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Marc Benioff eyes up all those lovely data tools for AI push

Salesforce is to buy Informatica, the enterprise data management and analytics biz, for around $8 billion.…

Commercial customers, STEM students all feeling the pain after mega outage of engineering data-analysis tool

Software biz MathWorks is cleaning up a ransomware attack more than a week after it took down MATLAB, its flagship product used by more than five million people worldwide.…

President Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on smartphone imports including iPhones would not provide enough economic incentive for Apple to relocate US-bound iPhone production to domestic facilities, according to a new Morgan Stanley note viewed by Slashdot. The tariff threat, announced Friday via social media, appeared to target Apple's recent shift of iPhone production from China to India through its contract manufacturing partners. Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that establishing US iPhone production would require a minimum of two years and several billion dollars to build multiple greenfield assembly facilities, with a trained workforce exceeding 100,000 workers during peak seasons. More significantly, the firm calculates that a US-produced iPhone would cost 35% more than current China or India production, primarily due to higher labor costs and the need to import 25% of iPhone components from China under existing 30% tariffs. By contrast, Apple could offset a 25% import tariff by raising global iPhone prices just 4-6%, making domestic production economically unviable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taxpayers on hold for 798 years might wish for a better service

The UK's tax collector has confirmed plans to contract out call center services with an associated price tag of £500 million ($677 million).…

Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse

Opinion I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google.…

Abstract of a paper on NBER: We elicited over a million stated preference choices over 126 dimensions or "aspects" of well-being from a sample of 3,358 respondents on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our surveys also collected self-reported well-being (SWB) questions about respondents' current levels of the aspects of well-being. From the stated preference data, we estimate relative log marginal utilities per point on our 0-100 response scale for each aspect. We validate these estimates by comparing them to alternative methods for estimating preferences. Our findings provide empirical evidence that both complements and challenges philosophical perspectives on human desires and values. Our results support Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia through family relationships and Maslow's emphasis on basic security needs, yet also suggest that contemporary theories of well-being may overemphasize abstract concepts such as happiness and life satisfaction, while undervaluing concrete aspects such as family well-being, financial security, and health, that respondents place the highest marginal utilities on. We document substantial heterogeneity in preferences across respondents within (but not between) demographic groups, with current SWB levels explaining a significant portion of the variation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round

Comment Linux distro wars are nothing new. "Advocacy" (a euphemism for angry argument) about hardware, OSes, programming languages and editors goes back as long as different computers have existed. Computers appeal to geeky folks, and geeky folks readily get a little too attached to things — and then become possessive and defensive about them.…