SoylentNews

canopic jug writes:

Developer Gavin L Rebeiro has posted[*see note below] a five-part article series at Techrights on how to deal with the ongoing Raspberry Pi fiasco by salvaging existing hardware with a replacement operating system.

• Part I: Acknowledgements
• Part II: Introduction
• Part III: Fundamentals
• Part IV: Doing The Task
• Part V: All The Rest

He covers the background, the technical principles, some methods for mitigation, proposes using NetBSD in place of the GNU/Linux, Raspberry Pi OS. Finally, he walks through installation of NetBSD.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

Saudi Arabia takes steps to lead the $700B global hydrogen market:

As governments and industries seek less-polluting alternatives to hydrocarbons, the world's biggest crude exporter doesn't want to cede the burgeoning hydrogen business to China, Europe or Australia and lose a potentially massive source of income. So it's building a $5 billion plant powered entirely by sun and wind that will be among the world's biggest green hydrogen makers when it opens in the planned megacity of Neom in 2025.

[...] Hydrogen is morphing from a niche power source — used in zeppelins, rockets and nuclear weapons — into big business, with the European Union alone committing $500 billion to scale up its infrastructure. Huge obstacles remain to the gas becoming a major part of the energy transition, and skeptics point to Saudi Arabia's weak track record so far capitalizing on what should be a competitive edge in the renewables business, especially solar, where there are many plans but few operational projects.

[...] Saudi Arabia is setting its sights on becoming the world's largest supplier of hydrogen — a market that BloombergNEF estimates could be worth as much as $700 billion by 2050.

takyon writes:

SK Hynix Commences Mass Production of 18GB LPDDR5 RAM Chips for Smartphones With 6,400Mbps Speeds

Android phone makers will continue to push the limits of hardware specifications, and from the looks of it, SK Hynix will lend out more than just a helping hand. The memory manufacturer today announced that it has started mass production of 18GB LPDDR5 RAM chips for flagship smartphones, meaning that premium handsets touting more memory than notebooks will become a commonplace.

SK Hynix claims that its 18GB LPDDR5 RAM for smartphones can operate up to 6,400Mbps, making it around 20 percent faster than the previous-generation LPDDR5 RAM, which could run up to 5,500Mbps. The manufacturer also mentions that it has supplied ASUS with these DRAM chips for the upcoming ROG Phone 5 flagship. Keep in mind that during a specifications leak, the ROG Phone 5 was spotted with the aforementioned RAM count.

Why does a smartphone need 18 GB of memory instead of the previous 16 GB? From the press release:

"This product will improve the processing speed and image quality by expanding the data temporary storage space, as the capacity increases compared to the previous 16GB product," an official from the company said.

So we will see smartphones with 18 GB of RAM, or perhaps smartphones or laptops with 16/32 GB of error correction code (ECC) LPDDR5 memory.

Also at ZDNet and Guru3D.

Previously: Samsung Begins Mass Producing 12 GB DRAM Packages for Smartphones
Samsung Mass Producing LPDDR5 DRAM (12 Gb x 8 for 12 GB Packages)
Get Ready for Smartphones with 16 GB of RAM
Samsung Announces Mass Production of 16 GB LPDDR5 DRAM Packages

Original Submission

aristarchus writes:

Some misconceptions in this article, but it does explain "alewives", so there is that. From The Conversation.

What do witches have to do with your favorite beer?

When I pose this question to students in my American literature and culture classes, I receive stunned silence or nervous laughs. The Sanderson sisters didn't chug down bottles of Sam Adams in "Hocus Pocus." But the history of beer points to a not-so-magical legacy of transatlantic slander and gender roles.

Up until the 1500s, brewing was primarily women's work – that is, until a smear campaign accused women brewers of being witches. Much of the iconography we associate with witches today, from the pointy hat to the broom, emerged from their connection to female brewers.

A routine household task

Humans have been drinking beer for almost 7,000 years, and the original brewers were women. From the Vikings to the Egyptians, women brewed beer both for religious ceremonies and to make a practical, calorie-rich beverage for the home.

True, dat.

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

A quantum computer just solved a decades-old problem three million times faster than a classical computer:

Scientists from quantum computing company D-Wave have demonstrated that, using a method called quantum annealing, they could simulate some materials up to three million times faster than it would take with corresponding classical methods.

Together with researchers from Google, the scientists set out to measure the speed of simulation in one of D-Wave's quantum annealing processors, and found that performance increased with both simulation size and problem difficulty, to reach a million-fold speedup over what could be achieved with a classical CPU.

The calculation that D-Wave and Google's teams tackled is a real-world problem; in fact, it has already been resolved by the 2016 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Vadim Berezinskii, J. Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless, who studied the behavior of so-called "exotic magnetism", which occurs in quantum magnetic systems.

[...] In contrast, D-Wave's latest experiment resolved a meaningful problem that scientists are interested in independent of quantum computing. The findings have already attracted the attention of scientists around the world.

Journal Reference:
Andrew D. King, Jack Raymond, Trevor Lanting, et al. Scaling advantage over path-integral Monte Carlo in quantum simulation of geometrically frustrated magnets [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-20901-5)

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:

China's Tianwen-1 zooms in on Mars surface on cusp of new tech era:

China's Mars orbiter has beamed back high-resolution images, revealing geographic features of the red planet in detail.

The photos taken by Tianwen-1 come a week after the United States released a panorama of the Martian surface snapped by the rover Perseverance.

They also come as China prepares to unveil a new five-year plan centred on science and hi-tech innovation, with aerospace technology expected to be a priority programme.

Chinese mission spokesman Liu Tongjie told state television that two of the orbiter's images were snapped at an altitude of about 330km (205 miles) and had a resolution down to 70cm (27 inches), revealing fine details of the Martian landscape.

"These two pictures clearly show craters, mountain ridges and dunes," said Liu, from the China National Space Administration.

"One image shows a crater with a diameter of about 620 metres and clearly displays the lines at the bottom of the crater."

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Exclusive: Flaws in Zoom's Keybase App Kept Chat Images From Being Deleted:

A serious flaw in Zoom's Keybase secure chat application left copies of images contained in secure communications on Keybase users' computers after they were supposedly deleted.

The flaw in the encrypted messaging application (CVE-2021-23827) does not expose Keybase users to remote compromise. However, it could put their security, privacy and safety at risk, especially for users living under authoritarian regimes in which apps like Keybase and Signal are increasingly relied on as a way to conduct conversations out of earshot of law enforcement or security services.

The flaw was discovered by researchers from the group Sakura Samurai as part of a bug bounty program offered by Zoom, which acquired Keybase in May, 2020. Zoom said it has fixed the flaw in the latest versions of its software for Windows, macOS and Linux.

[...] In a statement, a Zoom spokesman said that the company appreciates the work of the researchers and takes privacy and security "very seriously."

"We addressed the issue identified by the Sakura Samurai researchers on our Keybase platform in version 5.6.0 for Windows and macOS and version 5.6.1 for Linux. Users can help keep themselves secure by applying current updates or downloading the latest Keybase software with all current security updates," the spokesman said.

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Runaway1956:

Asteroid Itokawa contains water and organic matter:

Scientists at Royal Holloway, from the University of London (England), found water and organic materials in a small sample of the surface of the asteroid Itokawa, which was brought to Earth through a mission by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The discovery was revealed in the study published in Scientific Reports, this Thursday (4).

[...] The study was based on a particle collected by the Hayabusa mission, launched by JAXA in May 2003. Just over two years after takeoff, the spacecraft made a quick landing on the surface of Itokawa, in November 2005, to collect samples.

Even facing difficulties such as communication problems with the team on the ground and engine failures, the spacecraft managed to return to Earth in June 2010, landing in Woomera, Australia, with the important cargo that was carefully analyzed in the laboratory.

[...] The study showed that Itokawa has evolved constantly over billions of years, incorporating water and organic compounds of external origin throughout this process, just as it happened with Earth in the distant past, at the beginning of its formation.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Rather than using tools like YUMI and many others to create a multidistro boot usb stick, with Ventoy you can copy over .ISO files and boot from them on a multidistro USB!

With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.

You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them (screenshot).

x86 Legacy BIOS, IA32 UEFI, x86_64 UEFI, ARM64 UEFI and MIPS64EL UEFI are supported in the same way.

Most type of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/VMware/Xen...)

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)!

- Github page for Ventoy

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Comcast hides upload speeds deep inside its infuriating ordering system:

But while upload use on Comcast's network quickly grows—driven largely by videoconferencing among people working and learning at home—the nation's largest home-Internet provider with over 30 million customers advertises its speed tiers as if uploading doesn't exist. Comcast's 56 percent increase in upstream traffic made me wonder if the company will increase upload speeds any time soon, so I checked out Comcast's Xfinity.com site today to see the current upload speeds. Getting that information was even more difficult than I expected.

The Xfinity website advertises cable-Internet plans with download speeds starting at 25Mbps without mentioning that upstream speeds are just a fraction of the downstream ones. I went through Comcast's online ordering system today and found no mention of upload speeds anywhere. Even clicking "pricing & other info" and "view plan details" links to read the fine print on various Internet plans didn't reveal upload speeds.

Even after adding a plan to the cart and going through most of the checkout process, I could not find any mention of upload speeds. I got to the point where you have to enter credit card information to continue, so I initially stopped there. I later confirmed that Comcast's ordering system will show upload speeds after it checks whether your credit card is valid, in the final page where you submit an order.

Eratosthenes writes:

As reported by APNews,

NEW YORK (AP) — A new national study adds strong evidence that mask mandates can slow the spread of the coronavirus, and that allowing dining at restaurants can increase cases and deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the study Friday.

"All of this is very consistent," CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said during a White House briefing on Friday. "You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining."

The study was released just as some states are rescinding mask mandates and restaurant limits. Earlier this week, Texas became the biggest state to lift its mask rule, joining a movement by many governors to loosen COVID-19 restrictions despite pleas from health officials.

"It's a solid piece of work that makes the case quite strongly that in-person dining is one of the more important things that needs to be handled if you're going to control the pandemic," said William Hanage, a Harvard University expert on disease dynamics who was not involved in the study.

The new research builds on smaller CDC studies, including one that found that people in 10 states who became infected in July were more likely to have dined at a restaurant and another that found mask mandates in 10 states were associated with reductions in hospitalizations.

The CDC researchers looked at U.S. counties placed under state-issued mask mandates and at counties that allowed restaurant dining — both indoors and at tables outside. The study looked at data from March through December of last year.

The scientists found that mask mandates were associated with reduced coronavirus transmission, and that improvements in new cases and deaths increased as time went on.

The reductions in growth rates varied from half a percentage point to nearly 2 percentage points. That may sound small, but the large number of people involved means the impact grows with time, experts said.

Original Submission

Eratosthenes writes:

So I have always enjoyed Etruscan art, even back in the day when it was fresh, as in fresh frescos. Unfortunately, the remnants now are mostly in tombs, and in bad shape. But it seems technology is coming to the rescue? News from Live Science, on the use of

a technique called multi-illumination hyperspectral extraction (MHX), which involves taking dozens of images in the visible, infrared and ultraviolet bands of light and processing them using statistical algorithms developed at the National Research Council of Italy in Pisa, said team member Vincenzo Palleschi, a senior researcher at the research council.

And, voila! If not a restored painting, a much closer to the original image!

Scientists using a new technique have uncovered the colorful and once-hidden scenes in paintings of the ancient Etruscans, a group of people who flourished on the Italian peninsula around 2,500 years ago at a time before Rome became powerful.

For instance, they found new details in a painting from the "Tomb of the Monkey" and scenes of an underworld in another work of art.

The Etruscans created detailed paintings, but the passage of time has meant that many of them are now only partly visible and that much of their color has been lost.

"A major issue is the significant loss of information on the polychromy [colors] of the preserved paintings, with special regard to some specific colors owing to their physical chemical composition," Gloria Adinolfi, a researcher at Pegaso Srl Archeologia Arte Archeometria (a research institute), said in a presentation given Jan. 8 at the virtual joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies.

The fact that some colors survive the passage of time better than others can give a distorted view of what ancient paintings looked like at the time they were painted, Adinolfi said. For example, some shades of green tend not to survive well, whereas red often does, she said. "Red oaks [sic] usually seem to be more resistant so that sometimes reds are dominant and alter the correct perception of the original polychromy of the pictorial decoration," Adinolfi said.

Yes, I do look forward to being able to utilize this technology on my family photo albums, many of which have suffered the fading of colors with the ravages of time. And, remember, the Estrucans were the ones who taught the Romans about government and social justice. Well, about government.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Intel's next-generation "Rocket Lake" CPUs will be some of Intel's last desktop models on a "14nm" node, and include "backported" Willow Cove cores (referred to as "Cypress Cove") from "10nm" Tiger Lake mobile CPUs, with improved instructions per clock. Notably, the lineup only goes up to 8 cores, instead of 10 cores for the previous Core i9. The review embargo ends on the launch date, March 30th, but some retailers have been selling the CPUs early. AnandTech obtained an 8-core i7-11700K and wrote a review of it. The results were not great.

Power consumption of the 125 W TDP chip peaked at 224.56 W when running an AVX2 workload, compared to 204.79 W for its i7-10700K "Comet Lake" predecessor and 141.45 W for AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X. The i7-11700K reached 291.68 W with an AVX-512 workload.

The i7-11700K not only failed to beat the 5800X in many benchmarks, but trailed the previous-gen i7-10700K in some cases. The major exception is performance in AVX-512 workloads. Gaming performance of the i7-11700K was particularly bad, in part due to an increase in L3 cache and core-to-core latency.

It's possible that there will be some improvements from a final microcode update before launch. There's also models like the Core i9-11900K, which have the same 8 cores but can clock up to 300 MHz higher.

See also: Intel Core i7-11700K 8 Core Rocket Lake CPU Review Published By Anandtech – Very Hot, Consumes More Power Than Core i9-10900K & Slower Than AMD In Core-To-Core Tests

Related: Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Former Intel Principal Engineer Blasts the Company
Gigabyte Confirms Intel Rocket Lake Desktop CPUs Will Launch in March

Original Submission

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Samsung Electronics, Mastercard and Samsung Card develop fingerprint biometric payment card - Help Net Security:

Through this strategic collaboration, the companies aim to provide faster and more secure payment experiences. The biometric authentication capability allows safer interactions with reduced physical contact points by eliminating the need to enter a PIN on a keypad.

It also adds an extra layer of security to currently available credit cards by verifying the cardholder's identity via a unique fingerprint.

The biometric cards will adopt a new security chipset from Samsung's System LSI Business that integrates several key discrete chips, streamlining the overall component design and enabling more efficient development. These cards can be used at any Mastercard chip terminal or point of sale (POS) terminal.

[...] Samsung Card will lead the roll out in South Korea, with plans to introduce the biometric card later this year. The adoption of the solution will be a gradual process, starting from corporate credit cards that have more frequent international transactions.

Also at Engadget, Businesswire, and hypebeast.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The 40-Year-Old Version: ZX81's sleek plastic case shows no sign of middle-aged spread:

It has been 40 years since the launch of Sinclair's ZX81, a device that welcomed countless Brits to the delights of home computing at the dawn of the 1980s.

Released on 5 March 1981, the ZX81 was the successor to 1980's ZX80 and, like its predecessor, was based around a Z80 CPU. Both machines also featured 1KB of memory and required a UHF television to display the monochrome output.

The ZX81 was, however, a far sleeker affair than its white plastic-encased stablemate. A Rick Dickinson-designed case made for a more consumer-friendly computer, even if the pressure sensitive membrane of the keyboard was somewhat less easy to use.

[...] The BBC Micro would launch toward the end of 1981, and the rivalry between Acorn and Sinclair has been well documented over the years, including a dramatization in the form of the BBC's Micro Men.

[...] You can't beat the real thing, however. Fitzpatrick pointed out that the Centre for Computing History had a number of the devices, including some featuring creative modifications to overcome limitations like that keyboard. "There's always one on display," he said, "there's never a display without a ZX81."

Original Submission