During a small press gathering at CES in Las Vegas today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company doesn't have any plans to resurrect the Shield Tablet, which launched in 2014, was last refreshed in 2015 and officially discontinued last year. "Shield TV is still unquestionably the best Android TV in the world," he said. "We have updated the software now over 30 times. People are blown away by how much we continue to enhance it." And more (unspecified) enhancements are coming, he said. TechCrunch reports: On the mobile side, though, the days of the Shield Tablet are very much over, especially now that the Nintendo Switch, which uses Nvidia's Tegra chips, has really captured that market. "We are really committed to [Shield TV], but on mobile devices, we don't think it's necessary," Huang said. "We would only build things not to gain market share. Nvidia is not a "take somebody else's market share company.' I think that's really angry. It's an angry way to run a business. Creating new markets, expanding the horizon, creating things that the world doesn't have, that's a loving way to build a business."

He added that this is the way to inspire employees, too. Just copying competitors and maybe selling a product cheaper, though, does nothing to motivate employees and is not what Nvidia is interested in. Of course, Huang left the door open to a future tablet if it made sense -- though he clearly doesn't think it does today. He'd only do so, "if the world needs it. But at the moment, I just don't see it. I think Nintendo did such a great job."

MojoKid writes: Dell just unveiled its latest desktop-replacement class notebook, the new Alienware Area-51m. Unlike most other notebooks, however, the Area-51m is actually packing an array of desktop-class hardware. Intel's Core i9-9900K is an available CPU option, for example, and NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2080 will be offered in the machine as well. The Area-51m also supports up to 64GB of RAM via quad SO-DIMM slots, multiple NVMe M.2 solid state drives and a SATA drive can be installed, and numerous 17.3" display options will be available as well, including a 144Hz IPS G-SYNC model. The Alienware Area-51m is also upgradeable, thanks to the use of socketed desktop processors and a custom GPU module. The machine will be available starting January 29th in two color options, Lunar Light and Dark Side of the Moon.

Intel announced a major rethink of its chip design back in December, just before it finally delivers 10nm chips for PCs and laptops. At CES 2019 this week, Intel is demonstrating its first Ice Lake 10nm processor that's based on its new Sunny Cove microarchitecture. From a report: Intel is building in Thunderbolt 3, Wi-Fi 6, and DL Boost (deep learning boost) into these Ice Lake chips for laptops and PCs to take advantage of. Intel is now promising that PC makers will have devices with Ice Lake processors on shelves by the end of 2019. At its CES keynote today, Intel demonstrated ODM systems from Pegatron and Wistron, and Dell even joined Intel on stage to show off an Ice Lake-powered XPS laptop that will be available later this year. Dell didn't show the device powered on, but it appeared to be a 2-in-1 device that looked similar to the XPS 13. Intel is also looking to the future, too. The chip giant is planning to use Foveros 3D chip stacking technology to build future chips, a method that allows Intel's chip designers to stack extra processing power on top of an already-assembled chip die. These "chiplets" can be stacked atop one another to form a processor that includes graphics, AI processing, and more.

vikingpower writes: Until now, yours truly has been running a one-man freelancer show. However, since January 1st the first employee is here, and of course I'm mighty proud of a stellarly clever young person working for me. She works remotely (I'm in one European capital; she is in another) and I need to buy her a laptop. Since she's straight out of college and a non-techie, she basically only knows one OS: Windows, although she could get comfortable with macOS. However, as a long-time (server-side) programmer, I feel Apple hardware is seriously overpriced. Also, my brilliant first employee will mostly do research and hardly needs anything more than a browser, Office or Office-like software (yes, I'm looking at you, Libre Office, and I love you!), and bibliography software. Should I get her a Chromebook or a mid-level laptop running Windows? Any thoughts?

MojoKid writes from a report via Hot Hardware: NVIDIA launched a new, more reasonably-priced GeForce RTX card today, dubbed the GeForce RTX 2060. The new midrange graphics card will list for $349 and pack all the same features as NVIDIA's higher-end GeForce RTX 2080 and 2070 series cards. The card is also somewhat shorter than other RTX 20-series cards at only 9.5" (including the case bracket), and its GPU has a few functional blocks disabled. Although it's packing a TU106 like the 2070, six Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs) have been disabled, along with 20% of its Tensor and RT cores. All told, the RTX 2060 has 1,920 active CUDA cores, with 240 Tensor cores, and 30 RT cores. Although the GeForce RTX 2060 seems like the next-gen cousin to the 1060, the RTX 2060 is significantly more powerful and more in line with the GeForce GTX 1070 Ti and GTX 1080 in terms of raw performance in the benchmarks. It can also play ray-tracing enabled games like Battlefield V with decent frame rates at 1080p with high image quality and max ray-tracing enabled. NVIDIA has also apparently decided to support open standards-based adaptive refresh rate monitor technology and will soon begin supporting even AMD FreeSync monitors in future driver update.

Days after Amazon revealed that 100 million Alexa-enabled devices have been sold, Google said today that it expects the billionth device with its AI Assistant to be sold later this month. From a report: Ahead of CES this morning, Google dropped a little stat update: Google expects Assistant to be on 1 billion devices total by the end of this month. That's up from around 400M devices this time a year ago. Google first announced Assistant back in May of 2016. By October of that year, they'd rolled it out to the Pixel/Pixel XL; nowadays, it's on TVs, smart speakers, tablets, smart watches, and just about every new Android phone that hits the market.

For several decades, the areal density of hard disks increased by an average of nearly 40 percent each year. But in recent years, that rate has slowed to around 10 percent. Seagate and Western Digital, the leading manufacturers of hard drives, differ with each other on how to get around this. From a report: In back-to-back announcements in October 2017, Western Digital pledged to begin shipping drives based on what is known as microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) in 2019, and Seagate said it would have drives that incorporate heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) on the market by 2020. If one company's solution proves superior, it will reshape a US $24 billion industry and set the course for a decade of advances in magnetic storage. Companies that wish to store huge amounts of data do have other options, but hard drives are still the go-to choice for enterprise storage needs that fall somewhere between faster, more expensive solid-state drives built on flash memory, and slower, cheaper magnetic tape.

Seagate now aims to debut a 20+ terabyte drive based on HAMR in 2020, and Western Digital promises MAMR drives that will hold roughly 16 TB later this year. Western Digital expects to quickly scale up to MAMR drives with 40 TB of capacity by 2025, while Seagate believes it can achieve similar capacities through HAMR, though it has not publicly stated a target date. Both companies are essentially starting from the same place, with hard drives that share a few key components. The disk, for example, is a thin platter that has been coated with some form of magnetic material made up of countless individual grains, each of which is magnetized in one particular direction. Ten or so grains in a cluster, all with magnetization pointing in the same direction, represent a bit.

It has taken almost four years but China's Lenovo Group has begun to see some rewards from the multibillion dollar acquisitions of IBM's commodity server business and Google's Motorola Mobility smartphone unit, with the company recently regaining the crown from HP as the world's biggest personal computer (PC) maker. From a report: The company in November posted a third, straight quarter of profit growth as its Motorola business broke even operationally and as its data centre unit posted much-reduced losses of US$3 million, allowing it to say it was on track to be a "sustainable, profitable growth engine." Chairman and chief executive Yang Yuanqing believes the worst is over for Lenovo, which has spent the past few years refocusing on mobile and smart devices, as well as its data centre services, in what the company has called an "intelligent transformation" to capitalize on the rapid growth of the internet of things (IoT) market globally, as well as the wider adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. "Because of the past few years of laying the groundwork ... we have all the assets needed to now push ahead in the field of automation [where processes can be conducted with minimal human inputs]," he said in a recent interview.

Long-time Slashdot reader foxalopex writes: It looks like Nvidia is going to be hit with a class action for investors who lost big when their stock price crashed more than 50% due to an overstock of GPU cards that were produced for the crypto-currency craze back in 2018. The suit claims investors were told Nvidia had control of the situation until it crashed worse than even Nvidia had anticipated.
"The Company's public statements were false and materially misleading," argues the complaint from a Los Angeles law firm, seeking investors who purchased shares in NVIDIA between August 10, 2017 and November 15, 2018.

It was on November 15 that NVIDIA issued a statement that "excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom...will be corrected." Citing new products for machine learning, film rendering, and cloud computing, they added that "Our market position and growth opportunities are stronger than ever."

General Motors was once the world's most profitable company -- for two decades -- and by 1970 its revenue was $22.8 billion (or $152 billion in today's dollars). But five weeks ago GM announced that it was finally ending small-car production and closing its Lordstown Assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio.

So what went wrong? Quartz argues that GM's decline "began with its quest to turn people into machines," as "the company turned assembly work into an interlocking chain of discrete tasks, to be executed by robots whenever possible." In an article shared by Slashdot reader reporter, Quartz argues that seen in that light, the company's response to a 1972 strike "marked the beginning of the company's long but uneven descent, which would be characterized by a repeated impulse to bet on fancy, futuristic but unproven technologies while undervaluing its workers."

But the strike also raised larger issues for "a massive special task force" issuing a federal report on the quality of working life in 1972, titled Work in America... [T]echnology had failed in its promise to free humans from drudgery and wring profit from their talents, the authors said. On the contrary, the new jobs created generally required minimal expertise and therefore prevented workers from honing their skills. That stymied career mobility and left people mired in the same torpor of boredom for decades. Despite this, America continued to offer its young people increasingly rigorous education -- even as work life left little opportunity to apply it.... The larger hopes and ambitions of Work in America -- the vision that saw satisfying work itself as essential to the health of American society and democracy -- exists now as little but a curio in the footnotes of academic journals....

Meanwhile, GM continued to lavish spending on big capital investments, confident that the secret to competitiveness lay in replacing humans with technology. But as in Lordstown, the spending bore little fruit. As automotive analyst Maryann Keller recounted in her 1989 book Rude Awakening, one GM executive observed that, between 1980 and 1985, the company shelled out an eye-popping $45 billion in capital investment. Despite that spending, its global market share rose by but a single percentage point, to 22%. "For the same amount of money, we could buy Toyota and Nissan outright," said the executive -- which would have instantly bumped GM's market share to 40%.
At GM quality suffered because "Instead of making flawless cars, workers simply did their assigned jobs," Quartz argues. "Workers had no big-picture goal of building cars together to motivate them."

The 7,000-word article concludes by noting that Youngstown residents still hope that their car factory will re-open. But it's also possible that instead Lordstown Assembly "will remain standing, but empty, a vast roadside reminder of a corporate elite's doomed quest to cheapen labor by stripping the human need for skill, learning, independence, and purpose out of production, by reimagining people as machines."

Researchers at the University of Maryland have managed to trick Google's reCaptcha system by using Google's own speech-to-text service. "[The researchers] claim that their CAPTCHA-fooling method, unCaptcha, can fool Google's reCaptcha, one of the most popular CAPTCHA systems currently used by hundreds of thousands of websites, with a 90 percent success rate," reports Motherboard. From the report: The researchers originally developed UnCaptcha in 2017, which uses Google's own free speech-to-text service to trick the system into thinking a robot is a human. It's an oroborus of bots: According to their paper, UnCaptcha downloads the audio captcha, segments the audio into individual digit audio clips, uploads the segments to multiple other speech-to-text services (including Google's), then converts these services' responses to digits. After a little homophone guesswork, it then decides which speech-to-text output is closest to accurate, and uploads the answer to the CAPTCHA field. This old method returned an 85% success rate.

After the release of that version of unCaptcha, Google fixed some of the loopholes that made it work, including better browser automation detection and switching to spoken phrases, rather than digits. The researchers claim that their new method, updated in June, gets around these improvements and is even more accurate than before, at 90 percent. "We have been in contact with the ReCaptcha team for over six months and they are fully aware of this attack," the researchers write. "The team has allowed us to release the code, despite its current success."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day. "That's just a huge waste of resources, even if you don't believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers -- real people -- whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff," says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.

Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild's energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum's code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum's new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.

Some Amazon stores have no cashiers, and Waymo is testing self-driving taxis. Are robots taking our jobs? It depends on what you do and where you do it, according to a new report by the World Bank released this week. From a report: "Advanced economies have shed industrial jobs, but the rise of the industrial sector in East Asia has more than compensated for this loss," said the report, titled "The Changing Nature of Work." That may seem like good news in a broad sense, but not to the people whose jobs are disappearing. Technological advances and automation are making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

"Workers in some sectors benefit handsomely from technological progress, whereas those in others are displaced and have to retool to survive," the report said. "Platform technologies create huge wealth but place it in the hands of only a few people." The World Bank recommends a new social contract that includes investment in education and retraining. Would that help American workers? "Policy-makers in Washington may have talked about the need to better prepare lower-skilled workers for the future transition, but little has been done," Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said Thursday.

Conservation nonprofit Resolve is using AI-equipped cameras to act as remote park rangers and help spot wildlife poachers before they kill endangered animals. "Today, Resolve announced a new custom-made device called TrailGuard AI, which uses Intel-made vision chips to identify animals and humans that wander into view," reports The Verge. "The cameras will be placed on access trails used by poachers, automatically alerting park rangers who can check up on any suspicious activity." From the report: TrailGuard AI builds on past work by Resolve to create remote cameras to aid conservation. However, early devices were bulky, had limited battery life, and were unsophisticated, sending images to rangers every time their motion sensors were tripped. This resulted in lots of false positives, as the cameras would be triggered by non-events, such as the wind shaking tree branches. The new device, by comparison, is no thicker than a human index finger, has a battery life of a year and a half, and can reliably identify humans, animals, and vehicles. The chip used by Resolve is Intel's Movidius Myriad 2 VPU (or vision processing unit), which is the same technology that powered Google's automatic Clips camera.

According to new research from Rice University, Texas has enough natural patterns of wind and sun to operate without coal. "Scientists found that between wind energy from West Texas and the Gulf Coast, and solar energy across the state, Texas could meet a significant portion of its electricity demand from renewable power without extensive battery storage," reports Houston Chronicle. "The reason: These sources generate power at different times of day, meaning that coordinating them could replace production from coal-fired plants." From the report: Texas is the largest producer of wind energy in the United States, generating about 18 percent of its electricity from wind. Most of the state's wind turbines are located in West Texas, where the wind blows the strongest at night and in the early spring, when demand is low. The resource, however, can be complemented by turbines on the Gulf Coast, where wind produces the most electricity on late afternoons in the summer, when power demand is the highest. Solar energy, a small, but rapidly growing segment of the state's energy mix, also has the advantage of generating power when it is needed most -- hot, sunny summer afternoons.

In the summer, Gulf Coast wind generation could overtake West Texas wind capacity from about 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. when sea breezes kick in, Rice research showed. From about 8 a.m. until 6 p.m., solar power average capacity also could exceed wind generation in West Texas, which increases as evening turns to night. In the winter, winds in West Texas strengthen and generation increases, dropping off about 9 a.m., when solar energy begins to ramp up. "It's all a matter of timing," said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at the state's grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Weather, however, remains unpredictable. Texas would still need battery storage and natural gas-fired power plants to fill in gaps when, for example, winds might slacken earlier than expected.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Almost a third of new cars sold in Norway last year were pure electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025. In a bid to cut carbon emissions and air pollution, Norway exempts battery-driven cars from most taxes and offers benefits such as free parking and charging points to hasten a shift from diesel and petrol engines. The independent Norwegian Road Federation (NRF) said on Wednesday that electric cars rose to 31.2 percent of all sales last year, from 20.8 percent in 2017 and just 5.5 percent in 2013, while sales of petrol and diesel cars plunged. The sales figures consolidate Norway's global lead in electric car sales per capita, part of an attempt by Western Europe's biggest producer of oil and gas to transform to a greener economy. For comparison, electric cars had a 2.2 percent share in China in 2017 and 1.2 percent in the United States, according to IEA data.

Why would you go with the smaller brand, faced with those offerings from tech's behemoths? Or, at the previous displays, why not just buy the cheaper models? Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian: That's the challenge for many consumer electronics firms. Not how to make things, or how to distribute them and get them in front of potential buyers. It's how to make a profit. Out of Fitbit, GoPro, Parrot and Sonos -- each operating in different parts of the consumer electronics business -- only the latter made an operating profit in the last financial quarter, and all four have made a cumulative operating loss so far this year. Making a profit in hardware has always been difficult. By contrast, in software, all the significant costs are in development; reproduction and distribution are trivial -- a digital copy is perfect, and the internet will transport 0s and 1s anywhere, effectively for free. If your product is free and ad-supported, you don't even need anti-piracy measures; you want people to copy it and use it. Software companies typically have gross margins of around 80%, and operating profits of 40% or so.

In hardware, though, the world now seems full of companies living by the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's mantra that "your [profit] margin is my opportunity". Indeed, Amazon is one of the reasons why long-term profit is more elusive: it provides a means for small startups to distribute products without formal warehousing arrangements, and compete with bigger businesses at lower cost. That, together with the rise of a gigantic electronic manufacturing capability in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, about an hour's drive north of Hong Kong, has made the modern hardware business one where only those with huge reserves of capital and brand recognition can hope to thrive.

schwit1 shares a report: Mining corporation Rio Tinto says that an autonomous rail system called AutoHaul that it's been developing in the remote Pilbara region of Australia for several years is now entirely operational -- an accomplishment the company says makes the system the "world's largest robot." "It's been a challenging journey to automate a rail network of this size and scale in a remote location like the Pilbara," Rio Tinto's managing director Ivan Vella told the Sydney Morning Herald, "but early results indicate significant potential to improve productivity, providing increased system flexibility and reducing bottlenecks." The ore-hauling train is just one part of an ambitious automation project involving robotics and driverless vehicles that Rio Tinto wants to use to automate its mining operations. The company conducted its first test of the train without a human on board last year, and it now claims that the system has completed more than a million kilometers (620,000 miles) of autonomous travel.

From a 9to5Mac report: As the new year begins in Pacific Time, where Apple's Cupertino headquarters are based, the AirPower charging mat has officially missed its 2018 release window. The charging mat promised to charge iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods on a single compact mat with flexibility on where devices can be placed. However, the product has been rumored to have faced internal development challenges as late as this past summer, which prevented Apple from bringing the product to market as smoothly as it expected.

[...] Unusually, Apple has not provided a statement to press with an update on AirPower's status. Apple refused to acknowledge the product at its September and October events, and has not responded to press requests for comment at the end of December. The product therefore enters 2019 still in limbo.

Long-time Slashdot reader reporter shared this article from NPR: The former chairman and two vice presidents of the Tokyo Electric Power Co. should spend five years in prison over the 2011 flooding and meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Japanese prosecutors say, accusing the executives of failing to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe. Prosecutors say the TEPCO executives didn't do enough to protect the nuclear plant, despite being told in 2002 that the Fukushima facility was vulnerable to a tsunami....

"It was easy to safeguard the plant against tsunami, but they kept operating the plant heedlessly," prosecutors said on Wednesday, according to The Asahi Shimbun. "That led to the deaths of many people." Former TEPCO Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata, 78; former Vice President Ichiro Takekuro, 72; and former Vice President Sakae Muto, 68, face charges of professional negligence resulting in death and injury....

All three have pleaded not guilty in Tokyo District Court, saying they could not have predicted the tsunami.