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Ask Slashdot: Are There Any Good Android Tablets Out There?

2 hours 38 minutes ago
Longtime Slashdot reader hadleyburg writes: For a user with an Android phone and who's happy to stick within the Google ecosystem, an Android tablet might seem like the more obvious choice over an iPad. Of course, iPads are a lot more popular, and asking about Android tablets is likely to invite advice about sticking with what everyone else has. The Slashdot community on the other hand -- being a discerning and thoughtful crowd -- might have some experience in this area and be willing to share the pros and cons they have found. The use case is someone not requiring any heavy usage -- no video editing or gaming -- just email, browsing, YouTube, video calls, and that sort of thing.

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Battery trade war hits booming datacenter industry

2 hours 56 minutes ago
Tariffs can't stop cheaper, better Chinese tech, says Jefferies. Tesla is America's great hope

Battery energy storage systems (BESS) could become standard at datacenters as AI infrastructure expand, with analysts forecasting 20 GW of capacity deployed over the next decade.…

Dan Robinson

Valve Rejoins the VR Hardware Wars With Standalone Steam Frame

3 hours 18 minutes ago
Valve is ready to rejoin the VR hardware race with the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone SteamOS headset that can run games locally or stream wirelessly from a PC using new "foveated streaming" tech. It's set to launch in early 2026. Ars Technica reports: Powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor with 16 GB of RAM, the Steam Frame sports a 2160 x 2160 resolution display per eye at an "up to 110 degrees" field-of-view and up to 144 Hz. That's all roughly in line with 2023's Meta Quest 3, which runs on the slightly less performant Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. Valve's new headset will be available in models sporting 256GB and 1TB or internal storage, both with the option for expansion via a microSD card slot. Pricing details have not yet been revealed publicly. The Steam Frame's inside-out tracking cameras mean you won't have to set up the awkward external base stations that were necessary for previous SteamVR headsets (including the Index). But that also means old SteamVR controllers won't work with the new hardware. Instead, included Steam Frame controllers will track your hand movements, provide haptic feedback, and offer "input parity with a traditional game pad" through the usual buttons and control sticks. For those who want to bring desktop GPU power to their VR experience, the Steam Frame will be able to connect wirelessly to a PC using an included 6 GHz Wi-Fi 6E adapter. That streaming will be enhanced by what Valve is calling "foveated rendering" technology, which sends the highest-resolution video stream to where your eyes are directly focused (as tracked by two internal cameras). That will help Steam Frame streaming establish a "fast, direct, low-latency link" to the machine, Valve said, though the company has yet to respond to questions about just how much additional wireless latency users can expect. Further reading: Valve Enters the Console Wars

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OpenAI Fights Order To Turn Over Millions of ChatGPT Conversations

3 hours 56 minutes ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users' private conversations. The artificial intelligence company argued that turning over the logs would disclose confidential user information and that "99.99%" of the transcripts have nothing to do with the copyright infringement allegations in the case. "To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition," the company said in a court filing (PDF). The news outlets argued that the logs were necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted content and to rebut OpenAI's assertion that they "hacked" the chatbot's responses to manufacture evidence. The lawsuit claims OpenAI misused their articles to train ChatGPT to respond to user prompts. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang said in her order to produce the chats that users' privacy would be protected by the company's "exhaustive de-identification" and other safeguards. OpenAI has a Friday deadline to produce the transcripts.

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