An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: For those following Huawei's substantial rise over the past several years, it'll come as no surprise that the Chinese government played an important role in fostering the hardware maker. Even so, the actual numbers behind the ascent are still a bit jaw-dropping. Huawei reportedly had "access to as much as $75 billion in state support," according to a piece published by The Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day. That massive figure is culled from poring over various forms, including grants and tax breaks. Huawei, for its part, isn't denying any government support, but said in response that what it received was "small and non-material," in line with the usual variety of grants awarded to tech startups and companies.

Per WSJ's accounting of public records, Huawei got around $46 billion in loans and other support, coupled with $25 billion in tax cuts used to accelerate tech advances. There's also a billion or two here and there for things like land discounts and grants. At the very least, it seems China had a vested interest in the rise of a hardware company that could go head to head with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Certainly it's not unheard of that a government would foster some growth in the form of grants, but there's a clear question of how much.

Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo has managed to automate 90 percent of its flagship Tokyo warehouse, the Financial Times reports, adding that the facility includes a two-armed robot that can fold and box T-shirts, a job previously reserved for human staff. From a report: The industrial T-shirt folders come from Japanese robotics startup, Mujin. Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing, partnered with Mujin to equip its flagship Tokyo warehouse with the robots, reducing its reliance on human labor in the process. FT says the innovation could enable the factory to completely automate production.

Computer engineer George Hilliard says he has built an electronic business card running Linux. From his blog post: It is a complete, minimal ARM computer running my customized Linux firmware built with Buildroot. It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card's shell. The flash drive has a README file, a copy of my resume, and some of my photography. The shell has several games and Unix classics such as fortune and rogue, a small 2048, and a small MicroPython interpreter.

All this is accomplished on a very small 8MB flash chip. The bootloader fits in 256KB, the kernel is 1.6MB, and the whole root filesystem is 2.4MB. So, there's plenty of space for the virtual flash drive. It also includes a writable home directory, on the off chance that anyone creates something they want to keep. This is also saved on the flash chip, which is properly wear leveled with UBI. The whole thing costs under $3. It's cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I'm probably trying to impress you. In a detailed write-up, Hilliard goes on to explain how he came up with the design and assembled all the components. Naturally, there were some problems that arose during the construction that he had to troubleshoot: "first, the USB port wasn't long enough to reliably make contact in many USB ports. Less critically, the flash footprint was wrong, which I worked around by bending the leads under the part by hand..."

Impressively, the total cost of the card (not including his time) was $2.88 -- "cheap enough that I don't feel bad giving it away, as designed!"

A new method for preserving genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials is reported. From a report: The future of digital memory may be inside a small plastic bunny that contains 3-D printing instructions for replicating itself stored in artificial DNA, said scientists Monday, who announced a method for mixing genetically encoded data into common manufacturing materials. The scientists sealed the DNA data inside thousands of microscopic glass beads that protected the information as the plastic for the toy was heated and processed. By sequencing a snippet of the toy's DNA-infused plastic, they could extract the instructions and make flawless copies of the figure, they said. They reported the experiment in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

While cumbersome compared with conventional computer hard drives or tapes, the new DNA data-storage technique one day could be used to store digital information in items molded into virtually any shape, the scientists said. It could, for example, be used to make devices that contain their own blueprints or to embed electronic health records in medical implants and prescription drugs, they said. "We wanted to show that you can use this technology to hide information in common objects," said computational genomics researcher Yaniv Erlich, a co-author of the study who is chief science officer at a consumer genetics genealogy company called MyHeritage. The company wasn't involved in the project.

"Present laptop dying, battery of course," writes long-time Slashdot reader ClarkMills. It uses proprietary pouch Lithium cells. Wouldn't it be great to just swap in a new set of 18650s? Okay, it may not be a thin laptop but it would save me from turfing a perfectly good laptop otherwise...
The original submission drew some interesting comments -- including one from long-time Slashdot reader thegreatbob suggesting a used laptop might be the only option. "This seems to be due to the notion that 'thinner!' and 'lighter!' are more important than 'doesn't periodically turn into an incendiary pillow!' "

But are there other options? Share your own thoughts in the comments.

Is there a laptop that uses rechargeable 18650 cell batteries?

Long-time Slashdot reader kackle writes: If you cut your teeth on 8-bit computers during their explosion into the mainstream beginning in the 1970s, you were likely aware of and/or influenced by the work of electrical engineer Charles "Chuck" Peddle, who died this week.

The general public may not know his name today, but his efforts had a big impact on the cost and availability of computing to the average person at the beginning of the personal computer era.
"More than any other person, Chuck Peddle deserves to be called the founder of the personal computer industry," Byte magazine wrote back in 1982. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, management had told Peddle to abandon efforts to build an ultra low price microprocessor -- but instead he'd joined MOS Technology, working on the team that designed their influential $25 650x processors, remembers the Computer History Museum. "The most famous member of the 650x series was the 6502, which was subsequently used in very many microcomputer devices (four well-known examples from the consumer market being the Apple II, the Commodore VIC-20, the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES, the ATARI 8-bit computers and the BBC Micro from Acorn Computers)."

in 2014 Peddle recorded a four-hour oral history with the museum, and earlier this year Peddle spoke at the University of Maine, where he'd earned an engineering physics degree 60 years earlier.

This week in an online remembrance, engineer David Gray remembers "the joy of creating, inventing and innovating with Chuck on and off over a forty six (46) year period... I am missing your indomitable spirit as I write."

"China is about to start operation on its 'artificial sun' -- a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun," writes Newsweek.

schwit1 shared their report: If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy.

The device, called HL-2M Tokamak, is part of the nation's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, which has been running since 2006. In March, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation announced it would complete building HL-2M by the end of the year. The coil system was installed in June and since then, work on HL-2M has gone "smoothly," the Xinhua News Agency reported in November. Duan Xuru, head of the Southwestern Institute of Physics, which is part of the corporation, announced the device will become operational in 2020 at the 2019 China Fusion Energy Conference, the state news agency said.

He told attendees how the new device will achieve temperatures of over 200 million degrees Celsius. That's about 13 times hotter than the center of the sun. Previous devices developed for the artificial sun experiment reached 100 million degrees Celsius, a breakthrough that was announced in November last year.

"India has been aggressively pivoting away from coal-fired power plants and towards electricity generated by solar, wind, and hydroelectric power," writes the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Lasrick shared their report: The reasons for this change are complex and interlocking, but one aspect in particular seems to stand out: The price for solar electricity has been in freefall, to levels so low they were once thought impossible. For example, since 2017, one solar energy company has been generating electricity in the Indian state of Rajasthan at the unheard-of, guaranteed wholesale price of 2.44 rupees per kilowatt-hour, or 3 U.S. cents. (In comparison, the average price for electricity in the United States is presently about 13.19 cents per kilowatt-hour, and some locations in the country pay far more....) Consequently, with this massive reduction in the cost of renewables, India is able to shift away from the world's dirtiest fossil fuel, and to much cleaner sources.

While western countries continue to baulk at reducing their reliance on fossil fuels, India is accelerating its plans to lock in a sustained, aggressive reduction in the carbon emissions intensity of its economy. In fact, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, is targeting a fivefold expansion of the electricity generated from renewable energy sources by 2030 -- and this from a country that has already doubled its renewable energy in the past three years. This means that India is committed to more than meeting the goals of its national contributions in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement; it is going to "overdeliver," in the parlance of economists... What's more, the Indian government's plans include a progressive expansion of electric vehicles, putting the country on a path to progressively reduce reliance on expensive, high emissions oil imports....

As India benefits from the shift to domestic renewable energy, other emerging market nations are watching, keen to leverage the same benefits for their own countries. And therein lies a key path to global decarbonization and a much-needed solution to limit global warming.

harrymcc writes: Atari's first home computers, the 400 and 800, were announced at Winter CES in January 1980. But they didn't ship until late in the year -- so over at Fast Company, Benj Edwards has marked their 40th anniversary with a look at their rise and fall. Though Atari ultimately had trouble competing with Apple and other entrenched PC makers, it produced machines with dazzling graphics and sound and the best games of their era, making its computers landmarks from both a technological and cultural standpoint.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: [S]cientists at IBM Research have developed a new battery whose unique ingredients can be extracted from seawater instead of mining. The problems with the design of current battery technologies like lithium-ion are well known, we just tend to turn a blind eye when it means our smartphones can run for a full day without a charge. In addition to lithium, they require heavy metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel which come from giant mines that present hazards to the environment, and often to those doing the actual mining. These metals are also a finite resource, and as more and more devices and vehicles switch to battery power, their availability is going to decrease at a staggering pace.

As a potential solution, scientists at IBM Research's Battery Lab came up with a new design that replaces the need for cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and also uses a new liquid electrolyte (the material in a battery that helps ions move from one end to the other) with a high flash point. The combination of the new cathode and the electrolyte materials was also found to limit the creation of lithium dendrites which are spiky structures that often develop in lithium-ion batteries that can lead to short circuits. So not only would this new battery have less of an impact on the environment to manufacture, but it would also be considerably safer to use, with a drastically reduced risk of fire or explosions. The researchers believe the new battery would have a larger capacity than existing lithium-ion batteries, could potentially charge to about 80 percent of its full capacity in just five minutes, would be more energy-efficient, and, on top of it all, it would be cheaper to manufacture which in turn means they could help reduce the cost of gadgets and electric vehicles. As IEEE Spectrum notes, the group has revealed precious little technical information about their battery's chemistry, configuration, or design -- so those in the field are unsure if IBM has created something truly remarkable, or if they're exaggerating their claims.

Motorola is slightly delaying its reimagined foldable Razr flip phone, citing an unexpectedly high demand. Android Police reports: Pre-orders were originally slated to begin on December 26th, ahead of the launch on January 9th, but it looks like we'll have to wait a little bit for our fancy blasts from the past. Motorola has stated that it doesn't foresee "a significant shift" from the original launch window, so hopefully the delay won't be too long. With the announcement of the delay coming at the eleventh hour, it might put a damper on some tech enthusiasts' holiday, but at least we'll avoid the mad rush that comes with under-supplying.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Many IT workers worry their positions will become obsolete as changes in hardware, software, and computing tasks outstrip their skills. A former contractor for Siemens concocted a remedy for that -- plant logic bombs in projects he designed that caused them to periodically malfunction. Then wait for a call to come fix things. On Monday, David A. Tinley, a 62-year-old from Harrison City, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to six months in prison and a fine of $7,500 in the scheme. The sentence came five months after he pleaded guilty to a charge of intentional damage to a protected computer. Tinley was a contract employee for Siemens Corporation at its Monroeville, Pennsylvania, location.

According to a charging document filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the logic bombs Tinley surreptitiously planted into his projects caused them to malfunction after a certain preset amount of time. Because Siemens managers were unaware of the logic bombs and didn't know the cause of the malfunctions, they would call Tinley and ask him to fix the misbehaving projects. The scheme ran from 2014 to 2016. Tinley will be under supervised release for two years following his prison term. He will also pay restitution. The parties in the case stipulated a total loss amount of $42,262.50. Tinley faced as much as 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Dominion Energy, the utility that supplies the Commonwealth of Virginia with most of its electricity, is about to begin an ambitious plan to roll out electric school buses in the state that will store electricity when not ferrying kids to school. "Earlier this week, it was announced that phase one, which begins in 2020, will start with 50 electric school buses built by Thomas Built Buses in partnership with Proterra and Daimler Trucks," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The buses will be Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys, an electric version of one of TBB's existing buses. Each one will carry 220kWh of lithium-ion battery storage for a range of about 134 miles (216km), and they will recharge in about three hours using Proterra's 60kW DC fast charging system.

Dominion Energy says that replacing a single diesel school bus with an EV bus has the same effect as taking more than five gasoline cars off the road, and by 2025 it hopes to have deployed 1,000 EV school buses to the Commonwealth. Should all go well, it wants 50 percent of Virginia's school bus fleet to be battery electric by 2030. The utility is offsetting the costs to school districts, in part because it wants to use the buses for vehicle-to-grid storage when they're not on the school run. In fact, a school district's suitability for V2G is the main determining factor in deciding which districts will be chosen for the first 50 buses.

Russia has launched an effort to build a working quantum computer, in a bid to catch up to other countries in the race for practical quantum technologies. From a report: The government will inject around 50 billion roubles (US$790 million) over the next 5 years into basic and applied quantum research carried out at leading Russian laboratories, the country's deputy prime minister, Maxim Akimov, announced on 6 December at a technology forum in Sochi. The windfall is part of a 258-billion-rouble programme for research and development in digital technologies, which the Kremlin has deemed vital for modernizing and diversifying the Russian economy. "This is a real boost," says Aleksey Fedorov, a quantum physicist at the Russian Quantum Center (RQC), a private research facility in Skolkovo near Moscow. "If things work out as planned, this initiative will be a major step towards bringing Russian quantum science to a world-class standard."

[...] The race is on to create quantum computers that outperform classical machines in specific tasks. Prototypes developed by Google and IBM, headquartered in Mountain View, California, and Armonk, New York, respectively, are approaching the limit of classical computer simulation. In October, scientists at Google announced that a quantum processor working on a specific calculation had achieved such a quantum advantage. Russia is far from this milestone. "We're 5 to 10 years behind," says Fedorov. "But there's a lot of potential here, and we follow very closely what's happening abroad." Poor funding has excluded Russian quantum scientists from competing with Google, says Ilya Besedin, an engineer at the National University of Science and Technology in Moscow.

davidwr writes: If you were going to buy a desktop or laptop computer, how important is it to be able to upgrade memory and storage after your purchase? Is not being able to upgrade an "automatic no-buy," assuming you can get a computer that meets your needs that is upgradeable? If not, would you be willing to pay a little more for upgradeability? A lot more?

Personally, I like to keep computers 4-6 years, which means I prefer to buy an upgradeable machine then upgrade it after 2 or 3 years using then-much-cheaper or not-available-at-all-today parts. What are your thoughts?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A landmark legal case has been launched against the world's largest tech companies by Congolese families who say their children were killed or maimed while mining for cobalt used to power smartphones, laptops and electric cars, the Guardian can reveal. Apple, Google, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla have been named as defendants in a lawsuit filed in Washington DC by human rights firm International Rights Advocates on behalf of 14 parents and children from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The lawsuit accuses the companies of aiding and abetting in the death and serious injury of children who they claim were working in cobalt mines in their supply chain. The families and injured children are seeking damages for forced labour and further compensation for unjust enrichment, negligent supervision and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Since cobalt is used in the rechargeable lithium batteries used in millions of products sold by these tech companies, the lawsuit argues that they all aided and abetted the mining companies that profited from the labor of children who were forced to work in dangerous conditions -- conditions that ultimately led to death and serious injury.

"The court papers claim that Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Google and Tesla all have the authority and resources to supervise and regulate their cobalt supply chains and that their inability to do so contributed to the deaths and injuries suffered by their clients," reports The Guardian. The lawsuit says children were working illegally at a mine owned by UK mining company Glencore, which sold cobalt to Umicore, a Brussels-based metal and mining trader, which then sold battery-grade cobalt to several of the tech companies. Several other mines mentioned in the lawsuit are owned by Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, a major Chinese cobalt firm, which also supplies several tech companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A nuclear fusion start-up backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos raised more than $100 million to help design and build a demonstration power plant. The company lined up $65 million in Series E financing led by Singapore's Temasek Holdings Pte, and is getting another $38 million from Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund, General Fusion Inc. said in a statement Monday. It's now attracted more than $200 million in financing.

Canada-based General Fusion is one of about two dozen companies seeking to commercialize nuclear fusion technology. It relies on the same process that powers stars, generating huge amounts of energy by fusing small atoms into larger ones. While it holds out the promise of cheap, carbon-free energy, researchers have been working for decades to overcome significant technical hurdles. Firms pursuing such designs are hoping they can start generating power sooner than the 35-nation, $25 billion Tokamak fusion reactor known as ITER. Collaborators on that facility -- the largest research project in history -- have been laboring on a gigantic demonstration reactor in France since 2010.

California now has one million solar roofs, representing about 14% of all renewable power generated in the state. But solar advocates "said the milestone has come despite escalating efforts by utilities to undermine rooftop solar installations," according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

"They said those attacks include everything from hefty fees on ratepayers to calling for dramatic cuts to the credits residents receive for generating energy from the sun." "We will seek sensible solutions that continue to encourage solar power but don't adversely affect working families who can't afford solar systems," said SDG&E spokesman Wes Jones. Advocates have said that utilities are exaggerating the challenges that rooftop solar creates and downplaying the value it adds to the overall system. "They trot out this cost-shifting argument that looks on the face of it like they care about equity, but really the opposite is true," said Dave Rosenfeld, executive director of the Solar Rights Alliance, a new consumer rights group funded by ratepayers and rooftop solar companies. "If you do the numbers right, solar is contributing to a reduction in the cost of operating the electricity grid now and in the future..."

Power providers specifically argued that homeowners with solar panels weren't paying their fair share of the costs associated with building, maintaining and operating the state's extensive energy grid as well as fees associated with state-mandated energy efficiency and other programs. Over the last century, the price tag of expanding the state's electrical infrastructure to service remote communities and hook up to new power plants has largely been socialized, spread evenly over the customer base through rate increases approved by the utilities commission. All of those costs get baked into electric bills, but because the net metering program credits rooftop solar at the retail rate, rather than the wholesale rate, utilities say folks with solar panels have been getting something of a free ride. Utility officials have said that as a result they have had to shift those costs onto customers without solar. "Through the existing net energy metering policy, rooftop solar customers are subsidized by customers without solar rooftops," said Ari Vanrenen, spokesman for PG&E....

Advocates of rooftop solar strongly disagreed with this assessment. They said the technology, especially when paired with batteries, will eventually bring down the cost of electricity for everyone -- specifically by reducing the need for costly upgrades to the power grid. They argued that investor-owned utilities oppose rooftop solar because it will eventually curb the growth model that companies have long used to reward shareholders and pay out large salaries. SDG&E and others have an incentive to build solar out in the desert because it requires building long power lines, which are then used to justify rate hikes, said Bill Powers, a prominent electrical engineering consultant and consumer advocate.
The article also points out that some California utilities have raised their minimum bill -- with one specifically saying they were doing it to target solar customers, and another launching a new $65-a-month fee on any customer who installs solar panels.

"A new generation of reactors will start producing power in the next few years," writes Wired, addingi that "They're comparatively tiny -- and may be key to hitting our climate goals." For the last 20 years, the future of nuclear power has stood in a high bay laboratory tucked away on the Oregon State University campus in the western part of the state. Operated by NuScale Power, an Oregon-based energy startup, this prototype reactor represents a new chapter in the conflict-ridden, politically bedeviled saga of nuclear power plants. NuScale's reactor won't need massive cooling towers or sprawling emergency zones. It can be built in a factory and shipped to any location, no matter how remote. Extensive simulations suggest it can handle almost any emergency without a meltdown. One reason is that it barely uses any nuclear fuel, at least compared with existing reactors. It's also a fraction of the size of its predecessors.... Perhaps most importantly, small modular reactors can take advantage of several cooling and safety mechanisms unavailable to their big brothers, which all but guarantees they won't become the next Chernobyl... Yet this small reactor can crank out 60 megawatts of energy, which is about one-tenth the smallest operational reactor in the U.S. today....

But small reactors will still need to prove they can be cost-competitive, says Steve Fetter, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland. With the price of renewables like wind and solar rapidly falling and ample natural gas available, smaller, svelter reactors may never find their niche. Especially if a prime motivator is climate change, whose pace is exceeding that of regulatory approvals. "I am skeptical of the ability to license advanced nuclear reactors and deploy them on a scale that would make a difference for climate change," adds Fetter. "But I think it's worth exploring because they're a centralized form of carbon-free electricity and we don't have a lot of those available." At least in the US, it might be the only way nuclear power gets another chance.
NuScale Power has already secured permission to build its first 12-reactor plant at the Idaho National Laboratory, supplying power to Western states "as soon as 2026," according to the article. And they're not the only company pursuing smaller nuclear plants.

"Earlier this month, a secretive nuclear startup called Oklo unveiled Aurora, its 1.5-megawatt microreactor, and announced it had received a permit from the Department of Energy to build its first one at the Idaho National Lab."

Long-time Slashdot reader 140Mandak262Jamuna brings news of a triumph for a Tesla power project in South Australia: about 900 residential rooftop solar panels, coupled with storage batteries, "all linked up to central control, to form what they are calling a 'Virtual Power Plant.'" Nothing virtual about it, distributed power plant would have been a better name. That project, designed to link 50,000 homes and their solar panels, is just 2% complete. About 1000 homes. That 2% complete project had enough juice and control to step in, detect the frequency drop, increase power from the batteries and save the day.
But does this have implications for the future? "The opportunity for Virtual Power Plants to reach a large scale will benefit all energy users through added competition to deliver services at reducing prices," says the executive general manager of emerging markets and services for the Australian Energy Market Operator (in the linked-to article above from Teslarati).

The original submission from 140Mandak262Jamuna argues this could be a game-changer for renewable energy: This is unprecedented. The electric utilities have been government-sanctioned monopolies for over a century, protected from competition... The battery bank will stabilize the grid so well, there will be no surge pricing for peaker power plants...

At present the Return-on-Investment comparison between solar/wind storage versus gas turbine power plants include the surge pricing benefit in favor of the gas power plants. It will be gone.