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upstart writes:

ASUS, Acer and Lenovo built Chromebooks optimized to run services like GeForce Now:

One part of Google may have given up on cloud gaming, with Stadia set to be discontinued in a few months. But on the ChromeOS team, there's a whole new initiative to try and push back on the whole "you can't game on a Chromebook" thing. Today, Google — along with a handful of hardware and software partners — are announcing what it calls "the world's first laptops built for cloud gaming."

Stripping back the hyperbole, what does this mean in practice? After all, the whole point of cloud gaming is that you don't need superpowered hardware to enjoy high-quality games — many existing Chromebooks can run cloud gaming services just fine. That said, the new laptops announced today are quite a bit different than your average Chromebook.

At a high level, Google says that it focused on a handful of hardware features to differentiate these laptops, including large displays with high refresh rates, keyboards with anti-ghosting tech (and RBG keyboards in some cases), WiFi 6/6E cards and generally high specs.

upstart writes:

"We can't force the timeline. It will happen when it happens":

More than two decades have come and gone since entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first person to pay for his own ride into space, spending a week on the International Space Station.

After that pioneering mission aboard a Soyuz vehicle, Tito said he always had a desire to return to space, with a preference for flying to the Moon. But this thought remained mostly dormant, because Tito did not have confidence in any of the available spaceflight vehicles for such a mission.

That changed about a year and a half ago when he and his wife, Akiko Tito, visited SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. After a tour, they discussed possible space tourism trips, and it did not take long for the lunar idea to come up. Would Tito be interested in riding aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle for a flight around the Moon?

[...] "I said yes, I want to go," Akiko Tito added. "We both wanted to go."

The Titos announced Wednesday that they purchased two of a dozen seats on the second of SpaceX's planned circumlunar flights later this decade. With the public announcement, Akiko Tito becomes the first woman confirmed to fly on Starship. The flight will last about a week, outbound to the Moon, passing within about 40 km of the surface and flying back. Ten other seats on Starship remain unsold and are available. Tito said he was not at liberty to disclose the price he paid.

hubie writes:

UC Riverside physicist and colleague invoke the cosmological collider to explain why matter, and not antimatter, dominates the universe:

Early in its history, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with equal amounts of matter and "antimatter" — particles that are matter counterparts but with opposite charge. But then, as space expanded, the universe cooled. Today's universe is full of galaxies and stars which are made of matter. Where did the antimatter go, and how did matter come to dominate the universe? This cosmic origin of matter continues to puzzle scientists.

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside, and Tsinghua University in China have now opened a new pathway for probing the cosmic origin of matter by invoking the "cosmological collider."

[...] "Cosmic inflation provided a highly energetic environment, enabling the production of heavy new particles as well as their interactions," Cui said. "The inflationary universe behaved just like a cosmological collider, except that the energy was up to 10 billion times larger than any human-made collider."

[...] "The fact that our current-day universe is dominated by matter remains among the most perplexing, longstanding mysteries in modern physics," Cui said. "A subtle imbalance or asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the early universe is required to achieve today's matter dominance but cannot be realized within the known framework of fundamental physics."

Cui and Xianyu propose testing leptogenesis, a well-known mechanism that explains the origin of the baryon — visible gas and stars — asymmetry in our universe. Had the universe begun with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they would have annihilated each other into photon radiation, leaving nothing. Since matter far exceeds antimatter today, asymmetry is required to explain the imbalance.

upstart writes:

Analysts estimate SSD prices will drop 50 percent by mid-2023:

As SSD and NAND prices gradually decline, analysts now believe the price drops have no end in sight. The latest projections show that next year, consumers may be able to add 2TB worth of SSD storage to their PC for less than $100.

It's safe to say that one of the best inventions for PC components was the creation of NAND flash and the subsequent M.2 SSDs. The ability to store upwards of multiple terabytes of data on a storage device nearly the same size as a stick of gum is fantastic.Unfortunately, M.2 drives with those high amounts of data have been unfathomable for most consumers for a while.

Recently, SSDs have seen significant price cuts and capacity increases. Just six years ago, a 1 TB NVMe drive from Samsung cost nearly $500. Now, the same SSDs go for $90. That's an 80-percent price cut. Analysts believe this steady price decline will continue. Estimations indicate current SSD costs could be cut in half by the middle of 2023. If projections prove correct, 1 TB M.2 SSDs could retail for around $50, 2 TB SSDs might reach sub-$100 prices, and the 4 TB drives approaching the $200 mark might put them within reach of budget-minded customers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Metalenz ships millions of its tiny cameras and powers up with $30M B round:

The cameras in our phones, laptops, and increasingly home robots and the like are about as small as they can get unless we starting doing something different, and that's just what Metalenz is getting up to — with great success and now a $30 million funding round to expand its ultra-small 3D imaging tech.

The startup appeared in 2021 with a fresh take on cameras that abandons the approach we've used for decades, basically "a normal camera and lens but small." Instead, it uses a complex but nearly 2D surface to capture light passing through a single lens, allowing the whole unit to be a fraction of the size. It's not meant for taking clear ordinary images but providing the kind of extra info needed by those cameras — depth, object and material recognition, and so on.

We've seen this type of thing before, but usually in university research labs showing one-off prototypes. But Metalenz's camera tech isn't just capable of being manufactured — they're already shipping orders in the millions.

If you're wondering "wait, why haven't I heard of it then?" think about it — did you know who made your phone's camera, let alone its front-facing depth sensor? Not just Apple, not Samsung, not Google — they all use someone else's lens and sensor stack, companies like Sony Imaging and Omnivision that integrate their camera component with a board maker, who sells it on to the big guys.

As it happens, one of these integrators called STMicroelectronics was looking for a better camera to equip a class of imaging board it has shipping more than a billion units of over the years. They looked at what Metalenz had to offer and basically said "great, how many can you make? We'll buy that number."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

It has a planned capacity of 40 GWh/year of lithium ion cells by end of 2025:

A key component of the revised electric vehicle tax credit is a requirement for an ever-increasing amount of domestic content in those EVs' battery packs. Automakers and battery manufacturers were already in the process of setting up US manufacturing to be closer to locally built EVs, and that trend has accelerated ever since.

At the end of August, Honda and LG Energy Solutions announced that they were forming a joint venture to build a US battery factory. And on Tuesday, the pair announced that the factory would be in Fayette County, Ohio, about 40 miles (64.4 km) southwest of Columbus.

Honda and LG will spend $3.5 billion on the new plant after regulatory approval. Assuming that happens relatively rapidly, the plan is to begin construction in 2023 and finish the building work by the end of 2024. Honda said that by the end of the following year, the factory should have an annual capacity of 40 GWh. Honda and LG also said the factory should create 2,200 jobs in the area.

[...] The cells that the plant produces will be used in Honda's new "e:Architecture" platform. The first EVs to use e:Architecture should go on sale in the US in 2026 and will be built in North America.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

EU-US data sharing agreement: Is it a done deal?:

The thousands of companies waiting for a new US-EU data-transfer agreement to go into effect soon and ease the burdensome legal work necessary for cross-border data transfer shouldn't get their hopes up. US President Joe Biden's executive order to implement rules for the Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework agreed on earlier this year is a move in the right direction, but the new pact won't go into effect until next spring at the earliest, and even then it is bound to face legal challenges, say public policy and legal experts.

The executive order, signed by Biden on October 7, puts new restrictions on electronic surveillance by American intelligence agencies and gives Europeans new avenues to launch a complaint when they believe their personal information has been used unlawfully by US intelligence agencies.

The move comes two years after the European Court of Justice shut down the previous EU-US data sharing agreement known as Privacy Shield in 2020 on grounds that the US doesn't provide adequate protection for personal data, particularly in relation to state surveillance.

The new Trans-Atlantic Data Policy Framework is meant to improve US privacy safeguards, replace Privacy Shield, and eventually pass Court of Justice scrutiny when expected legal challenges are lodged. However, despite both the Biden Administration and the European Commission releasing statements endorsing the newly proposed data pact,  it's far from a done deal, according to Jonathan Armstrong, a compliance and technology lawyer at UK-based compliance specialists Cordery.

"Both the White House and the European Commission might be saying that they are confident, but we've been down this road before, with both sides saying that Privacy Shield would stand up to judicial scrutiny. It didn't," Armstrong said.

upstart writes:

You can build a smaller PC yourself, though the NUC will take out the guesswork:

Intel's NUC Extreme series of mini PCs have always tried to straddle the line between keeping the NUC's traditional tininess and providing the power of a full-size desktop. The NUC 11 and NUC 12 Extreme models both included enough room inside for a dual-slot GPU up to around 300 mm in length, but the company is apparently going even further with the NUC 13 Extreme, codenamed "Raptor Canyon." Intel showed off a new version of the box at TwitchCon (via VideoCardz) that is large enough to fit a triple-slot GPU alongside new 13th-generation Intel Core CPUs.

[...] The problem with compact-but-powerful ITX gaming builds—and the opening for the NUC 13 Extreme box—is that these cases are often tricky to build in and require careful measuring, planning, and cable management to ensure that all the components fit and that they're adequately cooled (I say this from sometimes-painful experience). Tiny cases and small-form-factor SFX power supplies also command their own price premium over full-size components. The benefit of building with standard parts is that you'll have more options for upgrading a few years down the road. But the simplicity of the NUC might be worth it for someone who wants something small and fast without all the hassle.

It's sort of funny that we're hearing about this case on the same day as GeForce RTX 4090 reviews are going live—other cards in the 4000-series will surely be small enough to fit in a "mere" triple-slot case, and Nvidia's partners may even figure out how to do it with a 4090. But the trend has been toward ever-larger GPUs, and owners of this new NUC (or many other GPU-compatible ITX cases) may find triple-slot compatibility more limiting in the future than it has been in the past.

Triple-slot GPU in a small box sounds like it has potential to be a loud space heater.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The orbital change was even bigger than scientists expected:

It worked! Humanity has, for the first time, purposely moved a celestial object.

As a test of a potential asteroid-deflection scheme, NASA's DART spacecraft shortened the orbit of asteroid Dimorphos by 32 minutes — a far greater change than astronomers expected.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, rammed into the tiny asteroid at about 22,500 kilometers per hour on September 26 (SN: 9/26/22). The goal was to move Dimorphos slightly closer to the larger asteroid it orbits, Didymos.

[...] The minimum change for the DART team to declare success was 73 seconds — a hurdle the mission overshot by more than 30 minutes. The team thinks the spectacular plume of debris that the impactor kicked up gave the mission extra oomph. The impact itself gave some momentum to the asteroid, but the debris flying off in the other direction pushed it even more — like a temporary rocket engine.

"This is a very exciting and promising result for planetary defense," Chabot said. But the change in orbital period was just 4 percent. "It just gave it a small nudge," she said. So knowing an asteroid is coming is crucial to future success. For something similar to work on an asteroid headed for Earth, "you'd want to do it years in advance," Chabot said. An upcoming space telescope called Near Earth Asteroid Surveyor is one of many projects intended to give that early warning.

Previously:
    NASA's DART Asteroid Impact Test Left a Trail Over 6,000 Miles Long
    New Hubble and Webb Images Capture Aftermath of DART Asteroid Smash Up
    NASA's DART Successfully Collides With Asteroid and Makes a Show

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Soylent Advice for those on the wrong side of 50.

New study questions the effectiveness of colonoscopies:

Colonoscopies are a dreaded rite of passage for many middle-age adults. The promise has been that if you endure the awkwardness and invasiveness of having a camera travel the length of your large intestine once every decade after age 45, you have the best chance of catching -- and perhaps preventing -- colorectal cancer. It's the second most common cause of cancer death in the United States. Some 15 million colonoscopies are performed in the US each year.

Now, a landmark study suggests the benefits of colonoscopies for cancer screening may be overestimated.

The study marks the first time colonoscopies have been compared head-to-head to no cancer screening in a randomized trial. The study found only meager benefits for the group of people invited to get the procedure: an 18% lower risk of getting colorectal cancer, and no significant reduction in the risk of cancer death. It was published Sunday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Study researcher Dr. Michael Bretthauer, a gastroenterologist who leads the clinical effectiveness group at the University of Oslo in Norway, said he found the results disappointing.

But as a researcher, he has to follow the science, "so I think we have to embrace it," he said. "And we may have oversold the message for the last 10 years or so, and we have to wind it back a little."

Other experts say that as good as this study was, it has important limitations, and these results shouldn't deter people from getting colonoscopies.

upstart writes:

They will expand their coverage over the next five years:

Zipline has teamed up with a healthcare provider servicing the Intermountain Region in the US to deliver medicine to customers using its drones. The company has started doing drone deliveries to select Intermountain Healthcare patients in the Salt Lake Valley area. For now, it can only do drops for local communities within several miles of its distribution center. Zipline intends to add more centers over the next five years, though, so it can eventually expand beyond Salt Lake Valley and deliver medicine throughout Utah.

[...] Intermountain Healthcare patients in the Salt Lake Valley area can now sign up for Zipline deliveries. The company will then evaluate their eligibility based on their location, their yard size — its target delivery area must be at least two parking spaces big — and their surrounding airspace. Zipline's drones are six-foot gliders with a wingspan that's 10 feet long. These drones fly 300 to 400 feet above the ground, though they drop down to an altitude of around 60 to 80 feet to deliver packages outfitted with a parachute.

Pizza from the sky: maybe this could be the next delivery model for DoorDash?

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Linux creator Linus Torvalds can't merge kernel code fast enough because of a particular hardware problem:

For most people, hardware problems and slow deliveries are annoying. But if you're the person behind the operating system that underpins much of the cloud, Android and IoT, your problems could easily become a big issue for lots of other people too.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds told a kernel contributor on Sunday that he's doing merges "very slowly" from one of his laptops as he waits for "new ECC memory DIMMS to arrive".

[...] "It was literally a DIMM going bad in my machine randomly after 2.5 years of it being perfectly stable. Go figure. Verified first by booting an old kernel, and then with memtest86+ overnight," he explains in a Linux kernel developer mailing list spotted by The Register.

[...] In early 2020, during the first wave of pandemic restrictions, Torvalds switched his main 'frankenbox' PC from one with an i9-9900k to one equipped with a monster 32-core AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor. It was, as he said then, the first time in 15 years that his desktop wasn't Intel-based. As a consequence of moving off Intel, his 'allmodconfig' test builds accelerated by a factor of three.

[...] Torvalds last year took a swipe at Intel for its ECC memory policies. "Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt [with regards to] ECC. Seriously," he wrote.

Torvalds has also been using an Apple M1 silicon laptop for some development work, thanks to the Asahi Linux project, which has been working on bringnig the Arch Linux distro to Apple's M1 architecture.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

China semiconductor production experienced its largest-ever decline in August:

The South China Morning Post reports that output of ICs was down 24.7% year-on-year to 24.7 billion units in August, the single largest monthly fall recorded since records began in 1997. Production volume was the lowest on record since October 2020.

This is the second month in a row that Chinese IC production has fallen; it was down 16.6% to 27.2 billion units in July. There had been a slight rebound in May and June, the result of lockdowns easing in Shanghai, where many assembly plants are located.

The SCMP writes that the decline can be attributed to new coronavirus outbreaks coupled with China's zero-Covid policy, as well as consumer spending cuts, power shortages caused by local heatwaves, and the global economic downturn. But a significant factor is likely to have been US sanctions.

[...] The Post notes that a record 3,470 companies in China, including those that use the Chinese word for "chip" in their registered names, brands, or operations, went out of business in the first eight months of the year. With the impact of the most recent US restrictions yet to be felt, there's likely more woe in store for the country's tech industry.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Prices of PCs have been trending upwards recently; that could be changing:

Cooling demand plus supply chain problems meant PC shipments declined 15% year on year in the third quarter (Q3) of 2022, totaling 74.2 million units, according to IDC's preliminary count in its worldwide personal computing device tracker.

Shipments by Lenovo, HP, Dell and Asus were all down for the quarter. Apple's share of the PC market, which includes desktops, notebooks and workstations, is now 13.5%, up from 8.2% in the same quarter a year ago, leaving Apple as the only vendor with growing shipments – up 40% on the same time last year.

In a nutshell, high-end PCs are selling well as consumer and education sales have slowed. Shipments of cheaper PCs have continued falling since 2021, amid inflation fears and the industry's supply chain woes, with vendors manufacturing fewer Chromebooks as they pursue profits in higher-end Windows PCs.

Gartner noted that to maintain profits as inflation leads to increased costs, the PC industry wants to raise average selling prices (ASPs) despite weakening demand. The reduction in the mix of PCs from Chromebooks, which tend to have low price points, and the shift to premium products also helped increase the average ASP – but an increase in inventory, especially in the consumer channel, could cause an ASP decline as vendors try to lower inventory.

Original Submission

looorg writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-thermal-attack-can-read-your-password-from-the-heat-your-fingertips-leave-behind/

Thermal keyboard attack

While an interesting idea I wonder, like with a lot of these "attacks" how useful in practice they really are.

The heat doesn't last very long, so you have to be there basically as you type or within seconds. After just 20 seconds the heat is dropping fast and after a minute you are basically guessing.

Still 4 digit ATM pins could be in deep trouble. But then after you entered the 4 digit pin you usually push a few more numbers to get your money and make various choices at the machine. So it might be a difference between real live usage and laboratory usage.

The heat or colour will then tell the order in what was used last to the keys that are fading was the once used earliest.

But still unless it can tell a few keys appear that might be very similar in heat you end up with options. But then getting or guessing a password from a limited pool of characters is better or faster then guessing one from a larger pool.

So the new security feature or recommendation will be to before you leave the ATM press ALL the keys or after you get your money just stand there for a minute or so and put the money into your wallet so you let the machine or the keypad cool down.

How will the camera note if you use the same keys over again (AxxxxAxxxxxA)? Will it know if you hit the A key then multiple times?

Original Submission