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Submission + - Ubuntu 23.10 is a Minotaur that moves faster and takes up less space (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release, and it's one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn't stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.

Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.

Elsewhere in the installer, you can now choose ZFS as your primary file system. There's also an experimental option to set up Trusted Platform Module (TPM) full-disk encryption rather than rely entirely on passphrases to encrypt your disk. This brings Ubuntu up to speed with Windows in offering a way to both secure your system and find out the hard way that you lack a backup key to get in after messing with your boot options. (Kidding! Somewhat.)

Comment Re:a cruise company based in Australia (Score 1) 69

Aussie to Greenland, thats a long cruise.

Yep, and they likely burned a lot of diesel fuel getting there. Coming up to reduce CO2 emissions are nuclear powered cruise ships.
https://www.cruisehive.com/shi...

Nuclear is not green nor neutral. There's long-term waste that must be dealt with and that no one wants to even talk about. As if that's someone else's problem. Nuclear is arguably worse than coal for the planet in terms of its long-term toxic waste requirements and responsibilities. Don't both Chernobyl and Fukushima serve well as cautionary tales, (not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki)? This month treated, radioactive water has been spilled into the ocean because there's too much of it to store over the short-term, nevermind the long-term because that's not possible to manage. At one point ice-walls were engineered as a container, and they seemed to have failed in short order. Ironically, seafood is a big deal in that part of the world, (not that the radioactive water won't disperse -- and I Am Not A Scientist).

The idea of nuclear powered cruise-ships only seems like another accident waiting to happen, at sea no less, especially given the capital life of a ship. Hardly worth the overall risk, especially given their limited value to both the general public and the planet.

There's a reason it is so controversial for scientists to argue for nuclear powered probes like Voyager.

It is a well reasoned argument that I wrote, not a troll post. Not a reason for fanbois of nuclear energy to downvote my post to Hell, but this is Slashdot after all, and some people are stuck in an endless loop of their own making. Hopefully they'll be here long enough to clean up leftover radioactivity long after I've left the room.

Comment Re:a cruise company based in Australia (Score -1, Troll) 69

by SpzToid (#63848910) Attached to: A Luxury Cruise Ship, Stuck Off Greenland's Coast for 3 Days, Is Pulled Free

Aussie to Greenland, thats a long cruise.

Yep, and they likely burned a lot of diesel fuel getting there. Coming up to reduce CO2 emissions are nuclear powered cruise ships. https://www.cruisehive.com/shi...

Nuclear is not green nor neutral. There's long-term waste that must be dealt with and that no one wants to even talk about. As if that's someone else's problem. Nuclear is arguably worse than coal for the planet in terms of its long-term toxic waste requirements and responsibilities. Don't both Chernobyl and Fukushima serve well as cautionary tales, (not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki)? This month treated, radioactive water has been spilled into the ocean because there's too much of it to store over the short-term, nevermind the long-term because that's not possible to manage. At one point ice-walls were engineered as a container, and they seemed to have failed in short order. Ironically, seafood is a big deal in that part of the world, (not that the radioactive water won't disperse -- and I Am Not A Scientist).

The idea of nuclear powered cruise-ships only seems like another accident waiting to happen, at sea no less, especially given the capital life of a ship. Hardly worth the overall risk, especially given their limited value to both the general public and the planet.

There's a reason it is so controversial for scientists to argue for nuclear powered probes like Voyager.

Comment Re:Why (Score 1) 47

by SpzToid (#63834592) Attached to: Wyze Security Camera Owners Were Briefly Able To See Feeds From Other Users
The firmware linked to below in the thread looks pretty good, and I'm pleased to have learned of it today. I'll give it some thought, but I'm not in a rush. I'm pleased using my Wyze v3 camera outdoors with Wyze's RTSP modified firmware, with all "phone-home" settings off, on a VLAN. It's pointed outdoors at a public street. I use it as part of an Open Broadcast Studio background layer for my video conferences, along with DroidCam OBS.

Comment Re:All trams are powered by windmills... (Score 1) 107

by SpzToid (#63779706) Attached to: Can Computing Clean Up Its Act?
Trams in Amsterdam are powered exclusively using renewable energy. Citation, (in Dutch):

https://www.ovmagazine.nl/nieu...

Here's an English translation, (GVB is the public transportation department):

GVB switched to Dutch green electricity

From 2019, the tram and metro in Amsterdam will run on Dutch green electricity. This is the result of the tender that GVB started in May this year together with Metro and Tram from the municipality of Amsterdam.

The tender was won by energy supplier Nuon/Vattenfall, which generates green energy with windmills on the Maasvlakte, among other things. The electricity comes 100 percent from the Netherlands. GVB wants to operate climate neutrally by 2025. In collaboration with Nuon/Vattenfall, the urban transport operator will also realize additional sustainable generation capacity to meet energy needs.

Decisive part

To meet the demand for green electricity, the tenderer had to write a plan. “Nuon/Vattenfall managed to distinguish itself on this point by offering Dutch wind power especially for GVB at a competitive price, originating from various wind farms,” says GVB.

According to the company, the knife cuts both ways. On the one hand, GVB and Nuon/Vattenfall jointly invest in the generation of sustainable energy. “On the other hand, we will ensure that GVB employees and residents of Amsterdam also benefit from this collaboration.”

Large consumer

In a year, the transport company consumes as much energy as 45,000 Amsterdam households. In 2025, the company must operate climate neutral. “Additionally greening electricity consumption is the next step to achieve this. As a large consumer of electricity, there is still a lot to be gained here.”

Submission + - Can computing clean up its act? (economist.com) 2

Submitted by SpzToid
SpzToid writes: The industry consumes as much electricity as Britain—and rising

What you notice first is how silent it is,” says Kimmo Koski, the boss of the Finnish IT Centre for Science. Dr Koski is describing LUMI—Finnish for “snow”—the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, which sits 250km south of the Arctic Circle in the town of Kajaani in Finland.

LUMI, which was inaugurated last year, is used for everything from climate modelling to searching for new drugs. It has tens of thousands of individual processors and is capable of performing up to 429 quadrillion calculations every second. That makes it the third-most-powerful supercomputer in the world. Powered by hydroelectricity, and with its waste heat used to help warm homes in Kajaani, it even boasts negative emissions of carbon dioxide.

LUMI offers a glimpse of the future of high-performance computing (HPC), both on dedicated supercomputers and in the cloud infrastructure that runs much of the internet. Over the past decade the demand for HPC has boomed, driven by technologies like machine learning, genome sequencing and simulations of everything from stockmarkets and nuclear weapons to the weather. It is likely to carry on rising, for such applications will happily consume as much computing power as you can throw at them. Over the same period the amount of computing power required to train a cutting-edge AI model has been doubling every five months.

All this has implications for the environment. HPC—and computing more generally—is becoming a big user of energy. The International Energy Agency reckons data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption, roughly the same as the entire British economy. That is expected to rise to 4% by 2030. With its eye on government pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the computing industry is trying to find ways to do more with less and boost the efficiency of its products. The work is happening at three levels: that of individual microchips; of the computers that are built from those chips; and the data centres that, in turn, house the computers.

Start with the microchips themselves. Digital computers have become vastly more efficient over the past 80 years. A modern machine can do around 10trn calculations for the same amount of energy as a single calculation would have consumed in the aftermath of the second world war. Much of that enormous progress was a result of the industry’s attempts to stick to Moore’s Law—the observation that the number of components that can be crammed onto an integrated circuit doubles every couple of years.

Comment Re:Doctor's prescription (Score 1) 11

by SpzToid (#63692394) Attached to: Stability AI Releases 'Stable Doodle', a Sketch-to-Image Tool
My doctor faxes prescriptions directly to the pharmacy as requested, since I can't remember how long ago exactly. ...gotta keep up with tech, right?

In fact, once the prescription has been filled and I haven't arrived before closing time to pick it up, it goes into a 24/7 vending machine with a PIN for the next week.

Life is good, (but don't talk about the delightful weather improvements where I am due to climate change, which is terrible over the long term. I am freaked out about that 'technology'.)

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