McGruber quotes TechCrunch: Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees" founder and CEO Dale Dougherty told TechCrunch. "I started this 15 years ago and it's always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works . . . barely. Events are hard . . . there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship." Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year's flagship Bay Area Maker Faire.

But Dougherty is still desperately trying to resuscitate the company in some capacity, if only to keep MAKE:'s online archive running and continue allowing third-party organizers to license the Maker Faire name to throw affiliated events. Rather than bankruptcy, Maker Media is working through an alternative Assignment for Benefit of Creditors process.

"We're trying to keep the servers running" Dougherty tells me. "I hope to be able to get control of the assets of the company and restart it. We're not necessarily going to do everything we did in the past but I'm committed to keeping the print magazine going and the Maker Faire licensing program." The fate of those hopes will depend on negotiations with banks and financiers over the next few weeks. For now the sites remain online.

A PNAS paper published this week outlines a plan to establish 70 islands of solar panels, each 328 feet in diameter, that sends electricity to a hard-hulled ship that acts as an oceanic factory. "This factory uses desalinization and electrolysis equipment to extract hydrogen gas (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) from the surrounding ocean water," reports Ars Technica. "It then uses these products to create methanol, a liquid fuel that can be added into, or substituted for, transportation fuels. Every so often, a ship comes to offload the methanol and take it to a supply center on land." From the report: The researchers estimated that we would need approximately 170,000 of these solar island systems to be able to produce enough green methanol to replace all fossil fuels used in long-haul transportation. While that seems like a lot, it's theoretically possible, even if we restrict these systems to ocean expanses where waves don't reach more than seven feet high and there's enough sunlight to meet the system's yearly average need.

Still, the authors admit that this is just the description of a possible prototype: whether it's practical to build or not will depend on the cost of the technology that supports the system, as well as the cost of competing forms of energy used in transportation. Cleaning and maintaining this equipment in a marine environment is also a concern, and the researchers admit that there may be room for alternate setups (like making another fuel instead of methanol) that might make more economic sense. For now, though, it's a compelling idea to avoid additional fossil fuel extraction that is within reach using existing technology.

In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent -- nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself). MIT Technology Review reports: The researchers looked at four models in the field that have been responsible for the biggest leaps in performance: the Transformer, ELMo, BERT, and GPT-2. They trained each on a single GPU for up to a day to measure its power draw. They then used the number of training hours listed in the model's original papers to calculate the total energy consumed over the complete training process. That number was converted into pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent based on the average energy mix in the US, which closely matches the energy mix used by Amazon's AWS, the largest cloud services provider.

They found that the computational and environmental costs of training grew proportionally to model size and then exploded when additional tuning steps were used to increase the model's final accuracy. In particular, they found that a tuning process known as neural architecture search, which tries to optimize a model by incrementally tweaking a neural network's design through exhaustive trial and error, had extraordinarily high associated costs for little performance benefit. Without it, the most costly model, BERT, had a carbon footprint of roughly 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent, close to a round-trip trans-American flight. What's more, the researchers note that the figures should only be considered as baselines. Using a model they'd produced in a previous paper as a case study, the researchers "found that the process of building and testing a final paper-worthy model required training 4,789 models over a six-month period," the report states. "Converted to CO2 equivalent, it emitted more than 78,000 pounds and is likely representative of typical work in the field."

Boston Dynamics is about to launch its first ever commercial product -- a quadrupedal robot named Spot. The Verge reports: Spot is currently being tested in a number of "proof-of-concept" environments, Boston Dynamics' CEO Marc Raibert told The Verge, including package delivery and surveying work. And although there's no firm launch date for the commercial version of Spot, it should be available within months, said Raibert, and certainly before the end of the year. "We're just doing some final tweaks to the design," said the CEO. "We've been testing them relentlessly."

Rather than selling the robot as a single-use tool, it's positioning it as a "mobility platform" that can be customized by users to complete a range of tasks. A Spot robot mounted with 3D cameras can map environments like construction sites, identifying hazards and work progress. When equipped with a robot arm, it has even greater flexibility, able to open doors and manipulate objects. At Re:MARS, a Spot with a robot arm used it to pick up items, including a cuddly toy that was then offered to a flesh-and-blood police dog. The dog was unimpressed with the robot, but happy, at least, to receive the toy. Raibert says it's this "athletic intelligence" that Boston Dynamics will be selling through its robots. Think of it like Amazon's AWS business, but instead of offering computing power on tap, its robotic mobility. How much will Spot cost? Raibert only said that the commercial version will be "much less expensive than prototypes [and] we think they'll be less expensive than other peoples' quadrupeds."

He did, however, reveal that the company had already found some paying customers, including construction companies in Japan who are testing Spot as a way to oversee the progress of work on sites.

Ikea has partnered with American furniture startup Ori Living to develop a new robotic furniture system for people living in small spaces. Called Rognan, the collection includes a large storage unit that can slide across a room via a touchpad to divide a room into two living spaces, a bed, desk, and a couch for people to pull out when needed. It will launch first in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020. The Verge reports: Rognan is built on Ori's robotic platform, and works with Ikea's Platsa line of storage furniture. It's also compatible with Ikea's Tradfri line of cabinet and wardrobe smart lighting. Ikea says the Rognan can save an extra eight square meters (about 86 square feet) of living space. That might not sound like much, but if you live in a tiny home, it could make all the difference. The Verge notes that Ori's line of automated furniture started as a concept from MIT's CityHome concept project in 2014. It launched for real estate developers and Airbnbs for $10,000 as Ori Systems.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: With in-screen fingerprint readers quickly becoming a regular feature of flagship phones, manufacturers are starting to wonder about what other things they can stick under the display. In the past day, both Oppo and Xiaomi have taken to social media to show off the latest development: under-display front-facing cameras. Forget camera notches, hole punch displays, and complicated pop-up mechanisms; the under-display camera enables all-screen smartphone designs with no moving parts.

Under-display cameras will work a lot like optical under-display fingerprint readers -- a CMOS chip will be placed under a transparent section of the display, and it will peer through the pixels to see the outside world. For an optical fingerprint reader, the image capturing setup only needs to be of high enough quality to identify the ridges and valleys of your fingertip. For selfies and video chats, there will be much higher demands for image quality, and we wonder what obstructing the camera view with pixels will do to the image quality. Both Xiaomi and Oppo shared videos of the in-display cameras working, but the videos are too low quality to make any kind of image quality determinations. When you aren't taking a picture, the display pixels work normally, and when it's picture time, the pixels around the camera turn off, allowing the camera to see through the display. Xiaomi detailed some of its implementation, saying it was using a "special low-reflective glass" for better image quality.

One of the most ridiculous announcements made at Apple's WWDC on Monday was the new Pro Display XDR monitor. It's a monitor made to pair with the new Mac Pro, complete with top-level specs and a staggering $5,000 starting price. CNET reports: The monitor's chief feature is high-dynamic range, aka HDR. Doing HDR correctly requires a lot of horsepower to illuminate the screen, and the XDR monitor can get exceedingly bright -- and stay that way. Apple says an advanced cooling system can maintain its 1,000 nits brightness "indefinitely." The monitor has a full-array backlight with 576 zones of full array local dimming -- more than just about any similarly equipped TV available. That advanced dimming tech likely contributes to the incredibly high 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio specification.

At 32 inches and a resolution of 6,016 x 3,384, the Pro Display XDR is Apple's largest retina display ever. While not used in many TVs (which are either 4K or 8K), the 6K resolution is increasingly popular for video capture, with cameras like the Pansonic Lumix S1H, Sony Venice, and models from Red doing 6K. Apple has also improved the screen to better control reflections and offers a new matte option called "nano-texture, with glass etched at the nanometer level for low reflectivity and less glare." The matte option brings the price of the monitor up to $6,000. Apple also talks up its polarizer technology and wide off-axis viewing angle. Pre-set reference modes include HDR video (P3-ST 2084), Digital Cinema (P3-DCI) and Photography (P3-D65). In traditional Apple fashion, the Pro Display XDR does not ship with a stand -- you'll have to buy that separately. The optional $999 Pro stand allows users to articulate the screen and place it in various positions. It has tilt, height, and rotation adjustment, meaning you can rotate it from landscape to portrait mode, juts like your iPhone.

Apple is also selling a VESA mount adapter for $199, but that will require you to buy another third-party stand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: iOS 13 will introduce Dark Mode to iPhones, iPads, and iPods for the first time. Apple brought Dark Mode to Macs via macOS Mojave last year, to much fanfare. As was the case there, Dark Mode doesn't actually change anything about the interface -- just the aesthetics. Apple showed Dark Mode running on the company's first-party apps for news, calendar, messages, and more. Dark Mode may also save battery life on devices with emissive OLED displays -- savings like that were discovered in our own tests comparing Android devices with LCD and OLED displays. But we'll have to test the new OS to be sure.

Every iOS update brings changes to key apps made by Apple itself, and most of the apps included with a new installation of iOS have seen some changes. Mail now allows you to mute certain conversations. Maps has a new, easier way of accessing saved locations. The upgrade to Apple Maps will bring far more detail to the overhead view of roads and landmarks, with this rolling out to the entire United States by the end of 2019 and "select countries" next year. Reminders has seen a ground-up interface overhaul, with natural-language processing similar to what's seen in third-party apps -- you'll be able to type the relevant details and Reminders will understand when and where the reminder should be set for. Apple is also adding a swipe-typing ability to its iOS keyboard for the first time, replicating something that has been available in third-party keyboards for years. Notes will have a new gallery view and support for shared folders. Safari will have new options to change text sizing, with per-website settings. The iPad's multitasking UI has also been overhauled, bringing a new window-based experience and an easier way to switch between apps in Slide Over mode. You'll also be able to plug thumb drives into newer iPads with USB-C.

The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet". Now the group has approved funding for the hybrid Libre RISC-V CPU/VPU/GPU, which will "pay for full-time engineering work to be carried out over the next year, and to pay for bounty-style tasks."

Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl explains why that's significant: High security software is irrelevant if the hardware is fundamentally compromised, for example with the Intel spying backdoor co-processor known as the Management Engine. The Libre RISCV SoC was begun as a way for users to regain trust and ownership of the hardware that they legitimately purchase.

This processor will be the first of its kind, as the first commercial SoC designed to give users the hardware and software source code of the 3D GPU, Video Decoder, main processor, boot process and the OS.

Shockingly, in the year 2019, whilst there are dozens of SoCs with full source code that are missing either a VPU or a GPU (such as the TI OMAP Series and Xilinx ZYNQ7000s), there does not exist a single commercial embedded SoC which has full source code for the bootloader, CPU, VPU and GPU. The iMX6 for example has etnaviv support for its GPU however the VPU is proprietary, and all of Rockchip and Allwinner's offerings use either MALI or PowerVR yet their VPUs have full source (reverse engineered in the case of Allwinner).

This processor, which will be quad core dual issue 800mhz RV64GC and capable of running full GNU/Linux SMP OSes, with 720p video playback and embedded level 25fps 3D performance in around 2.5 watts at 28nm, is designed to address that imbalance. Links and details on the Libre RISC-V SoC wiki.

The real question is: why is this project the only one of its kind, and why has no well funded existing Fabless Semiconductor Company tried something like this before? The benefits to businesses of having full source code are already well-known.

harrymcc shares a Fast Company article about "the generally gnarly process once required to hook up peripherals" in the late 1990s -- and one Intel engineer who saw the need for "one plug to rule them all." In the olden days, plugging something into your computer -- a mouse, a printer, a hard drive -- required a zoo of cables. Maybe you needed a PS/2 connector or a serial port, the Apple Desktop Bus, or a DIN connector; maybe a parallel port or SCSI or Firewire cable. If you've never heard of those things, and if you have, thank USB.

When it was first released in 1996, the idea was right there in the first phrase: Universal Serial Bus. And to be universal, it had to just work. "The technology that we were replacing, like serial ports, parallel ports, the mouse and keyboard ports, they all required a fair amount of software support, and any time you installed a device, it required multiple reboots and sometimes even opening the box," says Ajay Bhatt, who retired from Intel in 2016. "Our goal was that when you get a device, you plug it in, and it works."

It was at Intel in Oregon where engineers made it work, at Intel where they drummed up the support of an industry that was eager to make PCs easier to use and ship more of them. But it was an initial skeptic that first popularized the standard: in a shock to many geeks in 1998, the Steve Jobs-led Apple released the groundbreaking first iMac as a USB-only machine. The faster speeds of USB 2.0 gave way to new easy-to-use peripherals too, like the flash drive, which helped kill the floppy disk and the Zip drive and CD-Rs. What followed was a parade of stuff you could plug in: disco balls, head massagers, security keys, an infinity of mobile phone chargers. There are now by one count six billion USB devices in the world.
The article includes a thorough oral history of USB's development, and points out there's now also a new reversible Type-C cable design. And USB4, coming later this year, "will be capable of achieving speeds upwards of 40Gbps, which is over 3,000 times faster than the highest speeds of the very first USB."

"Bhatt couldn't have imagined all of that when, as a young engineer at Intel in the early '90s, he was simply trying to install a multimedia card."

"A robotic boat and submersible have won the XPRIZE to find the best new technologies to map the seafloor," writes the BBC -- taking home the grand prize of $4 million.

dryriver shares their report: The surface and underwater combo demonstrated their capabilities in a timed test in the Mediterranean, surveying depths down to 4km. [2.48 miles -- slightly deeper than the ocean's average depth of 2.3 miles.] Put together by the international GEBCO-NF Alumni team, the autonomous duo are likely now to play a role in meeting the "Seabed 2030" challenge. This aims to have Earth's ocean floor fully mapped to a high standard. Currently, only 20% of the world's sub-surface topography has been resolved to an acceptable level of accuracy...

The group triumphed by packaging an existing, state-of-the-art solution with a novel twist. So, while its HUGIN autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is an established industry tool for echo-sounding the depths, its uncrewed surface vessel (USV) that deployed and recovered the sub was developed specially for the competition... On arrival, the chosen technologies had just 24 hours to make an extensive, high-resolution (5m or better) bathymetric (depth) map; and take multiple pictures of the seabed. The GEBCO-NF Alumni team covered 278 sq km in its allotted time, returning more than 10 images of identifiable geological features.

samleecole writes: Apple's AirPods are a tragedy. Ecologically, socially, economically -- they're a capitalist disaster. The opposite of AirPods, then, is this extremely punk pair of DIY wireless earbuds that someone on Reddit hacked together using an old pair of wired Apple headphones and some hot glue. "I started this project roughly two months ago when my friend got a new pair of AirPods for his birthday and I thought to myself, 'that's quite a lot of money for something I can make at home,'" Sam Cashbook, who is 15, told Motherboard in a Reddit message.

Cashook started watching videos of people making their own AirPods, but mostly found people chopping the wires off of Apple headphones as a joke. He decided to take his own approach. He bought a hands-free bone conduction headset from eBay, and took apart the casing to reveal the electronics. Then, he desoldered the wires from the original speaker in the headset, and connected his old Apple earbud speaker to the headset's printed circuit board. Maybe a little uglier, but the headphones work well, he said. The set has buttons for power, pausing music, volume controls and skipping tracks, and the battery is rechargeable.

dryriver writes: If you had asked someone doing 3D graphics seriously back in 2000 what 3D technology will look like two decades away in 2019, they might have said: "Most internet websites will have realtime 3D content embedded or will be completely in 3D. 3D Games will look as good as movies or reality. Everyone will have a cheap handheld 3D scanner to capture 3D models with. High-end VR headsets, gloves, bodysuits and haptics devices will be sold in electronics stores. Still and video cameras will be able to capture true holographic 3D images and video of the real world. TVs and broadcast TV content will be in holographic 3D. 3D stuff you create on a PC will be realtime -- no more waiting for images to slowly render thanks to really advanced new 3D hardware. 3D content creation software will be incredibly advanced and fast to work with in 2019. Many new types of 3D input devices will be available that make working in 3D a snap."

Except of course that that in the real 2019, none of this has come true at all, and the entire 3D field has been stagnating very, very badly since around 2010. It almost seems like a small army of 3D technology geniuses pushed and pushed 3D software and hardware hard during the 80s, 90s, 2000s, then retired or dropped off the face of the earth completely around 10 years ago. Why is this? Are consumers only interested in Facebook, YouTube, cartoony PlayStation graphics and smartphones anymore? Are we never going to see another major 3D technology innovation push again?

merbs writes: If the robots are simply "coming," if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this techno-elemental phenomenon, and little is to be done about it beyond bracing for impact. Not the executives swayed by consulting firms who insist the future is in AI customer service bots, or the managers who see an opportunity to improve profit margins by adopting automated kiosks that edge out cashiers, or the shipping conglomerate bosses who decide to replace dockworkers with a fleet of automated trucks. These individuals may feel as if they have no choice, with shareholders and boards and bosses of their own to answer to, and an economic system that incentivizes the making of these decisions -- and sometimes the technology will perform obviously superior work to the human -- but they are exactly that: decisions, made by people, to call in or build the job-threatening robots.

Pretending otherwise, that robots in every use case are inevitable, is the very worst form of technological determinism, and leads to a dearth in critical thinking about when and how automation *is* best implemented. Because even the most ardent robot lovers will agree, there are plenty of cases of badly deployed automation; systems that make our lives worse and more inefficient, and that kill jobs en route to worse outcomes. And such automated regression is often implemented under the logic of 'robots are coming,' so better hop aboard. We will be able to make better decisions about embracing effective automation if we understand that, in practice, 'the robots are coming for our jobs' usually means something more like 'a CEO wants to cut his operating budget by 15 percent and was just pitched on enterprise software that promises to do the work currently done by thirty employees in accounts payable.'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: California regulators on Thursday approved allowing utilities to cut off electricity to possibly hundreds of thousands of customers to avoid catastrophic wildfires like the one sparked by power lines last year that killed 85 people and largely destroyed the city of Paradise. Utilities' liability can reach billions of dollars, and after several years of devastating wildfires, they asked regulators to allow them to pull the plug when fire risk is extremely high. That's mainly during periods of excessive winds and low humidity when vegetation is dried out and can easily ignite.

The California Public Utilities Commission gave the green light but said utilities must do a better job educating and notifying the public, particularly those with disabilities and others who are vulnerable, and ramp up preventive efforts, such as clearing brush and installing fire-resistant poles. The plans could inconvenience hundreds of thousands of customers while endangering some who depend on electricity to keep them alive. The precautionary outages could mean multiday blackouts for cities as large as San Francisco and San Jose, Northern California's major power provider warned in a recent filing with the utilities commission.

The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) today announced PCI Express 5.0, even though PCI Express 4.0 is still a rarity in the PC market. Phoronix reports: PCI Express 5.0 doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 with a promise of 32GT/s transfer rates while maintaining low-power and backwards compatibility with existing PCI Express specifications. PCI Express 5.0 is set to allow 128GB/s bandwidth via PCIe 5.0 x16, improved signal integrity and mechanical performance, a new "CEM" connector for add-in cards, and backwards compatibility back through PCIe 1.x. Additional details can be found via today's PCI-SIG press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A report released today by the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns world leaders that -- without support for new nuclear power or lifetime extensions for existing nuclear power plants -- the world's climate goals are at risk. "The lack of further lifetime extensions of existing nuclear plants and new projects could result in an additional four billion tonnes of CO2 emissions," a press release from the IEA noted.

The report is the IEA's first report on nuclear power in two decades, and it paints a picture of low-carbon power being lost through attrition (due to the retirement of aging plants) or due to economics (extremely cheap natural gas as well as wind and solar undercutting more expensive nuclear power for years in some regions). Around the world, 452 nuclear reactors provided 2,700 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2018. This makes nuclear a significant source of low-carbon energy on a global level. While 11.2 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power were connected to the grid last year, all of the new capacity was located in China or Russia. "Without additional nuclear, the clean energy transition becomes more difficult and more expensive -- requiring $1.6 trillion of additional investment in advanced economies over the next two decades," IEA says. "Critically, a major clean energy shortfall would emerge by 2040, calling on wind and solar PV to accelerate deployment even further to fill the gap."

MojoKid writes: What do you think graphics cards will look like in the next decade and a half? Intel wanted to know that as well, so it commissioned designer Cristiano Siquiera to give us a taste of what graphics cards might look like in the year 2035. Siquiera, the original talented designer that brought the first set of Intel Odyssey GPU renders not long ago, focused primarily on the fan/shroud designs and what innovations could be fostered in the coming years. He was tasked with thinking far beyond current design conventions, materials and cooling technologies in current-gen graphics cards, and to envision new designs that could employ technologies and materials not even invented yet. One concept, called Gemini, shows an ionic-based cooling system that isn't too far beyond the realm of feasibility. Yet another design, called Prometheus, showcases top edge-mounted display readout that could also be fairly easily employed with flexible OLED display technology. Intel also just launched a new Graphics Command Center driver package today, which offers more customization, better control of power and cooling and one-click game optimization for Intel GPU-enabled systems.

An anonymous reader writes: iRobot today launched two new robots: the Roomba s9+ robot vacuum cleaner and the Braava jet m6 robot mop. The Roomba s9+ robot vacuum with Clean Base Automatic Dirt Disposal starts at $1,299. The Roomba s9 without the Clean Base starts at $999. The Braava jet m6 robot mop starts at $499. All the robots are available for purchase today in the U.S. and Canada. They will start shipping in select European countries on July 12, 2019. The two robots can use iRobot's Imprint Link Technology to "talk to each other" -- vacuuming and then mopping automatically. The technology also works with the Roomba i7+, which launched in September. iRobot is thus introducing two robots that can clean together "as a team." Owners of the robots can initiate a "Linked clean" in the iRobot Home app.

Samsung on Tuesday announced the launch of two new chips that it says will support secure, fast-charging USB-C power delivery controllers. "One of them, the SE8A, is what the company calls the industry's first solution that combines a power delivery controller and Secure Element in a single chip, offering new protections like security key storage," reports BGR. "Another result of the development of these new power delivery controllers is that Samsung's power chargers will now be able to support up to a 100W capacity: A 10x improvement over the 10W of a general smartphone charger." From the report: Samsung said the MM101 supports a symmetric encryption algorithm called the Advanced Encryption Standard that enables product authentication and includes moisture sensing capabilities to ensure safer charging conditions. The SE8A supports USB Type-C Authentication, the certificate-based authentication program for USB-C chargers and devices. "With enhanced security," Samsung explained in the announcement, "the SE8A opens possibilities for new kinds of content and services that may be exclusive to a certain brand, location or event."

Today's announcement is also significant because Samsung says the new power delivery controllers meet the most recent USB specs for fast-charging which addresses things like compatibility and efficiency challenges across mobile devices and other electronics. Those challenges can have effects like causing a device to, for example, charge slower than usual in addition to compromising the battery's life cycle.