1sockchuck writes: Does it make sense for state to offer tax incentives to lure huge data center projects? After an extended debate, legislators in Michigan have approved tax breaks for a $5 billion data center in Grand Rapids. The project from Switch, which previously built the SuperNAP in Las Vegas, brought the debate into stark relief due to the size of the project — an estimated 2 million square feet of data center space. States competing for projects often find themselves in a bind, since the highly-automated facilities create a limited number of permanent jobs, but many states already offer juicy incentives. Michigan ultimately sought a middle path, tying the tax breaks to job creation goals. If the data center jobs don't materialize, the breaks disappear.

An anonymous reader writes: British mobile network EE is recalling every one of its promotional Power Bar smartphone chargers amid safety fears that they may overheat and blow up. The portable blue charging tubes were released in April of this year as a way to allow customers to charge their phones on the go. The mobile carrier, which also runs the Orange and T-Mobile brands, said that it had made the decision after reports of a very small number of incidents where Power Bars have overheated in circumstances that could cause a fire safety risk.

mdsolar writes with this National Geographic story about the danger of rising sea levels to low-lying power plants across the country. According to the story: "Just east of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, off Florida's Biscayne Bay, two nuclear reactors churn out enough electricity to power nearly a million homes. The Turkey Point plant is licensed to continue doing so until at least 2032. At some point after that, if you believe the direst government projections, a good part of the low-lying site could be underwater. So could at least 13 other U.S. nuclear plants, as the world's seas continue to rise. Their vulnerability, and that of many others, raises serious questions for the future."

HughPickens.com writes: Sewell Chan reports at the NYT that Britain's highest court has unanimously rejected an attempt by Donald J. Trump to block the construction of a wind farm near his luxury golf resort in northeast Scotland. Trump has vowed to stop further development on the project if the offshore wind farm — 11 turbines, which would be visible from the golf resort 2.2 miles away — goes forward. Trump spokesman George A. Sorial denounced the ruling as "extremely unfortunate for the residents of Aberdeen and anyone who cares about Scotland's economic future" adding that the wind farm will "completely destroy the bucolic Aberdeen Bay and cast a terrible shadow upon the future of tourism for the area. History will judge those involved unfavorably, and the outcome demonstrates the foolish, small-minded and parochial mentality which dominates the current Scottish government's dangerous experiment with wind energy."

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, withdrew Trump's status as a business ambassador to Scotland last week after Trump called for Muslims to be barred from entering the United States. Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen has stripped Mr. Trump of an honorary degree it awarded him in 2010. Trump's mother was born in Scotland and moved to the United States in the 1930s. " I think I do feel Scottish," said Trump at one time.

mdsolar writes with news that city officials in Woodland, North Carolina have taken issue with being ridiculed by the internet and want to set the record straight. According to the article: "Usually what happens in Woodland stays in Woodland, a town 115 miles east of Raleigh with one Dollar General store and one restaurant. But news of the Northampton County hamlet's moratorium on solar farms blew up on social media over the weekend after a local paper quoted a resident complaining to the Town Council that solar farms would take away sunshine from nearby vegetation. Another resident warned that solar panels would suck up energy from the sun. As outlandish as those claims seem, town officials say the Internet got it wrong."

An anonymous reader writes: Netflix has spent four years developing a new and more efficient video-encoding process that can shave off 20% in terms of space and bandwidth without reducing the quality of streamed video. With streaming video accounting for 70% of broadband use, the saving is much-needed, although the advent of 4K streaming, higher frame rates and HDR are likely to account for it all soon after. Netflix video algorithms manager Anne Aaron explained to Variety that certain types of video benefit little from the one-size-fits-all compression approach that Netflix has been using until now: "You shouldn't allocate the same amount of bits for My Little Pony as for The Avengers."

MojoKid writes: AMD announced today that the company is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give game developers, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU resources. AMD and their Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) are looking for ways to ease game development, so developers can more easily re-use code and port their games from consoles over to the PC. With GPUOpen, game developers will have direct access to GPU hardware, as well as access to a large collection of open source effects, tools, libraries and SDKs, which are being made available on GitHub under an MIT open-source license. As part of the effort, the company is also releasing a new HCC C++ compiler which will be a tool in enabling developers to more easily leverage the resources of discrete GPU hardware in heterogeneous systems. The HCC complier also allows developers to convert CUDA code to portable C++. According to AMD, internal testing shows that in many cases 90 percent or more of CUDA code can be automatically converted into C++ with the final 10 percent converted manually in the widely popular C++ language. An early access program for the "Boltzmann Initiative" tools is planned for Q1 2016.

colinneagle sends word that a developer has claimed to have achieved a jailbreak of the PlayStation 4. Networkworld reports: "If you have a PS4 and want to run homebrew content, then you might be happy to know developer CTurt claimed, "PS4 is now officially jailbroken." Over the weekend, CTurt took to Twitter to make the announcement. He did not use a jail vulnerability, he explained in a tweet. Instead, he used a FreeBSD kernel exploit.

Besides posting "an open source PlayStation 4 SDK" on GitHub, CTurt analyzed PS4's security twice and explained PS4 hacking. CTurt updated the open source PS4 SDK yesterday; he previously explained that Sony's proprietary Orbis OS is based on FREEBSD. In the past he released the PS4-playground, which included PS4 tools and experiments using the Webkit exploit for PS4 firmware version 1.76. To put that in context, Sony released version 3.0 in September. However, CTurt claimed the hack could be made to work on newer firmware versions.

Other PS4 hackers are reportedly also working on a kernel exploit, yet as Wololo pointed out, it is unlikely there might be more than proof-of-concept videos as the developers continue to tweak the exploit. Otherwise, Sony will do as it has in the past and release a new firmware version. In October 2014, developers nas and Proxima studied the PSVita Webkit exploit, applied it to the PS4, and then released the PS4 proof-of-concept. Shortly thereafter. Sony pushed out new firmware as a patch."

An anonymous reader writes: Humanoid robots in space are attractive because their emulation of the human form makes them capable of a huge range of tasks. But remotely controlling such bots is a very different challenge from the math-based methods used to make probe course corrections or plot rover routes. NASA has collaborated with Sony using PlayStation VR to explore methods for controlling humanoid robots in space, and created a virtual reality simulation designed to train operators to compensate for the data delay caused by the vast distances involved in space communication.

An anonymous reader writes: Most of us are now drowning in digital media, and the flood of information has robbed [us] of the ability to focus and concentrate—or do much of anything, uninterrupted, for an extended period of time. Perhaps this explains why a small but distinctive minority of people are now embracing decidedly old-fashioned technologies" like vinyl records, 35mm cameras, and the typewriter, the latter a strong "symbol of resistance against the over-digitization of our lives," as it was replaced by the personal computer. Of course, you're still not likely to see people committing public acts of typewriting, but you learn there's a surprising amount of fascinating things happening in the typewriting community if you consult The Typewriter Revolution, a new 'typist's companion' that covers everything from privacy issues (think: intelligence agencies using typewriters) to artistic endeavors (like the Boston Typewriter Orchestra) to the clever ways enthusiasts are bridging the typewritten and digital worlds (the USB Typewriter). In this interview with Richard Polt, the book's author answers the burning question: "Is it a Mad Max-ish world where people are scrounging for every [typewriter] ribbon they can get?

New submitter Farfetched619 writes: In November, Microsoft revealed that they would be reducing free OneDrive storage from 15GB to 5GB for all users, current and new. Microsoft mentioned that some subscribers were hosting movies and large files on the service, which has prompted the company to make this drastic change. Now, after community feedback, Microsoft is allowing free OneDrive users to retain their 15GB of free storage space.

MojoKid with word of The Stack, a new peripheral product from Lenovo that has a ThinkPad logo emblazoned on each component, writing In a nutshell, this is Lenovo's take on a line of peripherals that all work with one another and stack together via a custom connector. It applies the modular computing concept to the world of peripherals, which could be an ideal place for a set of modular products to actually make an impact in the market. The Stack's initial four products include a wireless router, a 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive, a Bluetooth mic + speaker combo unit, and a 10,000mAh battery pack / charger. The foursome is sold for just under $390, though each component can be purchased separately as well. The sheer size and weight of the package is impressive. While it's appropriately dense, it can fit into even the smallest saddle bag, taking up minimal room in a frequent flyer's carry-on. In testing, the Stack's individual components offered respectable performance results as well.

An anonymous reader writes: Linux Voice has a nice retrospective on the development of the Cray supercomputer. Quoting: "Firstly, within the CPU, there were multiple functional units (execution units forming discrete parts of the CPU) which could operate in parallel; so it could begin the next instruction while still computing the current one, as long as the current one wasn't required by the next. It also had an instruction cache of sorts to reduce the time the CPU spent waiting for the next instruction fetch result. Secondly, the CPU itself contained 10 parallel functional units (parallel processors, or PPs), so it could operate on ten different instructions simultaneously. This was unique for the time." They also discuss modern efforts to emulate the old Crays: "...what Chris wanted was real Cray-1 software: specifically, COS. Turns out, no one has it. He managed to track down a couple of disk packs (vast 10lb ones), but then had to get something to read them in the end he used an impressive home-brew robot solution to map the information, but that still left deciphering it. A Norwegian coder, Yngve Ådlandsvik, managed to play with the data set enough to figure out the data format and other bits and pieces, and wrote a data recovery script."

jjslash writes: For a few years now, Intel CPU overclocking has been limited to more expensive Core i5 and Core i7 'K' processors. Skylake launched this year with the rumor of strong non-K processor overclocking through an adjustable base clock, but that never eventuated... until now. In overclocking circles it was rumored that BCLK (base clock) overclocking might become a possibility in Skylake processors, but it would be up to motherboard manufacturers to circumvent Intel's restrictions. Asrock, Asus and a few other motherboard manufacturers are said to be issuing a BIOS update soon that will unlock base clock overclocking on Z170 motherboards. TechSpot has got an early look, overclocking a locked Core i3-6100 to 4.7GHz on air cooling.

1sockchuck writes: Data center providers are offering space with less power infrastructure than traditional mission-critical facilities, citing demand from customers looking to forego extra UPS and generators in return for more affordable pricing. The demand for "variable resiliency" space reflects a growing emphasis on controlling data center costs, along with a focus on application-level requirements like HPC and bitcoin mining. Data center experts differed on whether this trend toward flexible design was a niche, or a long-term trend. "In the next 12 months,data center operators will be challenged to deliver power to support both an HPC environment as well as traditional storage all under one roof," said Tate Cantrell, CTO at Iceland's Verne Global. "HPC will continue the trend to low resiliency options." But some requirements don't change. "Even when they say they're OK with lower reliability, they still want uptime," noted one executive.

Bruce Perens writes: At the TAPR conference this year, I did a talk on why Open Hardware licenses don't actually work, and how it would actually hurt us if they did. I'm not saying you should stop making Open Hardware, I just want to make sure you don't assume the license works better than it actually does. Also, I explain why my latest project is 100% Open Source but the hardware design is more restrictively licensed than the Open Hardware Definition would allow. The video is here. There's a long prelude of talk about Amateur Radio stuff before the Open Hardware part. But you'll probably find it interesting. Gary didn't succeed with the Kickstarter to fund recording the entire conference this year, but he made the trip and recorded it with a multi-camera shoot anyway, at significant personal expense. If you like the video, please help cover his expenses. Even $1 would help.

szczys writes: In 2003 AMD was on top of the world. Now they're not, but they're also still in business. AMD continues to produce inexpensive, well-engineered semiconductors. The fall over the last 10 years is due to Intel, who used illegal practices and ethically questionable engineering decisions to knock AMD off their roost while still keeping them in business. The latter prevents the finger of antitrust from being pointed at Intel the way it was for Ma Bell.

An anonymous reader writes: Curious about the performance of a Raspberry Pi Zero, Phoronix has published a number of Raspberry Pi 2 + Pi Zero performance benchmarks with paired power consumption data. They found the Pi Zero performed slower than even an Intel Celeron 320 from the NetBurst era, but that the Raspberry Pi 2 was performing between that Celeron and a Pentium 4 "C" 2.8GHz CPU from 2004. While the Raspberry Pis didn't win in raw performance, the performance-per-Watt of the Raspberry Pi 2 was 220x greater than the Pentium Northwood. The Pi Zero had an average power consumption of 2.7 Watts and the Raspberry Pi 2 was at 3.5 Watts; however, compared to newer Broadwell and Skylake processors, Intel's low-end parts delivered greater power efficiency while the Raspberry Pi had the best value.

New submitter Will Mason writes: The HTC Vive VR headset, originally planned to launch by the end of this year, has been pushed back until April 2016. HTC plans to unveil a second developer kit for the Vive at CES this year, and they plan to make 7,000 additional units available to developers. Recently, HTC's head of marketing, who said on stage that the product would launch this year, jumped ship for the secretive Magic Leap startup in Florida.

An anonymous reader sends this report form the Google Research blog on the effectiveness of D-Wave's 2X quantum computer: We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 10^8 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 10^8. A more detailed paper is available at the arXiv.