To stop their smartphone battery from swelling, long-time Slashdot reader shanen bought a Samsung Galaxy with a "restrictive charging option." But what setting should they use? The way this battery protection option worked was to stop charging the phone at 85%. That left me enough charge for my normal daily travels, which rarely took the phone below 50%, and the battery remained unswollen after a year, which included a month of quite heavy tethering, too. Unfortunately... After a recent upgrade, now my Galaxy has three options for the battery where it had two. The 85% option is still there, but it has been lowered to 80%. I've been using that for now and it still seems good enough. However my main concern is with the best option to maximize the overall lifespan of the smartphone... The other old option says something about using AI to control the battery charging, but I don't trust it and think it is just the old approach that causes phones to die quickly... The new third option is the one that is interesting me. This seems to be a kind of flutter charge where the phone will charge to 100% and then stop until it has dropped to 95% before charging again, even if it remains plugged in. This sounds attractive and would give me more battery insurance when I'm traveling, but maybe it reduces the overall lifetime of the phone? They tried getting answers from Samsung, but "I think I have been flagged as a low-profit customer." And of course, this raises several other questions? (Are other smartphones better? Have iPhones solved the battery-swelling issue?) And most importantly: is there a way to charge batteries without reducing their lifespan? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What's the best way to charge your smartphone battery?

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Commercial space efforts continue around the world, as the Chinese company Space Pioneer fired up a partially-fueled rocket engine Sunday for a short-duration test of its reusable rocket on the ground. But Space News reports that the test "ended in catastrophic failure and a dramatic explosion." "Amateur footage captured by Gongyi citizens and posted on Chinese social media shows the nine-engine test stage igntiing and then, exceptionally, taking off." Hold-down clamps and other structures are typically used to securely keep stages in place. The stage is seen climbing into the sky before halting, apparently with its engines shutting off, and returning to Earth. The stage impacted the ground around 50 seconds after it took off, apparently with much of its kerosene-liquid oxygen propellant remaining, causing a large explosion. The Tianlong-3 first stage would likely fire for a number of minutes on an orbital flight. Space Pioneer was conducting its test as a buildup to an orbital launch of the Tianlong-3, which is benchmarked against the SpaceX Falcon 9, in the coming months. The company announced earlier this month that it has secured $207 million in new funding. Shanghai-based digital newspaper The Paper reported Henan officials as saying there were no casualties reported. Space Pioneer issued its own statement later, stating there was a structural failure at the connection between the rocket body and the test bench. The rocket's onboard computer automatically shut down the engines and the rocket fell 1.5 kilometers southwest. It reiterated earlier reports that no casualties were found. The company said the test produced 820 tons of thrust. The article speculates on whether the event will delay the development of the rocket — or the planned launches for a Chinese megaconstellation of satellites. "Space Pioneer says it will conduct an analysis and restart testing with new hardware as soon as possible."

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Bloomberg and The Washington Post "claim AI power usage is dire," writes Slashdot reader NoWayNoShapeNoForm. But Ars Technica "begs to disagree with those speculations." From Ars Technica's article: The high-profile pieces lean heavily on recent projections from Goldman Sachs and the International Energy Agency (IEA) to cast AI's "insatiable" demand for energy as an almost apocalyptic threat to our power infrastructure. The Post piece even cites anonymous "some [people]" in reporting that "some worry whether there will be enough electricity to meet [the power demands] from any source." Digging into the best available numbers and projections available, though, it's hard to see AI's current and near-future environmental impact in such a dire light... While the headline focus of both Bloomberg and The Washington Post's recent pieces is on artificial intelligence, the actual numbers and projections cited in both pieces overwhelmingly focus on the energy used by Internet "data centers" as a whole... Bloomberg asks one source directly "why data centers were suddenly sucking up so much power" and gets back a blunt answer: "It's AI... It's 10 to 15 times the amount of electricity." Unfortunately for Bloomberg, that quote is followed almost immediately by a chart that heavily undercuts the AI alarmism. That chart shows worldwide data center energy usage growing at a remarkably steady pace from about 100 TWh in 2012 to around 350 TWh in 2024. The vast majority of that energy usage growth came before 2022, when the launch of tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT largely set off the industry's current mania for generative AI. If you squint at Bloomberg's graph, you can almost see the growth in energy usage slowing down a bit since that momentous year for generative AI. Ars Technica first cites Dutch researcher Alex de Vries's estimate that in a few years the AI sector could use between 85 and 134 TWh of power. But another study estimated in 2018 that PC gaming already accounted for 75 TWh of electricity use per year, while "the IEA estimates crypto mining ate up 110 TWh of electricity in 2022." More to the point, de Vries' AI energy estimates are only a small fraction of the 620 to 1,050 TWh that data centers as a whole are projected to use by 2026, according to the IEA's recent report. The vast majority of all that data center power will still be going to more mundane Internet infrastructure that we all take for granted (and which is not nearly as sexy of a headline bogeyman as "AI"). The future is also hard to predict, the article concludes. "If customers don't respond to the hype by actually spending significant money on generative AI at some point, the tech-marketing machine will largely move on, as it did very recently with the metaverse and NFTs..."

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It was analgous to the "Blue Screen of Death" that Windows gives for critical errors, Phoronix wrote. To enable error messages for things like a kernel panic, Linux 6.10 introduced a new panic handler infrastructure for "Direct Rendering Manager" (or DRM) drivers. Phoronix also published a follow-up from Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas (who was involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure). Given complaints about being too like Microsoft Windows following his recent Linux "Blue Screen of Death" showcase... Javier showed that a black screen of death is possible if so desired... After all, it's all open-source and thus can customize to your heart's content. And now the panic handler is getting even more new features, Phoronix reported Friday: With the code in Linux 6.10 when DRM Panic is triggered, an ASCII art version of Linux's mascot, Tux the penguin, is rendered as part of the display. With Linux 6.11 it will also be able to handle displaying a monochrome image as the logo. If ASCII art on error messages doesn't satisfy your tastes in 2024+, the DRM Panic code will be able to support a monochrome graphical logo that leverages the Linux kernel's boot-up logo support. The ASCII art penguin will still be used when no graphical logo is found or when the existing "LOGO" Kconfig option is disabled. (Those Tux logo assets being here.) This monochrome logo support in the DRM Panic handler was sent out as part of this week's drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window in July. This week's drm-misc-next material also includes TTM memory management improvements, various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers, and also the previously talked about monochrome TV support for the Raspberry Pi. Long-time Slashdot reader unixbhaskar thinks the new option "will certainly satisfy the modern people... But it is not as eye candy as people think... Moreover, it is monochrome, so certainly not resource-hungry. Plus, if all else fails, the ASCII art logo is still there to show!"

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What if across the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, six high-voltage power cables stretched -- each over 2,000 miles long. CNN reports that a group of entrepreneurs "wants to build what would be the worldâ(TM)s largest subsea energy interconnector between continents, linking Europe and North America...to connect places like the United Kingdomâ(TM)s west with eastern Canada, and potentially New York with western France... "The Europe-US cables could send 6 gigawatts of energy in both directions at the speed of light, said Laurent Segalen, founder of the London-based Megawatt-X renewable energy firm, who is also part of the trio proposing the transatlantic interconnector. Thatâ(TM)s equivalent to what six large-scale nuclear power plants can generate, transmitted in near-real time." The interconnector would send renewable energy both east and west, taking advantage of the sunâ(TM)s diurnal journey across the sky. âoeWhen the sun is at its zenith, we probably have more power in Europe than we can really use,â said Simon Ludlam, founder and CEO of Etchea Energy, and one of the trio of Europeans leading the project. âoeWeâ(TM)ve got wind and weâ(TM)ve also got too much solar. Thatâ(TM)s a good time to send it to a demand center, like the East Coast of the United States. Five, six hours later, itâ(TM)s the zenith in the East Coast, and obviously, we in Europe have come back for dinner, and we get the reverse flow,â he added. The transatlantic interconnector is still a proposal, but networks of green energy cables are starting to sprawl across the worldâ(TM)s sea beds. They are fast becoming part of a global climate solution, transmitting large amounts of renewable energy to countries struggling to make the green transition alone. But they are also forging new relations that are reshaping the geopolitical map and shifting some of the worldâ(TM)s energy wars down to the depths of the ocean... Already, energy cables run between several countries in Europe, most of them allied neighbors. Not all of them carry renewable power exclusively â" thatâ(TM)s sometimes determined by what makes up each countryâ(TM)s energy grid â"âbut new ones are typically being built for a green energy future. The UK, where land space for power plants is limited, is already connected with Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark under the sea. It has signed up to a solar and wind link with Morocco to take advantage of the North African countryâ(TM)s many hours of sunlight and strong trade winds that run across the equator. Similar proposals are popping up around the globe. A project called Sun Cable seeks to send solar power from sunny Australia, where land is abundant, to the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore, which also has plenty of sun but very little room for solar farms. India and Saudi Arabia plan to link their respective power grids via the Arabian Sea, part of a broader economic corridor plan to connect Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

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The RISC-V kernel port with Linux 6.11 is introducing the ability to handle memory hot plugging/unplugging...

Oui, beaucoup de hausse cette semaine, même si on commence avec une très belle baisse chez les bleus, avec le 13900K qui perd pas moins de 52 euros. Chez Intel, nous avons aussi le 14600K qui baisse bien, qui s'affiche à 322.90 euros, son prix le plus bas, c'est 17 euros de moins. Par contre, le 14700K fait + 27 euros et le 14900K fait + 24 euros. […]

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It transforms water into the fuel — one of the first fuel plants in the world to do so. The Washington Post visits a facility in Corpus Christi, Texas using renewable energy to produce "green" hydrogen. The plant feeds water through machines that pull out its hydrogen atoms... [T]he hydrogen is chemically transformed into diesel for delivery trucks. This process could represent the biggest change in how fuel for planes, ships, trains and trucks is made since the first internal combustion engine fired up in the 19th century... Turning hydrogen into liquid fuel could help slash planet-warming pollution from heavy vehicles, cutting a key source of emissions that contribute to climate change. But to fulfill that promise, companies will have to build massive numbers of wind turbines and solar panels to power the energy-hungry process. Regulators will have to make sure hydrogen production doesn't siphon green energy that could go towards cleaning up other sources of global warming gases, such as homes or factories. Although cars and light trucks are shifting to electric motors, other forms of transport will likely rely on some kind of liquid fuel for the foreseeable future. Batteries are too heavy for planes and too bulky for ships. Extended charging times could be an obstacle for long-haul trucks, and some rail lines may be too expensive to electrify. Together, these vehicles represent roughly half of emissions from transportation, the fourth-biggest source of greenhouse gases. To wean machines off oil, companies like Infinium, the owner of this plant, are starting to churn out hydrogen-based fuels that — in the best case — produce close to net zero emissions. They could also pave the way for a new technology, hydrogen fuel cells, to power planes, ships and trucks in the second half of this century. For now, these fuels are expensive and almost no one makes them, so the U.S. government, businesses and philanthropists including Bill Gates are investing billions of dollars to build up a hydrogen industry that could cut eventually some of the most stubborn, hard-to-remove carbon pollution. Most scenarios for how the world could avoid the worst effects of climate change envision hydrogen cleaning up emissions in transportation, as well as in fertilizer production and steel and chemical refining. But if they're not made with dedicated renewable energy, hydrogen-based fuels could generate even more pollution than regular diesel, creating a wasteful boondoggle that sets the world back in the fight against climate change. Their potential comes down to the way plants like this produce them... Only about 40 percent of the power on the [Texas] electric grid is from renewables, with the rest coming from natural gas and coal, according to state data. That grid energy is what flows through the power line into the Infinium plant. "One day, heavy transportation may shift to fuel cells that run on pure hydrogen and emit only water vapor from their tailpipes," the article points out. But to accommodate today's carbon-burning vehicles, Infinium produces "chemical copies of existing fuels made with crude oil" by combining captured carbon with green hydrogen. "A truck running on diesel made from hydrogen using only renewable electricity would create 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions over the course of its lifetime than a truck burning diesel made from petroleum, according to a 2022 analysis from the European nonprofit Transport & Environment."

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For those interested in laptops powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoC, it's looking like the ASUS Vivobook S15 model could be one of the first devices with decent Linux support. There are patches undergoing review for upstreaming the ASUS Vivobook S 15 DeviceTree support so that much of the basic functionality is working under Linux but various features are known to be broken...

The Etnaviv kernel graphics driver that provides reverse-engineered open-source support for Vivante graphics (and NPU) IP has seen a fresh round of patches ready to go for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off in mid-July...

With the first half of the year drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix so far in 2024. Year to date there has been 1,530 original news articles so far and 78 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles written by your's truly. There has been a lot happening in 2024 from Linux kernel improvements to exciting new hardware and other open-source advances...

Merged on Saturday ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc6 release is the latest batch of x86 platform driver changes. Notable as part of this week's fixes is improving support for the very latest (2024) LG laptop models...

For those on the Debian stable train, Debian 12.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to Debian Bookworm...

Nouvelle semaine classique à la Ferme avec un article par jour. Des domaines variés, peut-être même trop puisqu'il sera impossible d'assembler une machine ! Un boitier, d'accord, pareil pour le watercooling AIO et l'alimentation... Mais aucun rapport avec l'ordinateur portable ! En revanche, le petit ampli trouvera sa place sur de nombreux bureaux avec des PC fixes ou nomades. […]

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Slashdot reader Required Snark shared this article from Ars Technica: Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers — Collins Aerospace — expected to back out, Ars has learned. It's a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits. NASA's Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. "These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the International Space Station and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars," said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago. The two winning teams were led by Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space, respectively. They were eligible for task orders worth up to $3.5 billion — in essence NASA would rent the use of these suits for a couple of decades. Since then, NASA has designated Axiom to work primarily on a suit for the Moon and the Artemis Program, and Collins with developing a suit for operations in-orbit, such as space station servicing... The agency has been experiencing periodic problems with the maintenance of the suits built decades ago, known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which made its debut in the 1980s. NASA has acknowledged the suit has exceeded its planned design lifetime. Just this Monday, the agency had to halt a spacewalk after the airlock had been de-pressurized and the hatch opened due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of Tracy Dyson's spacesuit. As a result of this problem, NASA will likely only be able to conduct a single spacewalk this summer, after initially planning three, to complete work outside the International Space Station. Collins designed the original Apollo suits, according to the article. But a person familiar with the situation told Ars Technica that "Collins has admitted they have drastically underperformed and have overspent" on their work, "culminating in a request to be taken off the contract or renegotiate the scope and their budget." Ironically, the company's top's post on their account on Twitter/X is still a repost of NASA's February announcement that they're "getting a nextx-generation spacesuit" developed by Collins Aerospace, and saying that the company "recently completed a key NASA design milestone aboard a commercial microgravity aircraft." NASA's post said they needed the suit "In order to advance NASA's spacewalking capabilities in low Earth orbit and to support continued maintenance and operations at the Space Station."

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Today the Wall Street Journal reported that restoring net neutrality to America is "on shakier legal footing after a Supreme Court decision on Friday shifted power away from federal agencies." "It's hard to overstate the impact that this ruling could have on the regulatory landscape in the United States going forward," said Leah Malone, a lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. "This could really bind U.S. agencies in their efforts to write new rules." Now that [the "Chevron deference"] is gone, the Federal Communications Commission is expected to have a harder time reviving net neutrality — a set of policies barring internet-service providers from assigning priority to certain web traffic... The Federal Communications Commission reclassified internet providers as public utilities under the Communications Act. There are pending court cases challenging the FCC's reinterpretation of that 1934 law, and the demise of Chevron deference heightens the odds of the agency losing in court, some legal experts said. "Chevron's thumb on the scale in favor of the agencies was crucial to their chances of success," said Geoffrey Manne, president of the International Center for Law and Economics. "Now that that's gone, their claims are significantly weaker." Other federal agencies could also be affected, according to the article. The ruling could also make it harder for America's Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on power-plant pollution. And the Federal Trade Commission face more trouble in court defending its recent ban on noncompete agreements. Lawyer Daniel Jarcho tells the Journal that the Court's decision "will unquestionably lead to more litigation challenging federal agency actions, and more losses for federal agencies." Friday a White House press secretary issued a statement calling the court's decision "deeply troubling," and arguing that the court had "decided in the favor of special interests".

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An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from the Verge: Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday. Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn't be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads. That meant you'd have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies... [I]n a screenshot, Meta notes that you can't reply to replies "yet," so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future. "Threads is Meta's first app built to be compatible with the fediverse..." according to a Meta blog post. "Our vision is that people using other fediverse-compatible servers will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads profile, and vice versa, connecting communities..." [If you turn on "sharing"...] "Developers can build new types of features and user experiences that can easily plug into other open social networks, accelerating the pace of innovation and experimentation." And this week Instagram/Threads top executive Adam Mosseri posted that Threads is "also expanding the availability of the fediverse beta experience to more than 100 countries, and hope to roll it out everywhere soon."

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The Wall Street Journal reports that a European initiative studying the feasibility data centers in space "has found that the project could be economically viable" — while reducing the data center's carbon footprint. And they add that according to coordinator Thales Alenia Space, the project "could also generate a return on investment of several billion euros between now and 2050." The study — dubbed Ascend, short for Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero emission and Data sovereignty — was funded by the European Union and sought to compare the environmental impacts of space-based and Earth-based data centers, the company said. Moving forward, the company plans to consolidate and optimize its results. Space data centers would be powered by solar energy outside the Earth's atmosphere, aiming to contribute to the European Union's goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050, the project coordinator said... Space data centers wouldn't require water to cool them, the company said. The 16-month study came to a "very encouraging" conclusion, project manager Damien Dumestier told CNBC. With some caveats... The facilities that the study explored launching into space would orbit at an altitude of around 1,400 kilometers (869.9 miles) — about three times the altitude of the International Space Station. Dumestier explained that ASCEND would aim to deploy 13 space data center building blocks with a total capacity of 10 megawatts in 2036, in order to achieve the starting point for cloud service commercialization... The study found that, in order to significantly reduce CO2 emissions, a new type of launcher that is 10 times less emissive would need to be developed. ArianeGroup, one of the 12 companies participating in the study, is working to speed up the development of such reusable and eco-friendly launchers. The target is to have the first eco-launcher ready by 2035 and then to allow for 15 years of deployment in order to have the huge capacity required to make the project feasible, said Dumestier... Michael Winterson, managing director of the European Data Centre Association, acknowledges that a space data center would benefit from increased efficiency from solar power without the interruption of weather patterns — but the center would require significant amounts of rocket fuel to keep it in orbit. Winterson estimates that even a small 1 megawatt center in low earth orbit would need around 280,000 kilograms of rocket fuel per year at a cost of around $140 million in 2030 — a calculation based on a significant decrease in launch costs, which has yet to take place. "There will be specialist services that will be suited to this idea, but it will in no way be a market replacement," said Winterson. "Applications that might be well served would be very specific, such as military/surveillance, broadcasting, telecommunications and financial trading services. All other services would not competitively run from space," he added in emailed comments. [Merima Dzanic, head of strategy and operations at the Danish Data Center Industry Association] also signaled some skepticism around security risks, noting, "Space is being increasingly politicised and weaponized amongst the different countries. So obviously, there is a security implications on what type of data you send out there." Its not the only study looking at the potential of orbital data centers, notes CNBC. "Microsoft, which has previously trialed the use of a subsea data center that was positioned 117 feet deep on the seafloor, is collaborating with companies such as Loft Orbital to explore the challenges in executing AI and computing in space." The article also points out that the total global electricity consumption from data centers could exceed 1,000 terawatt-hours in 2026. "That's roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan, according to the International Energy Agency."

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Long-time Slashdot reader jrronimo says JILA physicist Jun Ye's group "has made a breakthrough towards the next stage of precision timekeeping." From their paper recently published to arXiv: Optical atomic clocks use electronic energy levels to precisely keep track of time. A clock based on nuclear energy levels promises a next-generation platform for precision metrology and fundamental physics studies.... These results mark the start of nuclear-based solid-state optical clocks and demonstrate the first comparison of nuclear and atomic clocks for fundamental physics studies. This work represents a confluence of precision metrology, ultrafast strong field physics, nuclear physics, and fundamental physics.

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