Codenamed Raptor Lake, Intel says it has made some improvements to the CPU architecture and the Intel 7 manufacturing process, but the strategy for improving their performance is both time-tested and easy to understand: add more cores, and make them run at higher clock speeds. From a report: Intel is announcing three new CPUs today, each with and without integrated graphics (per usual, the models with no GPUs have an "F" at the end): the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K will launch on October 20 alongside new Z790 chipsets and motherboards. They will also work in all current-generation 600-series motherboards as long as your motherboard maker has provided a BIOS update, and will continue to support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory.

Raptor Lake uses the hybrid architecture that Intel introduced in its 12th-generation Alder Lake chips last year -- a combination of large performance cores (P-cores) that keep games and other performance-sensitive applications running quickly, plus clusters of smaller efficiency cores (E-cores) that use less power -- though in our testing across laptops and desktops, it's clear that "efficiency" is more about the number of cores can be fit into a given area on a CPU die, and less about lower overall system power consumption. There have been a handful of other additions as well. The amount of L2 cache per core has been nearly doubled, going from 1.25MB to 2MB per P-core and from 2MB to 4MB per E-core cluster (E-cores always come in clusters of four). The CPUs will officially support DDR5-5600 RAM, up from a current maximum of DDR5-4800, though that DDR5-4800 maximum can easily be surpassed with XMP memory kits in 12th-generation motherboards. The maximum officially supported DDR4 RAM speed remains DDR4-3200, though the caveat about XMP applies there as well. As far as core counts and frequencies go, the Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs each pick up one extra E-core cluster, going from four E-cores to eight. The Core i9 gets two new E-core clusters, boosting the core count from eight all the way up to 16. All E-cores have maximum boost clocks that are 400MHz higher than they were before.

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems. Phoronix reports: Last week was a patch posted for the ACPI processor idle code to avoid an old chipset workaround on modern AMD Zen systems. Since ACPI support was added to the Linux kernel in 2002, there has been a "dummy wait op" to deal with some chipsets where STPCLK# doesn't get asserted in time. The dummy I/O read delays further instruction processing until the CPU is fully stopped. This was a problem with at least some AMD Athlon era systems with a VIA chipset... But not a problem with newer chipsets of roughly the past two decades.

With this workaround still being applied to even modern AMD systems, K Prateek Nayak discovered: "Sampling certain workloads with IBS on AMD Zen3 system shows that a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency. A large C-State residency value can prime the cpuidle governor to recommend a deeper C-State during the subsequent idle instances, starting a vicious cycle, leading to performance degradation on workloads that rapidly switch between busy and idle phases. One such workload is tbench where a massive performance degradation can be observed during certain runs."

At least for Tbench, this long-time, unconditional workaround in the Linux kernel has been hurting AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC performance in select workloads. This workaround hasn't affected modern Intel systems since those newer Intel platforms use the alternative MWAIT-based intel_idle driver code path instead. The AMD patch evolved into this patch by Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen. That patch to limit the "dummy wait" workaround to old systems is already queued into TIP's x86/urgent branch. With it going the route of "x86/urgent" and for fixing a overzealous workaround that isn't needed on modern hardware, it's likely this patch will be submitted this week still for the Linux 6.0 kernel rather than needing to wait until the next (v6.1) merge window.

In compliance with the country's nuclear phase-out law, Belgium's Doel 3 reactor was shut down on Friday after being in operation for 40 years. From a report: Despite the energy crisis in Europe, the nuclear reactor in the town of Doel, north of the port city of Antwerp, will close on Friday. This is the first time a nuclear reactor will be permanently shut down in Belgium. The Doel 3 reactor, one of four reactors of the Doel Nuclear Power Plant, will disconnect from the grid at 21.15 local time due to the nuclear phase-out law enforced by past governments. The 1,006 megawatt-hours capacitated reactor was built in 1978, was grid connected in 1982, and operated for 40 years. Belgium hosts a total of seven reactors, four of which are at the Doel Nuclear Power Plant close to the Dutch border, while three are located at the Tihange Nuclear Power Plant, close to the Germany and Luxembourg border. The electricity produced by these reactors meets about half of the country's needs.

After the Russia-Ukraine war, Belgium decided to extend the operation period of the Doel 4 and Tihange 3 reactors by 10 years to avoid energy supply shortages. The reactors were previously planned to close in 2025. Decisions taken by previous governments prescribed that the Doel 3 and the Tihange 2 reactors would shut down in September and February next year, respectively. With the looming energy crisis, however, the current government started to work on extending the operation period of these reactors. Negotiations between the operators and the government concluded that it was not technically and legally possible to postpone the Doel 3 shutdown process at this stage.

Apple could decide to release its remaining products for 2022, which includes an updated iPad Pro, Mac mini, and 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, through a press release on its website rather than a digital event, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. MacRumors reports: In his latest Power On newsletter, Gurman said that Apple is currently "likely to release its remaining 2022 products via press releases, updates to its website and briefings with select members of the press" rather than a digital event. Rumors had suggested that Apple was planning a second fall event in October that would focus on the Mac and iPad, but that may no longer be the case. Apple has three things on the roster for the remainder of 2022: an 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro with the M2 chip, an updated Mac mini with the M2 and yet announced "M2 Pro" chip, and updated 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros.

Apple announced the M2 chip in June for the redesigned MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro earlier this June at WWDC. Other than the new chip, the updates to the Mac and iPad will be relatively incremental upgrades with no major design changes rumored for the products. Apple has released products via press release in the past, such as the AirPods Max and the original AirPods Pro.

According to a new report from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), China now has almost half of all the world's robot installations and that it is increasing its lead rapidly. Engineering.com reports: The IFR, which exists to "promote research, development, use and international co-operation in the entire field of robotics," has been reporting that China has been the world leader in implementing industrial robots for the last 8 years. We have not been paying attention. In 3 years, China has almost doubled the number of industrial robot installations. With its 243,000 robot installations in 2020, China has almost half of all the industrial robots in the world, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A majority of new industrial robots are used in electronics manufacture (for circuit boards, consumer electronics, etc.) and in automobile assembly, particularly in the surging production of electric vehicles (EVs).One must wonder why China, a country with so much cheap manual labor available, would opt for expensive robots with their special demands for tech support. China may have a giant population (1.4 billion people), but its workforce is actually decreasing, says the IFR, due to an increasing segment of its population aging and a growing competition for service jobs. China also expects a leveling off of its rural-to-urban migration. China's government is determined not to let a declining workforce cause a drop in manufacturing, and as only a centralized, authoritarian government can, it has made robotizing a national priority and has mobilized its forces.

China's latest five-year plan for the robotics industry, released in December 2021 by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), aims for nothing less than making China a world leader in robot technology and industrial automation. And it appears to be working. China went from 10 robots per ten thousand employees 10 years ago to 246 robots per ten thousand employees in 2020, the ninth best ranking in the world. To keep the robots state of the art and operational, China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security introduced 18 new occupational titles in June, including "robotics engineering technician."

The vast majority of electric vehicle owners charge their cars at home in the evening or overnight. We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study. From the report: In March, the research team published a paper on a model they created for charging demand that can be applied to an array of populations and other factors. In the new study, published Sept. 22 in Nature Energy, they applied their model to the whole of the Western United States and examined the stress the region's electric grid will come under by 2035 from growing EV ownership. In a little over a decade, they found, rapid EV growth alone could increase peak electricity demand by up to 25%, assuming a continued dominance of residential, nighttime charging. To limit the high costs of all that new capacity for generating and storing electricity, the researchers say, drivers should move to daytime charging at work or public charging stations, which would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This finding has policy and investment implications for the region and its utilities, especially since California moved in late August to ban sales of gasoline-powered cars and light trucks starting in 2035. [...]

Current time-of-use rates encourage consumers to switch electricity use to nighttime whenever possible, like running the dishwasher and charging EVs. This rate structure reflects the time before significant solar and wind power supplies when demand threatened to exceed supply during the day, especially late afternoons in the summer. Today, California has excess electricity during late mornings and early afternoons, thanks mainly to its solar capacity. If most EVs were to charge during these times, then the cheap power would be used instead of wasted. Alternatively, if most EVs continue to charge at night, then the state will need to build more generators -- likely powered by natural gas -- or expensive energy storage on a large scale. Electricity going first to a huge battery and then to an EV battery loses power from the extra stop. At the local level, if a third of homes in a neighborhood have EVs and most of the owners continue to set charging to start at 11 p.m. or whenever electricity rates drop, the local grid could become unstable.

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. The research team compared several scenarios of charging infrastructure availability, along with several different residential time-of-use rates and commercial demand charges. Some rate changes made the situation at the grid level worse, while others improved it. Nevertheless, a scenario of having charging infrastructure that encourages more daytime charging and less home charging provided the biggest benefits, the study found. "The findings from this paper have two profound implications: the first is that the price signals are not aligned with what would be best for the grid -- and for ratepayers. The second is that it calls for considering investments in a charging infrastructure for where people work," said Ines Azevedo, one of the co-senior authors of the study.

"We need to move quickly toward decarbonizing the transportation sector, which accounts for the bulk of emissions in California," Azevedo continued. "This work provides insight on how to get there. Let's ensure that we pursue policies and investment strategies that allow us to do so in a way that is sustainable."

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang's remarks about Moore's Law from earlier this week: "Moore's Law's dead," Huang said, referring to the standard that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. "And the ability for Moore's Law to deliver twice the performance at the same cost, or at the same performance, half the cost, every year and a half, is over. It's completely over, and so the idea that a chip is going to go down in cost over time, unfortunately, is a story of the past." He added: "Computing is a not a chip problem, it's a software and chip problem."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nvidia is gearing up to deliver Drive Thor, its next-generation automotive-grade chip that the company claims will be able to unify a wide range of in-car technology from automated driving features and driver monitoring systems to streaming Netflix in the back for the kiddos. Thor, which goes into production in 2025, is notable not just because it's a step up from Nvidia's Drive Orin chip. It's also taking Drive Atlan's spot in the lineup. Nvidia is scrapping the Drive Atlan system on chip ahead of schedule for Thor, founder and CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday at the company's GTC event. Ever in a race to develop bigger and badder chips, Nvidia is opting for Thor, which, at 2,000 teraflops of performance, will deliver twice the compute and throughput, according to the company.

"If we look at a car today, advanced driver assistance systems, parking, driver monitoring, camera mirrors, digital instrument cluster and infotainment are all different computers distributed throughout the vehicle," said Nvidia's vice president of automotive, Danny Shapiro, at a press briefing Monday. "In 2025, these functions will no longer be separate computers. Rather, Drive Thor will enable manufacturers to efficiently consolidate these functions into a single system, reducing overall system cost." One chip to rule them all. One chip to help automakers build software-defined autonomous vehicles. One chip to continuously upgrade over-the-air. Further reading: Nvidia Announces Next-Gen RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs

In an in-depth teardown of the iPhone 14 Pro Max, iFixit provides a closer look at the device's internals. "Notably, the teardown includes a photo of the plastic spacer that replaced the SIM card tray on the U.S. model," reports MacRumors. From the report: All four iPhone 14 models sold in the U.S. no longer have a physical SIM card tray and rely entirely on digital eSIMs. The teardown confirms that Apple is not using the internal space freed up by the tray's removal for any other component or added functionality, and instead filled in the gap with a square piece of plastic. Outside of the U.S., all iPhone 14 models are still equipped with a SIM card tray in this space.

As seen in previous teardowns, iFixit provided close-up images of the iPhone 14 Pro Max's logic board, which is equipped with a faster A16 Bionic chip and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X65 modem that provides both 5G and satellite connectivity. While the standard iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus can be opened from the back side, and feature a more repairable design with an easily removable display and back glass panel, these design changes do not extend to the Pro models. The teardown shows that the iPhone 14 Pro Max continues to open from the front and does not have removable back glass. The internal design of the device is largely unchanged from the iPhone 13 Pro Max.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Morgan Stanley Smith Barney has agreed to pay a $35 million fine to settle claims that it failed to protect the personal information of about 15 million customers, the Securities and Exchange Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement announcing the settlement, the S.E.C. described what it called Morgan Stanley's "extensive failures," over a five-year period beginning in 2015, to safeguard customer information, in part by not properly disposing of hard drives and servers that ended up for sale on an internet auction site.

On several occasions, the commission said, Morgan Stanley hired a moving and storage company with no experience or expertise in data destruction services to decommission thousands of hard drives and servers containing the personal information of millions of its customers. The moving company then sold thousands of the devices to a third party, and the devices were then resold on an unnamed internet auction site, the commission said. An information technology consultant in Oklahoma who bought some of the hard drives on the internet chastised Morgan Stanley after he found that he could still access the firm's data on those devices.

Morgan Stanley is "a major financial institution and should be following some very stringent guidelines on how to deal with retiring hardware," the consultant wrote in an email to Morgan Stanley in October 2017, according to the S.E.C. The firm should, at a minimum, get "some kind of verification of data destruction from the vendors you sell equipment to," the consultant wrote, according to the S.E.C. Morgan Stanley eventually bought the hard drives back from the consultant. Morgan Stanley also recovered some of the other devices that it had improperly discarded, but has not recovered the "vast majority" of them, the commission said. The settlement also notes that Morgan Stanley "had not properly disposed of consumer report information when it decommissioned servers from local offices and branches as part of a 'hardware refresh program' in 2019," reports the Times. "Morgan Stanley later learned that the devices had been equipped with encryption capability, but that it had failed to activate the encryption software for years, the commission said."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany's general data retention law violates EU law, Europe's top court ruled on Tuesday, dealing a blow to member states banking on blanket data collection to fight crime and safeguard national security. The law may only be applied in circumstances where there is a serious threat to national security defined under very strict terms, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) said. The ruling comes after major attacks by Islamist militants in France, Belgium and Britain in recent years. Governments argue that access to data, especially that collected by telecoms operators, can help prevent such incidents, while operators and civil rights activists oppose such access.

The latest case was triggered after Deutsche Telekom unit Telekom Deutschland and internet service provider SpaceNet AG challenged Germany's data retention law arguing it breached EU rules. The German court subsequently sought the advice of the CJEU which said such data retention can only be allowed under very strict conditions. "The Court of Justice confirms that EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security," the judges said. "However, in order to combat serious crime, the member states may, in strict compliance with the principle of proportionality, provide for, inter alia, the targeted or expedited retention of such data and the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses," they said.

Nvidia is officially announcing its RTX 40-series GPUs today. After months of rumors and some recent teasing from Nvidia, the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 are now both official. The RTX 4090 arrives on October 12th priced at $1,599, with the RTX 4080 priced starting at $899 and available in November. Both are powered by Nvidia's next-gen Ada Lovelace architecture. From a report: The RTX 4090 is the top-end card for the Lovelace generation. It will ship with a massive 24GB of GDDR6X memory. Nvidia claims it's 2-4x faster than the RTX 3090 Ti, and it will consume the same amount of power as that previous generation card. Nvidia recommends a power supply of at least 850 watts based on a PC with a Ryzen 5900X processor. Inside the giant RTX 4090 there are 16,384 CUDA Cores, a base clock of 2.23GHz that boosts up to 2.52GHz, 1,321 Tensor-TFLOPs, 191 RT-TFLOPs, and 83 Shader-TFLOPs.

Nvidia is actually offering the RTX 4080 in two models, one with 12GB of GDDR6X memory and another with 16GB of GDDR6X memory, and Nvidia claims it's 2-4x faster than the existing RTX 3080 Ti. The 12GB model will start at $899 and include 7,680 CUDA Cores, 7,680 CUDA Cores, a 2.31GHz base clock that boosts up to 2.61GHz, 639 Tensor-TFLOPs, 92 RT-TFLOPs, and 40 Shader-TFLOPs. The 16GB model of the RTX 4080 isn't just a bump to memory, though. Priced starting at $1,199 it's more powerful with 9,728 CUDA Cores, a base clock of 2.21GHz that boosts up to 2.51GHz, 780 Tensor-TFLOPs, 113 RT-TFLOPs, and 49 Shader-TFLOPs of power. The 12GB RTX 4080 model will require a 700 watt power supply, with the 16GB model needing at least 750 watts. Both RTX 4080 models will launch in November. Further reading: Nvidia Puts AI at Center of Latest GeForce Graphics Card Upgrade.

Tom Persky, the founder of floppydisk.com who claims to be the "last man standing in the floppy disk business," said that the airline industry is one of his biggest customers. He talked about this in the new book "Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium" by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar. Insider reports: "My biggest customers -- and the place where most of the money comes from -- are the industrial users," Persky said, in an interview from the book published online in Eye On Design last week. "These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it's 1990, and you're building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you'd want to use the best technology available."

Persky added: "Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer." He also said that the medical sector still uses floppy disks. And then there's "hobbyists," who want to "buy ten, 20, or maybe 50 floppy disks."

China installed almost as many robots in its factories last year as the rest of the world, accelerating a rush to automate and consolidate its manufacturing dominance even as its working-age population shrinks. WSJ: Shipments of industrial robots to China in 2021 rose 45% compared with the previous year to more than 243,000, according to new data viewed by The Wall Street Journal from the International Federation of Robotics, a robotics industry trade group. China accounted for just under half of all installations of heavy-duty industrial robots last year, reinforcing the nation's status as the No. 1 market for robot manufacturers worldwide. The IFR data shows China installed nearly twice as many new robots as did factories throughout the Americas and Europe.

Part of the explanation for China's rapid automation is that it is simply catching up with richer peers. The world's second-largest economy lags behind the U.S. and manufacturing powerhouses such as Japan, Germany and South Korea in the prevalence of robots on production lines. The rapid automation also reflects a growing recognition in China that its factories need to adapt as the country's supply of cheap labor dwindles and wages rise. The United Nations expects India to surpass China as the world's most-populous country as soon as next year. The population of those in China age 20 to 64 -- the bulk of the workforce -- might have already peaked, U.N. projections show, and is expected to fall steeply after 2030, as China's population ages and birthrates stay low.

mspohr writes: A major bug in Apple's latest iPhone is causing the camera to physically fail when using apps such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, some owners have reported. The bug in the company's iPhone 14 Pro Max, the most expensive model in the iPhone 14 range, appears to affect the optical image stabilisation (OIS) feature, which uses a motor to eliminate the effects of camera shake when taking pictures. Opening the camera in certain apps causes the OIS motor to go haywire, causing audible grinding sounds and physically vibrating the entire phone. The vibration does not occur when using the built-in camera app, suggesting the problem's roots are in a software fault. However, some have warned affected users to limit their usage of apps that trigger the bug, in case excess vibration causes permanent damage to the OIS system. The company has previously warned users about potential damage to the OIS motor, particularly in situations where their phones are experiencing significant vibration. In January this year, the company published a long warning note for users about the risk of mounting their iPhones near "high-power motorcycle engines."

"Transportation is going to electrify much faster than people realize," says Rick Luebbe, chief executive officer of Group14 Technologies.

So this weekend the Seattle Times paid a visit to their small manufacturing plant in rural Western Washington working on becoming one of the companies supplying a crucial component: Inside this building, carbon is infused with a silicon gas to produce a black powdery substance that high-profile investors hope will be a key component of the next generation of electric car batteries enabling them to travel farther between plug-ins, recharge faster and cost less. "It's transformational," said Rick Luebbe, chief executive officer of Group14 Technologies, which opened the Maltby plant in 2021 and has raised $441 million in funding. The company employs nearly 100 people, and the industrial workplace north of Woodinville has the excitement of a startup company. A research laboratory is under construction in one corner of the building as production is underway elsewhere.

Group14 is one of more than 20 companies launched in a global quest to improve the lithium-ion battery — mainstay of the fledgling electric car industry — by including more silicon.... Within the next decade, two companies plan to make Washington a hub of this emerging technology. Group14, which has drawn Porsche AG as a lead investor, and Sila, an Alameda, California, company that is partnering with Mercedes-Benz, both have announced plans to open large-scale plants east of the Cascades in Moses Lake....

The silicon technology also has applications for many other battery-powered products ranging from cellphones that can last longer between charges to drones and aircraft that could stay aloft for more hours of flight... Company officials at Group14 and Sila say they have developed silicon products that can be blended with graphite — or replace it entirely — without unduly compromising battery life.... "Generally, every customer we're working with is getting the cycling they need for commercial deployment," Luebbe said. Gene Berdichevsky, Sila's chief executive, said Sila's technology, also proprietary, "achieves and exceeds" automotive industry specification even when silicon entirely replaces graphite.

Some automotive companies are betting that silicon does have an important role to play in the next generation of batteries... Mercedes-Benz AG, which this year announced it's opening a new battery plant in Alabama, invested in Sila in 2019. Then, last May, the company announced it would use the Sila silicon technology for electric G-Class vehicles that will start production in the middle of this decade. Uwe Keller, directory of battery development at Mercedes-Benz AG, said his company is involved in extensive research with Sila's silicon product to determine how it best can be incorporated into a next generation of batteries.

But he expects Sila's technology will boost electric car battery range by 15 to 20%....

Berdichevsky, Sila's chief executive, who worked at Tesla in its early years and co-founded Sila in 2011, said his company plans to start producing silicon product from Moses Lake to send to Mercedes-Benz in the second half of 2024.

"In addition to Ubuntu supporting the StarFive VisionFive and Nezha RISC-V boards, Canonical engineers are also working on supporting the Sipeed LicheeRV board too for next month's 22.10 release," reports Phoronix.

"The Sipeed LicheeRV is notable in being one of the cheapest RISC-V boards out there: pricing starts at $16.90 USD...." The Sipeed LicheeRV uses the Allwinner D1 SoC and is powered by a single-core XuanTie C906 64-bit RISC-V processor. This single-core RISC-V processor runs at just 1.0GHz. Yes, this is a very cheap but slow board. The LicheeRV is primarily for networking purposes and other IoT use-cases....

The Sipeed LicheeRV was announced last year and initially targeting support for OpenWrt-based Linux distributions, but Canonical recently has been working on getting support for this RISC-V board squared away in time for Ubuntu 22.10.

This appears to be part of an increasing focus by the Ubuntu maker for being a leading distribution contender for RISC-V hardware.

Eye on Design is the official blog of the US-based professional graphic design organization AIGA. They've just published a fascinating interview with Tom Persky, who calls himself "the last man standing in the floppy disk business." He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene....

Perkins: I was actually in the floppy disk duplication business. Not in a million years did I think I would ever sell blank floppy disks. Duplicating disks in the 1980s and early 1990s was as good as printing money. It was unbelievably profitable. I only started selling blank copies organically over time. You could still go down to any office supply store, or any computer store to buy them. Why would you try to find me, when you could just buy disks off the shelf? But then these larger companies stopped carrying them or went out of business and people came to us. So here I am, a small company with a floppy disk inventory, and I find myself to be a worldwide supplier of this product. My business, which used to be 90% CD and DVD duplication, is now 90% selling blank floppy disks. It's shocking to me....

Q: Where does this focus on floppy disks come from? Why not work with another medium...?

Perkins: When people ask me: "Why are you into floppy disks today?" the answer is: "Because I forgot to get out of the business." Everybody else in the world looked at the future and came to the conclusion that this was a dying industry. Because I'd already bought all my equipment and inventory, I thought I'd just keep this revenue stream. I stuck with it and didn't try to expand. Over time, the total number of floppy users has gone down. However, the number of people who provided the product went down even faster. If you look at those two curves, you see that there is a growing market share for the last man standing in the business, and that man is me....

I made the decision to buy a large quantity, a couple of million disks, and we've basically been living off of that inventory ever since. From time to time, we get very lucky. About two years ago a guy called me up and said: "My grandfather has all this floppy junk in the garage and I want it out. Will you take it?" Of course I wanted to take it off his hands. So, we went back and forth and negotiated a fair price. Without going into specifics, he ended up with two things that he wanted: an empty garage and a sum of money. I ended up with around 50,000 floppy disks and that's a good deal.
In the interview Perkins reveals he has around half a million floppy disks in stock — 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch, 8-inch, "and some rather rare diskettes. Another thing that happened organically was the start of our floppy disk recycling service. We give people the opportunity to send us floppy disks and we recycle them, rather than put them into a landfill. The sheer volume of floppy disks we get in has really surprised me, it's sometimes a 1,000 disks a day."

But he also estimates its use is more widespread than we realize. "Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That's a huge consumer. There's also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.... "

And in the end he seems to have a genuine affection for floppy disk technology. "There's this joke in which a three-year-old little girl comes to her father holding a floppy disk in her hand. She says: 'Daddy, Daddy, somebody 3D-printed the save icon.' The floppy disks will be an icon forever."

The interview is excerpted from a new book called Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium.

Hat tip for finding the story to the newly-redesigned front page of The Verge.

Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite chuckle to a contagious howl of mirth. Scientists are now developing an AI system that aims to recreate these nuances of humor by laughing in the right way at the right time. The Guardian reports: The team behind the laughing robot, which is called Erica, say that the system could improve natural conversations between people and AI systems. "We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy," said Dr Koji Inoue, of Kyoto University, the lead author of the research, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. "So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with users is to share their laughter."

Inoue and his colleagues have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and the robot, who was initially teleoperated by four female amateur actors. The dialogue data was annotated for solo laughs, social laughs (where humor isn't involved, such as in polite or embarrassed laughter) and laughter of mirth. This data was then used to train a machine learning system to decide whether to laugh, and to choose the appropriate type. It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations.

It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations. "Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn't easy because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all," said Inoue. "We had to carefully categorize exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to." [...] The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character. "We think that they can show this through their conversational behaviours, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style," said Inoue, although he added that it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a "casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend." "One of the things I'd keep in mind is that a robot or algorithm will never be able to understand you," points out Prof Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. "It doesn't know you, it doesn't understand you and doesn't understand the meaning of laughter."

"They're not sentient, but they might get very good at making you believe they understand what's going on."

Intel is replacing its Pentium and Celeron brands with just Intel Processor. The new branding will replace both existing brands in 2023 notebooks and supposedly make things easier when consumers are looking to purchase budget laptops. From a report: Intel will now focus on its Core, Evo, and vPro brands for its flagship products and use Intel Processor in what it calls "essential" products. "Intel is committed to driving innovation to benefit users, and our entry-level processor families have been crucial for raising the PC standard across all price points," explains Josh Newman, VP and interim general manager of mobile client platforms at Intel. "The new Intel Processor branding will simplify our offerings so users can focus on choosing the right processor for their needs."

The end of the Pentium brand comes after nearly 30 years of use. Originally introduced in 1993, flagship Pentium chips were first introduced in high-end desktop machines before making the move to laptops. Intel has largely been using its Core branding for its flagship line of processors ever since its introduction in 2006, and Intel repurposed the Pentium branding for midrange processors instead. Celeron was Intel's brand name for low-cost PCs. Launched around five years after Pentium, Celeron chips have always offered a lot less performance at a lot less cost for laptop makers and, ultimately, consumers. The first Celeron chip in 1998 was based on a Pentium II processor, and the latest Celeron processors are largely used in Chromebooks and low-cost laptops.