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Spotify is eliminating about 1,500 jobs, or about 17% of its workforce, in its third round of layoffs this year as the music streaming giant looks to become "both productive and efficient." From a report: In a note to employees Monday, Spotify founder and chief executive Daniel Ek said right-sizing the workforce is crucial for the company to face the "challenges ahead." He cited the slow economic growth and rising capital costs among reasons for the job cuts, saying the firm took advantage of lower-cost capital in 2020 and 2021 to invest significantly in the business. "I recognize this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions. To be blunt, many smart, talented and hard-working people will be departing us," he wrote in the note, which the company later published on the blog.

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Quantum computing is starting to fulfil its promise as a crucial scientific research tool, IBM researchers claim, as the US tech group attempts to quell fears that the technology will fail to match high hopes for it. From a report: The company is due to unveil 10 projects on Monday that point to the power of quantum calculation when twinned with established techniques such as conventional supercomputing, said Dario Gil, its head of research. "For the first time now we have large enough systems, capable enough systems, that you can do useful technical and scientific work with it," Gil said in an interview. The papers presented on Monday are the work of IBM and partners including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tokyo. They focus mainly on areas such as simulating quantum physics and solving problems in chemistry and materials science. Expectations that quantum systems would by now be close to commercial uses prompted a wave of funding for the technology in recent years. But signs that business applications are further off than expected have led to warnings of a possible "quantum winter" of waning investor confidence and financial backing. IBM's announcements suggest the technology's main applications have not yet fully extended to the broad range of commercialisable computing tasks many in the field want to see. "It's going to take a while before we go from scientific value to, let's say, business value," said Jay Gambetta, IBM's vice-president of quantum. "But in my opinion the difference between research and commercialisation is getting tighter."

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You probably keep a backup of important personal files, photos, and videos on a flash drive or external hard drive. In the not-too-distant future, you might store that data in DNA instead. French company Biomemory wants to bring personal DNA-based data storage to the public. From a report: Today, the company announced the availability of wallet-sized cards that store one kilobyte of text data each -- the equivalent of a short email -- using DNA as the storage medium. At $1,000 for two identical cards, the price isn't exactly comparable to a memory stick. At least not yet. Erfane Arwani, CEO of Biomemory, sees his firm's offering as an experiment of sorts. "We wanted to demonstrate that our process is ready to be shown to the world," he says. [...] One major benefit of DNA is that it is a far denser storage medium than current electronics. The Wyss Institute at Harvard estimates that a single gram of DNA can hold around 36 million copies of the Avengers: Endgame movie. It's also stable over time and requires less energy than the solid state drives and hard disk drives used in today's data centers. Once information is encoded into DNA, it doesn't require energy use until it's retrieved using a DNA sequencer. Biomemory is promising a minimum lifespan of 150 years -- a lot longer than current digital data storage methods. Hard disk drives last about five years, while flash drives last for around 10 years.

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What's behind a supposed shortage of cybersecurity workers? Last month cybersecurity professional Ben Rothke questioned whether a "shortage" even existed. Instead Rothke argued that human resources "needs to understand how to effectively hire information security professionals. Expecting an HR generalist to find information security specialists is a fruitless endeavor at best." Rothke — a founding member of the Cloud Security Alliance — contacted Slashdot this week with "a follow-up piece" arguing there's another problem. "How can you know how many security jobs there are if there's no real statistical data available?" (Most articles on the topic cite the exact same two studies, which Rothke sees as "not statistically defendable.") Which begs the question — how many information security jobs are there? The short answer is that no one has a clue. The problem is that there is no statistically verifiable and empirically researched data on the number of current information security jobs and what the future holds. All data to date is based on surveys and extrapolations, which is a poor way to do meaningful statistical research... Based on LinkedIn job postings, veteran industry analyst Richard Stiennon found 15,849 job openings at 1,433 cybersecurity vendors. As to the millions of security jobs, he notes that the same could be extrapolated for office administrators. There are millions of companies, but it's not like they all will need full-time security people. Helen Patton is a veteran information security professional and CISO at Cisco Security Business Group, and the author of Navigating the Cybersecurity Career Path. As to the security jobs crisis, she notes that there are plenty of talented and capable people looking for jobs, and feels there's in fact, no crisis at all. Instead, she says part of the issue is hiring managers who don't truly stop to think about the skills required for a role, and how a candidate can demonstrate those skills. What they do is post jobs that ask for false proxies for experience — degrees, certifications, work experience — and as a consequence, they are looking for candidates that don't exist. She suggests that fixing the hiring process will go a lot further to close the skills gap, than training a legion of new people. Challenging this supposed glut of unfilled positions, Rothke also shares some recent stories from people who've recently looked for information security jobs. ("He tried to explain to the CIO that Agile was not an appropriate methodology for security projects unless they were primarily software-based. The CIO replied, 'oh the CIO at Chase would tell you differently.' Not realizing that most projects at the bank are software-based.") If you want to know how few information security jobs there really are — speak to people who have graduated from security bootcamps and master's degree programs, and they will tell you the challenges they are facing... That's not to say there are not lots of information security jobs. It's just that there are not the exaggerated and hyperbolic amounts that are reported.

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The free open-source text editor Notepad++ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, the blog OMG! Ubuntu reported this week, "with a new release filled with some neat new features." In Notepad++ 8.6 (the 238th release since 2003, for those keeping count) the Windows-based code tool [which can also be used on Linux] adds to its extensive feature set with an improved multi-edit feature. A few 3rd-party Notepad++ plugins have offered similar functionality for a while, including BetterMultiSelection. And a bug report requesting to ability to "transform the column mode to multi-caret on HOME/END/Arrow keys" led to this native addition. Their blog post includes an animated GIF of Notepad++ multi-edit in action. "You can install Notepad++ on Ubuntu straight from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app (it's a Snap Store). Alternatively, install the Windows build via WINE/CrossOver or, if you got the l33t skillz, build it by hand, from source."

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"Advent of Code" has begun. New programming puzzles will appear every day until Christmas at AdventOfCode.com — and the annual event (first started in 2015) has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. This year's first puzzle has been completed by over 150,000 programmers (with another 115,652 completing Day Two's puzzle). And 108,000 fans have also joined the Advent of Code subReddit. Contest-related comments are popping up all around the web. Some participants are live streaming their puzzle-solving efforts on Twitch. Self-described computer nerd Gary Grady is tweeting cartoons about each day's puzzle. JetBrains is even giving away some prizes in their "Advent of Code with Kotlin" event. And JetBrains developer advocate Sebastian Aigner is also hosting daily livestreams about each puzzle. It's hard to overstate how big this event has become. This year's event attracted 60 sponsors, including Kotlin (for the third consecutive year), as well as Spotify, Shopify, and Sony Interactive Entertainment (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and American Express). Individual donors can get a special badge next to their name, and there's also a shop selling coffee mugs and t-shirts. But at its core is real-world developer Eric Wastl (plus a team of loyal beta-testers) sharing his genuine fondness for computer programming. Wastl is also the creator of a satirical web page for the fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework Vanilla JS ("so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade") and also curates a collection of "things in PHP which make me sad". And you can find him on X sharing encouraging comments for this year's participants.

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Slashdot reader XXongo writes: Nuclear power plants have historically been built at gigawatt scale. Recently, however, there has been a new dawn seeing multiple projects to build Small Modular Reactors ("SMRs"), both funded by billionaires and by the U.S. Department of Energy. Recently one of the players farthest ahead in the development, NuScale Power, canceled their headline project, but many other projects continue. In a lengthy analysis, Michael Barnard thinks that's crazy, and attributes the drive toward small reactors to "a tangled web that includes Bill Gates, Silicon Valley, desperate coal towns, desperate nuclear towns, the inability of the USA to build big infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy's budget, magical thinking and more." Due to thermal inefficiencies, small reactors are more expensive per unit of power generated, he points out, and the SMR projects ignore most of the field's history's lessons about both the scale of reactors for commercial success and the conditions needed for success. They are relying on Wright's Law, that each doubling of the number of manufactured items in production manufacturing would bring cost per item down by 20% to 27%, but Barnard points out that the number of reactors needed to achieve enough economy of scale in production to make the reactors make economic sense is unrealistically optimistic. He concludes that only government programs can meet the conditions for successful deployment of nuclear power. At one point Barnard characters SMRs as "a bunch of lab technologies that have been around for decades that depend on uranium from Russia, that don't have the physical characteristics for cheap nuclear generation and don't have the conditions for success for nuclear generation will be the saviours of the nuclear industry and a key wedge in fighting climate change... "I like nuclear generation. I know it's safe enough. I'm not concerned about radiation... I just know that it doesn't have the conditions for success to be built and scaled economically in the 21st Century, and wind, water, solar, transmission and storage do."

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Gene Simmons is 74 years old. But as the singer for the classic rock band KISS left the stage after their final show, USA Today reports there was a surprise: in the most on-brand KISS move even by KISS standards, before the quartet likely hit their dressing rooms after disappearing on stage in the blizzard of smoke and confetti that accompanied the set-closing "Rock and Roll All Nite," a message blasted on the video screens: "A new KISS era starts now." Digital avatars of the band followed, playing their anthem, "God Gave Rock and Roll To You." ABC News reports: The avatars were created by George Lucas' special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, in partnership with Pophouse Entertainment Group, the latter of which was co-founded by ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus. The two companies recently teamed up for the "ABBA Voyage" show in London, in which fans could attend a full concert by the Swedish band — as performed by their digital avatars. Per Sundin, CEO of Pophouse Entertainment, says this new technology allows Kiss to continue their legacy for "eternity." He says the band wasn't on stage during virtual performance because "that's the key thing," of the future-seeking technology. "Kiss could have a concert in three cities in the same night across three different continents. That's what you could do with this." In order to create their digital avatars, who are depicted as a kind of superhero version of the band, Kiss performed in motion capture suits. Experimentation with this kind of technology has become increasingly common in certain sections of the music industry. In October K-pop star Mark Tuan partnered with Soul Machines to create an autonomously automated "digital twin" called "Digital Mark." In doing so, Tuan became the first celebrity to attach their likeness to OpenAI's GPT integration, artificial intelligence technology that allows fans to engage in one-on-one conversations with Tuan's avatar. Aespa, the K-pop girl group, frequently perform alongside their digital avatars — the quartet is meant to be viewed as an octet with digital twins. Another girl group, Eternity, is made up entirely of virtual characters — no humans necessary. Kiss frontman Paul Stanley told ABC News that "The band deserves to live on because the band is bigger than we are."

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Today is the 20th anniversary of its last flight of the supersonic Concorde aircraft. It was faster than the speed of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h). Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph: As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound." Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world's finest engineering minds — were in pursuit of the same goal. It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn't run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft — including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union. The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4. The Telegraph adds: With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn't entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something — or someone — at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. "We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn't have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters," Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union's competing effort did. "There was one chap working there... He used to stay behind, he'd do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs..." Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man — he thinks his name was George — was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. "It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought... 'Ah'."

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For circuit-based quantum computations, the achievable circuit complexity is limited by the quality of timekeeping. That's according to a new analysis published in the journal Physical Review Letters exploring "the effect of imperfect timekeeping on controlled quantum dynamics." An announcement from the Vienna University of Technology explains its significance. "The research team was able to show that since no clock has an infinite amount of energy available (or generates an infinite amount of entropy), it can never have perfect resolution and perfect precision at the same time. This sets fundamental limits to the possibilities of quantum computers." ScienceAlert writes: While the issue isn't exactly pressing, our ability to grow systems based on quantum operations from backroom prototypes into practical number-crunching behemoths will depend on how well we can reliably dissect the days into ever finer portions. This is a feat the researchers say will become increasingly more challenging... "Time measurement always has to do with entropy," says senior author Marcus Huber, a systems engineer who leads a research group in the intersection of Quantum Information and Quantum Thermodynamics at the Vienna University of Technology. In their recently published theorem, Huber and his team lay out the logic that connects entropy as a thermodynamic phenomenon with resolution, demonstrating that unless you've got infinite energy at your fingertips, your fast-ticking clock will eventually run into precision problems. Or as the study's first author, theoretical physicist Florian Meier puts it, "That means: Either the clock works quickly or it works precisely — both are not possible at the same time...." [F]or technologies like quantum computing, which rely on the temperamental nature of particles hovering on the edge of existence, timing is everything. This isn't a big problem when the number of particles is small. As they increase in number, the risk any one of them could be knocked out of their quantum critical state rises, leaving less and less time to carry out the necessary computations... This appears to be the first time researchers have looked at the physics of timekeeping itself as a potential obstacle. "Currently, the accuracy of quantum computers is still limited by other factors, for example the precision of the components used or electromagnetic fields," says Huber. "But our calculations also show that today we are not far from the regime in which the fundamental limits of time measurement play the decisive role."

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The Atlantic writes: Failing a CAPTCHA isn't just annoying — it keeps people from navigating the internet. Older people can take considerably more time to solve different kinds of CAPTCHAs, according to the UC Irvine researchers, and other research has found that the same is true for non-native English speakers. The annoyance can lead a significant chunk of users to just give up. But is it all also just a big waste of time? The article notes there's now even CAPTCHA-solving services you can hire. ("2Captcha will solve a thousand CAPTCHAs for a dollar, using human workers paid as low as 50 cents an hour. Newer companies, such as Capsolver, claim to instead be using AI and charge roughly the same price.") And they also write that this summer saw more discouraging news: In a recent study from researchers at UC Irvine and Microsoft: - most of the 1,400 human participants took 15 to 26 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA with a grid of images, with 81% accuracy. - A bot tested in March 2020, meanwhile, was shown to solve similar puzzles in an average of 19.9 seconds, with 83% accuracy. The article ultimately argues that for roughly 20 years, "CAPTCHAs have been engaged in an arms race against the machines," and that now "The burden is on CAPTCHAs to keep up" — which they're doing by evolving. The most popular type, Google's reCAPTCHA v3, should mostly be okay. It typically ascertains your humanity by monitoring your activity on websites before you even click the checkbox, comparing it with models of "organic human interaction," Jess Leroy, a senior director of product management at Google Cloud, the division that includes reCAPTCHA, told me. But the automotive site Motor Biscuit speculates something else could also be happening. "Have you noticed it likes to ask about cars, buses, crosswalks, and other vehicle-related images lately?" Google has not confirmed that it uses the reCAPTCHA system for autonomous vehicles, but here are a few reasons why I think that could be the case. Self-driving cars from Waymo and other brands are improving every day, but the process requires a lot of critical technology and data to improve continuously. According to an old Google Security Blog, using reCAPTCHA and Street View to make locations on Maps more accurate was happening way back in 2014... [I]t would ask users to find the street numbers found on Google Street View and confirm the numbers matched. Previously, it would use distorted text or letters. Using this data, Google could correlate the numbers with addresses and help pinpoint the location on Google Maps... Medium reports that more than 60 million CAPTCHAs are being solved every day, which saves around 160,000 human hours of work. If these were helping locate addresses, why not also help identify other objects? Help differentiate a bus from a car and even choose a crosswalk over a light pole. Thanks to Slashdot reader rikfarrow for suggesting the topic.

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An anonymous reader writes: Using realistic ecological modeling, scientists led by Western Sydney University's Jürgen Knauer found that the globe's vegetation could actually be taking on about 20% more of the CO2 humans have pumped into the atmosphere and will continue to do so through to the end of the century. "What we found is that a well-established climate model that is used to feed into global climate assessments by the likes of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) predicts stronger and sustained carbon uptake until the end of the 21st century when extended to account for the impact of some critical physiological processes that govern how plants conduct photosynthesis," said Knauer. Mathematical models of ecological systems are used to understand complex ecological processes and in turn attempt to predict how the real ecosystems they're based on will change. The researchers found that the more complex their modeling, the more surprising the results – in the environment's favor. Current models, the team adds, are not that complex so likely underestimate future CO2 uptake by vegetation... [T]he modeling makes a strong case for the value of greening projects and their importance in comprehensive approaches to tackling global warming.

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Back in 2021 Hurricane Ida knocked out power lines in New Orleans, leaving parts of the city in darkness for 10 days. So a coalition of community-based organizations (including some churches) decided to build "solar-powered disaster response hubs that could transform the city's approach to resilience," reports the Guardian. So far there's seven, but the group "has ambitions to build dozens more." On a bright, balmy autumn morning a couple of weeks ago [61-year-old pastor Antoine] Barriere climbed a long, steep ladder to show me the 460 solar panels that now cover a third or so of his church's flat roof. The solar panels were generating more than enough energy to power Household of Faith, a non-denominational megachurch with 4,000 mostly Black parishioners in New Orleans East. Downstairs, a cabinet was stacked with backup batteries that were fully charged in case of a power outage — a frequent occurrence thanks to the low-lying city's vulnerability to hurricanes, thunderstorms, high winds, extreme heat and flooding. In a worst-case scenario — no sun, thundery dark skies and power outage — the backup batteries could power essential appliances for a couple of days including the water heater, five commercial fridge freezers storing perishables for the weekly food pantry, and air conditioning for the vast main hall which could be converted into a dormitory-style shelter. But on this brilliant cloudless morning, most of the solar-generated energy was going into the city's electric grid. New Orleans' one-for-one net metering scheme allows the church to offset its excess clean energy against the utility's dirty energy, and this should become a net zero facility within 12 months... The idea is that each community lighthouse should be an institution locals already know and trust — such as a place of worship, health clinic or community centre — that can be converted into a resilience hub where people can converge during a power outage to get cool, recharge phones, have a meal, connect to a medical device or store medication that requires refrigeration such as insulin. In addition, community lighthouses will be able to keep the services running that people rely on such as the food pantry and religious sermons, while also adding capacity to the city's wider emergency-response efforts as a distribution hub, shelter and possibly even house a makeshift clinic. Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

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Long-time Slashdot reader nmb3000 writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a new white paper, Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms , to propose an alternative to the "often ill-conceived, bills written by state, federal, and international regulators to tackle a broad set of digital topics ranging from child safety to artificial intelligence." According to the EFF, "these scattershot proposals to correct online harm are often based on censorship and news cycles. Instead of this chaotic approach that rarely leads to the passage of good laws, we propose another solution." The EFF writes: What would this comprehensive privacy law look like? We believe it must include these components: No online behavioral ads.Data minimization.Opt-in consent.User rights to access, port, correct, and delete information.No preemption of state laws.Strong enforcement with a private right to action.No pay-for-privacy schemes.No deceptive design. A strong comprehensive data privacy law promotes privacy, free expression, and security. It can also help protect children, support journalism, protect access to health care, foster digital justice, limit private data collection to train generative AI, limit foreign government surveillance, and strengthen competition. These are all issues on which lawmakers are actively pushing legislation—both good and bad.

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It's "the conference about the joy of Emacs and Emacs Lisp." Started in 2013, the volunteer-run EmacsConf accepted 44 talks for this year — and Day Two has just started streaming online now. Sunday kicks off with a talk counting on how the "hypertextual information manager" GNU Hyperbole can improve your Emacs productivity. (Click here for a list of all of Sunday's talks.) Or hang out in the #emacsconf channel on irc.libera.chat. The Free Software Foundation provided fiscal sponsorship for this year's event, noting that "The conference has grown rapidly in the last few years" and "welcomes speakers of all backgrounds and all levels of experience from across the world. "EmacsConf is rooted in the active, passionate community surrounding GNU Emacs, and like Emacs itself, it is committed to user freedom. It is organized and run using an entirely free software stack."

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100 miles south of the Canadian border, the tiny town of Bemidji, Minnesota "has been bombarded by a sudden onslaught of Amazon packages" since early November, reports the Washington Post, "and local postal workers say they have been ordered to deliver those packages first." A spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service tells the Post that's not true, and that their service "does not prioritize the delivery of packages from Amazon or other customers." But whatever's going on, the Post reports that "The result has been chaos..." Mail is getting backed up, sometimes for days, leaving local residents waiting for checks, credit card statements, health insurance documents and tax rebates. Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12. At least five carriers have quit, and the post office has banned scheduled sick days for the rest of the year, carriers say... Dennis Nelson, a veteran mail carrier, said he got so frustrated watching multiple co-workers "breaking down and crying" that he staged a symbolic strike earlier this month outside the post office where he has worked for more than 20 years... Bemidji is not the only place where postal workers say they have been overwhelmed by packages from Amazon... Carriers and local officials say mail service has been disrupted in rural communities from Portland, Maine, to Washington state's San Juan Islands. The situation stems from a crisis at the Postal Service, which has lost $6.5 billion in the past year. The post office has had a contract with Amazon since 2013, when it started delivering packages on Sundays. But in recent years, that business has exploded as Amazon has increasingly come to rely on postal carriers to make "last-mile" deliveries in harder-to-reach rural locations. The Postal Service considers the contract proprietary and has declined to disclose its terms. But U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said publicly that "increasing package volume" — not just from Amazon, but from FedEx and UPS as well — is key to the mail service's financial future. In a Nov. 14 speech to the Postal Service Board of Governors, DeJoy said he wants the post office to become the "preferred delivery provider in the nation...." In bigger cities, Amazon has its own distribution network, which takes some of the pressure off the post office. But in rural areas, where carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their personal vehicles, the arrangement has caused problems. In the mountains of Colorado, biologists in Crested Butte are struggling with the delay of time-sensitive samples, the Denver Post reported in September, while mail carriers in Carbondale say they are overwhelmed by Amazon packages. Other Minnesota towns including Brainerd and La Porte have been hit hard by Amazon in the past, carriers said... Partenheimer defended the post office's record in an email, while conceding "much work remains to be done...." An Amazon spokesperson told the Post "We work directly with the USPS to balance our delivery needs with their available capacity," and "we'll continue to collaborate on package volume each week and adjust as needed."

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Long-time Slashdot reader BishopBerkeley writes: Varjo follows a completely different model from Apple and Meta for its new AR headset. Computing is done on a connected (via a cable) computer. The tradeoff is that the headset can use the extra computing power of the host computer to drive ultrahigh resolution displays that are far more pixel dense than Apple's Vision Pro. The net result is that the headset is truly useful for demanding applications like professional flight simulators, where $10,000 for a headset is a sensible investment. Furthermore, the headset has a longer life span because its PC resident hardware and software are upgradeable. From IEEE Spectrum: The Meta Quest 3 is a capable, accessible mixed-reality device. But if you're a mad scientist working on a secret project in an underground lab, it's not going to cut it. Finnish headset manufacturer Varjo has a solution: the XR-4, a new generation of flagship mixed-reality headsets built for unusually demanding users. Varjo, based in Helsinki, serves up displays with record-setting pixel counts, auto-focusing cameras, and a "Secure Edition" that looks like it was ripped straight from a Bond film. The goal? A photo-real mixed-reality experience that lets designers, researchers, and creatives build and work with objects that don't yet physically exist. "How do you design a car without a clay prototype? How do you sell a yacht you haven't built yet? How do you train a pilot to fly a plane that's still on the ground?" says Patrick Wyatt, Varjo's chief product officer. "Jobs you do right now with physical things, we're virtualizing those." Varjo's XR-4 headset comes in three different editions, each with escalating features (and price tags). The "entry-level" XR-4, which starts at €3,990 (about US $4,300), homes in on product design and data visualization work that requires crisp virtual reality alongside occasional use of mixed reality. Varjo achieves this with dual 4K displays that leapfrog even the resolution of Apple's upcoming Vision Pro headset... Simulators might benefit from the XR-4's more expensive sibling: the XR-4 Focal Edition. Priced at €9,990 (about $11,000), it justifies its cost with dual gaze-directed autofocus cameras... The Secure Edition is available with fixed-focused or autofocus cameras and priced at €7,990 and €13,990 ($8,700 and $15,200), respectively.

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"As of this year, all new Mac computers are powered by Apple's own silicon, ending the company's 15-plus years of reliance on Intel," according to a new report from CNBC. "Apple's silicon team has grown to thousands of engineers working across labs all over the world, including in Israel, Germany, Austria, the U.K. and Japan. Within the U.S., the company has facilities in Silicon Valley, San Diego and Austin, Texas..." The latest A17 Pro announced in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max in September enables major leaps in features like computational photography and advanced rendering for gaming. "It was actually the biggest redesign in GPU architecture and Apple silicon history," said Kaiann Drance, who leads marketing for the iPhone. "We have hardware accelerated ray tracing for the first time. And we have mesh shading acceleration, which allows game developers to create some really stunning visual effects." That's led to the development of iPhone-native versions from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Mirage, The Division Resurgence and Capcom's Resident Evil 4. Apple says the A17 Pro is the first 3-nanometer chip to ship at high volume. "The reason we use 3-nanometer is it gives us the ability to pack more transistors in a given dimension. That is important for the product and much better power efficiency," said the head of Apple silicon, Johny Srouji . "Even though we're not a chip company, we are leading the industry for a reason." Apple's leap to 3-nanometer continued with the M3 chips for Mac computers, announced in October. Apple says the M3 enables features like 22-hour battery life and, similar to the A17 Pro, boosted graphics performance... In a major shift for the semiconductor industry, Apple turned away from using Intel's PC processors in 2020, switching to its own M1 chip inside the MacBook Air and other Macs. "It was almost like the laws of physics had changed," Ternus said. "All of a sudden we could build a MacBook Air that's incredibly thin and light, has no fan, 18 hours of battery life, and outperformed the MacBook Pro that we had just been shipping." He said the newest MacBook Pro with Apple's most advanced chip, the M3 Max, "is 11 times faster than the fastest Intel MacBook Pro we were making. And we were shipping that just two years ago." Intel processors are based on x86 architecture, the traditional choice for PC makers, with a lot of software developed for it. Apple bases its processors on rival Arm architecture, known for using less power and helping laptop batteries last longer. Apple's M1 in 2020 was a proving point for Arm-based processors in high-end computers, with other big names like Qualcomm — and reportedly AMD and Nvidia — also developing Arm-based PC processors. In September, Apple extended its deal with Arm through at least 2040. Since Apple first debuted its homegrown semiconductors in 2010 in the iPhone 4, other companies started pursuing their own custom semiconductor development, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Tesla. CNBC reports that Apple is also reportedly working on its own Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip. Apple's Srouji wouldn't comment on "future technologies and products" but told CNBC "we care about cellular, and we have teams enabling that."

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A pull request has been merged to fix a data corruption issue in OpenZFS (the open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager). "OpenZFS 2.2.2 and 2.1.14 released with fix in place," reports a Thursday comment on GitHub. Earlier this week, jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) wrote: All versions of OpenZFS 2.2 suffer from a defect that can corrupt the data. Attempts to mitigate the bug have reduced the likelihood of it occurring, but so far nobody has been able to pinpoint what is going wrong or why. Phoronix reported on Monday: Over the US holiday weekend it became more clear that this OpenZFS data corruption bug isn't isolated to just the v2.2 release — older versions are also susceptible — and that v2.2.1 is still prone to possible data corruption. The good news at least is that data corruption in real-world scenarios is believed to be limited but with some scripting help the corruption can be reproduced. It's also now believed that the OpenZFS 2.2 block cloning feature just makes encountering the problem more likely.

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Consumer Reports awarded a "recommended" rating to Tesla's Modey Y this year, "with owners reporting fewer issues with its suspension, in-car electronics and general build quality than in previous years". Tesla's Model 3 also earned a "recommended" rating. "Tesla's Model 3 and Model Y are now the sweet spot in the automotive industry when it comes to building electric cars," says Jake Fisher, the senior director of auto testing for Consumer Reports. "While Tesla is still a relatively new car company, it has more experience producing EVs than any other automaker." But how about the larger universe of all automakers? Electric vehicle owners continue to report far more problems with their vehicles than owners of conventional cars or hybrids, according to Consumer Reports' newly released annual car reliability survey. The survey reveals that, on average, EVs from the past three model years had 79 percent more problems than conventional cars... "Most electric cars today are being manufactured by either legacy automakers that are new to EV technology, or by companies like Rivian that are new to making cars," says Jake Fisher, senior director of auto testing at Consumer Reports. "It's not surprising that they're having growing pains and need some time to work out the bugs." Fisher says some of the most common problems EV owners report are issues with electric drive motors, charging, and EV batteries... This year's survey data show that hybrids continue to be among the most reliable vehicle type: Hybrids have 26 percent fewer problems than conventional models, even though they have both a conventional powertrain and an electric motor and therefore more potential problem spots than conventional cars. "It might not seem that long ago, but Toyota launched the Prius hybrid about 25 years ago," Elek says. "Automakers have been making hybrids long enough that they've gotten really good at it. Plus, many hybrids are also made by manufacturers that tend to produce reliable vehicles overall, such as Toyota, Hyundai, and Kia." Hybrids also are not typically loaded with high-tech features like multiple customizable displays that can be problem-prone, which is why Fisher says they are great options for drivers who are more interested in getting ideal fuel mileage than they are in bells and whistles. "These vehicles are not necessarily a tour de force of technology, so there's just less that can go wrong with them," he says. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), which have both a battery for short-range electric driving and an internal combustion engine for long-range driving, are the least reliable category — 146 percent more problems than conventional cars. "PHEVs are sort of like an EV and a conventional car rolled into one, so by their nature they have more things that can go wrong with them," Fisher says. There are exceptions, notes the auto testing director. Toyota's RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid "is one of the most reliable models in our survey this year. Similarly, the Ford F-150 hybrid has transmission and other issues that buck the trend of strong hybrid reliability." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

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