German Navy To Replace Aging 8-Inch Floppy Drives With an Emulated Solution

Mark Tyson reports via Tom’s Hardware: The German Navy is searching for a new storage system to replace the aging 8-inch (20cm) floppy disks which are vital to the running of its Brandenburg class F123 frigates. According to an official tender document, the ideal answer to the German Navy’s problems would be a drop-in floppy disk replacement based upon a storage emulation system, reports Golem.de. Germany’s Brandenburg class F123 frigates were commissioned in the mid 1990s, so it is understandable that floppy disks were seen as a handy removable storage medium. These drives are part of the frigates’ data acquisition system and, thus “central to controlling basic ship functions such as propulsion and power generation,” according to the source report.

The F123s are specialized in submarine hunting, and they are also being upgraded in terms of the weapon systems and weapon control systems. Swedish company Saab is the general contractor for the F123 modernizations. It won’t be trivial to replace three decades old computer hardware seamlessly, while retaining the full functionality of the existing floppies. However, we note that other companies have wrestled similar problems in recent years. Moreover, there are plenty of emulator enthusiasts using technologies for floppy emulation solutions like Gotek drives which can emulate a variety of floppy drive standards and formats. There are other workable solutions already out there, but it all depends on who the German Navy chooses to deliver the project.

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Palestinians Say Microsoft Unfairly Closing Their Accounts

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams writes: Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning — cutting them off from crucial online services. They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers — and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. Microsoft says they violated its terms of service — a claim they dispute. He also said being cut off from Skype was a huge blow for his family. The internet is frequently disrupted or switched off there because of the Israeli military campaign – and standard international calls are very expensive. […] With a paid Skype subscription, it is possible to call mobiles in Gaza cheaply — and while the internet is down — so it has become a lifeline to many Palestinians.

Some of the people the BBC spoke to said they suspected they were wrongly thought to have ties to Hamas, which Israel is fighting, and is designated a terrorist organization by many countries. Microsoft did not respond directly when asked if suspected ties to Hamas were the reason for the accounts being shut. But a spokesperson said it did not block calls or ban users based on calling region or destination. “Blocking in Skype can occur in response to suspected fraudulent activity,” they said, without elaborating.

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Arm Announces an Open-Source Graphics Upscaler For Mobile Phones

Arm is launching its Arm Accuracy Super Resolution (ASR) upscaler that “can make games look better, while lowering power consumption on your phone,” according to The Verge. “It’s also making the upscaling technology available to developers under an MIT open-source license.” From the reprot: Arm based its technology on AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), which uses temporal upscaling to make PC games look better and boost frame rates. Unlike spatial upscaling, which upscales an image based on a single frame, temporal upscaling involves using multiple frames to generate a higher-quality image.

You can see just how Arm ASR stacks up to AMD’s FSR 2 and Qualcomm’s GSR tech in [this chart] created by Arm. Arm claims ASR produced 53 percent higher frame rates than rendering at native resolution on a device with an Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and 2800 x 1260 display, beating AMD FSR 2. It also tested ASR on a device using MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 chip and found that rendering at 540p and upscaling with ASR used much less power than running a game at native 1080p resolution.

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Amazon Says It Now Runs On 100% Clean Power. Employees Say It’s More Like 22%

Today, Amazon announced that it reached its 100% renewable energy goal seven years ahead of schedule. However, as Fast Company’s Adele Peters reports, “a group of Amazon employees argues that the company’s math is misleading.” From the report: A report (PDF) from the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, argues that only 22% of the company’s data centers in the U.S. actually run on clean power. The employees looked at where each data center was located and the mix of power on the regional grids — how much was coming from coal, gas, or oil versus solar or wind. Amazon, like many other companies, buys renewable energy credits (RECs) for a certain amount of clean power that’s produced by a solar plant or wind farm. In theory, RECs are supposed to push new renewable energy to get built. In reality, that doesn’t always happen. The employee research found that 68% of Amazon’s RECs are unbundled, meaning that they didn’t fund new renewable infrastructure, but gave credit for renewables that already existed or were already going to be built.

As new data centers are built, they can mean that fossil-fuel-dependent grids end up building new fossil fuel power plants. “Dominion Energy, which is the utility in Virginia, is expanding because of demand, and Amazon is obviously one of their largest customers,” says Eliza Pan, a representative from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and a former Amazon employee. “Dominion’s expansion is not renewable expansion. It’s more fossil fuels.” Amazon also doesn’t buy credits that are specifically tied to the grids powering their data centers. The company might purchase RECs from Canada or Arizona, for example, to offset electricity used in Virginia. The credits also aren’t tied to the time that the energy was used; data centers run all day and night, but most renewable energy is only available some of the time. The employee group argues that the company should follow the approach that Google takes. Google aims to use carbon-free energy, 24/7, on every grid where it operates.

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Inside the Health Crisis of a Texas Bitcoin Town

Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from TIME Magazine: On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.” Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.” It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit. None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area — and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor — ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo — says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis. “I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there,” Bhaloo says. “This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it.” “By the end of 2024, we intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling, with no expansion required,” said a representative for Marathon Digital Holdings, the company that owns the mine. “Initial sound readings on immersion containers indicate favorable results in sound reduction and compliance with all relevant state noise ordinances.” They did not answer questions about the health impacts their mining site was causing.

“We’re living in a nightmare,” said Rosenkranz. She clocked the hum at 72 decibels in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. “Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away,” notes TIME. She had to be pulled from her school after she developed so many ear infections from the sound.

The report also said a resident’s dog “started going bald and developed debilitating anxiety shortly after the Bitcoin mine began operating four blocks away.” TIME added: “Directly next door, Tom Weeks’ dog Jack Rabbit Slim started shaking and hyperventilating uncontrollably for hours on end; a vet placed him on the seizure medication Gabapentin. Rosenkranz’s chickens stopped laying eggs for months. And Jerry and Patricia Campbell’s centuries-old oak tree, which had served as the family’s hub and protector for generations of backyard family reunions and even a wedding, died suddenly three months ago.”

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