Meta, Microsoft and Apple, and Google all want carbon-free power. But Google "says its goals for carbon-free power are impeded by state-regulated utilities," reports the New York Times, especially those in America's Southeastern states which aren't facing a competitive market. Google's battle in the region, where it has a major concentration of data centers, raises a question that applies to the energy transition everywhere: Is what's good for a few companies good for all?

At the heart of their campaign, Google and its tech giant allies want to dismantle a decades-old regulatory system in the Southeast that allows a handful of utilities to generate and sell the region's electricity — and replace it with a market in which many companies can compete to do so. Such markets exist in some form in much of the country, but the Southeastern utilities are staunchly defending the status quo. Senior utility executives contend that their system better insulates consumers from spikes in prices of commodities like natural gas, promotes reliability and supports the long-term investments needed to develop clean-power technologies....

Most electricity in the United States was long generated and distributed by heavily regulated monopoly utilities in each state. But just before the start of this century, lawmakers and regulators, arguing that competition would bring efficiencies, made it possible to set up power markets and end the dominance of the utilities — a revolution that bypassed the Southeast. Google and others contend that the markets have brought cost savings, innovation and the capital needed to increase clean power generation from wind and solar. The most recent move toward a form of power market, in a group of Western states, has saved nearly $3 billion since 2014, according to the market operator.

Self-interest also plays a role: In power markets, large companies can strike deals with independent producers that give them more leeway to bargain on price and secure more clean energy. Google entered a landmark deal last year to provide clean power to its data centers in Virginia, which is in a sprawling market called PJM....

The big utilities in the Southeast are now building more solar projects, but those pushing for a market in the region say it's not enough. In the region, the proposed solar projects' generating capacity is equivalent to just over a fourth of total capacity, which is far below the 80 percent for PJM, according to an analysis by Tyler Norris, a senior executive at Cypress Creek Renewables, a solar company, and a special adviser in the Energy Department during the Obama administration. "Project developers are attracted to open wholesale electricity markets with price transparency, independent oversight and the ability to trade with multiple potential customers," Mr. Norris said.

For three years Stockholm-based games studio Embark has been working on the Rust-gpu project to make Rust "a first class language and ecosystem for GPU programming." The project's latest announcement? rust-gpu now supports ray-tracing.

Their original announcement explained the rationale for this years-long dvelopment effort: Historically in games GPU programming has been done through writing either HLSL, or to a lesser extent GLSL. These are simple programming languages that have evolved along with rendering APIs over the years. However, as game engines have evolved, these languages have failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with large codebases, and have generally stayed behind the curve compared to other programming languages.

In part this is because it's a niche language for a niche market, and in part this has been because the industry as a whole has sunk quite a lot of time and effort into the status quo. While over-all better alternatives to both languages exist, none of them are in a place to replace HLSL or GLSL. Either because they are vendor locked, or because they don't support the traditional graphics pipeline. Examples of this include CUDA and OpenCL. And while attempts have been made to create language in this space, none of them have gained any notable traction in the gamedev community.

Our hope with this project is that we push the industry forward by bringing an existing, low-level, safe, and high performance language to the GPU; namely Rust. And with it come some additional benefits that can't be overlooked: a package/module system that's one of the industry's best, built in safety against race-conditions or out of bounds memory access, a wide range of tools and utilities to improve programmer workflows, and many others!
Along with ray-tracing, this week they announced plans to keep rust-gpu on the same schedule as the stable Rust release, "so you can use your favorite new language features as new stable versions of Rust are being released, by just updating your rust-gpu version."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the news!

An anonymous reader shares a report: This holiday season at the Garden City Hotel on Long Island, Merle Ayers is feeling especially grateful for the Whiz. At two feet tall and 66 pounds, the powerful robot vacuum doesn't mind working late into the night after the parties are over. The Whiz doesn't care that it's the holidays. It doesn't even need a day off. "It just needs to be cared for. We have to change the vacuum bags periodically and keep the batteries charged," says Ayers, the hotel's director of banquets. Amid ongoing staffing shortages, the two robot vacuums the hotel purchased late last year for about $30,000 each are proving their worth many times over, filling gaps in both the catering department and housekeeping.

"If we vacuum every floor with a robot, that saves one whole shift," says Garden City Hotel managing director Grady Colin. "That's one whole person per day that can be redeployed to do something else." These days, he'll take all the help he can get. Travelers have returned from the pandemic, but hotel workers have not, creating unprecedented staffing challenges for the hospitality industry. According to the Labor Department, there are 350,000 fewer people working in hotels today than there were in February 2020, before the pandemic. It's not for lack of trying. Hotels have raised hourly wages by 25% since early 2020, and employers are offering greater flexibility in scheduling. Still, workers are nowhere to be seen. "I've been in the hotel business for a long time," says Colin. "I've never seen anything like this."

Zimbabwe has prohibited the export of raw lithium from its mines so it can cash in on value addition and stop losing billions of dollars in mineral proceeds to foreign companies. Quartz reports: The ministry of Mines and Mining Development on Dec. 20 published a circular under the Base Minerals Export Control Act that seeks to "ensure that the vision of the president to see the country becoming an upper-middle income economy has been realized." The government says it is losing $1.8 billion in mineral revenues due to smuggling and externalization to South Africa and the United Arab Emirates. Gold is the most smuggled mineral.

With continued high international demand, Zimbabwe is projected to become one of the world's largest lithium exporters, with the government hoping to meet 20% of the world's total demand for lithium when it fully exploits its known lithium resources. Mineral exports account for about 60% (pdf) of Zimbabwe's export earnings while the mining sector contributes 16% to its GDP, according to a 2021 mining report by the London School of Economics.

"No lithium-bearing ores, or unbeneficiated lithium whatsoever, shall be exported from Zimbabwe to another country except under the written permit of the minister," mining minister Winston Chitando says in the circular. However, according to deputy mining minister Polite Kambamura, mining companies that are building processing plants will be excluded from the directive. "If we continue exporting raw lithium we will go nowhere. We want to see lithium batteries being developed in the country," he said. "We have done this in good faith for the growth of industry."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: What if the U.S. placed a tax on robots? The concept has been publicly discussed by policy analysts, scholars, and Bill Gates (who favors the notion). Because robots can replace jobs, the idea goes, a stiff tax on them would give firms incentive to help retain workers, while also compensating for a dropoff in payroll taxes when robots are used. Thus far, South Korea has reduced incentives for firms to deploy robots; European Union policymakers, on the other hand, considered a robot tax but did not enact it. Now a study by MIT economists scrutinizes the existing evidence and suggests the optimal policy in this situation would indeed include a tax on robots, but only a modest one. The same applies to taxes on foreign trade that would also reduce U.S. jobs, the research finds.

"Our finding suggests that taxes on either robots or imported goods should be pretty small," says Arnaud Costinot, an MIT economist, and co-author of a published paper detailing the findings. "Although robots have an effect on income inequality ... they still lead to optimal taxes that are modest." Specifically, the study finds that a tax on robots should range from 1 percent to 3.7 percent of their value, while trade taxes would be from 0.03 percent to 0.11 percent, given current U.S. income taxes. "We came in to this not knowing what would happen," says Ivan Werning, an MIT economist and the other co-author of the study. "We had all the potential ingredients for this to be a big tax, so that by stopping technology or trade you would have less inequality, but ... for now, we find a tax in the one-digit range, and for trade, even smaller taxes."

[...] Apart from its bottom-line tax numbers, the study contains some additional conclusions about technology and income trends. Perhaps counterintuitively, the research concludes that after many more robots are added to the economy, the impact that each additional robot has on wages may actually decline. At a future point, robot taxes could then be reduced even further. "You could have a situation where we deeply care about redistribution, we have more robots, we have more trade, but taxes are actually going down," Costinot says. If the economy is relatively saturated with robots, he adds, "That marginal robot you are getting in the economy matters less and less for inequality." The paper, "Robots, Trade, and Luddism: A Sufficient Statistic Approach to Optimal Technology Regulation," appears in advance online form in The Review of Economic Studies.

b0s0z0ku writes: The European Union is proposing a law requiring easily replaceable batteries in new appliances and portable electronic devices. The law also sets targets for collection and recycling of those batteries, requiring 73% compliance by 2030. "Companies would get plenty of notice, however, as the requirement would only come into force 3.5 years after the legislation takes effect," adds 9to5Mac. "Companies will also be legally required to accept and recycle old batteries."

Additionally, the European Commission is "expected to consider outlawing the use of non-rechargeable portable batteries," though this would likely come with many exceptions and wouldn't happen before the end of the decade.

Further reading: EU Sets December 28, 2024, Deadline For All New Phones To Use USB-C for Wired Charging

LastPass revealed today that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. BleepingComputer reports: This follows a previous update issued last month when the company's CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to "certain elements" of customer information. Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data. The attacker gained access to Lastpass' cloud storage using "cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys" stolen from its developer environment.

"The threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," Toubba said today. "The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data."

Fortunately, the encrypted data is secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user's master password. According to Toubba, the master password is never known to LastPass, it is not stored on Lastpass' systems, and LastPass does not maintain it. Customers were also warned that the attackers might try to brute force their master passwords to gain access to the stolen encrypted vault data. However, this would be very difficult and time-consuming if you've been following password best practices recommended by LastPass. If you do, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology," Toubba added. "Your sensitive vault data, such as usernames and passwords, secure notes, attachments, and form-fill fields, remain safely encrypted based on LastPass' Zero Knowledge architecture."

An anonymous reader shares a report: I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year -- that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home -- because, with Apple's MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side. For many of these models, I found myself writing the same review over and over and over. They were generally good. They performed well. But their battery life was bad.

What these laptops had in common is that they were all powered by the Intel P-series. Without getting too into the weeds here, Intel processors have, in the past, included H-series processors -- powerful chips that you'll find in gaming laptops and workstations -- and U-series processors for thinner, lighter devices. (There was also a G-series, which was this whole other thing, for a couple of years.) But the Intel 12th Generation of mobile chips (that is, the batch of chips that Intel released this year) has a new letter: the P-series. The P-series is supposed to sit between the power-hungry H-series and the power-efficient U-series; the hope was that it would combine H-series power with U-series efficiency.

And then many -- a great many -- of this year's top ultraportable laptops got the P-series: big-screeners like the LG Gram 17; modular devices like the Framework Laptop; business notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7; premium ultraportables like the Acer Swift 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, and the Dell XPS 13 Plus. The problem was that, in reality, the P-series was just a slightly less powerful H-series chip, which Intel had slapped an "ultraportable" label onto. It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.

Les Pounder writes via Tom's Hardware: Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton announced via a recent blog post that 100,000 units would be making their way into the supply chain, and that the in the latter-half of 2023 we can expect stock levels to return to pre-pandemic normality. That said, the supply chain shortage has impacted the normal cadence of Raspberry Pi releases, and according to Upton in an interview with Christopher Barnatt from Explaining Computers it means we sadly won't be seeing a Raspberry Pi 5 in 2023.

In the interview, Explaining Computers host Barnatt asks Upton about the future of the Raspberry Pi and if there are new models on the horizon. Upton then talks about how the past couple of years have been "weird" (pandemic and global chip shortage) and it has disrupted the cadence of Raspberry Pi development and release. Upton states that "the platform [Raspberry Pi 4] has been around longer than any Raspberry Pi platform has been around before, I think." At 29 minutes and 30 seconds Upton breaks the bad news, "Don't expect a Pi 5 next year [2023]" Upton then expands and explains that 2023 is a "recovery year". The recovery year is there to help Raspberry Pi and the technology industry recover from the double-punch of a pandemic and a global chip shortage which has caused a slowdown across the world.

Upton explains "What would really be a disaster would be if we tried to introduce some kind of Raspberry Pi 5 product" Upton provides a scenario akin to that of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, launched midway through the pandemic. It has been relatively unobtainium since release. Upton said he is very concerned about the consequences "if we introduced a Raspberry Pi 5 product and it couldn't ramp properly because of constraints, or if we introduced some Raspberry Pi 5 product and it somehow cannibalized some supply chain element." Upton then explains how cannibalization could impact the recovery of Raspberry Pi 4 and the 3 / 3+ and that Raspberry Pi has to be "ginger" as they move forward with its recovery. "The good news is the second half of next year, 2024 onwards, some of those things start to abate. And that's the point where we can start to think about what might be a sensible Raspberry Pi 5 platform," Upton said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Mark Gurman: The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company's chip and manufacturing plans. When Apple announced plans in June 2020 to transition away from Intel processors to Mac chips designed in-house, the company said the move would take about two years. Now at the tail end of 2022, it's clear that Apple has missed its self-imposed deadline for completing the shift. In addition to not offering a Mac Pro with Apple silicon, the company still only sells the high-end version of the Mac mini desktop in an Intel flavor. While Apple has said little to nothing about its future Mac desktops or the reasons behind the holdup, the company continues to actively test an all-new Mac Pro and an M2 Pro-based Mac mini to replace the remaining Intel models. Apple had aimed to introduce the new Mac Pro by now, but the high-end machine has been held up for a number of reasons, including multiple changes to its features, a significant shift in the company's plans for high-end processors and a potential relocation of its manufacturing.

When Apple first set out to build a replacement for the Intel Mac Pro, it planned a machine with a processor based on the original M1 chip. The approach called for two main configurations: one chip equal to the power of two M1 Max processors -- the highest-end MacBook Pro chip -- and another equal to four M1 Max components combined. The dual M1 Max chip ended up first launching in the Mac Studio as the M1 Ultra, and Apple decided to push back the Mac Pro to the M2 generation. The company then planned for the Mac Pro to come in two configurations: an M2 Ultra version and a double-M2 Ultra that I've dubbed the "M2 Extreme." The M2 Ultra chip is destined to have some serious specifications for professional users, including up to 24 CPU cores, 76 graphics cores and the ability to top out the machine with at least 192 gigabytes of memory. An M2 Extreme chip would have doubled that to 48 CPU cores and 152 graphics cores. But here's the bad news: The company has likely scrapped that higher-end configuration, which may disappoint Apple's most demanding users -- the photographers, editors and programmers who prize that kind of computing power.

The company made the decision because of both the complexity and cost of producing a processor that is essentially four M2 Max chips fused together. It also will help Apple and partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. save chip-production resources for higher-volume machines. Moreover, there are concerns about how much consumers are willing to spend. Using the highest-end M1 Ultra chip pushes the Mac Studio up to $5,000 -- only $1,000 less than the current Mac Pro. That's $3,000 more than the M1 Max Mac Studio. Based on Apple's current pricing structure, an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 -- without any other upgrades -- making it an extraordinarily niche product that likely isn't worth the development costs, engineering resources and production bandwidth it would require. Instead, the Mac Pro is expected to rely on a new-generation M2 Ultra chip (rather than the M1 Ultra) and will retain one of its hallmark features: easy expandability for additional memory, storage and other components. Gurman says the Mac Mini update "will come in regular M2 and M2 Pro variations, while new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros are arriving early next year with M2 Pro and M2 Max options." A high-end iMac Pro with Apple silicon is also in the works, "but that machine has suffered internal delays for similar reasons as the Mac Pro," he notes.

In addition, Gurman says Apple is "working on multiple new external monitors [...], including an update to the Pro Display XDR that was launching alongside the Intel Mac Pro in 2019." The new monitors will also include Apple silicon.

A new study published in Nature Astronomy assessed the viability of turbines as an energy source for future Mars missions, and "the results hint that wind power could be an important pillar of energy generation on the red planet, assuming humans are able to successfully land there in the coming decades," reports Motherboard. From the report: Scientists have generally written off wind power as a key energy source for Mars missions, compared to solar and nuclear power, because Martian winds are extremely weak. Now, a team led by Victoria Hartwick, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, has used global climate models of Mars to show that, contrary to past assumptions, "wind power represents a stable, sustained energy resource across large portions of the Mars surface," according to the study. "Using a state-of-the-art Mars global climate model, we analyze the total planetary Martian wind potential and calculate its spatial and temporal variability," Hartwick and her colleagues said in the study. "We find that wind speeds at some proposed landing sites are sufficiently fast to provide a stand-alone or complementary energy source to solar or nuclear power." "Wind energy represents a valuable but previously dismissed energy resource for future human missions to Mars, which will be useful as a complementary energy source to solar power," the team added.

To assess whether wind power could fill that gap, Hartwick and her colleagues used the NASA Ames Mars global climate model to estimate wind speeds across the planet. Since Mars' atmosphere is very thin, with only 1 percent the density of Earth's atmosphere, Martian winds are pretty wimpy everywhere. Even so, the researchers found that several tantalizing locations could theoretically use wind as the only source of power, and that a combination of solar and wind power would unlock sites across a huge swath of the planet -- including icy locations at the poles.

To that point, the team identified several sites that would be particularly conducive to wind power, including locations within the icy northern regions of Deuteronilus Mensae and Protonilus Mensae. The researchers envision setting up medium-sized turbines, measuring 50 meters (160 feet) tall, to catch the stronger winds in these areas, allowing astronauts to subsist in the strange glacial terrain of an alien world. Turbines could also be effective if placed near topographical gradients, such as crater rims or the slopes of ancient volcanoes, to catch the gusts generated by these landscapes.

"Content of every type disappears from the internet all the time..." writes Popular Photography's long-time "gear editor" (for photography equipment).

But someone's doing something about it: the newly-founded Flickr Foundation, which has announced plans "to make sure Flickr will be preserved for future generations." Or, as Popular Photography puts it, to stop photos "from suffering the same ill fate as our MySpace photos" — providing the example of important historical photos.

One particular collection their article notes is The Flickr Commons, "started back in 2008 as a collaborative effort with the Library of Congress to make publicly held photography collections readily available online for people seeking them out." It's a massive, eclectic, fascinating archive that pulls images and content from around the world. This new organization hopes to integrate more partners and ensure that everything remains available and easily accessible.... If you're not already familiar with The Commons, it's a really fascinating online resource. It grants access to everything from historical portraits to scientific images and everything in between. It's easy to get lost in the sheer volume of images available on the site, but Flickr relies on curators in order to bring notable images to the forefront and keep things organized and available.

With the establishment of the new foundation, Flickr hopes that it can keep this archive running to 2122 and beyond. It will doubtlessly add countless more images along the way.
Flickr is currently hiring a new archivist, according to their announcement (which also points out that the Flickr API was one of the first public APIs ever).

Among other things, it says that the foundation hopes to "investigate preservation strategies that could last for the next century,"

"Samsung's Mobile Experience (MX) Business has formed a completely new team for designing and developing its own chipsets," reports the Business Standard, citing media reports. "The company has formed an application processor (AP) solution development team within the business."

A similar position already exists with Samsung System LSI, which designs logic chips such as Exynos, which MX uses in its Galaxy phones. According to sources, the MX Business is forming its own identical team either to optimise these Exynos chips for its Galaxy line or, more likely, to entirely develop its own processors in the future, said the report.
Slashdot reader joshuark describes it as "Samsung ditching Samsung." Some context from Hot Hardware: Samsung's fancy phones sold in the U.S. use powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs that may not always outrun Apple's bespoke processors, but they're pretty darn fast. Overseas, though, Samsung uses its own home-grown Exynos chips, and they don't typically compete as well in terms of performance or efficiency.

It could be for this reason that the company has allegedly formed a new "application processor solution development team." This information comes from Korean tech and electronics site The Elec.... The average smartphone user doesn't obsess much about smartphone speed, but the gap between Apple's finest and even the best Exynos SoCs is a yawning chasm. Rumor has it that the Galaxy S23 will be the first to use Snapdragon processors around the world. If that's true, then Samsung is definitely concerned about performance, and it may well be the case that [team leader] Choi Won-joon wants Samsung's mobile unit to start building its own processors.

Once part of the USSR, the nation of Georgia seceded in 1991. Still located on Russia's southern border — and on the eastern edge of the Black Sea — it's now part of a four-country system that plans to transmit wind-generated electricity from Azerbaijan (to Georgia's east, also located on Russia's southern border) across an undersea cable below the Black Sea, through Romania and then on to Hungary.

Expected to be completed within three or four years, it could become "a new power source for the European Union amid a crunch on energy supplies caused by the war in Ukraine," reports the Associated Press, with Hungary's foreign minister hailing it as a major step toward diversifying energy supplies and meeting carbon neutrality targets.

Finalized today, the deal comes as Hungary "is seeking additional sources for fossil fuels to reduce its heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas." Hungary's foreign minister, Peter Szijjarto, said in August that Azerbaijan would soon produce "large quantities of green electricity" with offshore wind farms, and that by signing on to the connector project which could bring that energy to Europe, Hungary was fulfilling a requirement that two EU member nations participate in order for the investment to receive funding from the bloc.... BR>
This week, Szijjarto met with officials from both Qatar and Oman on the potential future import of oil and natural gas to Hungary from the two Middle Eastern countries, a further sign that Hungary is taking steps to level down the 85% of its natural gas and more than 60% of its oil that it currently receives from Russia.
The article also points out that the country of Romania has also signed a deal with Azerbaijan's state oil company for natural gas deliveries starting on January 1.

The Biden administration on Friday reversed a 1954 decision by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to revoke the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, known as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his work on the Manhattan Project. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a written order that the since-dissolved AEC acted out of political motives when it revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance nearly 70 years ago. Oppenheimer died in 1967. * From the Santa Fe New Mexican: Fifty-five years after the death of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Biden administration has annulled a decades-old decision that stripped weapons security clearance from the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and celebrated "father of the atomic bomb."

Oppenheimer was credited for his role in the Manhattan Project, a World War II research and development initiative that created the first nuclear weapons at what is now called Los Alamos National Laboratory. He later served as director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. But in 1954, after Oppenheimer had opposed development of the hydrogen bomb, the AEC revoked his security clearance through what government officials now call a "flawed process that violated the commission's own regulations."

The hearing took place against the backdrop of the "Red Scare" of the 1950s, and the review concluded that Oppenheimer's privileges were revoked not because of security concerns but due to "fundamental defects" in his character based on past ties with communism and associations with communists — which had had been previously cleared in 1947.

Following an investigation, the Energy Department determined the decision that ended Oppenheimer's national security career was aimed at discrediting him in public debates over U.S. weapons policy. The review detailed numerous procedural flaws, concluding, "the system failed ... [and] that a substantial injustice was done to a loyal American."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pine64, makers of ARM-based, tinker-friendly gadgets, is making the PineTab 2, a sequel to its Linux-powered tablet that mostly got swallowed up by the pandemic and its dire global manufacturing shortages. The PineTab 2, as described in Pine64's "December Update," is based around the RK3566, made by RockChip. Pine64 based its Quartz64 single-board system on the system-on-a-chip (SoC), and has all but gushed about it across several blog posts. It's "a dream-of-a-SoC," writes Community Director Lukasz Erecinski, a "modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU. And it should be ideal for space-constrained devices: it runs cool, has a variety of I/O options, solid price-to-performance ratio, and "is genuinely future-proof."

The PineTab 2 is a complete redesign, Erecinski claims. It has a metal chassis that "is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance, and repair." The tablet comes apart with snap-in tabs, and Pine64 will offer replacement parts. The insides are modular, too, with the eMMC storage, camera, daughter-board, battery, and keyboard connector all removable "in under 5 minutes." The 10.1-inch IPS display, with "modern and reasonably thin bezels," should also be replaceable, albeit with more work. On that easily opened chassis are two USB-C ports, one for USB 3.0 I/O and one for charging (or USB 2.0 if you want). There's a dedicated micro-HDMI port, and a front-facing 2-megapixel camera and rear-facing 5-megapixel (not the kind of all-in-one media production machine Apple advertises, this tablet), a microSD slot, and a headphone jack. While a PCIe system is exposed inside the PineTab, most NVMe SSDs will not fit, according to Pine64. All of this is subject to change before final production, however.

As with the original PineTab, this model comes with a detachable, backlit keyboard cover, included by default. That makes supporting a desktop OS for the device far more viable, Erecinski writes. The firmware chipset is the same as in the PineBook Pro, which should help with that. No default OS has been decided as of yet, according to Pine64. The tablet should ship with two memory/storage variants, 4GB/64GB and 8GB/128GB. It's due to ship "sometime after the Chinese New Year" (January 22 to February 5), though there's no firm date. No price was announced, but "it will be affordable regardless of which version you'll settle on." A video version of the "December Update" can be found on YouTube.

Welding problems will require a further six-month delay for France's next-generation nuclear reactor at Flamanville, the latest setback for the flagship technology the country hopes to sell worldwide, state-owned electricity group EDF said Friday. Barron's reports: The delay will also add 500 million euros to a project whose total cost is now estimated at around 13 billion euros ($13.8 billion), blowing past the initial projection of 3.3 billion euros when construction began in 2007. It comes as EDF is already struggling to restart dozens of nuclear reactors taken down for maintenance or safety work that has proved more challenging than originally thought.

EDF also said Friday that one of the two conventional reactors at Flamanville would not be brought back online until February 19 instead of next week as planned, while one at Penly in northwest Farnce would be restarted on March 20 instead of in January. EDF said the latest problems at Flamanville, on the English Channel in Normandy, emerged last summer when engineers discovered that welds in cooling pipes for the new pressurized water reactor, called EPR, were not tolerating extreme heat as expected. As a result, the new reactor will be start generating power only in mid-2024.

Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Peter Wennink, the chief executive of ASML Holding NV, the Dutch semiconductor equipment maker, on Tuesday questioned whether a U.S. push to get the Netherlands to adopt new rules restricting exports to China make sense. "He said that following U.S. pressure, the Dutch government has already restricted ASML from exporting its most advanced lithography machines to China since 2019, something he said has benefited U.S. companies selling alternative technology," reports Reuters. "He said that while 15% of ASML's sales are in China, at U.S. chip equipment suppliers 'it is 25 or sometimes more than 30%.'"

In response to U.S. claims that advanced chips owned by China pose a threat to national security due to military applications and the rise of artificial intelligence, Wennink said: "What constitutes national security is for Americans to determine. But it is common knowledge that chip technology for purely military applications is usually ten, fifteen years old. The technology used to make such chips can still be sold to China. Artificial intelligence requires the most advanced chips. They are made with EUV and are therefore not produced in China. But those chips are simply sold, also to the Chinese. American chip manufacturers have no problem with China as a customer."

Apple is developing a 15.5-inch MacBook Air that could launch in the spring of 2023, according to display analyst Ross Young. MacRumors reports: In a tweet shared with super followers, Young said that production on panels designed for the MacBook Air will start in the first quarter of 2023. A 15.5-inch MacBook Air will be sized between the 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models, and it will be the largest MacBook Air to date. The current model measures in at 13.6 inches. While Young now says that the display will be 15.5 inches, he previously said it would be around 15.2 inches.

Apple's rumored 15-inch MacBook Air is expected to feature the same general design as the 13-inch MacBook Air that was released in 2022 with flat edges, a large Force Touch trackpad, a keyboard with function keys, and more. It will also likely include a MagSafe charging port, upgraded speaker system, and a 1080p camera. As for chips, the larger-screened MacBook Air could be available with M2 and M2 Pro chip options, and in comparison to the MacBook Pro models, it is not expected to feature the same mini-LED display or ProMotion technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dell continues tinkering with what it hopes to be a repairable laptop like the Framework Laptop. Last year, it showed off Concept Luna, a clamshell designed to easily disassemble for easy repairs, upgrades, and harvested components. This year, Dell showed the press an updated Concept Luna that could support more power while being even simpler to dismantle. The vendor is also exploring how to automate the process, from disassembly to parts diagnostics, on a broad scale. Dell's Concept Luna laptop is comparable in size to a Latitude with some Dell XPS 13 Plus-like stylings. In person, it looked similar to the Concept Luna demoed last year, including appearing to be a functioning PC. But Dell's representative was able to open this year's version up and pull out internal parts much more rapidly -- well under 60 seconds.

The computer was easier to take apart because it doesn't have screws (last year's Concept Luna had four). Dell's rep simply stuck a pin (it could be anything that fits, they said) into a hole in the security lock slot on the right side of the system's deck. That allowed Dell's rep to pull off the keystone north of the keyboard and then slide the keyboard up and out. Once the system was open, the speakers, fan, motherboard, and battery were removed instantly thanks to pop-out modules, which, Dell said, are recyclable. The concept laptop also got rid of the cable connecting the battery, so there are no cables, adhesives, or other types of connectors.

Dell built Concept Luna with simple display upgrades and repairs in mind as well. Dell's spokesperson promptly removed the system's LCD by inserting a pin into a hole in a keystone south of the screen and then took off the keystone, releasing a latch underneath the piece, and plucked the display off the chassis. There's also potential for better accommodations for beefier components in the updated Concept Luna. Last year's version used passive cooling, while the new one has a fan. The fans lock into the motherboard, keeping it in place. A tech giant like Dell releasing something like Concept Luna could certainly give the younger Framework a run for its money, but Dell still isn't talking about releasing a laptop with Concept Luna's repairability. And it could ultimately decide not to. However, in addition to advancing the laptop's design this year, Dell also looked into automation techniques that could further this concept on a scale that could extend beyond a single product.