AI services may not stay cheap for long, as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are currently subsidizing usage to rapidly grow market share. As these companies move toward profitability and potential IPOs, Axios reports that investors will likely push them to increase prices and improve margins. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Flashback: Silicon Valley has seen this movie before. The so-called "millennial lifestyle subsidy" meant VC money helped underwrite cheap Uber rides and DoorDash deliveries. Before that, Amazon built its base with low prices, free shipping and, for years, no sales tax in most states. Eventually, all of these companies had to charge enough to cover costs -- and make a profit.

Follow the money: The current iteration of AI subsidies won't last forever. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are widely expected to go public. Public investors will demand earnings growth and expanding margins. Even as chips get more efficient, total spending keeps rising. Labs need more capacity, more upgrades and more supply to meet demand.

The bottom line: The costs of AI will keep going down. But total spend from customers will need to keep going up if AI companies are going to become profitable and investors are ever going to get returns on their massive investments.

Samsung says it's thinking about bringing "vibe coding" to future Galaxy phones, allowing users to describe apps or interface changes in plain language and have AI generate the code. TechRadar interviewed Won-Joon Choi, Samsung's head of mobile experience, to learn more about the plans. Here's an excerpt from their report: As noted by Won-Joon Choi, the usefulness of vibe coding on smartphones is that it opens up the "possibility of customizing your smartphone experience in new ways, not just your apps but your UX." He added, "Right now we're limited to premade tools, but with vibe coding, users could adjust their favorite apps or make something customized to their needs. So vibe coding is very interesting, and something we're looking into." [...]

Samsung recently debuted the Galaxy S26 series of phones and made a point to not call them smartphones -- they're "AI phones" now. This certainly rang true with the majority of upgrades to the devices being AI software-focused, like the new Now Nudge and expanded Audio Eraser tools, with the biggest hardware bump for the base models coming via the 39% improved NPU processing (the processor in charge of on-device AI tasks). It also teased the debut of Perplexity on its phones, joining as an alternative to the Gemini assistant, and teased the possibility of other AI models getting the same treatment in the future.

How many Node.js users are running unsupported or outdated versions. Roughly two thirds, according to data from Node's nonprofit steward, OpenJS.

So they've announced "the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program" to help enterprises move safely off legacy/end-of-life Node.js. "This program gives enterprises a clear, trusted path to modernize," said the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation, "while staying aligned with the Node.js project and community." The Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program connects organizations with experienced Node.js service providers who handle the work of upgrading safely.

Approved partners assess current versions and dependencies, manage phased upgrades to supported LTS releases, and offer temporary security support when immediate upgrades are not possible... Partners are surfaced exactly where users go when upgrades become unavoidable, including the Node.js website, documentation, and end of life guidance.

The program follows the existing OpenJS Ecosystem Sustainability Program revenue model, with partners retaining 85% of revenue and 15% supporting OpenJS and Node.js through Open Collective and foundation operations. OpenJS provides the guardrails, alignment, and oversight to keep the program credible and connected to the project. We're pleased to welcome NodeSource as the inaugural partner in the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program.
"The goal is simple: reduce risk without breaking production or trust with the upstream project."

Apple has removed the 512GB RAM configuration for the Mac Studio, leaving 256GB as the new maximum. The remaining 256GB upgrade has also increased in price and now faces longer shipping delays as demand grows "due to consumers seeking machines suitable for running local AI agents," reports MacRumors. From the report: The Mac Studio starts with 36GB RAM, but there were upgrades ranging from 48GB to 512GB, with the higher tier upgrades limited to the M3 Ultra chip. Now there are options ranging from 48GB to 256GB, with wait times into May for the 256GB upgrade. Apple has also raised the price for the 256GB RAM upgrade option. It used to cost $1,600 to go from 96GB to 256GB on the high-end M3 Ultra machine, but now it costs $2,000. 512GB was $4,000 when it was available.

Major tech companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta pledged at the White House to pay for new power generation and grid upgrades needed to support their rapidly expanding datacenters. The Guardian reports: The agreement is meant to help mitigate concerns that big tech's datacenters are driving up US electricity costs for homes and small businesses at a time the administration of Donald Trump is seeking to curb inflation. "This means that the tech companies and the datacenters will be able to get the electricity they need, all without driving up electricity costs for consumers," the president said at the pledge signing event. "This is a historic win for countless American families and we'll also make our electricity grid stronger and more resilient than ever before."

The so-called "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" was first announced by Trump in his State of the Union address, and comes as communities and state legislators increase scrutiny of rapidly proliferating datacenters. Datacenters consume vast amounts of electricity to run server racks and cooling systems for the development of technologies such as artificial intelligence. "Some datacenters were rejected by communities for that, and now I think it's going to be just the opposite," Trump said, referencing cancelled or postponed projects in recent months across several states after local opposition.

The pledge includes a commitment by technology companies to bring or buy electricity supplies for their datacenters, either from new power plants or existing plants with expanded output capacity. It also includes commitments from big tech to pay for upgrades to power delivery systems and to enter special electricity rate agreements with utilities. The effort is aimed at drawing support from towns and cities that otherwise oppose the projects, said the Trump official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Intel has formally unveiled its Xeon 6+ "Clearwater Forest" data-center processor with up to 288 cores, built on the company's new Intel 18A process and using Foveros Direct packaging. The chip targets telecom, cloud, and edge-AI workloads with massive parallelism, large caches, and high-bandwidth DDR5-8000 memory. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's Xeon 6+ processors with up to 288 cores combine 12 compute chiplets containing 24 energy-efficient Darkmont cores per tile that are produced using 18A manufacturing technology, two I/O tiles made on Intel 7 production node, as well as three active base tiles made on Intel 3 fabrication process. The compute tiles are stacked on top of the base dies using Intel's Foveros Direct 3D technology, whereas lateral connections are enabled by Intel's EMIB bridges.

Intel's 'Darkmont' efficiency cores have received rather meaningful microarchitectural upgrades. Each core integrates a 64 KB L1 instruction cache, a broader fetch and decode pipeline, and a deeper out-of-order engine capable of tracking more in-flight operations. The number of execution ports has also been increased in a bid to improve both scalar and vector throughput under heavily threaded server workloads.

From a cache hierarchy standpoint, the design groups cores into four-core blocks that share approximately 4 MB of L2 cache per block. As a result, the aggregate last-level cache across the full package surpasses 1 GB, roughly 1,152 MB in total. This unusually large pool is intended to keep data close to hundreds of active cores and reduce dependence on external memory bandwidth, which in turn is meant to both increase performance and lower power consumption. Platform-wise, the processor remains drop-in compatible with the current Xeon server socket, so the CPU has 12 memory channels that support DDR5-8000, 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes with 64 lanes supporting CXL 2.0.

AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid.

In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right."

HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine's retail price.

The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080. At current sale prices, subscribers would exceed the cost of buying the laptop outright within 16 to 19 months; at MSRP, that window stretches to roughly 25 months. In exchange for giving up ownership, subscribers get yearly hardware upgrades, next-day replacements, 24/7 support, and an ongoing warranty. There is a 30-day trial period, but cancelling in the second month triggers steep early termination fees -- $550 for the Victus 15 and $1,430 for the Omen Max 16. Cancellation becomes free only after the 13th month. HP also offers accessories like the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless headset as add-on rentals for $8 a month.

The price of water and sewer services for American households has more than doubled since the early 1980s after adjusting for inflation, even though per-capita water use has actually decreased over that period. Households in large cities now spend about $1,300 a year on water and sewer charges, approaching the roughly $1,600 they spend on electricity. The main driver is federal regulation.

Since the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, the U.S. has spent approximately $5 trillion in contemporary dollars fighting water pollution -- about 0.8% of annual GDP across that period. The EPA itself admits that surface water regulations are the one category of environmental rules where estimated costs exceed estimated benefits.

New York City was required to build a filtration plant to address two minor parasites in water from its Croton aqueduct. The project took a decade longer than expected and cost $3.2 billion, more than double the original estimate. After the plant opened in 2015, the city's Commissioner of Environmental Protection noted that the water would basically be "the same" to the public. Jefferson County, Alabama, meanwhile, descended into what was then the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2011 after EPA-mandated sewer upgrades pushed its debt from $300 million to over $3 billion.

Seven out of ten C-suite executives believe traditional enterprise resource planning software has seen its best days, though the category remains firmly entrenched in corporate IT and opinion is sharply divided on what comes next. A survey of 4,295 CFOs, CISOs, CIOs and CEOs worldwide found 36% expect ERP to give way to composable, API-driven best-of-breed systems, while 33% see the future in "agentic ERP" featuring autonomous AI-driven decision-making.

The research was commissioned by Rimini Street, a third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP. Despite the pessimism, 97% said their current systems met business requirements. Vendor lock-in remains a sore point: 35% cited limited flexibility and forced upgrades as frustrations. Kingfisher, operator of 2,000 European retail stores including Screwfix and B&Q, recently eschewed an SAP upgrade in favor of using third-party support to shift its existing application to the cloud. Gartner analyst Dixie John cautioned that while third-party support may work in the short or medium term, organizations will eventually need to upgrade.

BrianFagioli writes: Wine 11.0 has officially landed, wrapping up a year of development with more than 6,000 code changes and a broad set of upgrades that touch gaming, desktop behavior, and long-standing architectural work. The biggest milestone is the completion of the new WoW64 model, which is now considered fully supported and allows 32-bit and even 16-bit applications to run in a cleaner way inside 64-bit prefixes. Wine also gains support for the NTSYNC kernel module now bundled in Linux 6.14, which cuts overhead from thread synchronization and should deliver observable performance benefits in games and multi-threaded applications. A single unified wine binary now replaces the old wine64 launcher, and several system behaviors align more closely with modern Windows, including syscall numbering and NT reparse points.

Graphics and desktop integration received more polish, including deeper Vulkan support (up to API 1.4.335), hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding through Direct3D, and further improvements to Wine's Wayland driver, which now supports clipboard operations, IMEs, and shaped windows. X11 users gain better window activation and fullscreen handling, and legacy DirectX features continue to expand under Wine's Vulkan renderer. Device support also moves forward, with better joystick handling, improved Bluetooth visibility and pairing, and working TWAIN scanning on 64-bit apps. Broad multimedia updates, DirectMusic refinements, .NET/XNA improvements, and developer-facing tools round out a release that appears focused on smoothing sharp edges rather than introducing flashy experiments. As always, source is live now and distro packages are rolling out.

Meta has signed long-term nuclear power deals totaling more than 6 gigawatts to fuel its data centers: "one from a startup, one from a smaller energy company, and one from a larger company that already operates several nuclear reactors in the U.S," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oklo and TerraPower, two companies developing small modular reactors (SMR), each signed agreements with Meta to build multiple reactors, while Vistra is selling capacity from its existing power plants. [...] The deals are the result of a request for proposals that Meta issued in December 2024, in which Meta sought partners that could add between 1 to 4 gigawatts of generating capacity by the early 2030s. Much of the new power will flow through the PJM interconnection, a grid which covers 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states and has become saturated with data centers.

The 20-year agreement with Vistra will have the most immediate impact on Meta's energy needs. The tech company will buy a total of 2.1 gigawatts from two existing nuclear power plants, Perry and Davis-Besse in Ohio. As part of the deal, Vistra will also add capacity to those power plants and to its Beaver Valley power plant in Pennsylvania. Together, the upgrades will generate an additional 433 MW and are scheduled to come online in the early 2030s.

Meta is also buying 1.2 gigawatts from young provider Oklo. Under its deal with Meta, Oklo is hoping to start supplying power to the grid as early as 2030. The SMR company went public via SPAC in 2023, and while Oklo has landed a large deal with data center operator Switch, it has struggled to get its reactor design approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If Oklo can deliver on its timeline, the new reactors would be built in Pike County, Ohio. The startup's Aurora Powerhouse reactors each produce 75 megawatts of electricity, and it will need to build more than a dozen to fulfill Meta's order. TerraPower is a startup co-founded by Bill Gates, and it is aiming to start sending electricity to Meta as early as 2032.

Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it "the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux." I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract)...

Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean.

Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it.
As the clocks chimed midnight on New Year's Eve, he advised everyone to "spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists."

JPMorgan Chase is now fighting to avoid paying $10.2 million in disputed legal charges racked up by Charlie Javice, the convicted founder of student-finance startup Frank, after court filings revealed her defense team billed more than $5 million simply for attending her fraud trial -- including on days when court wasn't even in session.

A previously sealed Delaware court filing [PDF] released Monday showed that Javice's total legal tab has reached $74 million, far exceeding the $30 million Elizabeth Holmes spent defending herself in the Theranos case. JPMorgan claims the five law firms representing Javice operated under the mindset that "someone else is paying her bills." The bank's filing focused on Quinn Emanuel and Mintz Levin, the two largest firms on Javice's defense. JPMorgan said Javice had between 16 and 29 lawyers and legal staff present every day of her six-week trial, billing an average of $360,000 daily. No more than four lawyers had speaking roles.

Among the 2,377 pages of receipts submitted for March: a Cookie Monster toddler's toy, lavender and jasmine sachets, 57 hotel room upgrades at $300 per night, and a $900 meal at Koloman, a highly rated New York restaurant. A New York jury found Javice guilty in March of misleading JPMorgan into acquiring Frank for $175 million by fabricating millions of fake users. She was sentenced in September to seven years in prison but remains free on bail pending her appeal.

Amid a global DDR5 shortage and soaring prices, Russian hardware enthusiasts are experimenting with do-it-yourself DDR5 RAM by sourcing empty PCBs and soldering memory chips by hand. Tom's Hardware reports: The idea comes from Russian YouTuber PRO Hi-Tech's Telegram channel, where a local enthusiast known as "Vik-on" already performs VRAM upgrades for GPUs, so this is a relatively safe operation for him. According to Vik-on, empty RAM PCBs can be sourced from China for as little as $6.40 per DIMM. The memory chips themselves, though, that's a different challenge.

The so-called spot market for memory doesn't really exist at the moment, since no manufacturer has the production capacity to make more RAM, and even if they did, they'd sell to better-paying AI clients instead. Still, you can find SK Hynix and Samsung chips across Chinese marketplaces if you search for the correct part number, as shown in the attached screenshots.

Moreover, the Telegram thread says it would cost roughly 12,000 Russian Rubles ($152) to build a 16 GB stick with "average" specs, which is about the same as a retail 16 GB kit. There's also a ZenTimings snapshot showing CL28 timings, claiming that even relatively high-end DDR5 RAM can be built using this method, but it won't be cost-effective. Therefore, it doesn't make too much sense just yet to get the BGA rework station out and assemble your own DDR5. Things are expected to get worse, though, so maybe these Russians are on to something.

Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding: Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won't prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026.... Before the memory shortage, PC sales had been on the upswing in part because of forced Windows 11 upgrades. That trend will likely reverse in 2026, as buyers avoid Lenovo laptops and alternatives from its rivals.

Realizing a slowdown in purchases is inevitable, postponed launches are one potential outcome. Other manufacturers, including Dell and Framework have already announced impending price hikes... [The article also cites reports that one laptop manufacturer "plans to raise the prices of high-end models by as much as 30%."] U.S.-based Maingear now encourages customers to mail in their own modules to complete custom builds. Yet, without recycling parts from older systems, that won't result in significant savings for consumers.

The 2011 meltdown at Fukushima's nuclear plant "was the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986," CNN remembers.

But this week Japanese authorities "have approved a decision to restart the world's biggest nuclear power plant," reports CNN, "which has sat dormant for more than a decade following the Fukushima nuclear disaster."

Despite nerves from many local residents, the Niigata prefectural assembly, home to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, approved a bill on Monday that clears the way for utility company Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) to restart one of the plant's seven reactors. The company plans to bring the No. 6 reactor back online around January 20, Japan's public broadcaster NHK reported...

Following the [2011] disaster, Japan shut down all 54 of its nuclear power stations including Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, which sits in the coastal and port region of Niigata about 320 kilometers (200 miles) north of Tokyo on Japan's main island of Honshu. Japan has since restarted 14 of the 33 nuclear reactors that remain operable, according to the World Nuclear Association. The Niigata plant will be the first to reopen under the operation of TEPCO, the company that ran the Fukushima Daiichi power station. It has been trying to reassure residents of the restart plan is safe...

About 60-70% of Japan's power generation comes from imported fossil fuels, which cost the country about 10.7 trillion yen ($68 billion) last year alone... Japan is the world's fifth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, after China, the United States, India and Russia, according to the International Energy Agency. But it has committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050, and renewable energy was at the center of its latest energy plan published earlier this year, with a push for greater investments in solar and wind. The country's energy demands are also expected to increase in the coming years due to a boom in energy-hungry data centers that power AI infrastructure. To achieve its energy and climate goals, Japan aims to double the share of nuclear power in its electricity mix to 20% by 2040...

On its website, TEPCO said Kashiwazaki-Kariwa had undergone multiple inspections and upgrades and that the company had learned "the lessons of Fukushima." The company said new seawalls and watertight doors would provide "stronger protection against tsunamis" and that mobile generators and more fire trucks would be on hand for "cooling support" in an emergency. It also said the plant now had "upgraded filtering systems designed to control the spread of radioactive materials."
A survey published by the prefecture in October "found 60% of residents did not think conditions for the restart had been met," reports Reuters, adding that "Nearly 70% were worried about TEPCO operating the plant."

An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia's Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an independent report (PDF) on the matter written by Dr Kerry Schott, an Australian executive who has held senior management roles at many of the country's most significant businesses. The report found that Optus planned 18 firewall upgrades and had executed 15 without incident. But on the 16th upgrade, Optus issued incorrect instructions to its outsourced provider Nokia. [...] Schott summarized the incident as follows: "Three issues are clear during this incident. The first is the very poor management and performance within [Optus] Networks and their contractor, Nokia. Process was not followed, and incorrect procedures were selected. Checks were inadequate, controls avoided and alerts given insufficient attention. There appeared to be reticence in seeking more experienced advice within Networks and a focus on speed and getting the task done, rather than an emphasis on doing things properly."

The review also found that Optus' call center didn't appreciate it could be "the first alert channel for Triple Zero difficulties." The document also notes that Australian telcos try to route 000 calls during outages, but that doing so is not easy and is made harder by the fact that different smartphones behave in different ways. Optus does warn customers if their devices have not been tested for their ability to connect to 000, and maintains a list of known bad devices. But the report notes Optus's process "does not capture so-called 'grey' devices that have been bought online or overseas and may not be compliant." "To have a standard firewall upgrade go so badly is inexcusable," the document states. "Execution was poor and seemed more focussed on getting things done than on being right. Supervision of both network staff and Nokia must be more disciplined to get things right."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has increasingly moved toward keeping features locked to its hardware products, but the Translate app is bucking that trend. The live translate feature is breaking out of the Google bubble with support for any earbuds you happen to have connected to your Android phone. The app is also getting improved translation quality across dozens of languages and some Duolingo-like learning features.

The latest version of Google's live translation is built on Gemini and initially rolled out earlier this year. It supports smooth back-and-forth translations as both on-screen text and audio. Beginning a live translate session in Google Translate used to require Pixel Buds, but that won't be the case going forward. Google says a beta test of expanded headphone support is launching today in the US, Mexico, and India.

The audio translation attempts to preserve the tone and cadence of the original speaker, but it's not as capable as the full AI-reproduced voice translations you can do on the latest Pixel phones. Google says this feature should work on any earbuds or headphones, but it's only for Android right now. The feature will expand to iOS in the coming months. [...] The new translation model, which is also available in the search-based translation interface, supports over 70 languages.

Longtime Slashdot reader MadCow42 writes: Canonical just announced that they're packaging AMD's ROCm libraries (for AIML and HPC with both data-center GPUs as well as desktop/laptop GPUs), directly into the Ubuntu Universe archive. You can run ROCm on Ubuntu today but you have to install it via a script from AMD and manually remove and reinstall for any upgrades or bug fixes. Having it in Ubuntu as a normal Debian package will make it much easier to install and also to maintain in the long run via normal apt tooling ('apt upgrade'). This also means that ROCm can be an automatically-installed dependency for other packages, which doesn't happen today.

And, interestingly, Canonical has committed to providing long-term-support for ROCm in Ubuntu -- which is particularly exciting for edge and IoT devices that may have a long life in the field and need regular security patches and updates.