Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Power infrastructure (Score 2) 200

by symbolset (#66222976) Attached to: 842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave

It makes no sense to spend more to tiptoe through costly incremental steps of infrastructure buildout buying stuff you crave to be rid of when you can hop right to the conclusion. Fuel is bad. You use it and then you need more fuel. That's a vulnerability to the fuel supplier, the logistics, the free market for fuel, changing government meddling. Fix it right once without fuel and be done with it for 30 years. It's not like there won't be another problem to solve the next day.

Comment Re:Power infrastructure (Score 2) 200

by symbolset (#66222872) Attached to: 842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave

>as they are not allowed to use oil or coal

Or natural gas. No carbon. Carbon fuels amplify the already obscene thermal output by at least 2.5.

Also, none of them is dumb enough to go fission. The time to power is an order of magnitude greater than their expiration date if they don't have it. And their server and power costs are bad enough. They don't need to compound those expenses with the costliest source of energy available.

Comment Re:Amazing if it works (Score 3, Interesting) 111

by symbolset (#66215538) Attached to: IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip

The transistors aren't actually smaller. It's standard in the field to market the next chip generation as a smaller size when they mean equivalent to the new size. In this case the transistors are stacked vertically so looking down you get layers X areal density of the 2 dimensional surface. We don't do this with flash stacks, which now have up to 321 layers and are mapped to 1000+.

Comment Using Z (Score 5, Informative) 111

by symbolset (#66215522) Attached to: IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip

The angstrom scale business is marketing fluff to make the density increase understandable to consumers. But this is one of the developments leveraging the Z dimension that are legitimate progress. The Z dimension gives more than just the same chip folded like origami. The net distance traveled by a signal in a cycle can be reduced, which yields massive improvement in performance without additional cost of power/heat.

Submission + - Max Planck Slapped With Paper Retractions by Suspected Rogue Algorithm (science.org) 1

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: Being a titan in the history of physics, the 1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics, having the smallest rational physical measurement (the Planck Length) named after you, and being deceased for 79 years is all apparently still not enough to prevent your work from being threshed and hit with retractions by an algorithm. Science.org has a succinct article that explains it:

"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."

The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.

"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."

However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:

"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."

Comment Motorola owns the patent (Score 2) 54

A colleague of mine working for Motorola patented encrypted memory sometime in the 2006-2010 timeframe. Maybe Motorola figured out that AMD was violating their patent and negotiated royalties privately with AMD. I don't know; I don't work at Motorola, but if AMD had to suddenly start paying royalties, it makes sense that they'd remove the feature from lower end, lower margin processors.

Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.

iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.

iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."

Comment Doom (Score 4, Interesting) 72

Super El Niño, AMOC shutting down. Mauna Loa CO2 shutting down reporting 432 PPM before we shut them up. The mighty Colorado river died. We drank it up. India has been over 95F for months, and parts are becoming uninhabitable reaching 114F.

Dinosaurs had 165 million years. Sea turtles 260 million. Genus Homo, 2 million. Sentience may be self defeating, which solves the Fermi Paradox.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Turn on, tune up, rock out." -- Billy Gibbons

Close