Earlier today at Samsung's Galaxy Note 10 launch event, Samsung announced several new features coming to DeX, an application that transforms your Samsung phone into a "desktop like" interface. The expanded version of DeX on the Note 10 now works with your computer, allowing you to transfer files (including photos), reply to messages and run mobile apps on your Mac or Windows PC. Engadget reports: The Note 10 also touts a Link to Windows option in the phone's Quick Panel that connects to a Windows 10 PC, sharing your phone's notifications on your PC screen with no specialized apps required. This concept also isn't completely new, but it's still helpful if you'd rather not check your phone for a must-see message or app alert. More Microsoft integrations are coming. You'll get to make and receive calls right from your PC (it's not clear if this is just for Samsung phones or for all Android devices). Samsung's Gallery app, meanwhile, will tie into OneDrive to upload photos to cloud storage. If the company has its way, your phone and computer will feel like extensions of each other.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Four Japanese companies have teamed up to build the world's first zero-emission tanker by mid-2021 that will be powered by large-capacity batteries and will operate in Tokyo Bay, according to a statement on Tuesday. The new company e5 Lab is a venture between Asahi Tanker, Exeno Yamamizu, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and Mitsubishi. The global maritime industry is facing an onslaught of legislation to improve its environmental performance. From next year, a majority of vessels will have to burn fuel containing less sulfur. A challenge requiring even more innovation, though, is a goal to halve shipping's carbon emissions by 2050.

While fully-electric ships have struggled to penetrate major markets, momentum is gathering. Rolls-Royce said last year that it had started offering battery-powered ship engines, while Norway's Kongsberg Gruppen ASA is developing an electric container vessel. Still, there are challenges in making the technology applicable to ships navigating thousands of miles across oceans because of the need to recharge batteries. Industries from auto to aviation are also looking to go electric. Komatsu, the world's second-biggest construction equipment, has developed its first-battery powered electric diggers. Electric-plane company Eviation Aircraft, which has signed up its first customer, predicts that in a few years it may not be able to keep up with orders.

Hyundai has released a version of its Sonata hybrid that has solar panels to help charge its battery. The BBC reports: The Korean car maker said up to 60% of the power for the car's battery could be supplied if the solar roof was used for six hours a day. The panels would provide enough power to propel the Sonata for 1,300km (800miles) a year, it added. Hyundai said it planned to offer the roof as an optional extra on other models in its range. The solar-roof equipped Sonata will be on sale in North America and Korea. Hyundai said it had no plans to sell it in other regions. No price for the hybrid passenger car equipped with a solar roof has been given by Hyundai. Stephen Edelstein from Digital Trends said: "Hybrids like the Sonata have smaller battery packs than all-electric cars, so a solar roof can make a bigger difference in charging." With that said, solar cells add cost and weight to cars, so "it's unclear how effective they can be in the real world," he added.

dryriver writes: Almost everything in computing appears to be tainted by profits-driven decisionmaking today, from the privacy catastrophe of using personal electronic devices to forced SaaS software licensing. If Big Oil or Big Tobacco ran the computing sector, things probably wouldn't be much worse than they are today. So here's the question: Is a return to idealism possible in computing? Can we go back to the days when computing was about smart nerds building cool shit for other nerds? Or is computing so far gone now that things simply cannot get better anymore?

At the Flash Memory Summit today, Toshiba introduced a new form factor for NVMe SSDs that is small enough to be a removable alternative to soldered-down BGA SSDs. "The new XFMEXPRESS form factor allows for two or four PCIe lanes while taking up much less space than even the smallest M.2 22x30mm card size," reports AnandTech. "The XFMEXPRESS card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm." From the report: XFMEXPRESS is intended to bring the benefits of replaceable storage to devices that would normally be stuck with soldered BGA SSDs or eMMC and UFS modules. For consumer devices this opens the way for aftermarket capacity upgrades, and for embedded devices that need to be serviceable this can permit smaller overall dimensions. Device manufacturers also get a bit of supply chain flexibility since storage capacity can be adjusted later in the assembly process. XFMEXPRESS is not intended to be used as an externally-accessible slot like SD cards; swapping out an XFMEXPRESS SSD will require opening up the case of the device it's installed in, though unlike M.2 SSDs the XFMEXPRESS socket and retention mechanism itself is tool-less.

XFMEXPRESS will allow for similar performance to BGA SSDs. The PCIe x4 host interface will generally not be the bottleneck, especially in the near future when BGA SSDs start adopting PCIe gen4, which the XFMEXPRESS connector can support. Instead, SSDs in these small form factors are often thermally limited, and the XFMEXPRESS connector was designed to allow for easy heat dissipation with a metal lid that can serve as a heatspreader.

Backblaze: As of June 30, 2019, Backblaze had 110,640 spinning hard drives in our ever-expanding cloud storage ecosystem. Of that number, there were 1,980 boot drives and 108,660 data drives. This review looks at the Q2 2019 and lifetime hard drive failure rates of the data drive models currently in operation in our data centers.

A California-based company called SkyCool Systems is in the early stages of manufacturing a cooling system that's more energy efficient than anything humans have used for a century. It's doing it using radiative cooling, a concept that was used in the Middle East and India hundreds of years ago. Quartz reports: To understand how radiative cooling works, forget for a moment the sun. Think instead about the night sky. Once the sun has set and the cooler evening begins, just about everything on Earth -- the soil, the grass, the roofs of homes, even people -- give off heat. A lot of that heat rises up into the atmosphere where it effectively transmits out into space, never returning to Earth. The night sky is very chilly, and objects sending heat upward at night send up more heat than the whole sky is sending back down.

Hundreds of years ago, long before refrigeration existed, people in India and Iran used this basic concept to make ice in climates with temperatures above freezing. Water was filled into large and shallow ceramic pools that were surrounded and insulated by hay, and then the pools were left out on clear nights. It sounds counterintuitive, but if the air wasn't too far above freezing, the heat emitted by the water made it lower in temperature than the surrounding air, allowing it to freeze. It's the same principle at play when you wake up on a summer morning to find a layer of frost or dew. Now the people at SkyCool are taking that principle and applying it to the modern era, employing it to reimagine how we cool our homes, data centers, and refrigerators. SkyCool's three co-founders created a material that helps facilitate the radiative cooling process.

"Their invention looks a lot like a solar panel," reports Quartz. "A flat metal panel is covered in a sheet of the material -- a high-tech film -- the trio invented. The material reflects the light and heat of the sun so effectively that the temperature beneath the film can drop 5 to 10-degrees Celsius (41 to 50-degrees Fahrenheit) lower than the air around it. A system of small pipes circulating through the metal panel beneath the film are exposed to that colder temperature, cooling the fluid inside before it's sent out to current-day refrigeration systems." A new study published today in the journal Nature Sustainability says radiative cooling could one day be its own, electricity-free system.

Huawei is testing a smartphone equipped with Hongmeng, the company's self-developed operating system, which could potentially go on sale by the end of this year, Chinese state-media outlet Global Times reported. From a report: The release of a Hongmeng-powered smartphone would mark a major step for China's Huawei, the world's second-biggest maker of smartphones, as U.S. government actions threaten its access to Google's Android operating system. The device will be priced at around 2,000 yuan ($288), the Global Times said on Sunday, citing unnamed sources. That will place the device toward the low-end segment of the smartphone market. Huawei executives have previously described Hongmeng as an operating system designed for internet-of-things products. Last month the company said the first major devices powered by Hongmeng would be its upcoming line of Honor-brand smart TVs.

"Lyft's Wednesday move to pull all its black and pink electric bikes from the East Bay, San Francisco and San Jose came after flammable battery packs or vandalism caused at least four bikes to catch fire," reports the Bay Area Newsgroup: San Jose city officials are encouraged by the fact no one was injured when a bike caught fire there on Tuesday, said Colin Heyne, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation... "They have no intention of re-introducing the bikes until they know what the problem is and have fixed it," Heyne said. "We'll work with them to get a full picture of what they are doing to investigate these batteries and what they will go through for safety testing before they relaunch the bikes...."

Representatives from Lyft reached out to the city on Wednesday after two fires were reported in San Francisco over the past week, he said, and told them it would deactivate the e-bikes until it could remove them from its fleet...

Lyft spokeswoman Julie Wood declined to answer questions about the incidents, other than to say no one was injured.... Wood on Thursday didn't respond to repeated questions from this news organization about whether there were any fires involving the e-bikes outside of San Francisco.
Lyft told the paper at least one of the fires was causd by vandalism (and not a malfunctioning battery) but acknowledged they weren't sure what caused the next two bike fires.

One frequent cycler wondered why Lyft didn't simply offer their customers regular (non-electric) bicycles? He told the newspaper that the disruption in service was frustrating -- though "I understand the safety concern and I don't want there to be a battery exploding between my legs when I'm riding the bike around."

The paper also notes reports that Lyft "pulled its black electric assist bikes in April after problems with the brakes caused some riders to careen over the handlebars."

Kant (Slashdot reader #67,320) shared this story from the photovoltaics news site PV Magazine: Scientists at Rice University in Texas have developed a device which converts heat into light by squeezing it into a smaller bandgap. The 'hyperbolic thermal emitter' could be combined with a PV system to convert energy otherwise wasted as heat -- a development the researchers say could drastically increase efficiency...

"Any hot surface emits light as thermal radiation," said Gururaj Naik, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. "The problem is that thermal radiation is broadband while the conversion of light to electricity is efficient only if the emission is in a narrow band." The team worked to create a device that could squeeze the photons emitted as heat into a narrower band that could be absorbed by a solar cell...

The next step for the research will be to combine the 'hyperbolic thermal emitter' device with a solar cell. "By squeezing all the wasted thermal energy into a small spectral region we can turn it into electricity very efficiently," said Naik, "the theoretical prediction is that we can get 80% efficiency."

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: AMD's Ryzen 3000 series processors, spearheaded by the Ryzen 7 3700X, have led what looks like an unprecedented assault on Intel's CPUs, at least going by the figures from one component retailer. The latest stats from German retailer Mindfactory (as highlighted on Reddit) for the month of July show that AMD sold an incredible 79% of all processor units, compared to 21% for Intel.

AMD's top-selling chip was the Ryzen 7 3700X, and get this: sales of that one single processor weren't far off equaling the sales of Intel's entire CPU range (at around the 80% mark of what Intel flogged). In June, AMD's overall market share was 68% at Mindfactory, so the increase to 79% represents a big jump, and the highest proportion of sales achieved by the company this year by a long way.

To put this in a plainer fashion, for every single processor sold by Intel, AMD sold four.

Ryzen 3rd-gen offerings have seemingly sold up a storm in the first couple weeks on shelves, and then slowed down, although that slippage is likely due to stock shortages rather than falling demand (the new flagship Ryzen 9 3900X chip is vanishingly thin on the ground, for example, and is therefore being flogged for extortionate prices on eBay in predictable fashion)... [W]e can throw in as many caveats as we like, but the plain truth (at least from this source) is that AMD's doing better than ever, and grabbing a truly startling proportion of CPU market share -- even with apparent stock issues providing some headwind.

By the end of the year, Stop & Shop will have installed 500 "giant, gray, aisle-patrolling robots" in its chains of stores, reports Mashable, starting in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.

"Attention shoppers: I've seen the future of grocery store technology, and let me tell you, we can do better." Each of the robots weighs a massive 140-pounds and costs a whopping $35,000. Oddly, all of the robots are named Marty, and atop their tall frames -- which tower over my own 5 foot, 3 inch stature -- rests a large pair of google eyes. You know, so as not to come off as complete faceless, emotionless, lifeless bots. If you're confused as to what these rolling mechanical columns do, Martys also wear the following description on their bodies like a name tag:

This store is monitored by Marty for your safety. Marty is an autonomous robot that uses image capturing technology to report spills, debris, and other potential hazards to store employees to improve your shopping experience.

Essentially, once Marty identifies a hazard using its sensors, it stops in its tracks, changes its signature operating lights from blue to yellow, and repeatedly announces "caution, hazard detected," in English and Spanish. One of several catches to their existence, however, is that the robots don't actually clean anything...

[O]ne of the robot's major flaws that its sensors appear to treat each hazard with the same level of caution. A harmless bottle cap or errant piece of cilantro will elicit the same response as a spill of clear liquid that someone could genuinely slip and injure themselves on, which means that in certain cases an employee may have to take time that could be spent interacting with a customer to walk across the store and grab a puny little grape that escaped a bag.
One customer complained on Twitter that the robot "just roams around and makes ominous beeps constantly."

And one employee confided told the New Food Economy site that "It's really not doing much of anything besides getting in the way."

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: Making smaller, better transistors for microprocessors is getting more and more difficult, not to mention fantastically expensive. Only Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) are equipped to operate at this frontier of miniaturization. They are all manufacturing integrated circuits at the equivalent of what is called the 7-nanometer node... Right now, 7 nm is the cutting edge, but Samsung and TSMC announced in April that they were beginning the move to the next node, 5 nm. Samsung had some additional news: It has decided that the kind of transistor the industry had been using for nearly a decade has run its course. For the following node, 3 nm, which should begin limited manufacture around 2020, it is working on a completely new design.

That transistor design goes by a variety of names -- gate-all-around, multibridge channel, nanobeam -- but in research circles we've been calling it the nanosheet. The name isn't very important. What is important is that this design isn't just the next transistor for logic chips; it might be the last. There will surely be variations on the theme, but from here on, it's probably all about nanosheets....

All in all, stacking nanosheets appears to be the best way possible to construct future transistors. Chipmakers are already confident enough in the technology to put it on their road maps for the very near future. And with the integration of high-mobility semiconductor materials, nanosheet transistors could well carry us as far into the future as anyone can now foresee.

simpz writes: Does anyone know of a fairly inexpensive webcam that doesn't depend on a cloud service? A few years ago, you could buy a cheap webcam (with the usual pan/tilt and IR) for about $50 that was fully manageable from a web browser. Nowadays the web interfaces are limited in functionality (or non-existent), or you need a phone app that doesn't work well (maybe only working through a cloud service). I've even seen a few cheap ones that still need ActiveX to view the video in a web browser, really people!

I'd like to avoid a cloud service for privacy and to allow this to operate on the LAN with no internet connection present. Even a webcam where you can disable the cloud connection outbound would be fine and allow you to use it fully locally. I guess the issue is this has become a niche thing that the ease of a cloud service connection probably wins for most people, and other considerations don't really matter to them.

I had a brief look at a Raspberry Pi solution, but didn't see anything like a small webcam form factor (with pan/tilt etc). Alternatively, are there any third-party firmwares for commercial webcams (sort of a OpenWRT-, DD-WRT-, or LineageOS-style project for webcams) that could provide direct local access only via a web browser (and things like RTSP)?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC An artificial intelligence system should be recognized as the inventor of two ideas in patents filed on its behalf, a team of academics says. The AI has designed interlocking food containers that are easy for robots to grasp and a warning light that flashes in a rhythm that is hard to ignore. Patents offices insist innovations are attributed to humans -- to avoid legal complications that would arise if corporate inventorship were recognized. The academics say this is "outdated." And it could see patent offices refusing to assign any intellectual property rights for AI-generated creations. As a result, two professors from the University of Surrey have teamed up with the Missouri-based inventor of Dabus AI to file patents in the system's name with the relevant authorities in the UK, Europe and US. Dabus is designed to develop new ideas, which is "traditionally considered the mental part of the inventive act," according to creator Stephen Thaler.

Law professor Ryan Abbott told BBC News: "These days, you commonly have AIs writing books and taking pictures - but if you don't have a traditional author, you cannot get copyright protection in the US. So with patents, a patent office might say, 'If you don't have someone who traditionally meets human-inventorship criteria, there is nothing you can get a patent on.' In which case, if AI is going to be how we're inventing things in the future, the whole intellectual property system will fail to work." He suggested an AI should be recognized as being the inventor and whoever the AI belonged to should be the patent's owner, unless they sold it on.

Intel's new generation of processors is nigh upon us, and it promises to be a doozy in several respects. VentureBeat: The Santa Clara chipmaker today launched 11 new 10-nanometer 10th Gen Intel Core processors (code-named Ice Lake) designed for slim laptops, 2-in-1s, and other high-end mobile form factors. In addition to capable new integrated graphics and enhanced connectivity courtesy Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 3, the chips feature tweaks intended to accelerate task-specific workloads like AI inference and photo editing, as well as gaming. Intel expects the first 35 or so systems sporting Ice Lake-U and Ice Lake-Y chips to ship for the holiday season. Several that passed the chipmaker's Project Athena certification were previewed at Computex in Taiwan, including the Acer Swift 5, Dell XPS 13-inch 2-in 1, HP Envy 13, and Lenovo S940.

No matter which processor in the 10th Gen portfolio your future PC sports, its four cores (eight logical cores) paired with a 6MB or 8MB cache will support up to 32 GB of LP4/x-3733 (or up to 64GB of DDR4-3200), and they'll sip 9W, 15W, or 28W of power while clocking up to 4.1GHz at maximum Turbo Boost frequency. Each chip has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for external use, and their memory controllers allow for idle power states for less intensive tasks. With respect to AI and machine learning, every laptop-bound 10th Gen processor -- whether Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 -- boasts Sunny Cove cores with Intel AVX-512-Deep Learning Boost, a new instruction set that speeds up automatic image enhancements, photo indexing, media postprocessing, and other AI-driven tasks.

According to The Planetary Society, LightSail 2 has successfully raised its orbit using solar sailing, making it the first small spacecraft to demonstrate the concept. From the report: Since unfurling the spacecraft's silver solar sail last week, mission managers have been optimizing the way the spacecraft orients itself during solar sailing. After a few tweaks, LightSail 2 began raising its orbit around the Earth. In the past 4 days, the spacecraft has raised its orbital high point, or apogee, by about 2 kilometers. The perigee, or low point of its orbit, has dropped by a similar amount, which is consistent with pre-flight expectations for the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft. The mission team has confirmed the apogee increase can only be attributed to solar sailing, meaning LightSail 2 has successfully completed its primary goal of demonstrating flight by light for CubeSats.

The milestone makes LightSail 2 the first spacecraft to use solar sailing for propulsion in Earth orbit, the first small spacecraft to demonstrate solar sailing, and just the second-ever solar sail spacecraft to successfully fly, following Japan's IKAROS, which launched in 2010. LightSail 2 is also the first crowdfunded spacecraft to successfully demonstrate a new form of propulsion. The mission team will continue raising LightSail 2's orbit for roughly a month, until the perigee decreases to the point where atmospheric drag overcomes the thrust from solar sailing. During the orbit-raising period, the team will continue optimizing the performance of the solar sail.

Researchers from Tsinghua University in China and University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new kind of soft robot that looks like a bent strip of paper, but is able to move at 20 body lengths per second and survive being stomped on. The robot has been presented in the current issue of Science Robotics. IEEE Spectrum reports: This prototype robot measures just 3 centimeters by 1.5 cm. It takes a scanning electron microscope to actually see what the robot is made of -- a thermoplastic layer is sandwiched by palladium-gold electrodes, bonded with adhesive silicone to a structural plastic at the bottom. When an AC voltage (as low as 8 volts but typically about 60 volts) is run through the electrodes, the thermoplastic extends and contracts, causing the robot's back to flex and the little "foot" to shuffle. A complete step cycle takes just 50 milliseconds, yielding a 200 hertz gait. And technically, the robot "runs," since it does have a brief aerial phase.

The researchers also put together a prototype with two legs instead of one, which was able to demonstrate a potentially faster galloping gait by spending more time in the air. They suggest that robots like these could be used for "environmental exploration, structural inspection, information reconnaissance, and disaster relief," which are the sorts of things that you suggest that your robot could be used for when you really have no idea what it could be used for. But this work is certainly impressive, with speed and robustness that are largely unmatched by other soft robots. An untethered version seems possible due to the relatively low voltages required to drive the robot, and if they can put some peanut-sized sensors on there as well, practical applications might actually be forthcoming sometime soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: About 5,000 euros ($5,600) are set to buy your 10-year-old combustion clunker an electric makeover -- and offer a cut-price way to avoid driving bans across European cities. French startup Transition-One has developed retrofitting technology that adds an electric engine, batteries and a connected dashboard into older models of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV, Volkswagen AG, Renault SA and PSA Group for about 8,500 euros, or 5,000 euros after government subsidies in France.

In the prototype Twingo, three battery packs are fitted in front and two in what used to be the gas tank. The whole pack, bought from a Tesla Inc. parts reseller, weighs 120 kilograms (265 pounds). To compare, Renault's electric Zoe has a 290 kilogram battery for a 210 kilometer driving range. Prices start at around 23,000 euros excluding battery rental battery. The transition takes less than a day, leaving the original stick shift and gear box and installing the plug behind the hatch that drivers usually pop open to refill the tank. Founder Aymeric Libeau, whose previous experiences include co-founding software company Pentalog Group, has worked on retrofitting for two years, and tested the method with a French business school. He is looking to raise 6 million euros to build a factory he says would be capable of churning out as many as 4,000 vehicles next year.

Libeau expects French and European regulator approval by the end of the year and will start pre-orders in September to test demand.

Samsung is one of the only companies still producing tablets to rival Apple's iPad. Today the company announced the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6, its latest high-end tablet, for $649. Pre-orders start August 23, and the device ships September 6. Samsung says there will be an LTE version available later. Ars Technica reports: The Samsung Tab S6 features a 10.5-inch 2560x1600 OLED display, a 2.84GHz Snapdragon 855, and a 7040mAh battery. The base version has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, with a higher tier of 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. For cameras, there's an 8MP front camera, while the rear gets a 13MP main camera and a 5MP wide-angle lens. The device is down to 5.7mm thick and weighs 420 grams. This is Samsung's first-ever tablet with an in-screen fingerprint reader. Interestingly, it's an optical reader instead of the ultrasonic tech that the Galaxy S10 uses. Somehow, on a 10-inch tablet, Samsung couldn't find room for a headphone jack. Even Apple, which ditched the headphone jack two years ago, still puts a headphone jack on iPads. Samsung is apparently declaring war on the headphone jack with this round of updates -- the Galaxy Note 10, launching next week, is expected to dump the headphone jack, too.

The S-Pen comes with the tablet but doesn't stow away inside the body; instead, a groove on the back of the tablet gives it a spot to magnetically attach to. Of course, don't expect the tablet to sit flat on a table with a big pen attached to the back. As with other newer Samsung devices, the S-Pen now comes with a battery and some Bluetooth functionality, allowing it to do things like work as a remote shutter button for the camera. A new "Air action" gesture system lets you do things like change the camera mode or scroll through pictures with a flick of the pen.