LinuxWebLog.com

Fwupd 2.0.14 Boosts Linux Firmware with New Device Support and Fixes  WebProNews

Btrfs Maintainer Josef Bacik Leaves Meta, Steps Back from Linux Dev  WebProNews

They offer "a self-sustaining power solution for marine regions," according to a newly published 41-page review after "pioneering use in wave energy harvesting in 2014". Ten years later, researchers have developed several structures for these "triboelectric nanogenerators" (TENGs) to "facilitate their commercial deployment." But there's a lack of "comprehensive summaries and performance evaluations". So the review "distills a decade of blue-energy research into six design pillars" for next-generation technology, writes EurekaAlert, which points the way "to self-powered ocean grids, distributed marine IoT, and even hydrogen harvested from the sea itself..." By "translating chaotic ocean motion into deterministic electron flow," the team "turns every swell, gust and glint of sunlight into dispatchable power — ushering in an era where the sea itself becomes a silent, self-replenishing power plant." Some insights: - Multilayer stacks, origami folds and magnetic-levitation frames push volumetric power density...three orders of magnitude above first-generation prototypes. - Frequency-complementary couplings of TENG, EMG and PENG create full-spectrum harvesters that deliver 117 % power-conversion efficiency in real waves. - Pendulum, gear and magnetic-multiplier mechanisms translate chaotic 0.1-2 Hz swells into stable high-frequency oscillations, multiplying average power 14-fold. - Resonance-tuned structures now span 0.01-5 Hz, locking onto shifting wave spectra across seasons and sea states. - Spherical, dodecahedral and tensegrity architectures harvest six-degree-of-freedom motion, eliminating orientational blind spots. - Single devices co-harvest wave, wind and solar inputs, powering self-charging buoys that cut battery replacement to zero... Another new wave energy project is moving forward, according to the blog Renewable Energy World: Eco Wave Power, an onshore wave energy technology company, announced that its U.S. pilot project at the Port of Los Angeles has successfully completed operational testing and achieved a new milestone: the lowering of its floaters into the water for the first time. The moment, broadcast live by Good Morning America, follows the finalization of all installation works at the project site, including full installation of all wave energy floaters; connection of hydraulic pipes and supporting infrastructure; and placement of the onshore energy conversion unit. With installation completed, Eco Wave Power has now officially entered the operational phase of its U.S. excursion... [Inna Braverman, founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power] said "This pilot station is a vital step in demonstrating how wave energy can be harnessed using existing marine infrastructure, while laying the groundwork for full-scale commercialization in the United States...." Eco Wave Power's patented onshore wave energy system attaches floaters to existing marine structures. The up-and-down motion of the waves drives hydraulic cylinders, which send pressurized fluid to a land-based energy conversion unit that generates electricity... The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that wave energy has the potential to generate over 1,400 terawatt-hours per year — enough to power approximately 130 million homes. Eco Wave Power's 404.7 MW global project pipeline also includes upcoming operational sites in Taiwan, India, and Portugal, alongside its grid-connected station in Israel. Long-time Slashdot reader PongoX11 also brings word of a company building a "simple" floating rig to turn wave motion into electricity, calling it "a steel can that moves water around" and wondering if "This one might work!" The news site TechEBlog points out that "Unlike old-school wave energy systems with clunky mechanical parts, Ocean-2 rocks a modular, flexible setup that rolls with the ocean's flow." At about 10 meters wide [30 feet wide. and 260 feet long!], it is made from materials designed to (hopefully) withstand the ocean's abuse, over some maintenance cycle. It's designed for deep ocean, so solving this technically is the first big challenge. Figuring out how to use/monetize all that cheap energy out in the middle of nowhere will be the next. "Ocean-2 works with the ocean, not against it, so we can generate power without messing up marine life," said Panthalassa's CEO, Dr. Elena Martinez, according to TechEBlog: Tests in Puget Sound, done with Everett Ship Repair, showed it pumping out up to 50 kilowatts in decent conditions — enough juice for a small coastal town. "We're thinking big," Martinez said in a press release. "Ocean-2 is just the start, but we're already planning bigger arrays that could crank out gigawatts..." Looking forward, Panthalassa sees Ocean-2 as part of a massive wave energy network. By 2030, they're aiming to roll out arrays that could power whole coastal cities, cutting down on fossil fuel use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Torvalds Reclassifies Bcachefs as Externally Maintained in Linux Kernel  WebProNews

After switching to Linux, I finally stopped believing the myth that intimidated me  xda-developers.com

When it comes to nuclear fusion energy, "How do we advance fusion as fast as possible?" asks the CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems. They've just raised $863 million from Nvidia, Google, the BIll Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures and nearly two dozen more investors, which "may prove helpful as the company develops its supply chain and searches for partners to build its power plants and buy electricity," reports TechCrunch. Commonwealth's CEO/co-founder Bob Mumgaard says "This round of capital isn't just about fusion just generally as a concept... It's about how do we go to make fusion into a commercial industrial endeavor." The Massachusetts-based company has raised nearly $3 billion to date, the most of any fusion startup. Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) previously raised a $1.8 billion round in 2021... CFS is currently building a prototype reactor called Sparc in a Boston suburb. The company expects to turn that device on later next year and achieve scientific breakeven in 2027, a milestone in which the fusion reaction produces more energy than was required to ignite it. Though Sparc isn't designed to sell power to the grid, it's still vital to CFS's success. "There are parts of the modeling and the physics that we don't yet understand," Saskia Mordijck, an associate professor of physics at the College of William and Mary, told TechCrunch. "It's always an open question when you turn on a completely new device that it might go into plasma regimes we've never been into, that maybe we uncover things that we just did not expect." Assuming Sparc doesn't reveal any major problems, CFS expects to begin construction on Arc, its commercial-scale power plant, in Virginia starting in 2027 or 2028... "We know that this kind of idea should work," Mordijck said. "The question is naturally, how will it perform?" Investors appear to like what they've seen so far. The list of participants in the Series B2 round is lengthy. No single investor led the round, and a number of existing investors increased their stakes, said Ally Yost, CFS's senior vice president of corporate development... The new round will help CFS make progress on Sparc, but it will not be enough to build Arc, which will likely cost several billion dollars, Mumgaard said. "As advances in computing and AI have quickened the pace of research and development, the sector has become a hotbed of startup and investor activity," the article points out. And CEO Mumgaard told TechCrunch that their Sparc prototype will prove the soundness of the science — but it's also important to learn "the capabilities that you need to be able to deliver it. It's also to have the receipts, know what these things cost!"

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6 Must-Have Open-Source Apps for Linux Gamers  How-To Geek

By exploiting two-color beams, researchers "can generate ordered chains and lattices," reports ScienceDaily, "with tunable topology — potentially revolutionizing data storage, communications, and photonic processing." An internationally joint research group between Singapore and Japan has unveiled a blueprint for arranging exotic, knot-like patterns of light into repeatable crystals that extend across both space and time. The work lays out how to build and control "hopfion" lattices using structured beams.. three-dimensional topological textures whose internal "spin" patterns weave into closed, interlinked loops. They have been observed or theorized in magnets and light fields, but previously they were mainly produced as isolated objects. The authors show how to assemble them into ordered arrays that repeat periodically, much like atoms in a crystal, only here the pattern repeats in time as well as in space. The key is a two-color, or bichromatic, light field whose electric vector traces a changing polarization state over time. By carefully superimposing beams with different spatial modes and opposite circular polarizations, the team defines a "pseudospin" that evolves in a controlled rhythm. When the two colors are set to a simple ratio, the field beats with a fixed period, creating a chain of hopfions that recur every cycle. Starting from this one-dimensional chain, the researchers then describe how to sculpt higher-order versions whose topological strength can be dialed up or down... Topological textures like skyrmions have already reshaped ideas for dense, low-error data storage and signal routing. Extending that toolkit to hopfion crystals in light could unlock high-dimensional encoding schemes, resilient communications, atom trapping strategies, and new light-matter interactions. "The birth of space-time hopfion crystals," the authors write, opens a path to condensed, robust topological information processing across optical, terahertz, and microwave domains.

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They were extinct in the Netherlands in the early 19th century. But in 1988 beavers were reintroduced to the region, and now there's over 7,000, reports the Guardian. But unfortunately... Beavers are increasingly digging burrows and tunnels under roads, railways and — even more worryingly — in dikes. For a country where a quarter of the land sits below sea level, this is not a minor problem — especially as beavers are not exactly holding back when digging. "We've found tunnels stretching up to 17 metres [equivalent to 60 feet] into a dike... That's alarming," says Jelmer Krom of the Rivierenland water board... If a major dike gives way, it would cause a serious flood affecting thousands of people... [T]heir entrances are under water, and as yet there are no effective techniques for mapping them. During high water, special patrols go out at night with thermal-imaging cameras to spot where beavers are active, but this method doesn't always yield the desired results. Also, when a beaver that's causing problems is found, it can only be killed in exceptional circumstances, because beavers are a protected species in the Netherlands. Moving it doesn't do much good either, as the beaver tends simply to return. Current mitigation efforts include mesh reinforcements (as well as sealing burrows) — and also removing the thickets of willows on the riverbanks to make them a less appealing habitat. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember those Harvard dropouts who built smart glasses for covert facial recognition — and then raised $1 million to develop AI-powered glasses to continuously listen to conversations and display its insights? "People Are REALLY Mad," writes Futurism, noting that some social media users "have responded with horror and outrage." One of its selling points is that the specs don't come with a visual indicator that lights up to let people know when they're being recorded, which is a feature that Meta's smart glasses do currently have. "People don't want this," wrote Whitney Merill, a privacy lawyer. "Wanting this is not normal. It's weird...." [S]ome mocked the deleterious effects this could have on our already smartphone-addicted, brainrotted cerebrums. "I look forward to professional conversations with people who just read robot fever dream hallucinations at me in response to my technical and policy questions," one user mused. The co-founder of the company told TechCrunch their glasses would be the "first real step towards vibe thinking." But there's already millions of other smart glasses out in the world, and they're now drawing a backlash, reports the Washington Post, citing the millions of people viewing "a stream of other critical videos" about Meta's smart glasses. The article argues that Generation Z, "who grew up in an internet era defined by poor personal privacy, are at the forefront of a new backlash against smart glasses' intrusion into everyday life..." Opal Nelson, a 22-year-old in New York, said the more she learns about smart glasses, the angrier she becomes. Meta Ray-Bans have a light that turns on when the gadget is recording video, but she said it doesn't seem to protect people from being recorded without consent... "And now there's more and more tutorials showing people how to cover up the [warning light] and still allow you to record," Nelson said. In one such tutorial with more than 900,000 views, a man claims to explain how to cover the warning light on Meta Ray-Bans without triggering the sensor that prevents the device from secretly recording. One 26-year-old attracted 10 million views to their video on TikTok about the spread of Meta's photography-capable smart glasses. "People specifically in my generation are pretty concerned about the future of technology," the told the Post, "and what that means for all of us and our privacy." The article cites figures from a devices analyst at IDC who estimates U.S. sales for Meta Ray-Bans will hit 4 million units by the end of 2025, compared to 1.2 million in 2024.

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"From a side project in Amsterdam to powering AI at the world's biggest companies — this is the story of Python," says the description of a new 84-minute documentary. Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: It traces Python all the way back to its origins in Amsterdam back in 1991. (Although the first time Guido van Rossum showed his new language to a co-worker, they'd typed one line of code just to prove they could crash Python's first interpreter.) The language slowly spread after van Rossum released it on Usenet — split across 21 separate posts — and Robin Friedrich, a NASA aerospace engineer, remembers using Python to build flight simulations for the Space Shuttle. (Friedrich says in the documentary he also attended Guido's first in-person U.S. workshop in 1994, and "I still have the t-shirt...") Dropbox's CEO/founder Drew Houston describes what it was like being one of the first companies to use Python to build a company reaching millions of users. (Another success story was YouTube, which was built by a small team using Python before being acquired by Google). Anaconda co-founder Travis Oliphant remembers Python's popularity increasing even more thanks to the data science/macine learning community. But the documentary also includes the controversial move to Python 3 (which broke compatability with earlier versions). Though ironically, one of the people slogging through a massive code migration ended up being van Rossum himself at his new job at Dropbox. The documentary also includes van Rossum's resignation as "Benevolent Dictator for Life" after approving the walrus operator. (In van Rossum's words, he essentially "rage-quit over this issue.") But the focus is on Python's community. At one point, various interviewees even take turns reciting passages from the "Zen of Python" — which to this day is still hidden in Python as an import-able library as a kind of Easter Egg. "It was a massive undertaking", the documentary's director explains in a new interview, describing a full year of interviews. (The article features screenshots from the documentary — including a young Guido van Rossum and the original 1991 email that announced Python to the world.) [Director Bechtle] is part of a group that's filmed documentaries on everything from Kubernetes and Prometheus to Angular, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails... Originally part of the job platform Honeypot, the documentary-makers relaunched in April as Cult.Repo, promising they were "100% independent and more committed than ever to telling the human stories behind technology." Honeypot's founder Emma Tracey bought back its 272,000-subscriber YouTube channel from Honeypot's new owners, New Work SE, and Cult.Repo now bills itself as "The home of Open Source documentaries." Over in a thread at Python.org, language creator Guido van Rossum has identified the Python community members in the film's Monty Python-esque poster art. And core developer Hugo van Kemenade notes there's also a video from EuroPython with a 55-minute Q&A about the documentary.

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bsd-user-4-linux Lets FreeBSD Binaries Run Unmodified On Linux  Phoronix

Wine 10.14 released with library upgrades, network improvements, and bug fixes  BetaNews

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: After bringing 4G and 5G connectivity to the Underground, London's public transport authority has started scolding noisy passengers who subject everyone to music and calls blasting out of their phones. A new poster campaign launched by Transport for London (TfL) this week encourages customers to wear headphones when watching or listening to content on their devices to reduce disruption for other commuters. "Please don't disturb others with loud music or calls when traveling on the network," reads the "Headphones On" poster. The posters are already being displayed on the Elizabeth rail line, according to TfL, and will expand to bus, Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, London Underground, and London Tram services from October. The campaign targets headphone dodgers as data coverage becomes more available across the underground rail network, making it easier for passengers to stream content and make calls on the go. People who do so without donning headphones are annoying other commuters, however, with TfL research showing that 70 percent of 1,000 surveyed customers reported loud music and phone calls disrupting their journeys. "The vast majority of Londoners use headphones when traveling on public transport in the capital, but the small minority who play music or videos out loud can be a real nuisance to other passengers and directly disturb their journeys," says London's deputy transport mayor, Seb Dance. "TfL's new campaign will remind and encourage Londoners to always be considerate of other passengers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community  Tom's Hardware

20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community  Tom's Hardware

20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community  Tom's Hardware

20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community  Tom's Hardware

20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community  Tom's Hardware

20-year-old ATI Radeon GPUs are still getting driver updates and extensions — old ATI Radeon R300 GPUs receive Linux updates from the community  Tom's Hardware