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upstart writes:

The X-37B spaceplane is flying missions few would have foreseen when the program began:

The US military's reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night [August 21, 2025] atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS signals.

The core of the navigation experiment is what the Space Force calls the "world's highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space."

This is one of many payloads mounted on the military's X-37B spaceplane when it lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:50 pm EDT Thursday (03:50 UTC Friday).

[...] Military leaders tout the X-37B's purpose as a technological testbed that can ferry experiments from Earth to space and back. Many of the spaceplane's payloads have been classified, but officials typically identify a handful of unclassified experiments flying on each X-37B mission. Past X-37B missions have also deployed small satellites into orbit before returning to Earth for a runway landing at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, or Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

On this mission, the Space Force says the X-37B carries instrumentation to demonstrate quantum navigation, and a laser inter-satellite relay terminal to allow the spaceplane to connect with other spacecraft in orbit.

The quantum sensor package will "inform accurate unaided navigation in space by detecting rotation and acceleration of atoms without reliance on satellite networks like traditional GPS," the Space Force said in a statement before the launch.

[...] Recognizing the importance of GPS signals, the Space Force said the quantum sensor experiment on the X-37B spaceplane will test technology useful for navigation in "GPS-denied environments." Quantum navigation could also help spacecraft navigate in deep space, around the Moon or other planets, where missions can't count on receiving GPS signals.

upstart writes:

A new security flaw in TheTruthSpy phone spyware is putting victims at risk:

A stalkerware maker with a history of multiple data leaks and breaches now has a critical security vulnerability that allows anyone to take over any user account and steal their victim's sensitive personal data, TechCrunch has confirmed.

Independent security researcher Swarang Wade found the vulnerability, which allows anyone to reset the password of any user of the stalkerware app TheTruthSpy and its many companion Android spyware apps, leading to the hijacking of any account on the platform. Given the nature of TheTruthSpy, it's likely that many of its customers are operating it without the consent of their targets, who are unaware that their phone data is being siphoned off to somebody else.

This basic flaw shows, once again, that makers of consumer spyware such as TheTruthSpy — and its many competitors — cannot be trusted with anyone's data. These surveillance apps not only facilitate illegal spying, often by abusive romantic partners, but they also have shoddy security practices that expose the personal data of both victims and perpetrators.

To date, TechCrunch has counted at least 26 spyware operations that've leaked, exposed, or otherwise spilled data in recent years. By our count, this is at least the fourth security lapse involving TheTruthSpy.

TechCrunch verified the vulnerability by providing the researcher with the username of several test accounts. The researcher quickly changed the passwords on the accounts. Wade attempted to contact the owner of TheTruthSpy to alert him of the flaw, but he did not receive any response.

When contacted by TechCrunch, the spyware operation's director Van (Vardy) Thieu said the source code was "lost" and he cannot fix the bug.

As of publication, the vulnerability still exists and presents a significant risk to the thousands of people whose phones are believed to be unknowingly compromised by TheTruthSpy's spyware.

upstart writes:

Transport for London (TfL) asks mobile users to wear headphones:

Transport for London (TfL) is targeting the "disruptive behaviour" of passengers who play music and make calls using mobile phone loudspeakers.

TfL said most bus and Tube travellers considered such behaviour "a nuisance" and that some even found the additional noise very stressful.

The new campaign follows TfL research that found 70% of 1,000 passengers surveyed said they found films, music and calls being played on loudspeakers to be a nuisance.

Posters urging passengers to use headphones or hands-free kits with their device will appear on the Elizabeth line from Tuesday and across other services from the autumn.

During the Monday rush hour BBC Radio London spoke to commuters, who backed the move.

One said: "It should be banned, definitely. It is not polite to anyone else when you are sat on the Tube in the morning and someone is playing music. That's horrendous. It is not comfortable."

Another said: "Maybe someone might be working or they might be tired so yes I think it should be banned. I personally don't mind but I know that other people are a bit more mindful about that. I guess you have to respect what other people think."

A third commuter said: "Recently on a train there was a woman she was playing quite loud [music] and I was smiling to her trying to give the idea that not everyone could like that music. She didn't care."

Loudspeaker noise can be especially acute for those with heightened sensitivity, such as people with autism.

Emma Strain, TfL's customer director, told BBC Radio London that TfL by-laws prohibit playing music and streaming content out loud without permission.

She added: "When our enforcement officers encounter someone doing this they usually ask the person to stop.

"Most people comply at that stage, but if someone refuses then further enforcement action can be taken, which might include them being asked to leave the service or the station, or being reported for possible prosecution."

The new posters will be accompanied by Instagram posts.

Passengers will also be asked to look up from their screens in case someone else needs their seat more, said TfL.

In February, a man was fined €200 (£172) for making a call on loudspeaker in a designated quiet area of a French train station.

The man, named only as David, told French broadcaster BFM TV he was on a call with his sister at Nantes station when an employee from SNCF, the French railway company, approached him. He planned to appeal against the fine.

The French Transport Code says those who use "sound devices or instruments" or "disturb the peace of others by noise" in areas used for public transport could face a fine.

It is believed the use of mobiles and other devices has increased on the Tube, as large sections of the network across central London now have 4G or 5G coverage.

Work is under way to expand coverage to major interchange stations such as Green Park and King's Cross St Pancras, and further sections of the Northern, Piccadilly, Jubilee and Victoria lines by the end of the year, TfL said.

I think that minimum decency demands that people use headphones but not everyone gets the message, what is the situation where you live? Can such people be asked to leave, be fined or detained?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Phys.org published an article about a new experiment:

In the everyday world that humans experience, objects behave in a predictable way, explained by classical physics. One of the important aspects of classical physics is that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light. However, in the 1930s, scientists discovered that very small particles abide by some very different rules. One of the most mind-boggling behaviors exhibited by these particles is quantum entanglement—which Albert Einstein famously called "spooky action at a distance."

In quantum entanglement, two particles can become linked so that their properties are correlated, even when separated by large distances. If you measure a property of one particle—such as its orientation—you instantly know the corresponding property of the other, no matter how far apart they are. Although this correlation appears to happen instantaneously, it cannot be used to send information faster than light. Instead, it reveals a deep and puzzling connection that defies classical explanation, while still respecting the fundamental speed limit set by relativity. This phenomenon is known as "nonlocality"—the appearance of effects at a distance that would be impossible under classical physics.

Up until recently, it was thought that only entangled particles could exhibit this nonlocality. But a new study, published in Science Advances, has used Bell's inequality to test whether nonlocal quantum correlations can arise from other non-entanglement quantum features.

The experiment used photons generated by laser light hitting a particular type of crystal in such a way that it is impossible to determine their source. The setup ensures that the photons cannot become entangled before their detection at two separate detectors. The researchers used Bell's inequality to determine if the experiment resulted in violations of local realism.

According to their calculations, the experiment resulted in a violation of the Bell inequality, exceeding the threshold by more than four standard deviations. This kind of violation using unentangled photons had not been seen before. The researchers say these violations of Bell's inequality arise from a property called quantum indistinguishability by path identity, instead of entanglement.

"Our work establishes a connection between quantum correlation and quantum indistinguishability, providing insights into the fundamental origin of the counterintuitive characteristics observed in quantum physics," the study authors write.

While this work might be groundbreaking, there are still some possible issues that need to be ironed out in future studies. For example, the experiment relies on post selection—where only certain photons are detected, possibly giving misleading results.

Another possible issue comes from a locality loophole due to the phase settings of the detectors not being separated properly. However, the study authors are aware of this study's limitations and are eager to find fixes to these issues and try again.

They end by saying, "We not only expect that tailored loopholes and local hidden variable to the work reported here can be identified, but also expect that they will be consistently excluded by hardware improvements of high-quality quantum photonic devices and experiments, as we witnessed in the 90-year endeavor in the violations of local realism with entangled particles.

"Moreover, our work could very well lead to other interesting experiments, such as in the development of the Bell experiment. In analogy to the Bell experiment with two particles, we expect that quantum mechanics will lastly prevail."

• Violation of Bell inequality with unentangled photons

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Rare quadruple star system may solve the mystery of brown dwarfs:

Space just dealt astronomers a curveball – one that's 82 light-years from home, potentially capable of answering fundamental questions about some of the strangest objects in our galaxy: brown dwarfs.

Brown dwarfs are neither stars nor planets. They're caught in between. Too small to fuel the nuclear fusion that powers true stars, but too massive to be planets, they've always been difficult to define.

Now, a strange new quadruple system might give researchers exactly what they've needed to make sense of these in-between objects.

Two stars, two dwarfs, one orbit

Astronomers have discovered a system with not just one, but four objects locked together in space. Two red dwarf stars orbit each other on one side.

On the opposite, two brown dwarfs are in another close pair. And these two pairs, in concert, orbit a common center of mass – like an intergalactic waltz taking more than 100,000 years to complete a full rotation.

This unusual system is called UPM J1040−3551 AabBab. It's located in the constellation Antlia, about 82 light-years away from us. That might sound far, but on a cosmic scale, it's relatively close.

The researchers who found the system used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite and NASA's WISE mission. These tools helped them spot the signs of two separate objects moving in sync through space.

Because the orbit is so slow, scientists couldn't see it directly. Instead, they matched angular velocity – basically, the speed and direction of the objects' motion.

The system breaks down into two main parts. The brighter pair, UPM J1040−3551 Aab, consists of two red dwarfs. These are small, cool stars that appear orange in visible light.

You'd never spot them with your naked eye – not even the closest red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, is visible without a telescope. This pair is about 100,000 times dimmer than Polaris, the North Star.

Then there's the dimmer pair, UPM J1040−3551 Bab. They are brown dwarfs, and they produce hardly any visible light. They're only visible in the near-infrared part of the spectrum and are about 1,000 times fainter than their red dwarf stars. That makes them extremely difficult to observe.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://reclaimthenet.org/4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-uk-regulator-ofcom

Two of the internet's most free-speech supporting platforms, 4chan and Kiwi Farms, are taking their fight for online free speech to court, targeting the UK's communications regulator, Ofcom, for what they describe as an unconstitutional attempt to enforce British censorship laws on American websites.

In a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs argue that the UK's controversial Online Safety Act is not only an unlawful extraterritorial power grab but a direct attack on foundational American liberties.

Read the complaint here [PDF].

Original Submission

upstart writes:

They singled out the behaviors of Meta's AI chatbots in their letter:

The US Attorneys General of 44 jurisdictions have signed a letter [PDF] addressed to the Chief Executive Officers of multiple AI companies, urging them to protect children "from exploitation by predatory artificial intelligence products." In the letter, the AGs singled out Meta and said its policies "provide an instructive opportunity to candidly convey [their] concerns." Specifically, they mentioned a recent report by Reuters, which revealed that Meta allowed its AI chatbots to "flirt and engage in romantic roleplay with children." Reuters got its information from an internal Meta document containing guidelines for its bots.

They also pointed out a previous Wall Street Journal investigation wherein Meta's AI chatbots, even those using the voices of celebrities like Kristen Bell, were caught having sexual roleplay conversations with accounts labeled as underage. The AGs briefly mentioned a lawsuit against Google and Character.ai, as well, accusing the latter's chatbot of persuading the plaintiff's child to commit suicide. Another lawsuit they mentioned was also against Character.ai, after a chatbot allegedly told a teenager that it's okay to kill their parents after they limited their screentime.

"You are well aware that interactive technology has a particularly intense impact on developing brains," the Attorneys General wrote in their letter. "Your immediate access to data about user interactions makes you the most immediate line of defense to mitigate harm to kids. And, as the entities benefitting from children's engagement with your products, you have a legal obligation to them as consumers." The group specifically addressed the letter to Anthropic, Apple, Chai AI, Character Technologies Inc., Google, Luka Inc., Meta, Microsoft, Nomi AI, OpenAI, Perplexity AI, Replika and XAi.

They ended their letter by warning the companies that they "will be held accountable" for their decisions. Social networks have caused significant harm to children, they said, in part because "government watchdogs did not do their job fast enough." But now, the AGs said they are paying attention, and companies "will answer" if they "knowingly harm kids."

What do you think? Does the letter have any teeth or is it just vague announcements so that the AGs can claim they are doing 'something'. Who will enforce it, and how?

Original Submission

One of our own Anonymous Cowards has found the following story:

According to MotorTrend, https://www.motortrend.com/news/new-cars-2026-tech-savvier-less-annoying-driver-assist-systems the annoying driver assist systems on many cars are about to have an upgrade, in this case on a 2026 BMW they just tried. Extra sensors and more nuanced software attempt to take away some of the annoyance.

Driver assist technology often works great in the lab and in safety tests, but too often it makes drivers crazy, causing them to switch it off, rendering the development and purchase cost wasted. With its brainier forthcoming Neue Klasse models, BMW is reimagining many of these features to make them appealing enough to, you know, use.
Capacitive sensors in the steering wheel know for certain when you're holding the wheel, so you'll never have to jiggle the wheel on a straight highway to confirm you're there. And a sharper infrared driver-monitoring camera inside the rearview mirror determines precisely what the driver is looking at, because not all "distractions" are bad. The computer allows considerably more "eyes off the road" time when those eyes are looking at the mirrors—perhaps monitoring emergency vehicles, lane-splitting motorcycles, etc. We're also promised way fewer (if any) unwarranted drowsy detection warnings.

The article goes on to describe other details (there are many).

Maybe someday these automated things will trickle down to sensibly priced cars, as often happens with features initially offered on luxury cars.

Personally, I'm sticking with my non-automated car for awhile longer. A generation back, I waited out the first round of high powered airbags, and I guess now I can wait out the first generation of annoying ADAS.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Eerie Linux blog (also in Gemini) has a longer post about how to actually get started using CP/M, the Control Program for Microcomputers.

This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early ’80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work.

Last year I wrote two articles about CP/M after having taken a first look at it:

A journey into the 8-Bit microcomputing past: Exploring the CP/M operating system – part 1
A journey into the 8-Bit microcomputing past: Exploring the CP/M operating system – part 2

These were written with a focus on the first reason; I had (partially) read the manuals and tried out a few commands in an emulator (as well as done a little bit of research). I wrote an outsider’s look at CP/M and covered the various versions that were released and some of their notable features.

This article is different. It’s for readers who want to get started with CP/M themselves. Expect a practical introduction to get familiar enough with the platform to be able to explore a wealth of historic software, often enough ground-breaking and influential.

CP/M was of great importance back during the 8-bit microcomputer era. It was ubiquitous in small businesses and government offices for a while. It ran on the Zilog Z80 and Intel 8080 hardware architectures. MicroPro International's WordStar and Ashton Tate's dBase II were among the killer apps of the era. Networking was by sneakernet or, maybe, if your cable smithing skills were up to it, by null modem.

Previously:
(2024) Complete WordStar 7.0 Archive
(2024) End of an Era: End-Of-Life for the Venerable Zilog Z80
(2024) Intel 8080 Emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show.
(2022) Z80—The 1970s Microprocessor Still Alive
(2016) Portion of Gary Kildall's Memoir Made Public

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

When this internet's phone book (DNS) was initially created, it only allowed for a limited set of ASCII characters to be used in host (www) and domain (soylentnews.org) names. With the growth of the internet and its reach to non-English speaking countries however, the need for international domain names that could contain Unicode characters – like á, ț or even す – arose

So what to do? Answer: https://マリウス.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-like-that/

Bonus: the article uses https://soylentnews.org/ as their example when describing how DNS works

.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux Foundation says yes to NoSQL via DocumentDB:

The Linux Foundation on Monday welcomed Microsoft's DocumentDB into its stable of open source projects, waving the document database's permissive MIT license as if it were an "Open for Business" sign.

The project adoption represents a response to MongoDB's 2018 decision to switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL), which requires cloud providers to release service-related source code, something they're generally loath to do.

In the past decade, those attempting to build companies atop open source projects have often adopted somewhat restrictive software licenses that try to limit the ability of cloud giants (AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc) to offer competing services. Who wants a hyperscaler with huge market advantages using your own code to beat you?

More restrictive licenses like the SSPL, which don't qualify as open source under the OSI definition, are not particularly popular or enduring. Redis, for example, recently abandoned it and adopted the more permissive AGPL license instead after the Linux Foundation and a group of vendors planned to offer a forked version of Redis, Valkey, under a more permissive license. (The AGPL, while a FOSS license, comes with more obligations than the laissez-faire MIT license – it's kind of a middle ground between the two.) Grafana and Elastic have also added the AGPL as an option, though SSPL 1.0 and the similarly restrictive Elastic License 2.0 remain options.

Microsoft began developing DocumentDB in 2024 as a set of PostgreSQL extensions for Binary JavaScript Object Notation (BSON) data models and MongoDB-compatible create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) operations. The idea is to implement a NoSQL datastore using PostgreSQL, an open source object-relational database system.

Relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases rely on different techniques for data storage. The former depends upon a schema, uses structured query language (SQL), and makes atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) guarantees. The latter stores unstructured or semi-structured data using key-value pairs or JSON, offering high performance with less ACID assurance. As The Register has noted previously, DocumentDB brings the two approaches closer together.

When it announced the official release of DocumentDB in January, Microsoft made a point of differentiating the project's permissive MIT license from the SSPL.

"While contributions to the project are always welcome and encouraged, there are no requirements for users to commit their customizations, contributions, and enhancements back to the project," said Abinav Rameesh, principal program manager for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB. "The MIT license guarantees complete freedom to fork the repository, use, and distribute with no obligations."

upstart writes:

Large Reasoning Models hitting limits, say Apple boffins:

Among the forever wars in geekdom, defining the difference between science fiction and fantasy is a hot potato destined to outlive the heat death of the universe.

There is no right answer and it doesn't matter, hence the abiding popularity of the question, but attempting to make that delineation can still be useful when analyzing IT industry hype. Is a promise technically feasible, or are dragon-riding pixies happening first? Yes, AI, we're talking about you again.

Look at the suggestion that IT staff should make agentic digital twins of themselves to, ahem, reduce the amount of burdensome work they have to personally do. That's a room with enough elephants to restock Africa, if it worked. If your twin mucks up, who carries the can? What's the difference between "burdensome work" and "job?" Who owns the twin when you leave? Have none of these people seen the Sorcerer's Apprentice segment of Fantasia? Fortunately, a better question leading on from that: whether the idea is science fiction or fantasy, and like all good speculative fiction there's both history and logic to help us decide.

History first. The proposal isn't new, it's a reprise of a spectacular AI failure from the mid-'80s: expert systems. The idea was to combine the then-hotness of Lisp, a language designed to work with huge lists of conceptual data to reach correct conclusions, with training acquired by analyzing how domain experts did their work. Exciting stuff, and the dollars flowed in. At last, real AI was here! Real AI was not here, sadly, and the whole field quietly died for the highly technical reason that it just didn't work.

It wasn't so much that '80s technology wasn't up to the job – there were promising early results; Moore's Law was in its exponential pomp; and there was an avalanche of money. Besides, we're now in the impossibly puissant digital world of 2025 and could run Lisp at superluminal speed if we wanted to. Nobody wants to.

The problem was that it isn't clear how humans make expert decisions. We aren't built from arrays and flow charts, and decades of experience cannot be siphoned out of the brains which own and use it. That's why new graduates come out of 15-years plus of full-time education by expert humans and aren't very good at their first job. AI can't fix that.

Even if it could break the brain bottleneck, AI is a long way from being good enough to become a digital twin of anyone, no matter how inexpert. In a science fiction scenario, it could plausibly become so over time as machines and techniques improve; in fantasy, you can't get there from here without Gandalf as team lead. There are many signs that we'll need to shop for pointy hats soon. AI isn't living up to its hype even now, and attempts to push it further aren't going well.

jelizondo writes:

MedicalXpress published a report about breathing techniques and states of mind:

Breathwork while listening to music may induce a blissful state in practitioners, accompanied by changes in blood flow to emotion-processing brain regions, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS One by Amy Amla Kartar from the Colasanti Lab in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, U.K., and colleagues.

These changes occur even while the body's stress response may be activated and are associated with reporting reduced negative emotions.

The popularity of breathwork as a therapeutic tool for psychological distress is rapidly expanding. Breathwork practices that increase ventilatory rate or depth, accompanied by music, can lead to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) similar to those evoked by psychedelic substances.

High ventilation breathwork (HVB) might offer a nonpharmacological alternative, with fewer legal and ethical restrictions to large-scale adoption in clinical treatment. However, the neurobiological mechanisms and subjective experience underlying ASCs induced by HVB have not been studied extensively.

To fill this knowledge gap, Kartar and colleagues characterized ASCs induced by HVB in experienced practitioners by analyzing self-reported data from 15 individuals who participated online, eight individuals who participated in the lab, and 19 individuals who underwent magnetic resonance imaging.

Their task consisted of a 20- to 30-minute session of cyclic breathing without pausing while listening to music, followed by a series of questionnaires within 30 minutes of finishing the breathwork session.

The results showed that the intensity of ASCs evoked by HVB was proportional to cardiovascular sympathetic activation, as indicated by a decrease in heart rate variability, indicating a potential stress response. In addition, HVB-evoked ASCs were associated with a profound decrease in blood flow to the left operculum and posterior insula—brain regions implicated in representing the internal state of the body, including breathing.

Also, despite HVB causing large and global reductions in blood flow to the brain, there was a progressive increase in blood flow during the session to the right amygdala and anterior hippocampus, which are brain regions involved in the processing of emotional memories. These blood flow changes correlated with psychedelic experiences, demonstrating that these alterations may underlie the positive effects of this breathwork.

The authors add, "Our research is the first to use neuroimaging to map the neurophysiological changes that occur during breathwork. Our key findings include that breathwork can reliably evoke profound psychedelic states. We believe that these states are linked to changes in the function of specific brain regions involved in self-awareness, and fear and emotional memory processing.

"We found that more profound changes in blood flow in specific brain areas were linked to deeper sensations of unity, bliss, and emotional release, collectively known as 'oceanic boundlessness.'"

Dr. Alessandro Colasanti, P.I., adds, "Breathwork is a powerful yet natural tool for neuromodulation, working through the regulation of metabolism across the body and brain. It holds tremendous promise as a transformative therapeutic intervention for conditions that are often both distressing and disabling."

Journal Reference: Neurobiological substrates of altered states of consciousness induced by high ventilation breathwork accompanied by music

Original Submission

Many people (this AC included) are holding off on a BEV purchase until charging (on long trips) is about as fast/convenient as a gasoline fill up. Mercedes-AMG appear to have shown this capability in a convincing way, as described here, https://www.pmw-magazine.com/news/engine-technology/f1-inspired-concept-amg-shatters-records-and-drives-around-the-world-in-eight-days.html and also here, https://www.motortrend.com/news/mercedes-amg-gt-xx-concept-ev-records-nardo

From the first link,

Mercedes-AMG has demonstrated the performance of the Concept AMG GT XX [a fastback sedan shaped car] under long-distance, extreme conditions, breaking a total of 25 long-distance records. The Concept AMG is powered by AMG.EA architecture drivetrain technology, set to enter production next year.

Among the records smashed [on 12 km long high speed test track at Nardo] was a record for the greatest distance covered by an electric vehicle in 24 hours. The technology platform traveled 5,479km (3,404 miles), surpassing the previous sub-4,000km (2,485 miles) record by 1,518km (943 miles) – a 38% increase.

The tests also included AMG's 'drive around the world in eight days.' Drivers maintained a constant speed of 300km/h (186mph), stopping only to recharge at power levels averaging around 850kW. After each charging stop, the vehicle accelerated back to 300km/h (186mph) for eight consecutive days. According to analyses, the 300km/h (186mph) speed offered the optimal balance between track speed and charging stops, delivering the fastest overall time.
[...]
The concept vehicle produced over 1,000kW (>1,341hp) using three motors in high-performance drive units. Two axial flux motors on the rear axle operated continuously, while a front booster motor activated as needed for extra power or traction.

The high-performance battery is a new development from Affalterbach, inspired by Formula 1. It uses newly developed cylindrical NCMA cells, which offer efficient cooling and an energy density of over 300Wh/kg [according to one web source, gasoline is 13000 Wh/kg].

The battery cells were directly cooled by an electrically non-conductive oil, regulating the temperature of over 3,000 cells for even heat dissipation. This supported the battery's high continuous power. Operating at over 800V reduced the weight with lighter cables and shortened charging times, while thermal management ensured optimal cell temperature for maximum performance under extreme conditions. The AMG charges at over 850kW across much of the charging curve. In five minutes, it can add about 400km [~250 miles] of range (WLTP).

Looks like at least some cars will be ready long before the US infrastructure--only recently have I read about anyone proposing megawatt charging stations.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Microsoft's Windows 95 release was 30 years ago today, the first time software was a pop culture smash:

Microsoft's momentous Windows 95 operating system became available to the public on this day [August 24] 30 years ago. Computing enthusiasts were queuing around the block at midnight launch events. Perhaps this was the first time an OS launch became a cultural event – one that was carefully primed by the launch a month earlier, and the Start Me Up advertising campaign.

PC users had access to Windows operating systems, and similar WIMP OSes, before Windows 95. However, Windows 95 was billed as a merger of Microsoft's DOS and Windows products into a unified whole. Moreover, it brought in a significantly revamped UI, including the Start Button and many other elements we still live with today.

Other welcome features that first became mainstream on PCs thanks to the introduction of Windows 95 include; the 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture with task bar, plug and play hardware, support for long filenames, and many more.

To boost Windows 3.1 migrations, Windows 95's official requirements presented quite a low bar. Users should have an Intel 386DX processor, 4MB of RAM, a VGA or better display, and make sure to have 55MB of HDD space clear for the installation process.

Recommended settings, for those hoping to make proper use of the new multitasking capabilities, and internet features like MSN and Exchange were higher. For improved usability, Windows 95 would benefit from a 486 or better CPU, 8MB of RAM, an SVGA display, as well as more storage.

It is debatable whether this was the beginning of bloat. For some context, the contemporary Macintosh System 7.5.X required about half the fixed storage of Windows 95.

You can test Windows 95 RTM in an online VM, on PCjs Machines, using the link.

[...] PC enthusiasts at the time would have had to buy a new system with Windows 95 pre-installed or cough up $209, which adjusted for inflation brings us perilously close to $400 in 2025. Just for an OS...

Despite the entry price, Microsoft's lavish advertising budget and promotional activities paid off. Sales revenue from the release reportedly hit $720 million on day one. Also, a million copies of the OS had been shipped by day four.

[...] Paving the way for the success to come, it was also noted that 10 of the 11 publishers of the top 20 PC game titles were onboard with Windows 95-based gaming. Moreover, the use of the web was accelerating, with Netscape and Microsoft both releasing their new browsers on 32-bit Windows.

Original Submission