Frederick P. Brooks Jr., whose innovative work in computer design and software engineering helped shape the field of computer science, died on Thursday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his son, Roger, who said Dr. Brooks had been in declining health since having a stroke two years ago. The New York Times reports: Dr. Brooks had a wide-ranging career that included creating the computer science department at the University of North Carolina and leading influential research in computer graphics and virtual reality. But he is best known for being one of the technical leaders of IBM's 360 computer project in the 1960s. At a time when smaller rivals like Burroughs, Univac and NCR were making inroads, it was a hugely ambitious undertaking. Fortune magazine, in an article with the headline "IBM's $5,000,000,000 Gamble," described it as a "bet the company" venture.

Until the 360, each model of computer had its own bespoke hardware design. That required engineers to overhaul their software programs to run on every new machine that was introduced. But IBM promised to eliminate that costly, repetitive labor with an approach championed by Dr. Brooks, a young engineering star at the company, and a few colleagues. In April 1964, IBM announced the 360 as a family of six compatible computers. Programs written for one 360 model could run on the others, without the need to rewrite software, as customers moved from smaller to larger computers. The shared design across several machines was described in a paper, written by Dr. Brooks and his colleagues Gene Amdahl and Gerrit Blaauw, titled "Architecture of the IBM System/360." "That was a breakthrough in computer architecture that Fred Brooks led," Richard Sites, a computer designer who studied under Dr. Brooks, said in an interview.

But there was a problem. The software needed to deliver on the IBM promise of compatibility across machines and the capability to run multiple programs at once was not ready, as it proved to be a far more daunting challenge than anticipated. Operating system software is often described as the command and control system of a computer. The OS/360 was a forerunner of Microsoft's Windows, Apple's iOS and Google's Android. At the time IBM made the 360 announcement, Dr. Brooks was just 33 and headed for academia. He had agreed to return to North Carolina, where he grew up, and start a computer science department at Chapel Hill. But Thomas Watson Jr., the president of IBM, asked him to stay on for another year to tackle the company's software troubles. Dr. Brooks agreed, and eventually the OS/360 problems were sorted out. The 360 project turned out to be an enormous success, cementing the company's dominance of the computer market into the 1980s. "Fred Brooks was a brilliant scientist who changed computing," Arvind Krishna, IBM's chief executive and himself a computer scientist, said in a statement. "We are indebted to him for his pioneering contributions to the industry."

Dr. Brooks published a book in 1975 titled, "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering." It was "a quirky classic, selling briskly year after year and routinely cited as gospel by computer scientists," reports the Times.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The San Francisco Police Department is currently petitioning the city's Board of Supervisors for permission to deploy robots to kill suspects that law enforcement deems a sufficient threat that the "risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD." The draft policy, which was written by the SFPD itself, also seeks to exclude "hundreds of assault rifles from its inventory of military-style weapons and for not include personnel costs in the price of its weapons," according to a report from Mission Local.

As Mission Local notes, this proposal has already seen significant opposition from both within and without the Board. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, initially pushed back against the use of force requirements, inserting "Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person," into the policy language. The SFPD removed that wording in a subsequent draft, which I as a lifelong San Francisco resident did not know was something that they could just do. The three-member Rules Committee, which Peskin chairs, then unanimously approved that draft and advanced it to the full Board of Supervisors for a vote on November 29th. Peskin excused his decision by claiming that "there could be scenarios where deployment of lethal force was the only option."

The police force currently maintains a dozen fully-functional remote-controlled robots, which are typically used for area inspections and bomb disposal. However, as the Dallas PD showed in 2016, they make excellent bomb delivery platforms as well. Bomb disposal units are often equipped with blank shotgun shells used to forcibly disrupt an explosive device's internal workings, though there is nothing stopping police from using live rounds if they needed, as Oakland police recently acknowledged to that city's civilian oversight board.

Shipments of integrated and discrete graphics processing units dropped to a 10-year low in the third quarter as PC OEMs reduced procurements of CPUs, and gamers lowered their purchases of existing graphics cards while waiting for next-generation products. From a report: In contrast, miners ceased to buy graphics boards due to changes that happened to Ethereum. In general, sales of standalone graphics cards for desktops hit a multi-year low. Usually, PC makers increase procurement of PC hardware components in the third quarter as they assemble computers to sell them in back-to-school and holiday seasons when sales are high. But as demand for PCs softened recently, manufacturers initiated inventory corrections and lowered their components buying to sell off what they already have. As a result, sales of integrated and discrete GPU dropped to 75.5 million units in Q3 2022, down 10.5% sequentially and 25.1% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research. In addition, shipments of desktop GPUs fell by 15.43%, and notebook GPUs decreased by 30%, which is the most significant drop since the 2009 recession, JPR notes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google announced that Android's space-saving app file format, Android App Bundles (AABs), will finally be the standard on Android TV. By May 2023 -- that's in six months -- Google will require all Android TV apps to switch to the new file format, which can cut down on app storage requirements by 20 percent.

Android App Bundles were announced with Android 9 in 2018 as a way to save device storage by breaking an app up into modules, rather than one big monolithic APK (the old Android app format) with every possible piece of data. Android apps support a ton of different languages, display resolutions, and CPU architectures, but each individual device only needs to cherry-pick a few of those options to work. Android App Bundles integrate with the Play Store to create a dynamic delivery system for each module. Your phone communicates which modules it needs to the Play Store, and Google's servers bundled up an appropriate package and sent it to your device. It's even possible for developers to move some lesser-used app functionality into a bundle that can be downloaded on the fly if a user needs it. [...]

Google says Android App Bundles average around a 20 percent space savings compared to a monolithic APK, which will be a huge help for these storage-starved devices. Since 2021, they have been the required standard for phones and tablets, and in six months, TV apps will be required to use them, too. Developers who don't switch in time will have their TV apps hidden from search, so they'd better get to work! Google estimates that "in most cases it will take one engineer about three days to migrate."

The Biden administration said on Monday it has approved conditional funding of up to $1.1 billion to prevent the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, as part of its effort to fight climate change. Reuters reports: The Pacific Gas & Electric plant, which was set to fully shut in 2025, applied for funding in the initial phase of the Department of Energy's (DOE) $6 billion Civil Nuclear Credit program meant to help keep struggling nuclear power reactors open. Diablo is the last operating nuclear plant in California. The Biden administration believes nuclear power is critical in curbing climate change and wants to keep plants open ahead of the development of next-generation reactors. President Joe Biden wants to decarbonize the power grid by 2035.

The U.S. nuclear power industry's 92 reactors generate more than half of the country's virtually carbon-free electricity. But about a dozen reactors have closed since 2013 in the face of competition from renewable energy and plants that burn plentiful natural gas. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said the grant was a "critical step toward ensuring that our domestic nuclear fleet will continue providing reliable and affordable power to Americans as the nation's largest source of clean electricity." Further reading: Debate at COP27: Nuclear Energy, Climate Friend or Foe?

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plans to bring its most advanced technology to Arizona, the founder of the chip giant said Monday. From a report: TSMC's plans come as tensions between Washington and Beijing are rising over chips, with President Joe Biden imposing a sweeping set of controls on the sale of advanced chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese firms. Taiwan, a self-governing democracy that the Chinese Communist Party claims as its own territory despite having never controlled it, has also faced growing military aggression from Beijing in recent months -- throwing a spotlight on the critical role the island plays in the global chipmaking industry. TSMC accounts for an estimated 90% of the world's super-advanced computer chips, supplying tech giants including Apple and Qualcomm.

"Chips are very important products," TSMC's founder Morris Chang said Monday at a press briefing in Taipei. "It seems that people are only starting to realize this recently, and as a result, lots of people out there are envious of Taiwan's chip manufacturing." Chang has retired but remains an influential force within the industry. [...] Advances in chip manufacturing require etching ever-smaller transistors on to silicon wafers. Chang said its plant in Arizona will produce 3-nanometer chips, TSMC's most advanced technology. In 2020, the company had already committed at least $12 billion to build its first facility in Arizona. At the time, the tech giant had said that the facility will "utilize TSMC's 5-nanometer technology for semiconductor wafer fabrication" and "create over 1,600 high-tech professional jobs directly." Production is expected to begin in 2024.

Long-time Slashdot reader gordm shares an interesting video from the United Nations Climate Change Conference. "At COP27, Tobias Holle (activist with Youth Strike for Climate) debated Mark Nelson (founder of Radiant Energy Fund) as to whether nuclear power can help us tackle climate change."

The event took place at the International Atomic Energy Agency's "Atoms for Climate" pavillion, where the IAEA's climate advisor presented the debate's topic as "Nuclear Energy: Climate Friend or Foe?" (and introduced the two debaters as "enthusiastic young climate champions"). The Youth Strike for Climate activist objected to commiting humanity to 1 million years of maintaining nuclear waste. But he also argued that extreme weather was creating additional security risks, that the per-kilowatt hour cost was economically prohibitive, that nuclear plants were politically unpopular — and that anyways, they take too long to build given our current climate crisis. "We need fast solutions."

The Radiant Energy founder disagreed, arguing over specific statistics and insisting that nuclear energy should be considered a low-carbon energy solution, and also safe. (He pointed out that Chernobyl's nuclear plant actually continued operating for 14 years after its 1986 nuclear accident.) Interestingly he also argued that in the Netherlands there's a museum of nuclear waste — a science museum attached to their nuclear facility — "where they don't just have the high-level waste, they have the highest part of high-level waste, the most dangerous isotopes, separated from the nuclear fuel. The most radioactive stuff — very hot for 500 years — and they have a tour where you can walk over it, and you can feel the warmth from the floor from the radioactive isotopes....

"You can absolutely manage the safe, secure, and even educational storage of the most radioactive isotopes... We know very well how to manage it."

NVIDIA has responded to a class action lawsuit over melting RTX 4090 GPU adapters. The Verge reports: Weeks after Nvidia announced that it was investigating reports that the power cables for its RTX 4090 graphics card were melting and burning, the company says it may know why: they just weren't plugged in all the way.

In a post to its customer support forum on Friday, Nvidia says that it's still investigating the reports, but that its findings "suggest" an insecure connector has been a common issue. It also says that it's gotten around 50 reports of the issue.

Nvidia's flagship card uses what's known as a 12VHPWR power connector, a new standard that isn't natively supported by most of the power supplies that people already have in their PCs. Because of that, it ships an adapter — or "power dongle," as Friday's post calls it — in the box. Users' initial reports blamed the adapter, with some saying that the melting cable had damaged their $1,599 GPU as well....

GamersNexus, an outlet that's respected in the PC-building community for its rigorous testing, basically came to the same conclusion earlier this week. A video posted on Wednesday by the outlet, which inspected damaged adapters sent in by viewers and done extensive testing and reporting on the issue, showed that the connectors had wear lines, implying that they hadn't been completely inserted into the slot. GamersNexus even says that some people seem to have missed a full connection by several millimeters. Its video shows that a loose connection could cause the plug to heat up dramatically, if it were plugged in poorly and tilted at an angle..... [A]n unnamed spokesperson for the company told GamersNexus on Friday that "any issues with the burned cable or GPU, regardless of cable or GPU, it will be processed" for a replacement.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the article.

"Drought conditions are worsening in the U.S.," reports CNBC, "and that is having an outsized impact on the real estate that houses the internet." Water is the cheapest and most common method used to cool the centers. In just one day, the average data center could use 300,000 gallons of water to cool itself — the same water consumption as 100,000 homes, according to researchers at Virginia Tech who also estimated that one in five data centers draws water from stressed watersheds mostly in the west. "There is, without a doubt, risk if you're dependent on water," said Kyle Myers, vice president of environmental health, safety & sustainability at CyrusOne, which owns and operates over 40 data centers in North America, Europe, and South America. "These data centers are set up to operate 20 years, so what is it going to look like in 2040 here, right...?"

Realizing the water risk in New Mexico, Meta, formerly known as Facebook, ran a pilot program on its Los Lunas data center to reduce relative humidity from 20% to 13%, lowering water consumption. It has since implemented this in all of its center. But Meta's overall water consumption is still rising steadily, with one fifth of that water last year coming from areas deemed to have "water stress," according to its website. It does actively restore water and set a goal last year to restore more water than it consumes by 2030, starting in the west.

Microsoft has also set a goal to be "water positive" by 2030. Â"The good news is we've been investing for years in ongoing innovation in this space so that fundamentally we can recycle almost all of the water we use in our data centers," said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft. "In places where it rains, like the Pacific Northwest where we're headquartered in Seattle, we collect rain from the roof. In places where it doesn't rain like Arizona, we develop condensation techniques."

Slashdot has been covering plans for the UK's largest chip plant to be acquired by Chinese-owned firm Nexperia.

But this week the U.K. government "has blocked the takeover of the country's largest microchip factory by a Chinese-owned firm," CNBC reported this week, "over concerns it may undermine national security." Grant Shapps, minister for business, energy and industrial strategy, on Wednesday ordered Dutch chipmaker Nexperia to sell its majority stake in Newport Wafer Fab, the Welsh semiconductor firm it acquired for £63 million ($75 million).

Nexperia is based in the Netherlands but owned by Wingtech, a partially Chinese state-backed company listed in Shanghai. Nexperia completed its acquisition of Newport Wafer Fab in 2021, and the firm subsequently changed its name to Nexperia Newport Limited, or NN.

"The order has the effect of requiring Nexperia BV to sell at least 86% of NNL within a specified period and by following a specified process," the United Kingdom's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said in a statement. Nexperia had initially owned 14% of Newport Wafer Fab, but in July 2021 it upped its stake to 100%.

"We welcome foreign trade & investment that supports growth and jobs," Shapps tweeted Wednesday. "But where we identify a risk to national security we will act decisively."
Nexperia plans to appeal the decision.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Ford CEO Jim Farley made a blockbuster of a statement this week. According to the somewhat jovial and optimistic cousin of late comedic actor Chris Farley, producing electric vehicles requires about 40% less labor than producing the same number of fossil-powered cars. The fact that electric vehicles are "simpler" than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles has long been a talking point of electric vehicle fans and evangelists (aka EVangelists). This has mostly come into play when talking about lower maintenance costs. There aren't all the belts, tubes, hoses, etc. that you find in a gasmobile. That means fewer parts that can break and less maintenance over time. What is less discussed is what Jim Farley has highlighted this week -- that it also means simpler production and a smaller labor force manufacturing the world's cars and trucks.

Interestingly, Farley is also taking this difference to shift Ford back to more vertical integration. Rather than lay off workers, Farley aims to retrain them to produce more parts within the walls of Ford. As Farley says it, "we have to insource, so that everyone has a role in this growth." Nonetheless, that's not easy and certainly not going to be 100% smooth. Farley noted that the transition to EVs would involve "storm clouds." Recall that Ford aims to reach 50% EV sales by 2030, up from just a few percent in 2022. Making that massive transition provides the opportunity for a new approach and retraining, but also plenty of likely hurdles and challenges.

The FT highlighted that back in the days of Henry Ford, vertical integration was the name of the game. "A shift in corporate strategy towards more vertical integration at Ford would hark back to the company's early days when founder Henry Ford owned forest, iron mines, limestone quarries and even a rubber plantation in Brazil to wholly control the company's supply chain," the media outlet stated. "If Henry Ford came back to life, he would have thought the last 60 years weren't that exciting, but he would love it right now because we're totally reinventing the company," Farley said.

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer has revealed why the company delayed its plans to introduce an Xbox streaming console, speaking to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast this week. The Verge reports: "It was more expensive than we wanted it to be when we actually built it out with the hardware that we had inside," said Spencer, discussing the Keystone prototype device that recently appeared on his office shelves. "We decided to focus that team's effort on delivering the smart TV streaming app." Microsoft delivered an Xbox TV app in partnership with Samsung instead, but it doesn't mean the idea for a streaming-only Xbox console is fully over. "With Keystone, we're still focused on it and watching when we can get the right cost," reveals Spencer.

Microsoft wanted to aim for around $129 or $99 for this Xbox streaming device, says Spencer, and hints that bundling a controller with the streaming console, as well as Microsoft's silicon component choices, had pushed the price up closer to the $299 Xbox Series S. The choice to bundle a controller matches what Microsoft traditionally does with its Xbox consoles and was also Google's original approach to putting its discontinued Stadia cloud gaming service on TVs. But a cloud gaming TV stick or puck could support any controller you have if the hardware supports Bluetooth, so it's interesting Microsoft specifically wanted to bundle an Xbox controller, likely to make the user experience feel more seamless.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The powerful lithium ion batteries used in small electric vehicles are responsible for a growing epidemic of fires. This year, there have been about 200 fires and six deaths, according to the New York City fire department. This month, an e-bike fire inside a Manhattan high-rise apartment became an inferno that injured nearly 40 people and forced firefighters to evacuate residents using ropes. These fires can spread quickly and suddenly: "We have a fully formed fire within a matter of seconds," the chief fire marshal said at a news conference.

As the densest city in America, New York is a micro-mobility haven. Here, small electric vehicles aren't toys for weekend jaunts but vital tools for the estimated 65,000 delivery workers trying to scrape a living through low-paying apps. There are thousands of choices today if you want an e-bike, e-scooter or e-moped. Some of the high-end, name-brand machines are sold in beautiful downtown showrooms for well over $5,000. But many of the vehicles used by New York City's workers come from unknown manufacturers and are sold online or through small shops for between $1,000 and $2,000. Nearly all of these vehicles are powered by lithium ion battery packs, which contain tightly bundled cells that store energy as flammable chemicals. Typically, the cells are kept in sync by a piece of electronic circuitry called a battery management system, or BMS, which makes sure that the cells don't overcharge or release too much energy at once. But that careful balance can get disrupted due to damage, wear or faulty manufacturing, sometimes with dangerous results.

Lawmakers are worried too. The authority that manages New York's public housing proposed an e-bike ban on its property this year but backed down after an outcry from low-income residents. On Monday, the city council held a hearing where legislators touted bills to combat the battery fires, including a proposal to outlaw the sale of secondhand electric vehicle batteries, and another to ban all batteries that haven't been approved by a nationally recognized testing lab. If passed, that measure would force riders to use batteries such as those certified by the Illinois-based Underwriters Laboratory (UL), which subjects e-bikes and their batteries to rigorous testing on issues ranging from their performance under extreme temperatures to how easily fire spreads between cells. Manufacturers have to pay a "nominal" cost to undergo testing, said Robert Slone, UL's chief scientist, but "we see a lot of manufacturers showing interest in certifying the batteries". UL sent a statement to the city council supporting the proposed measures, though it said a total ban on used batteries could be overkill: "When done correctly, batteries can be safely repurposed." Something else that would make a big difference for workers is better intel. "Each fire happened, they say it's an e-bike, but we don't know which one it is," said Gustavo Ajche, the founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, a prominent delivery worker labor group. "There's a lot of missing information."

What would be more useful, he said, would be if the fire department committed resources to testing and sharing details about which batteries were safe to use, so that workers could make more informed decisions.

Apple will buy some of its chips from a factory in Arizona, Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month at an internal company meeting in Germany, according to Bloomberg News. CNBC reports: Apple currently sources all of its processors from factories in Taiwan. It designs its own chips and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company manufactures the A-series and M-series processors that power iPhones and Mac computers. If Apple were to buy processors manufactured in the U.S., it would represent a significant diversification in Apple's supply chain away from Taiwan.

"We've already made a decision to be buying out of a plant in Arizona, and this plant in Arizona starts up in '24, so we've got about two years ahead of us on that one, maybe a little less," Cook said, according to Bloomberg. TSMC previously announced plans for a single factory in Arizona to open in 2024 focusing on chips that use the latest manufacturing technology. TSMC said earlier this month that it is planning a second chip factory in Arizona because of "strong customer demand."

In a blog post initially published Tuesday and since taken down, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, its new marquee chipset offering. The new features of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, as described on the since altered blog, include:

1. Upgraded Hexagon DSP, with support for microtile inferencing and a bigger tensor accelerator (up to 4.35X increase in AI perf when compared to 8 Gen 1 in MobileBert)
2. Support for INT4 with a 60% perf/watt improvement
3. Sensing Hub with dual AI processors
4. Upgraded GPU (~25% faster perf YoY)
5. Upgraded CPU (~40% more power efficient YoY)
6. Snapdragon X70 modem-RF system, w/ support for 5G DSDA
7. FastConnect 7800 support, w/ WiFi 7 support

Devices powered with the new chipset are expected to come out starting end of the year, Qualcomm said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A facility described as the world's largest floating wind farm produced its first power over the weekend, with more turbines set to come online before the year is out. In a statement Monday, Norwegian energy firm Equinor -- better known for its work in the oil and gas industry -- said power production from Hywind Tampen's first wind turbine took place on Sunday afternoon. While wind is a renewable energy source, Hywind Tampen will be used to help power operations at oil and gas fields in the North Sea. Equinor said Hywind Tampen's first power was sent to the Gullfaks oil and gas field.

Hywind Tampen is located around 140 kilometers (86.9 miles) off the coast of Norway, in depths ranging from 260 to 300 meters. Seven of the wind farm's turbines are slated to come on stream in 2022, with installation of the remaining four taking place in 2023. When complete, Equinor says it will have a system capacity of 88 megawatts. Equinor said Hywind Tampen was expected to meet around 35% of the Gullfaks and Snorre fields' electricity demand. "This will cut CO2 emissions from the fields by about 200,000 tonnes per year," the company added.

NPR reports that "two teams of scientists — one at Northeastern University in Boston; the other at the University of Cambridge in the UK — recently announced that they managed to manufacture, in a lab, a material that does not exist naturally on Earth."

"It — until now — has only been found in meteorites." We spoke to Laura Henderson Lewis, one of the professors on the Northeastern team, and she told us the material found in the meteorites is a combination of two base metals, nickel and iron, which were cooled over millions of years as meteoroids and asteroids tumbled through space. That process created a unique compound with a particular set of characteristics that make it ideal for use in the high-end permanent magnets that are an essential component of a vast range of advanced machines, from electric vehicles to space shuttle turbines.

The compound is called tetrataenite, and the fact that scientists have found a way to make it in a lab is a huge deal. If synthetic tetrataenite works in industrial applications, it could make green energy technologies significantly cheaper. It could also roil the market in rare earths, currently dominated by China, and create a seismic shift in the industrial balance between China and the West....

But it will be a long time before tetrataenite is in a position to disrupt any existing markets, Laura Lewis says. She says there is still a lot of testing to be done to find out whether lab tetrataenite is as hardy and as useful as the outer space material. And even if it turns out to be as good, it will be five to eight years "pedal to the metal" before anyone could make permanent magnets out of it. In the meantime, China's competitors are working hard to source rare earths of their own. The US is investing in mines in Australia; there's exploration ongoing in Malaysia, and the Japanese are researching ways to extract elements from mud mined from the sea bed.

America's Department of Energy awarded $3 million to Oregon State University "to explore the development of a new rechargeable battery technology that would accelerate the clean energy transition," reports the Associated Press, "without relying on rare finite minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel." OSU chemistry professor Xiulei "David" Ji, who will lead a battery research team, said it could be a game-changer. "It's a new paradigm," he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. "We are very excited and very grateful to have this opportunity to work on this project...." His plan is to explore anion batteries that provide the necessary components without using limited minerals like the ones lithium batteries use and that could potentially increase how much energy a battery can hold. "The new battery chemistry does not have to rely on these elements," Ji said. "That's the benefit of the new chemistry. It's a game changer."

Ji said the primary market for these batteries would be electric vehicles, but he doesn't rule out the possibility of anion batteries being used by large-scale utilities, like Portland General Electric's solar, wind and battery facility. He also said they could be commercialized soon and be used in homes.
The article points out that the price of lithium tripled in 2021, and according to the International Energy Agency, the world could face lithium shortages by 2025.

An anonymous reader writes that Seagate Technology has launched its second generation dual actuator MACH.2 series hard drives. "Computing power, storage capacities, and storage performance: all must continue moving forward in order for technology innovators to solve humanity's greatest challenges," boasts Seagate's page for the drives: MACH.2 is the world's first multi-actuator hard drive technology, containing two independent actuators that transfer data concurrently. MACH.2 solves the need for increased performance by enabling parallelism of data flows in and out of a single hard drive. By allowing the data center host computer to request and receive data from two areas of the drive simultaneously, MACH.2 doubles the IOPS performance of each individual hard drive.... MACH.2 provides up to 2x performance — with two independent actuators and data paths, it enables concurrent I/O streams to and from the host.
Seagate claims it offers "optimal latency" by improving sequential peformance to double data transfer rates over single-actuator drives.

And in other news, Seagate is selling hard drives with commemorative Star Wars themes, including the Mandalorian drive, the Grogu drive, and the Boba Fett drive. (It's in addition to Seagate's officially licensed external drive for God of War Ragnarök — optimised for PS4 and PS5, delivering "the ability to play PS4 games directly from the drive.") Seagate also made drives commemorating Marvel's Avengers and Spider-Man, and now has new drives for Marvel's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever .

Microsoft has done a lot to make their flagship tablet-laptop more repairable. Following iFixit's recent teardown, the Surface Pro 9 was the "most repairable we've seen from the product line yet." Ars Technica shares the major findings: iFixit has consulted with Microsoft's hardware teams for a while now, providing advice on making devices more repairable. As evidence of this, Microsoft claims in a statement that it will:

- Make repair guides available for the Surface Pro 9's components by the end of the year
- Work with "a major US retailer" to build out an authorized (in-store) repair network by early 2023
- Offer parts to individuals and repair shops by the first half of 2023

All these factors improve repairability, both in practice and in iFixit's (and French, European, and potentially other nations') repair scores.

iFixit's editorial teardowns, however, are conducted independently. When the team dug in, they found that the glass display has some flex built into it now, making it harder to shatter when you pry on the (now softer) glue underneath. With the screen off, you have access to all the modular components: motherboard, thermal module, the Surface Connect Port, speakers, Wi-Fi module, front and rear cameras, and side buttons. Most notably, the battery is now screwed down instead of held in place with glue. That makes the most common and predictable repair to the device "just plain simple," iFixit claims. The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, something that iFixit would typically penalize in the past. But iFixit says that given the power savings and performance boost from proximity to the CPU, it can't punish the decision. "Adding it all up, iFixit gives the Surface Pro 9 a 7 out of 10," concludes Ars' report. "That's a notable leap from prior Surface models, like the Pro 7, which received a 1 out of 10. But the Surface Pro 9's score will likely move up a notch or two if Microsoft keeps its promises to release manuals and spare parts to anyone who wants them next year."