fidzu : computers

"Huawei believes its new Luterra S2 is more than just a home backup battery," reports Electrek: This high-tech Huawei home battery pack hopes to hold back Tesla's latest Powerwall with silicon carbide technology, AI-powered energy management baked in, and enough modular storage to keep even large homes bright and warm when the rest of the block goes dark... The Chinese tech firm is calling it an "all-in-one residential energy system" that combines a hybrid inverter, modular battery storage, and AI-powered energy management in a single, simple, and stackable package that's available in single-phase versions that put out between 3 and 10 kW and three-phase versions that can push up to 20 kW. The Luterra S2 is the first system of its kind to use Huawei's proprietary full-silicon carbide (SiC) architecture, which promises improved efficiency, power density, and ease of use. It's so easy, in fact, that Huawei claims it can be installed and commissioned in just minutes. Huawei's basic Luterra S2 configuration starts with "just" 5 kWh of battery energy storage and 3 kW of output. That's enough to keep essential household appliances, lighting, and electronics running during a power outage, but you'll want to keep going if you're preparing for more than a day or two without power. If that sounds like you, Luterra's got you covered. The modular system can be expanded with modular 7 kWh LFP battery packs and can keep scaling up to a massive 336 kWh of total storage across interconnected systems, with inverter output peaking at an impressive 60 kW using three 20 kW units in parallel. Keeping all that power cool and quiet is a Huawei-developed passive cooling system that does without external fans, keeping operating noise levels below a claimed 29 dB (about the same as my Mac mini).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Nov 2026 5:34pm GMT

Environmental activist Bill Gates has "quietly accumulated a $29 billion stake in America's No. 2 landfill operator, Republic Services," reports ProPublica, in a new 5,000-word investigation. But inspectors from America's Environmental Protection Agency "have repeatedly found methane - a highly potent greenhouse gas - escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. Republic has lobbied against regulations that could make the waste industry cleaner, including by keeping organic garbage out of landfills in the first place." While Gates has invested at least $2 billion in green companies, he's "put more than double that amount into a very dirty, old-school industry," their article argues. And Gates has increased his stake in Republic "to 38% of the company, a position worth $29 billion." While fossil fuels get most of the attention, scientists increasingly see landfills as a crucial climate issue. They're responsible for as much as a fifth of the country's emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, studies show. Republic alone generates as much climate pollution as 3 million gasoline-burning cars each year, according to its own reports.... [Gates] has failed to make Republic live up to his own climate principles, a ProPublica investigation has found. Federal inspectors have repeatedly found methane escaping from Republic landfills at levels above federal limits. The company has refrained from adopting the ambitious emissions-reduction goal embraced by its main competitor... "It seems very likely that Bill Gates has the power to influence Republic's behavior to make it more climate-friendly, even if that costs the company profits," said Ann Lipton, a legal scholar who studies corporate governance at the University of Colorado, Boulder... Gates didn't respond to repeated requests to discuss his landfill investments, and ProPublica couldn't find any public comments he's made about them. But the bet has proven wildly lucrative. Since November 1999, when he emerged as the owner of 5% of Republic's shares - "It's 'Garbage In' for Gates," the New York Post headline read - the company's stock price has soared thirtyfold. And Gates has personally received $2.6 billion in dividends, a ProPublica analysis of securities filings shows... A rare clue to why Gates made his foray into landfills can be found in an interview he gave to Fortune [in 1999]... To fund his plan to give away virtually his entire fortune, he said he'd given his personal money manager, Michael Larson, a simple remit: Sell Microsoft shares, buy safe, boring assets... After that initial investment, Larson progressively increased Gates' stake in Republic over the years that followed. [On behalf of the Gates Foundation] Larson would also acquire a small chunk of Republic's main competitor, Waste Management. Methane emissions weren't a major focus of climate activism until years later The gas can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in the near term, and it's responsible for one-third of the global warming we experience today, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. But it also breaks down much more quickly, turning into CO2 and water vapor in about a decade - which means that cutting methane emissions now would reduce that warming within our lifetimes. This is especially urgent, scientists say, as the climate approaches tipping points that could doom rainforests, coral reefs and ice sheets.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Nov 2026 4:34pm GMT

"In November's edition of the TIOBE Index, Rust has dropped out of Top 10," writes I-Programmer, noting that Rust ceded the #10 position to Go. "At the same time, another Google-originated language, Dart, has entered the top 20 ousting Julia after only one month." TIOBE explains Dart's popularity is mainly being driven by Flutter, Google's framework for building cross-platform mobile applications. In fact, Flutter has become one of the major technologies for cross-platform mobile app development. The Dart language itself is not particularly unique, although it incorporates many modern programming language features. Its success is largely driven by the strength of the Flutter ecosystem and the convenience of developing applications for multiple platforms using a single codebase... [In November's ranking] Visual Basic has also lost two places, making room for R and SQL in the Top 10. Further down the ranking, Assembly has re-entered the Top 20. So TIOBE ranks the top 10 languages in November as Python, C, Java, C++, C#, JavaScript, R, SQL, Visual Basic, and Go. But I-Programmer points out that "At the top of the table, Java is back in the top 3, after over three years in 4th position," pushing C++ down to #4. Are some changes more significant than others? If you think of the ratings as shares of a pie divided into 100 pieces, there is one huge slice - Python, accounting for a over a fifth of the pie, then comes C with a slice slightly less than half of Python's. Java and C++ then have smaller slices... and C#'s share is around half of their average size. Over half the pie has now been shared between just five languages... - Next 5 (#6-10): 10.17% (JavaScript, R, SQL, Visual Basic, Go) - Next 10 (#11-20): 11.12% (Rust, PHP, Fortran, Scratch, Perl, MATLAB, Assembly, Swift, Delphi, Dart) - Next 30 (#21-50): 12.81% - Final 50 (#51-100): 12.93% [So in this month's chart...] Java has overtaken C++, but as you can see from this month's Top 10 chart they are in lock step and the difference between them is insignificant. More obvious is that Python is way ahead of all the competition and that C has an edge over Java and C++. For more discussion of this see TIOBE - Two To Rule Them All in which Mike James argued that this: confirms the standard model of programming - code is written in Python and C and everything else is just noise. Back in July we reported Rust Enters TIOBE Top 10. After four months in #10 Rust is now back at #11, which is still three places above its position, 14, a year ago. Given the way these rankings operate it only takes a very small month-on-month change for a language to lose its position and even, as has happened here it can gain in terms of its percentage ranking while still moving down. So Rust with 1.63% in November is now in #11 when it had been in #10 with 1.44%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Nov 2026 3:34pm GMT

MenuetOS, the operating system written in x86-64 assembly, has seen a few new releases since we last looked at it, delivering some welcome improvements. Secure network connections are now faster, there's a TrueType font demo, and, of course, the usual bugfixes and smaller improvements. The game Wizord EXL100 has been ported, and a few drivers have been improved as well. You can get the latest releases from the downloads page.

13 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

The ReactOS project organised two hackfests this year, and the work done during those in-person sessions, combined with the ongoing regular progress, has led to some pretty significant breakthroughs and progress. More NT6+ syscalls have been added, ReactOS supports floppy disks now, NTFS support has been vastly improved, and much more. There's also a new USB3/4 stack, which is now merged and offers basic support for these versions of USB. One of the biggest additions is a new kernel shim engine which gives ReactOS the ability to work around buggy drivers and implement quirks, moreso than even Windows itself can. For instance, thanks to this new shim, XP-era NVIDIA drivers can run on NT6 ReactOS. The ongoing efforts to implement SMP are yielding results too: ReactOS can now run with SMP for days on end while doing tasks in the background, which is quite promising. The team is showing off Steam and the game Among Us running on ReactOS, which is definitely impressive.

13 Nov 2026 12:38am GMT

MATE is probably the last X11-only holdout among the major desktop environments, but that's about to change if Kerem Söke has anything to say about it. Polo is a port of Marco's behavior and window management policies to Wayland, built on libweston and written in Vala and C. It's a window manager, compositor, and session authority for the MATE Wayland desktop. It takes over, step by step, what Marco, mate-session-manager and the compositor-facing parts of mate-settings-daemon do on X11. ↫ Polo's GitHub page Söke is looking for testers with this very first Polo 1.0.0 release - cute name, too - which is available on its GitHub page.

13 Nov 2026 12:16am GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT