MachineShedFred writes: Tesla has opened their charging connector and equipment standards as the "North American Charging Standard" (NACS), including links to technical specifications and connector data sheets and CAD files. The formerly proprietary connector, now called NACS, is the most common charging standard in North America: "NACS vehicles outnumber CCS two-to-one, and Tesla's Supercharging network has 60% more NACS posts than all the CCS-equipped networks combined." Tesla noted that charging network operators "already have plans in motion to incorporate NACS at their chargers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For a second time in less than a year, regulators in California moved on Thursday to roll back the compensation that homeowners receive from utilities for the excess electricity their rooftop solar panels send to the electric grid -- payments that power companies and some consumer groups have argued hurt poor and low-income households. The new proposal from the California Public Utilities Commission would cut the benefit for almost all new rooftop solar customers by about 75 percent starting in April. Under current rules, households that send excess power to the grid receive credits on their utility bills that are equivalent to retail electricity rates. The system of credits is known as net energy metering. The measure, which will be subject to public comment before the commission's five members vote on it, would also limit solar systems to 150 percent of a building's electricity load.

Regulators in other states are closely watching how California changes its net metering program. Utilities and solar energy companies have been fighting over energy credits in numerous states. Billions of dollars in investment and revenue are potentially at stake. More generous credits typically encourage people to buy solar panels but can cut into the profits of utilities. California leads the nation by far in the use of rooftop solar, with about 1.5 million such installations. The utilities commission estimates that those systems have the collective capacity to generate 12 gigawatts of electricity, or the equivalent of 12 nuclear power plants.

In a statement, the commission said the new proposal would make net metering more equitable. Average residential customers of Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric who install solar panels would save $100 a month on their electricity bill, and average residential customers installing solar paired with battery storage would save at least $136 a month, the commission stated. As a result of those savings, it said, the average household that installs a new solar or solar and battery system would be able to fully pay off the system in nine years or less. Compensation would not change for homeowners who already had rooftop solar panels, for at least 20 years from when their system was installed. "As rooftop solar systems have spread over the last decade, the utility industry has criticized use of the technology and called net metering an unjust subsidy," adds the report. "Utilities argue that rooftop solar homes that greatly reduce or zero out their monthly electric bills are effectively forcing households without panels to bear more of the cost of maintaining the electric grid. But the solar industry has argued that net metering is needed to encourage use of rooftop solar and reduce the emissions responsible for climate change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Amazon on Thursday showed off a new robot that could one day assist warehouse workers with some of the more tedious aspects of the job. The company unveiled "Sparrow," a robotic arm that can pluck millions of items of varying shapes and sizes, on stage at the Delivering the Future conference near Boston, where it showcased new robotics, transportation and last-mile delivery technologies. Amazon says Sparrow uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to move products before they're packaged. A video of Sparrow shows the robotic arm picking up a board game, a bottle of vitamins and a set of sheets -- all the kinds of items that might flow through one of the company's warehouses -- and deftly placing them in crates.

Suction cups attached to the surface of the robot allow it to firmly grasp items. Previous iterations of robotic arms have been able to pick up boxes, which are generally uniform in their shape but might vary in size. But Sparrow is capable of handling items with varying curvature and size, said Jason Messinger, principal technical product manager of robotic manipulation at Amazon Robotics, in a demonstration. "This is not just picking the same things up and moving it with high precision, which we've seen in previous robots," Messinger said. The robotic arm can identify around 65% of Amazon's product inventory, the company said.

While the introduction of robots to the warehouse often raises questions about whether human jobs will be replaced, Amazon says Sparrow will "take on repetitive tasks," freeing employees up to focus on other things. The company also said the technology can improve safety in the workplace, although that prospect has been debated. An investigation by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found the company's warehouses with robots have higher injury rates than facilities without automation. Further reading: Amazon Unveils Smaller Delivery Drone That Can Fly in Rain

While Apple is still expected to release its first VR/AR headset next year, the bigger step to mainstream adoption -- the Google Glass-style AR glasses -- may have slipped two years according to one analyst. Tom's Guide reports: In an email to MarketWatch, Haitong International Tech Research's Jeff Pu wrote that Apple Glasses could now be up to four years from making their first appearance. "We now expect the AR Glass to be postponed to 2025-2026, due to design issues," Pu wrote. This is significant as just five months ago Pu stated that the AR glasses could be announced as soon as 2024.

The term "design difficulties" is, of course, a bit of a catch-all. It could cover anything from making the glasses aesthetically pleasing and light enough for extended wear, to ensuring they have enough battery life to be useful and don't overheat. But it's striking that nearly a decade after Google Glass became available to 'Explorers' in the US, companies are still struggling to make the form factor work, despite the considerable technological improvements we've seen in the intervening years.

Scientists say tht measured over a 20-year period, methane "packs about 80 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide," according to the Associated Press. "And according to the International Energy Agency, methane is to blame for roughly 30% of the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

And yet... Aerial surveys have documented huge amounts of methane wafting from oil and gas fields in the United States and beyond. It's a problem the Biden administration has sought to attack in its recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act. One of the law's provisions threatens fines of up to $1,500 per ton of methane released, to be imposed against the worst polluters. Perhaps most crucially, the law provides $1.55 billion in funding for companies to upgrade equipment to more effectively contain emissions — equipment that could, in theory, help the operators avoid fines.

Yet some of the best equipment for reducing emissions is already installed on oil and gas infrastructure.... And critics say such equipment is failing to capture much of the methane and casting doubt on whether the Biden plan would go far to correct the problem.... "Energy companies have made pledges, but I've got to tell you, I haven't seen anything from a practical standpoint that makes me believe there's any reality to reductions on the ground," said Tim Doty, an environmental scientist and former air quality inspector for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. "Maybe they're making progress, but are they making enough progress to slow down climate change? I don't think so...."

Sometimes, methane escapes because the equipment designed to contain it hasn't been properly calibrated or maintained. Emissions aren't immediately stopped once new equipment is installed. Companies must still invest in properly designing the system and continuously monitoring and maintaining the equipment. This requires money and staff, which experts say many companies neglect.... And hydrocarbons like methane, because they are corrosive, inevitably degrade the tanks, pipes and equipment that are supposed to contain them. "All this stuff is going to be prone to leak — that's just the way it is," said Coyne Gibson, who spent about two decades as an engineer inspecting oil and gas equipment. "That's mechanics. And there's there's not really any way to avoid it...."

The staffing it would take to continuously survey the nation's 3 million miles of natural gas pipelines would likely be prohibitively expensive.
"Emissions keep going up. We're moving in the wrong direction..." Antoine Halff, chief analyst at energy analytics company Kayrros, tells the Associated Press. But he adds that "the potential, the conditions, to change course seem to be here."

The article points out that America's Environmental Protection Agency "is writing rules on methane reduction that will further detail what would be required of companies starting in 2024."

Slashdot reader thedarklaser writes: A chemical engineering professor at Utah's BYU has created a nuclear reactor design that could produce enough energy for 1000 homes in the space of 4 feet by 7 feet. And there's a bonus: potentially no nuclear waste or risk of melt down.

They use molten salt that bonds with the dissolved fuel. Then, very valuable Molybdenum-99 (as in $30 million per gram) can be extracted from that salt and sold for use in medical imaging.

Additionally, this system is very inexpensive, at a cost of around 3 cents per kilowatt hour.
The professor (who led a larger team on the project) tells a local TV station it's important because nuclear energy is "the only baseload or controllable, 100% on-power that has no emissions at all."

And since all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt with this technique, he believes it's "a system that's impossible to melt down. There's nothing to melt, and it's not likely to cause any release problems because there's no pressure and there's nothing to push it out."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion -- called "The Commodordion" -- he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Akesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

So how does the Commodordion work? Akesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Yesterday, a company called Rewind AI announced a self-titled software product for Macs with Apple Silicon that reportedly keeps a highly compressed, searchable record of everything you do locally on your Mac and lets you "rewind" time to see it later. If you forget something you've "seen, said, or heard," Rewind wants to help you find it easily. Rewind AI claims its product stores all recording data locally on your machine and does not require cloud integration. Among its promises, Rewind will reportedly let you rewind Zoom meetings and pull information from them in a searchable form. In a video demo on Rewind.AI's site, the app opens when a user presses Command+Shift+Space. The search bar suggests typing "anything you've seen, said, or heard." It also shows a timeline at the bottom of the screen that represents previous actions in apps.

After searching for "tps reports," the video depicts a grid view of every time Rewind has encountered the phrase "tps reports" as audio or text in any app, including Zoom chats, text messages, emails, Slack conversations, and Word documents. It describes filtering the results by app -- and the ability to copy and paste from these past instances if necessary. Founded by Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek, Rewind AI is composed of a small remote team located in various cities around the US. Portions of the company previously created Scribe, a precursor to Rewind that received some press attention in 2021. In an introductory blog post, Rewind AI co-founder Dan Siroker writes, "What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing?" Rewind AI provides few details about the app's back-end technology but describes "mind-boggling compression" that can reportedly compress recording data up to 3,750 times "without a major loss of quality," giving an example of 10.5GB of data squeezed down to just 2.8MB.

Slashdot readers MojoKid and williamyf share the news of AMD's two new high-end graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. "Priced at $999 and $899 respectively and available in December this year, the new Radeon cards are expected to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090," writes MojoKid. HotHardware reports: AMD states that its goals for RDNA 3 are to accelerate performance-per-watt leadership and to raise the bar for high resolution and high framerate gaming. AMD has turned to a chiplet architecture to accomplish these goals, a first for gaming GPUs. The chiplet complexes consist of a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD), which is flanked top and bottom by up to six 6nm memory and cache dice (MCD). The RX 7900 XTX uses the full complement of 6 MCDs which aggregates as a 384-bit memory bus (64-bit per die) with GDDR6 memory offering 20Gbps of throughput. The RX 7900 XT uses 5 MCDs with a corresponding 320-bit bus.

All of this increased bandwidth and resources translates to what AMD claims is up to a 1.7X uplift in performance for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX versus its previous gen Radeon RX 6950 XT card in high resolution gaming. This could put the card within striking distance of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 possibly, but it's hard to say until cards ship to independent reviewers for testing. Regardless, gamers will appreciate the RX 7900 XTX's price point versus NVIDIA's $1600 top-end beast.

Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth said on Thursday it will make electric cars in the kingdom under a joint venture with Apple supplier Foxconn as part of a push to build new industries and lessen dependence on oil. Reuters reports: Ceer "is the first Saudi automotive brand to produce electric vehicles in Saudi Arabia, and will design, manufacture and sell a range of vehicles for consumers in Saudi Arabia and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, including sedans and sports utility vehicles," PIF said in a statement. PIF said its cars would be available in 2025, adding Ceer would draw more than $150 million in foreign direct investment, create up to 30,000 direct and indirect jobs and is projected to contribute $8 billion to the kingdom's GDP by 2034.

The joint venture "will license component technology from BMW for use in the vehicle development process," PIF said in a statement. "Foxconn will develop the electrical architecture of the vehicles, resulting in a portfolio of products that will lead in the areas of infotainment, connectivity and autonomous driving technologies," it added.

China's government-owned utility State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) has launched the world's first commercial offshore floating solar that's paired with an offshore wind turbine. Electrek reports: SPIC is one of five major electrical utility companies in China, and the world's largest photovoltaic power generation enterprise. The pilot is located off the coast of Haiyang, a city in Shandong, eastern China. The project uses Norway-based Ocean Sun's patented floating solar power technology. The two solar floaters (see the photo above) have an installed capacity of 0.5 megawatts peak. They're connected to a transformer on a SPIC-owned wind turbine and then a subsea cable runs from the wind turbine to the power grid. If the pilot is successful, the plan is to build a 20 MW floating wind-solar farm in 2023 using Ocean Sun's technology.

The Chinese Navy could finally use lithium technology to replace the lead-acid batteries that are now used in its fleet of conventional submarines. Interesting Engineering reports: Since lithium batteries had a higher risk of catching fire or exploding, the navy was hesitant to replace the submarine fleet's current batteries with them. But, "after solving these problems, the replacement of lead-acid batteries with lithium batteries in conventional submarines is just around the corner," said Wang Feng, study lead and a submarine designer. The study claims that technical answers have been discovered through significant testing and development in China's electric car sector, and lithium batteries have been demonstrated to operate safely under difficult circumstances. The modifications could considerably improve a submarine's capacity for survival and battle, according to research that was released on October 15 in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Marine Electric and Electronic Engineering.

For more than a decade, the Chinese military has planned to replace the lead-acid batteries in its fleet of conventional submarines with lithium technology. The lead-acid batteries on these submarines, which have not seen significant development since World War II, have proved problematic due to their poor energy storage capacity, delayed charging, limited power output, short lifespan, and harmful gas leaks, according to the paper. Nickel and cobalt, which are added to batteries to increase performance, were a contributing factor to mishaps; however, some Chinese battery manufacturers have begun using iron and phosphate in their place recently.

Apple's next group of Macs probably won't launch until early next year, Bloomberg News reports, which means it will have fewer new devices to sell in the holiday quarter. From the report: Apple has been gearing up to launch a slew of new Macs, and now we have a clearer idea of when that will occur: early next year. I'm told that Apple is aiming to introduce the upgraded models -- including M2-based versions of the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros -- in the first quarter of calendar 2023 and has tied the launches to the upcoming macOS Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.3. Those software updates are expected to debut between early February and the beginning of March.

[...] The new MacBook Pros will continue to look like the current models, but they'll trade their M1 Pro and M1 Max chips for the first M2 Pro and M2 Max processors. The M2 Max will go to 12 CPU cores, up from 10, and see its top graphics option move to 38 cores from 32. A new Mac mini remains in development, and the company continues to test versions with the same M2 chip as the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, as well as an M2 Pro chip, which hikes the CPU and graphics counts. If Apple indeed launches the M2 Pro variation, we can expect the company to probably wind down the still-available Intel model.

"Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City," reports NPR: Sometimes, it does so on the street, but more often, it happens when the owner is recharging the lithium ion battery. A mismatched charger won't always turn off automatically when the battery's fully charged, and keeps heating up. Or, the highly flammable electrolyte inside the battery's cells leaks out of its casing and ignites, setting off a chain reaction.

"These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch," said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. "We've seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they're actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments."

And these fires are getting more frequent.

As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year.

Fierce Electronics reports on "a complex legal battle in U.S. district court" between Qualcomm and Arm "over licensing of intellectual property with potentially far-reaching impact..." Normally, Arm licenses its architectural designs and related IP to chipmakers such as Nvidia or Qualcomm, which in turn produce chips that are then sold to OEMs that use those chips to make servers and other computers and devices. In an updated Qualcomm counterclaim made public Oct. 26, Qualcomm argues that Arm is no longer going to license its CPU designs after 2024 to Qualcomm and other chip companies under technology license agreements. Instead, Qualcomm asserts, Arm will only license to a broad array of device makers....

Arm has not yet formally responded to Qualcomm's latest counterclaim but told Fierce Electronics via email on Friday that Qualcomm's complaint is "riddled with inaccuracies" that Arm will address in a formal legal response in coming weeks....

[Analyst] Dylan Patel in SemiAnalysis also said the counterclaim shows Arm is not planning to allow external GPUs, NPUs or ISPs in Arm-based SoCs. "It seems that Arm is effectively bundling its other IP with the CPU IP in a take-it-or-leave-it model," Patel said. "That would mean Samsung's licensing deal with AMD for GPU or Mediatek with Imagination GPU is not longer allowed after 2024...." Qualcomm argues Arm is making it clear to the marketplace that "it will act recklessly and opportunistically, threatening the development of new and innovative products as a negotiating tactic, not because it has valid license and trademark claims."
Again, Arm has called Qualcomm's complaint "riddled with inaccuracies." Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, tells Fierce Wireless that If Qualcomm's counterclaim is accurate, "this is a troubling step for the industry." If Arm were to get rid of tech licensing as described by Qualcomm, it would give rise to RISC-V use, something Arm "should be worried about," Gold said....

[Analyst] Patel has also questioned if Arm's original lawsuit is more than just about money and might be because Softbank (owner of Arm) and Arm remain angry that Qualcomm, as Patel puts it, worked with regulators to block Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm. After working for more than a year to seal the deal, Nvidia and SoftBank announced the termination of the proposed deal on Feb. 7, 2022, due to "significant regulatory challenges." Arm was expected to go public within a year, but an IPO has not occurred as of late October.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: AMD turned to advanced packaging to create chiplet designs and become a formidable CPU player again. Apple used the tech to beef up the power of its M1 Ultra chip. And Intel is pinning its future success on 2D and 3D multi-die packaging technologies as part of its ambitious comeback plan. Now TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, wants to make chiplet-based products easier and faster to manufacture using its growing toolbox of advanced packaging tech that has already benefited the likes of AMD, Apple, and others. The Taiwanese foundry giant plans to do this through the formation of the 3DFabric Alliance, announced Thursday, which aims to help chip designers implement advanced packaging tech into their plans faster by collaborating with partner companies that are key to the development process.

TSMC's partners cover several important elements of chip development, from electronic design automation and memory to substrates and testing. As part of the new alliance, they will have early access to TSMC's 3DFabric portfolio of 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technologies. The goal is to allow these partners to build new solutions in parallel with the development of TSMC's 3DFabric tech so that chip designers can get their hands on the tools, technologies, materials, and other resources necessary to make multi-die chip packages faster. TSMC's 3DFabric portfolio includes brand-new technology, like system-on-integrated-chips (SoIC), which underpins the 3D V-Cache tech in AMD's Milan-X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D processors that came out this year. The portfolio also includes older technologies: integrated-fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), which have received new iterations over the past several years. Those using CoWoS include Nvidia and Amazon Web Services. Representatives from AMD, Nvidia, and AWS gave support for the new alliance, which is one of several set up by TSMC as part of its Open Innovation Platform initiative. TSMC veep of R&D, LC Lu, said while advanced packaging technologies can "open the door to a new era of chip-level and system-level innovation," "extensive ecosystem collaboration" is required to "help designers navigate the best path through the myriad options and approaches available to them."

"Through the collective leadership of TSMC and our ecosystem partners, our 3DFabric Alliance offers customers an easy and flexible way to unlocking the power of 3D [integrated circuits] in their designs," he added.

China plans to break its own record for the world's largest wind farm by constructing a new one before 2025 that could power more than 13 million homes. Interesting Engineering reports: The 14th five-year plan for Chaozhou, China's Guangdong province, was released last week, outlining the city's ambitious plans for a 43.3 gigawatt (GW) project in the Taiwan Strait. Work on the project will begin "before 2025." It will surpass the largest wind farm in the world once it is finished, according to Guangdong province officials. The 10-kilometer-long farm, which will have thousands of strong wind turbines, will operate between 75 and 185 kilometers (47 and 115 miles) offshore. And because of the region's distinctive topographical features and windy location, these turbines will be able to run between 43 percent to 49 percent of the time, meaning 3,800 to 4,300 hours each year.

A gigawatt is one billion watts, and 3 million solar panels are required to produce one gigawatt of power. 100 million LEDs or 300,000 typical European homes may each be powered by one gigawatt. The facility's 43.3 GW of power-generating capacity could supply electricity to 13 million households, which is equal to 4.3 billion LED lights, as per Euronews. The Jiuquan Wind Power base in China, a huge facility with a 20 gigawatt capacity, presently holds the distinction of being the world's largest wind farm.

Nearly six years after the Pebble smartwatch was purchased by Fitbit and discontinued, a new Pebble app for Android has been released by the Rebble Alliance, a group that has kept Pebble viable for its users since Fitbit shut down Pebble's servers in mid-2018," writes Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "Pebble version 4.4.3 makes the app 64-bit so it can work on the mostly 64-bit Pixel 7 and similar Android phones into the future. It also restores a caller ID function that was hampered on recent Android versions." From the report: Most notably, the app is "signed using the official Pebble keys," with Google Fit integration maintained, but isn't available through Google's Play Store. Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, making it the steward of Pebble's remaining IP and software pieces. Katharine Berry, a key Rebble coder and leader, works on Wear OS at Google and was one of the first to tweet news of the new update, "four years after 4.4.2." That was the last Play Store update to the Pebble app from Pebble developers, one that freed up many of the app's functions to be replaced by independent servers.

That's exactly where Rebble picked up, providing web services to Pebble watches, including (for paying subscribers) voice dictation. But those services still relied on the core Pebble app to connect the watch and smartphone. If Android did make the leap to a 64-bit-only OS, it could have left Pebble/Rebble users in the lurch. Berry's post on r/pebble offers "thanks to Google for providing us with one last update!" This is, to be sure, not the typical outcome of products that have been acquired by Google, even if second-hand.

A Redditor says they've managed to get a hold of an old Netflix server for free, and has posted a detailed online look at the once mysterious hardware. The devices were part of Netflix's Open Connect Content Delivery Network (CDN), and can often be found embedded within major ISP networks to ensure your Netflix streams don't suck. From a report: Reddit user PoisonWaffle3 said the ISP he currently works for has been offloading old Netflix servers as they upgrade to more modern equipment. In a Reddit thread titled "So I got a Netflix cache server..." he posted a photo of the server, which is bright Netflix red, and explained how he was curious about what's inside the boxes given how little public information was available.

"All I could find online was overviews, installation/config guides for their proprietary software, etc.," he said. "No specs, no clue what was inside the red box." Dave Temkin, Netflix's former Vice President of Network Systems Infrastructure told Motherboard there's nothing too mysterious about what the servers can do, though they significantly help improve video streaming by shortening overall content transit time. "They're just an Intel FreeBSD box," he said. "We got Linux running on some of the generations of that box as well."

Netflix's Open Connect Content Delivery Network hardware caches popular Netflix content to reduce overall strain across broadband networks. Netflix lets major broadband ISPs embed a CDN server on the ISP network for free; the shorter transit time then helps improve video delivery, of benefit to broadband providers and Netflix alike. It took all of three screws for PoisonWaffle3 to get inside the mysterious red unit, at which point users discovered a "fairly standard" Supermicro board, a single Xeon E5 2650L v2 processor, 64GB of DDR3 memory, and a 10 gigabit ethernet card. They also found 36 7.2TB 7200RPM drives and six 500GB Micron solid state drives, for a grand total of 262 terabytes of storage.

From Tokyo to San Francisco, mobile game studios have sparred for years to captivate a fickle audience, fostering an overlooked problem -- the average title has become so huge that players can no longer fit more than a few on their phones. From a report: Japanese games publisher Gree expects an impending reckoning over escalating costs and ballooning file sizes, as developers pack their games with increasingly intricate graphics, voice acting and larger storylines, all to get players spending. That's creating a winner-takes-all situation that could winnow out smaller studios in coming years, Gree Senior Vice President Yuta Maeda said in an interview. The situation will only get worse as console veteran Sony -- no stranger to space-hogging hits -- prepares to invade the mobile arena. "Production of mobile games can't avoid becoming more complex, time-consuming and larger-scale, which will inevitably result in bigger app sizes," Maeda said. "Companies that survive in the market will only be the ones that can keep up with that trend."

The spending poured into today's A-list mobile titles -- MiHoYo's Genshin Impact, for instance, started with a $100 million budget -- rivals Hollywood blockbusters and is yielding better production values than ever, but also an outsized footprint. That game can occupy upwards of 20 gigabytes of storage, which is a huge chunk of what most people have available on their phones. With memory upgrades not keeping pace, the result is fewer games can vie for attention. Sony, one of the giants of console gaming, has laid out plans to bring its high-profile PlayStation franchises to mobile platforms. Rival Microsoft is also building an Xbox mobile gaming store. All of that piles pressure on the entrenched free-to-play business model followed by Gree and others. These publishers rely on monetizing in-game items and upgrades, regularly adding more content players can buy and play with. The most common workaround from game studios is to put only a basic installer in app stores, which then downloads further game assets once the player starts. Gree uses it with Heaven Burns Red, which is an initial 1GB and grows beyond 10GB for players who want the full experience.