the same 1440p performance as an RTX 3070 at 1440p for $399. That's $100 less than the RTX 3070's $499 price point, which, in October 2020, I said offered a 1440p sweet spot for games during that period of time. It's now nearly three years on, and I'd certainly expect more performance here at 1440p. Why is yesterday's 1440p card suddenly a 1080p one for Nvidia?