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Slashdot: Hardware

Samsung Reportedly Developing a Voice-Controlled Speaker To Compete With Amazon Echo


Samsung may be working on a smart speaker of its own. The company is developing a smart speaker powered by its Bixby voice assistant, according to The Wall Street Journal. From a report: A new report from The Wall Street Journal claims Samsung is working on its own voice-controlled home speaker to compete with the likes of the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and other devices that will be launched over the next few months and years. Details about Samsung's speaker and when we might expect to see it on the market are scant, but The Wall Street Journal does say that the device will be powered by Bixby. Bixby -- Samsung's answer to Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri -- is available in South Korea, where the company is based, but the English-language version is still in the works. Meanwhile, other tech companies like Alibaba, Apple, and Microsoft are developing their own smart speakers to compete with Amazon and Alphabet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/iMoFUAB5H0A/samsung-reportedly-developing-a-voice-controlled-speaker-to-compete-with-amazon-echo


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Norway To Ban the Use of Oil For Heating Buildings By 2020


Norway, which is the largest producer of oil and natural gas outside of the Middle East, is set to become the first country in the world to ban the use of gas to heat buildings. The country plans to pass legislation that will stop the use of both oil and paraffin to warm buildings from 2020 onwards. The Independent reports: Vidar Helgesenlaid, the nation's Environment Minister, laid out the plans in a statement, saying: "Those using fossil oil for heating must find other options by 2020." The country advises its citizens to research alternatives to oil such as heat pumps, hydroelectricity, and even special stoves that burn wood chips. By some stage, the legislation could be widened to include restrictions on using natural gas to heat buildings. The Ministry of Climate and Environment said the ban would apply to both new and old buildings and cover both private homes and the public space of businesses and state-owned facilities. The ministry says the plans are expected to lessen Norway's emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by an estimated 340,000 tons per year, compared to overall national emissions of 53.9 million tons in 2015.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/9ppM-Ze-YQI/norway-to-ban-the-use-of-oil-for-heating-buildings-by-2020


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China Suspects Its 'Car-Eating,' Traffic-Straddling Bus Is a Total Scam


China's "Transit Elevated Bus" or TEB-1 made headlines last year for its futuristic design that let it straddle two lanes of traffic, allowing cars to pass under it. Now, that very bus is the focus of an investigation. According to Quartz, "police in Beijing announced that it had started an investigation into the company behind the TEB for alleged illegal fundraising." From the report: More than 30 people associated with Huaying Kailai, an online financing platform that has been selling an investment product to raise money from individual investors to develop the bus, have been held, said Beijing's Dongcheng district police bureau in a statement (link in Chinese) on microblogging site Weibo. The statement added that the police is working to recover funds from the firm, and advised TEB investors to report their complaints to local police stations. Huaying Kailai couldn't be reached for comment. The number listed on its website is invalid and a message to the email provided bounced back. Bai Zhiming, who runs Huaying Kailai and is also chief executive of TEB Technology Development, a Beijing-based company that purchased the patent for the elevated bus, was among those detained, according to the police statement. Bai bills himself as "the father of the TEB" on Weibo. Days after the Qinghuangdao government announced the TEB track's demolition, Bai told Chinese media that the bus would be relocated to another Chinese city.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/IT8-HnpiFUA/china-suspects-its-car-eating-traffic-straddling-bus-is-a-total-scam


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Apple Tests 3-D Face Scanning To Unlock Next iPhone: Bloomberg


Five years ago, Apple made fingerprint scanners on smartphones popular. Now the company may have found a better technology to replace it. According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, the Cupertino-based company is exploring 3D facial detection as a replacement for Touch ID fingerprint authentication. From the article: This is powered by a new 3-D sensor, added the people, who asked not to be identified discussing technology that's still in development. The company is also testing eye scanning to augment the system, one of the people said. The sensor's speed and accuracy are focal points of the feature. It can scan a user's face and unlock the iPhone within a few hundred milliseconds, the person said. It is designed to work even if the device is laying flat on a table, rather than just close up to the face. The feature is still being tested and may not appear with the new device. However, the intent is for it to replace the Touch ID fingerprint scanner, according to the person.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/WuDp45CZUCA/apple-tests-3-d-face-scanning-to-unlock-next-iphone-bloomberg


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15 Devices (Including 6 Laptops) Awarded FSF's 'Respects Your Freedom' Certification


This week the Free Software Foundation awarded its coveted 'Respects Your Freedom' certification to 15 products -- more than doubling the number of certified products (from 12 to 27) since the program began in 2012. An anonymous reader writes: The non-profit FSF certified six different laptops, two docking stations, three WiFi USB adapters and two internal WiFi devices, a mainboard, and their first-ever certified Bluetooth device, the TET-BT4 USB adapter. The products are all from Technoethical (formerly Tehnoetic), a Romania-based company who previously had just one mini wireless USB adapter on their list of FSF-certified products. "In 2014 we started selling hardware compatible with fully free systems in order to fund the free software activism work that we've been doing with our foundation," said Technoethical founder, Tiberiu C. Turbureanu. "Since then, we worked hard to build a hardware catalog that allows free software users to choose what best fits their computing needs, while also helping with the funding of different free software projects." "We are excited that Technoethical has brought out such an impressive collection of hardware whose associated software respects user freedom," said the FSF's executive director, John Sullivan. "RYF certification continues to gain speed and momentum, thanks to companies like them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/ZLBL8TspzSo/15-devices-including-6-laptops-awarded-fsfs-respects-your-freedom-certification


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California Has So Much Solar Power That Other States Are Paid To Take It


"On 14 days during March, Arizona utilities got a gift from California: free solar power," reported the Los Angeles Times. Mic reports: California is generating so much solar energy that it is resorting to paying other states to take the excess electricity in order to prevent overloading power lines. According to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona residents have already saved millions in 2017 thanks to California's contribution. The state, which produced little to no solar energy just 15 years ago, has made strides -- it single-handedly has nearly half of the country's solar electricity generating capacity... When there's too much solar energy, there is a risk of the electricity grid overloading. This can result in blackouts. In times like this, California offers other states a financial incentive to take their power. But it's not as environmentally friendly as one would think. Take Arizona, for example. The state opts to put a pin in its own solar energy sources instead of fossil fuel power, which means greenhouse gas emissions aren't getting any better due to California's overproduction. The Los Angeles Times suggests over-construction of natural gas plants created part of the problem -- Californians now pay roughly 50% more than the rest of the country for power -- but they report that power supplies could become more predictable when battery storage technologies improve.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/9Coxi6OG5iA/california-has-so-much-solar-power-that-other-states-are-paid-to-take-it


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HP Answers The Question: Moore's Law Is Ending. Now What?


Long-time Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes: R. Stanley Williams, of Hewlett Packard Labs, wrote a report exploring the end of Moore's Law, saying it "could be the best thing that has happened in computing since the beginning of Moore's law. Confronting the end of an epoch should enable a new era of creativity by encouraging computer scientists to invent biologically inspired devices, circuits, and architectures implemented using recently emerging technologies." This idea is also looked at in a broader shorter article by Curt Hopkins also with HP Labs. Williams argues that "The effort to scale silicon CMOS overwhelmingly dominated the intellectual and financial capital investments of industry, government, and academia, starving investigations across broad segments of computer science and locking in one dominant model for computers, the von Neumann architecture." And Hopkins points to three alternatives already being developed at Hewlett Packard Enterprise -- neuromorphic computing, photonic computing, and Memory-Driven Computing. "All three technologies have been successfully tested in prototype devices, but MDC is at center stage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/FY0XOXjCqmM/hp-answers-the-question-moores-law-is-ending-now-what


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Central Bankers Warned Of Possible Economic 'Robocalypse'


An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times: At an exclusive gathering at a golf resort near Lisbon, the big minds of monetary policy were seriously discussing the risk that artificial intelligence could eliminate jobs on a scale that would dwarf previous waves of technological change. "There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalpyse upon us?'" David Autor, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an audience Tuesday that included Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and dozens of other top central bankers and economists... [A]long with the optimism is a fear that the economic expansion might bypass large swaths of the population, in part because a growing number of jobs could be replaced by computers capable of learning -- artificial intelligence. Policymakers and economists conceded that they have not paid enough attention to how much technology has hurt the earning power of some segments of society, or planned to address the concerns of those who have lost out... In the past, technical advances caused temporary disruptions but ultimately improved living standards, creating new categories of employment along the way... But artificial intelligence threatens broad categories of jobs previously seen as safe from automation, such as legal assistants, corporate auditors and investment managers. Large groups of people could become obsolete, suffering the same fate as plow horses after the invention of the tractor. "More and more, we are seeing economists saying, 'This time could be different,'âS" said Autor, who presented a paper on the subject that he wrote with Anna Salomons, an associate professor at the Utrecht University School of Economics in the Netherlands. Ultimately we'll just have to wait and see, Autor concluded. "I say not Robocalpyse now. Perhaps Robocalpyse later."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/zhsITeKB-Ck/central-bankers-warned-of-possible-economic-robocalypse


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Study Claims Discarded Solar Panels Create More Toxic Waste Than Nuclear Plants


Templer421 shares an article from National Review: A new study by Environmental Progress warns that toxic waste from used solar panels now poses a global environmental threat. The Berkeley-based group found that solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear-power plants. Discarded solar panels, which contain dangerous elements such as lead, chromium, and cadmium, are piling up around the world, and there's been little done to mitigate their potential danger to the environment. "We talk a lot about the dangers of nuclear waste, but that waste is carefully monitored, regulated, and disposed of," says Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates for the use of nuclear energy. "But we had no idea there would be so many panels -- an enormous amount -- that could cause this much ecological damage." Solar panels are considered a form of toxic, hazardous electronic or "e-waste," and according to EP researchers Jemin Desai and Mark Nelson, scavengers in developing countries like India and China often "burn the e-waste in order to salvage the valuable copper wires for resale. Since this process requires burning off plastic, the resulting smoke contains toxic fumes that are carcinogenic and teratogenic (birth defect-causing) when inhaled." A spokesman for the Solar Energy Industries Association argues that the study is incorrect, and that in fact solar panels are "mainly made up of easy-to-recycle materials that can be successfully recovered and reused at the end of their useful life."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/0YE6ZwRnusQ/study-claims-discarded-solar-panels-create-more-toxic-waste-than-nuclear-plants


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AMD Launches Ryzen PRO CPUs: Enhanced Security, Longer Warranty, Better Quality


Reader harrisonweber shares a report: This morning AMD introduced their Ryzen PRO processors for business and commercial desktop PCs. The new lineup of CPUs includes the Ryzen 3 PRO, Ryzen 5 PRO and Ryzen 7 PRO families with four, six, or eight cores running at various frequencies. A superset to the standard Ryzen chips, the PRO chips have the same feature set as other Ryzen devices, but also offer enhanced security, 24 months availability, a longer warranty and promise to feature better chip quality. The AMD Ryzen PRO lineup of processors consists of six SKUs that belong to the Ryzen 7, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 families targeting different market segments and offering different levels of performance. As one would expect, the Ryzen 7 PRO models are aimed at workstation applications and thus have all eight cores with simultaneous multithreading enabled, the Ryzen 5 PROmodels are designed for advanced mainstream desktops and therefore have four or six cores with SMT, whereas the Ryzen 3 PRO models are aimed at office workloads that work well on quad-core CPUs without SMT. The specifications of the Ryzen 7 PRO and the Ryzen 5 PRO resemble those of regular Ryzen processors. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 3 PRO are the first chips from the Ryzen 3 lineup and thus give us a general idea what to expect from such products: four cores without SMT operating at 3.1-3.5 GHz base frequency along with 2+8 MB of cache.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/NgxLmvSCYgA/amd-launches-ryzen-pro-cpus-enhanced-security-longer-warranty-better-quality


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Raspberry Pi Wins UK's Top Engineering Award


An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: The team behind the device was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert Prize at a ceremony in London last night. The tiny computer launched in 2012. Its designers hoped to introduce children to coding and had modest ambitions. They beat two other finalists, cyber-security company Darktrace and radiotherapy pioneers Vision RT, to win the prize. Previous winners of the innovation award, which has been run since 1969, include the creators of the CT (computerised tomography) scanner; the designers of the Severn Bridge; and the team at Microsoft in Cambridge that developed the Kinect motion sensor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/9iNlS4bJP8U/raspberry-pi-wins-uks-top-engineering-award


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New Study Finds How Much Sleep Fitbit Users Really Get


Fitbit has published the results of a study that uses their longitudinal sleep database to analyze millions of nights of Sleep Stages data to determine how age, gender, and duration affect sleep quality. (Sleep Stages is a relatively new Fitbit feature that "uses motion detection and heart rate variability to estimate the amount of time users spend awake in light, deep, and REM sleep each night.") Here are the findings: The average Fitbit user is in bed for 7 hours and 33 minutes but only gets 6 hours and 38 minutes of sleep. The remaining 55 minutes is spent restless or awake. That may seem like a lot, but it's actually pretty common. That said, 6 hours and 38 minutes is still shy of the 7+ hours the the CDC recommends adults get. For the second year in a row Fitbit data scientists found women get about 25 minutes more sleep on average each night compared to men. The percentage of time spent in each sleep stage was also similar -- until you factor in age. Fitbit data shows that men get a slightly higher percentage of deep sleep than women until around age 55 when women take the lead. Women win when it comes to REM, logging an average of 10 more minutes per night than men. Although women tend to average more REM than men over the course of their lifetime, the gap appears to widen around age 50.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/Phrt2NcZ7Io/new-study-finds-how-much-sleep-fitbit-users-really-get


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There Is a Point At Which It Will Make Economical Sense To Defect From the Electrical Grid


Michael J. Coren reports via Quartz: More than 1 million U.S. homes have solar systems installed on their rooftops. Batteries are set to join many of them, giving homeowners the ability to not only generate but also store their electricity on-site. And once that happens, customers can drastically reduce their reliance on the grid. It's great news for those receiving utility bills. It's possible armageddon for utilities. A new study by the consulting firm McKinsey modeled two scenarios: one in which homeowners leave the electrical grid entirely, and one in which they obtain most of their power through solar and battery storage but keep a backup connection to the grid. Given the current costs of generating and storing power at home, even residents of sunny Arizona would not have much economic incentive to leave the electric-power system completely -- full grid-defection, as McKinsey refers to it -- until around 2028. But partial defection, where some homeowners generate and store 80% to 90% of their electricity on site and use the grid only as a backup, makes economic sense as early as 2020. [A]s daily needs for many are supplied instead by solar and batteries, McKinsey predicts the electrical grid will be repurposed as an enormous, sophisticated backup. Utilities would step up and supply power during the few days or weeks per year when distributed systems run out of juice.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/RXtXK5SUWOM/there-is-a-point-at-which-it-will-make-economical-sense-to-defect-from-the-electrical-grid


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$7.5 Billion Kemper Power Plant Suspends Coal Gasification


romanval writes: A coal gasification plant in Mississippi is iswitching to natural gas after 5 years of delays and $4 billion cost overrun. Megan Geuss writes via Ars Technica: "The Kemper County plant was supposed to be a cutting-edge demonstration of the power of 'clean coal,' and, despite running five years late and more than $4 billion over budget, Kemper was able to start testing its coal gasification operations late last year. The plant used a chemical process to break down lignite coal into synthesis gas, or 'syngas,' which was then fed into a generator. The syngas burns cleaner than pulverized lignite coal does. In addition, emissions were caught by a carbon capture system and delivered to a nearby oil field to help with oil extraction. That, Southern and Mississippi Power said, would reduce the greenhouse emissions of burning lignite by up to 65 percent. But with only 200 days of gasification operations under its belt, Kemper identified more issues with its technology, including design flaws that caused leaks and ash buildup."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/IOrrmMACNO8/75-billion-kemper-power-plant-suspends-coal-gasification


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Elon Musk's Boring Machine Completes the First Section of An LA Tunnel


New submitter simkel shares a report from The Verge: Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk says his ambitious tunnel-boring endeavor, aptly named The Boring Company, has officially started digging underneath Los Angeles. Musk announced the news on Twitter, where he said "Godot," the Samuel Beckett-inspired name of the company's tunnel boring machine, had completed the the first segment of a tunnel in the Southern California metropolis. Prior to today, it was unclear how long it would take Musk to convince the city to allow him to move the experimental effort beyond the SpaceX parking lot in Hawthorne. We don't have details on what Musk hammered out with the city of LA. But he did tweet earlier this month about a meeting with L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti to lay the groundwork for the necessary permits and regulatory approvals he'd need to start digging with Godot, which weighs about 1,200 tons and runs about 400 feet long. Musk said last month that the first tunnel would run from LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood, and Sherman Oaks, with later tunnels covering more of the greater LA area. Now, it looks like the LAX to Culver City route appears underway.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotHardware/~3/m_PTo_dKHhA/elon-musks-boring-machine-completes-the-first-section-of-an-la-tunnel


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