fidzu : geek

The UK's science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, "including building one of the world's first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030." Despite the potentially transformative impact of fusion, which in theory could provide limitless clean energy and create a £12 trillion global market, no country has managed to use this fledgling technology to generate useable electricity... [T]he UK is backing a spherical tokamak design... investing an initial £1.3 billion into a prototype fusion power plant called Step (Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production) on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire. Paul Methven, chief executive of the government-owned UK Industrial Fusion Solutions, which is delivering the Step project, said the aim is to get the reactor operating early in the 2040s. "It's quite an aggressive programme," he said. "We need to show that we can achieve genuine 'wall socket' energy - which has not been done before." On Monday, [science minister] Vallance will also announce £180 million for a facility in Culham, Oxfordshire, to manufacture tritium fuel and £50 million for training 2,000 scientists and engineers in fusion-related disciplines. The government is also buying a £45 million fusion-dedicated AI supercomputer called Sunrise to model plasma physics. Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority last year developed an AI model that can rapidly simulate how the ultra-hot fuel in a fusion power plant will behave, cutting calculations that previously took days down to seconds... Vallance will also announce new support and collaboration for the many fusion, robotics, engineering and AI start-ups working in Britain, to develop a strong supply chain for a new fusion sector. One of those companies, Tokamak Energy, which spun out from the UK Atomic Energy Authority in 2009, has already built a smaller reactor that has informed the Step design. In March 2022, it became the first private organisation in the world to surpass 100 million degrees Celsius in its reactor.

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16 Mar 2026 1:34am GMT

Europe's EV sales for January and February spiked 21% from last year, according to new data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Electrek reports that just in those two months over 600,000 EVs were sold in Europe. And figures for "rest of world" (which excludes Europe, North America, and China) are up a whopping 84% - with 370,000 EVs sold in January and February. (EVs now represent more than 30% of the vehicles sold in South Korea.) But for the same period China's sales are down 26% from last year, with 1.1 million vehicles sold. And North America showed an even larger drop of 36% from the January/February figures in 2025, now selling just 170,000 electric vehicles, while Canada's EV sales were down 23%. EV sales seem heavily influenced by government incentives, with Germany and France leading Europe's growth: EV sales in Germany are up 26% so far this year, following the country's introduction of a new subsidy program at the start of 2026. France's market is up 30%, supported by its existing incentive program. Italy is also seeing rapid growth. EV sales there jumped 23% month-over-month in February, making it the country's strongest month ever for EV sales. The Italian market is now up 98% year to date. That surge follows the Italian government's October 2025 launch of a new subsidy program, funded by the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, to increase EV adoption. Households can receive up to €11,000 ($12,700) in incentives, while smaller businesses can get up to €20,000 ($23,200)... [T]he global EV transition isn't slowing, but it's becoming much more uneven depending on policy, incentives, and trade rules.

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15 Mar 2026 10:51pm GMT

Slashdot reader SysEngineer does embedded/IoT work, but "I want to pick a single system-on-a-chip architecture family and commit to it across multiple product lines - sensor nodes up through edge gateways... I've been on one platform for years and want to know what embedded engineers are actually running in production before I commit!" And "the family needs to scale - cheap and small at the low end, capable of running Linux on the bigger variants!" Their requirements? WiFi + BLE required LoRaWAN a nice-to-have. Low power modes that actually work in the field, not just on the datasheet. Full peripheral set - SPI, I2C, UART, ADC, timers, CAN. A toolchain and runtime support, support multi threads... Slashdot reader Gravis Zero is skeptical all the requirements can be met. "If you want embedded, you get embedded. If you want to run a big OS, you get one that will run a big OS." But Slashdot reader SysEngineer believes "The obvious architecture candidates are ARM, STM, and RISC-V" - and specifically they want to hear your experiences with the RISC-V choices. "What would you standardize on today if you were starting fresh? And how does real-world toolchain and community support hold up compared to the marketing?" Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What's the best all-purpose RISC-V system on a chip family?

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15 Mar 2026 9:51pm GMT

Technology like four-wheel steering and variable valve timing debuted in the Prelude.

15 Mar 2026 11:15am GMT

What if you have a very modern machine that is entirely UEFI-only, meaning it has no compatibility support module and thus no way of enabling a legacy BIOS mode? Well, install a CSM as an EFI application, of course! CSMWrap is an EFI application designed to be a drop-in solution to enable legacy BIOS booting on modern UEFI-only (class 3) systems. It achieves this by wrapping a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) build of the SeaBIOS project as an out-of-firmware EFI application, effectively creating a compatibility layer for traditional PC BIOS operation. ↫ CSMWrap's GitHub page The need for this may not be immediately obvious, but here's the problem: if you want to run an older operating system that absolutely requires a traditional BIOS on a modern machine that only has UEFI without any CSM options (a class 3-machine), you won't be able to boot said operating system. CSMWrap is a possible solution, as it leverages innate EFI capabilities to run a CSM as an EFI application, thereby adding the CSM functionality back in. All you need to do is drop CSMWrap into /efi/boot on the same drive the operating system that needs BIOS to boot is on, and UEFI will list it as a bootable operating system. It does come with some limitations, however. For instance, one logical core of your processor will be taken up by CSMWrap and will be entirely unavailable to the booted BIOS-based operating system. In other words, this means you're going to need a processor with at least more than one logical processor (e.g., even a single-core machine with hyperthreading will work). It's also suggested to add a legacy-capable video card if you're using an operating system that doesn't support VESA BIOS extensions (e.g. anything older than NT). This is an incredibly neat idea, and even comes with advantages over built-in CSMs, since many of those are untested and riddled with issues. CSMWrap uses SeaBIOS, which is properly tested and generally a much better BIOS than whatever native CSMs contain. All in all, a great project.

14 Mar 2026 9:06pm GMT

Staff complain that the constant upheaval is destroying morale.

14 Mar 2026 7:14am GMT

"This ought to make for some good reading," NASA's mission management team chair said.

14 Mar 2026 12:17am GMT

SMF is the illumos system for managing traditional Unix services (long-lived background processes, usually). It's quite rich in order to correctly accommodate a lot of different use cases. But it sometimes exposes that complexity to users even when they're trying to do something simple. In this post, I'll walk through an example using a demo service and the svcprop(1) tool to show the details. ↫ Dave Pacheco Soalris' system management facility or SMF is effectively Solaris' systemd, and this article provides a deeper insight into one of its features: properties. While using SMF and its suite of tools and commands for basic tasks is rather elementary and easy to get into - even I can do it - once you start to dive deeper into what is can do, things get complex and capable very fast.

13 Mar 2026 11:49pm GMT

Google has announced that it will release Chrome for Linux on ARM64 in the second quarter of this year. Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google's most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features. This release represents a significant undertaking to ensure that ARM64 Linux users receive the same secure, stable, and rich Chrome experience found on other platforms. ↫ The Chromium Blog While the idea of running Linux on Arm, only to defile it with something as unpleasant as Chrome seem entirely foreign to me, most normal people do actually use Google's browser. Having it available on Linux for Arm makes perfect sense, and might convince a few people to buy an Arm machine for Linux, assuming the platform can get its act together.

13 Mar 2026 11:37pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT