Wednesday, April 24th, 2024

Time	Event
10:00a	Flame-Throwing Robot Dog Now Available Under $10,000 Okian Warrior writes: For $10,000, you can now get a flamethrower mounted on a robotic dog. Just load the webpage and scroll down. I saw this on the news today. *Definitely* we need to have a conversation about where AI is going. The robot, called the Thermonator, is constructed by Ohio flame throwing manufacturer Throwflame and features one of the company's ARC flamethrowers mounted on its back. The 26-pound robotic quadruped "can shoot fire in a 30-foot stream and comes with a built-in fuel tank powered by gasoline," notes Gizmodo. "The company says the robot also has an hour-long battery, a laser sight, and lidar mapping, and it can be remotely controlled via the company's app." The company says its product is designed for "wildfire control and prevention," "agriculture management," "ecological conservation," "entertainment and SFX," and "snow and ice removal." It can be yours for the low price of $9,420 with free shipping. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:02p	Framework Won't Be Just a Laptop Company Anymore Today, Framework is the modular repairable laptop company. Tomorrow, it wants to be a consumer electronics company, period. From a report: That's one of the biggest reasons it just raised another $18 million in funding -- it wants to expand beyond the laptop into "additional product categories." Framework CEO Nirav Patel tells me that has always been the plan. The company originally had other viable ideas beyond laptops, too. "We chose to take on the notebook space first," he says, partly because Framework knew it could bootstrap its ambitions by catering to the PC builders and tinkerers and Linux enthusiasts left behind by big OEMs -- and partly because it wanted to go big or go home. If Framework could succeed in laptops, he thought, it would be able to build almost anything. After five years building laptops, what might Framework add to the portfolio? Patel won't say -- I only get the barest hints, no matter how many different ways I ask. He won't even say if they'll make less or more of a splash than laptops. Framework might choose an "equally difficult" category or might instead try something "a bit smaller and simpler to execute, streamlined now that we have all this infrastructure." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
9:20p	Lenovo First To Implement LPCAMM2 in Laptop Lenovo's latest ThinkPad P1 Gen 7 laptop is set to be the first to use the new LPCAMM2 memory form factor, the successor to SODIMM sticks. From a report: While Lenovo has largely focused on the AI performance of its new laptop, which is equipped with an Intel Core Ultra CPU and Nvidia RTX 3000 Ada GPU, the company also noted that its device was the first in the world to use the LPCAMM2 memory standard. LPCAMM2 uses 64 percent less space than SODIMM and 61 percent less active power, according to Lenovo. This is thanks to it being based on LPDDR5X memory instead of regular DDR5. Designed specifically for laptops, the LPCAMM2 standard actually has its origins in tech developed by Dell. Simply termed CAMM (Compression Attached Memory Module), it first debuted as a proprietary type of memory in Dell's Precision 7670 in 2022. However, in 2023 the PC giant donated its intellectual property to JEDEC, the organization that standardizes memory technologies. CAMM became LPCAMM2 (Low-Power Compression Attached Memory Module) in September 2023 when JEDEC finally confirmed its specifications. Samsung promptly announced plans to produce LPCAMM2 sticks, and claimed they would have 50 percent more performance and 70 percent more efficiency than their SODIMM-based predecessors. Plus, LPCAMM2 can offer dual-channel memory without requiring a second module. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:00p	Updating California's Grid For EVs May Cost Up To $20 Billion An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two researchers at the University of California, Davis -- Yanning Li and Alan Jenn -- have determined that nearly two-thirds of [California's] feeder lines don't have the capacity that will likely be needed for car charging. Updating to handle the rising demand might set its utilities back as much as 40 percent of the existing grid's capital cost. Li and Jenn aren't the first to look at how well existing grids can handle growing electric vehicle sales; other research has found various ways that different grids fall short. However, they have access to uniquely detailed data relevant to California's ability to distribute electricity (they do not concern themselves with generation). They have information on every substation, feeder line, and transformer that delivers electrons to customers of the state's three largest utilities, which collectively cover nearly 90 percent of the state's population. In total, they know the capacity that can be delivered through over 1,600 substations and 5,000 feeders.[...] By 2025, only about 7 percent of the feeders will experience periods of overload. By 2030, that figure will grow to 27 percent, and by 2035 -- only about a decade away -- about half of the feeders will be overloaded. Problems grow a bit more slowly after that, with two-thirds of the feeders overloaded by 2045, a decade after all cars sold in California will be EVs. At that point, total electrical demand will be close to twice the existing capacity. The problems aren't evenly distributed, though. They appear first in high-population areas like the Bay Area. And throughout this period, most of the problems are in feeders that serve residential and mixed-use neighborhoods. The feeders that serve neighborhoods that are primarily business-focused don't see the same coordinated surge in demand that occurs as people get home from work and plug in; they're better able to serve the more erratic use of charging stations at office complexes and shopping centers. In terms of the grid, residential services will need to see their capacity expand by about 16 gigawatts by 2045. Public chargers will need nine gigawatts worth of added capacity by the same point. The one wild card is direct current fast charging. Eliminating fast chargers entirely would reduce the number of feeders that need upgrades by 12 percent. Converting all public stations to DC fast charging, in contrast, would boost that number by 15 percent. So the details of the upgrades that will be needed will be very sensitive to the impatience of EV drivers. Paying for the necessary upgrades will be pricey, but there's a lot of uncertainty here. Li and Jenn came up with a range of anywhere between $6 billion and $20 billion. They put this in context in two ways. The total capital invested in the existing grid is estimated to be $51 billion, so the cost of updating it could be well over a third of its total value. At the same time, the costs will be spread out over decades and only total up to (at most) three times the grid's annual operation and maintenance costs. So in any one year, the costs shouldn't be crippling. All that might be expected to drive the cost of electricity up. But Li and Jenn suggest that the greater volume of electricity consumption will exert a downward pressure on prices (people will pay more overall but pay somewhat less per unit of electricity). Based on a few economic assumptions, the researchers conclude that this would roughly offset the costs of the necessary grid expansion, so the price per unit of electricity would be largely static. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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