I’ve been seeing a lot about Sodium-ion just in the past week.
While they seem to have a huge advantage in being able to charge and discharge at some fairly eye-watering rates, the miserable energy density would seem to limit them to stationary applications, at least for now.
Perfect for backup power, load shifting, and other power-grid-tied applications though.
I too have an oddly specific one of these, which is tartare sauce.
I actively dislike all three of mayonnaise, gherkins, and capers. Mix 'em together though? Brilliant.
Yes and no.
The original 2015 release (10240) has support from 2015 - 2025. The latest 2021 release (19044) 2021 - 2032.
The product as a whole has around 16.5 years of support from go to woah, but each individual release is supported for 10 - 11.
Free for personal use, so yes-ish. That’ll certainly be a deal-breaker for some.
Realistically, people who are using it for personal use would probably be upgrading to the next LTS shortly after it’s released (or in Ubuntu fashion, once the xxxx.yy.1 release is out). People who don’t qualify to be using it for free anyway are more likely to be the ones keeping the same version for >5 years.
To note: this appears to be a move from 5 years (standard, free) + 5 years (extended, paid) to 5+7. Users not paying Canonical aren’t getting anything different as to with prior LTS releases.
Standard free support for 24.04 is still 2024-04 through 2029-06.
There definitely are vendors ignoring common sense and putting socket SP5 on desktop boards.
No argument about the price, I think list on these is something like $13k USD.
Their top-of-the-range Epyc 9684X has 1152MB :)
See, and raise KDE Neon.
Ubuntu LTS base, but with up-to-date upstream KDE releases rather than the (typically) relatively ancient releases that Kubuntu has.
Really is the best of both worlds.
Specs look good for the price, and those machine work great with Linux (I’m using Ubuntu 22.04 on the slightly earlier 9310 right now).
The only slight downside of the 9315 is that the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. Make sure you back up your data regularly, because there might be no way to get anything off the machine if it breaks.
There’s also something of a lack of IO; just one USB-C on each side (which is nice, because you can plug the charger into either side). But I have no issues with Bluetooth headphones, and monitors with USB-C have always worked great for plugging larger numbers of peripherals in.
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It’s not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it’s definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they’ve done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it’s a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won’t be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
And even apparently from name brands.
My sister bought a low-end Samsung tablet (some years ago admittedly), and it NEVER received a software update in the 3 years she owned it. Not a major update, not a security patch, nothing.
I’d hope they’ve gotten better about that, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven’t forgotten.
Dark times, those were.
Except that they’ve ruined that too. You now need an account to view anything, so the reach of announcements is greatly diminished.
At this point leaving shouldn’t really be too difficult, since a large portion of your audience already has; because they’ve been shut out, or have quit voluntarily.
T’ain’t enough. Gotta block everything they do, everywhere on the internet.
As someone so eloquently put it: you might not have a facebook profile, but facebook has a you profile.
If you’ve ever seen a “share on facebook” button on another website, they’ve been watching you.
Plays out in small tech companies too, albeit in a slightly different way.
Got that carrot dangled in front of me at a past job. Company was past start-up phase; self-supporting and doing ok, but not outrageously well. Promises of riches should the company be “noticed” and bought for an outrageous amount.
Of course none of that accounted for the CEO (founder and 85% shareholder) being an absolute crazy person, who would change the development roadmap into making a vastly different product than the one we (the techies) believed in, TURN DOWN THE OUTRAGEOUS SUM BECAUSE HE THOUGHT HE COULD GET A BETTER OFFER, basically run the company into the ground, and wind up selling it for a pittance (which would have made the employees’ share a pittance of a pittance).
I mean most of us had already left by that point, but finding out around 4 years after that he’d turned down about $150M and wound up selling out for $3M, that stung a little.
Heh, came here to post that and you beat me to it by 40 minutes.
Other user’s comment up thread about “churning vomit water”… accurate.
As of USB-PD 3.1 there are now nine fixed voltages - 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 28, 36, and 48V - and two variable-voltage modes; PPS with 3.3 - 21V in 0.02V increments, and AVS with 15 - 48V in 0.1V increments.
Combined with a few different current limits, some of these features being optional, and then doubling down with what your cable does or doesn’t support, amazing anything gets charged at all.
Sony pioneered that one, I reckon over the lifespan of a phone - especially since people tend to keep phones longer these days - it does make a difference. I’m glad other manufacturers have done the same (I believe Apple has something similar, and maybe one other Android OEM).
My Xperia 1ii (mid 2020) still reports around 83% of its original battery capacity, and it’s been plugged in overnight more or less every day of its life.
Unfortunately what’s shipping today seems it would offer maybe half that.
For the batteries that were announced this past week, a larger-than-refrigerator-sized cabinet held a capacity of around 15kWh.
Around half the energy density by mass of Lithium batteries, and in the order of a sixth of the density by volume.
Now if only we could come up with a system where your car could be charged while stopped at traffic lights, we might be onto a winner (:
Considering however that the price of sodium is around 1-2% that of lithium, I expect we will see significant R&D and those numbers quickly start to improve.