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Microsoft has won dismissal of a private consumer antitrust lawsuit over its $69 billion proposed purchase of "Call of Duty" maker Activision Blizzard, but the plaintiffs were given 20 days to refine their legal challenge. From a report: A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the lawsuit from a group of video game plaintiffs "lacks allegations" supporting their claim that the proposed acquisition would harm market competition. "Plaintiffs' general allegation that the merger may cause 'higher prices, less innovation, less creativity, less consumer choice, decreased output, and other potential anticompetitive effects' is insufficient," wrote U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Corley. "Why? How?" The decision does not affect the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) regulatory challenge to the largest-ever gaming industry deal.

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Variety has analyzed the often underappreciated process of selecting movie titles in Hollywood. As one of the most crucial aspects of a film's marketing strategy, the title serves as the first point of contact for potential audiences, shaping perceptions and driving intrigue. In a highly competitive industry, a captivating and effective title can be the difference between success and failure at the box office, the article argues. The naming process typically involves collaboration between a diverse range of stakeholders, including studio executives, marketing teams, producers, directors, and screenwriters. The title must not only align with the film's story and themes, but also appeal to target demographics, meet legal requirements, and translate well into foreign languages. As a result, naming a film can be a complex and lengthy endeavor. Some movies adopt their titles from pre-existing source material, such as books or plays, while others rely on brainstorming sessions, market research, and even audience testing. High-profile examples of title changes include "Pretty Woman," originally named "3000," and "Scream," initially titled "Scary Movie."

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My goodness that's moist

Peanut butter, Nutella, and strawberry jam represent squirtable media in a demonstration of 3D printing digital cooking, which has led to the odd dubious result.…

Oracle today announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the popular programming language and development platform. From a report: The latest version of the 27-year-old language includes thousands of performance, stability and security improvements and features seven enhancement proposals to the Java Development Kit that are aimed at increasing developer productivity and enhancing performance, stability and security. Oracle has coordinated a disciplined rollout of new Java releases on a six-month cadence for the past five years and says it's the top contributor to the open-source project. Java is the world's third most widely used programming language, according to Tiobe Software BV, and is No. 1 in organizational development, according to Oracle. "The innovation pipeline has never been richer," said Chad Arimura, vice president of developer relations at Oracle. "The problem space is changing and developers have higher demands on their programming languages than ever."

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Adobe is jumping into the generative AI game with the launch of a new family of AI models called Firefly. From a report: Focused on bringing AI into Adobe's suite of apps and services, specifically AI for generating media content, Firefly will be made up of multiple AI models "working across a variety of different use cases,' Adobe VP of generative AI Alexandru Costin told TechCrunch in an email interview. It's an expansion of the generative AI tools Adobe introduced in Photoshop, Express and Lightroom during its annual Max conference last year, which let users create and edit objects, composites and effects by simply describing them. As the fervor around the tech grows, Adobe has raced to maintain pace, for example allowing contributors to sell AI-generated artwork in its content marketplace. "Firefly is the next step on our AI journey -- bringing together our new 'gentech' models with decades of investment in imaging, typography, illustration and more to produce assets," Costin said. "We'll bring this value to our customers' workflows where content is created across Creative Cloud, Experience Cloud and Document Cloud." Firefly as it exists today, in beta and without firm pricing (Adobe says that's coming), offers a single model designed to generate images and text effects from descriptions. Developed using hundreds of millions of photos, the model can create content across Adobe apps including Express, Photoshop, Illustrator and Adobe Experience Manager given a text prompt.

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An anonymous reader writes: Last week, we learned that Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy tens of thousands of Nvidia A100 graphics chips so that partner OpenAI could train the large language models (LLMs) behind Bing's AI chatbot and ChatGPT. Don't have access to all that capital or space for all that hardware for your own LLM project? Nvidia's DGX Cloud is an attempt to sell remote web access to the very same thing. Announced today at the company's 2023 GPU Technology Conference, the service rents virtual versions of its DGX Server boxes, each containing eight Nvidia H100 or A100 GPUs and 640GB of memory. The service includes interconnects that scale up to the neighborhood of 32,000 GPUs, storage, software, and "direct access to Nvidia AI experts who optimize your code," starting at $36,999 a month for the A100 tier. Meanwhile, a physical DGX Server box can cost upwards of $200,000 for the same hardware if you're buying it outright, and that doesn't count the efforts companies like Microsoft say they made to build working data centers around the technology.

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13 years of research at $40m/year only produced 2 cancelled projects, says oversight arm

If you've ever wondered why NASA's recent space missions haven't made more aggressive use of nuclear power, the Space Administration's Office of the Inspector General issued a report this week that may have your answer. The decade-long project to develop better nuclear space systems is, to put it lightly, a bit of a mess.…

Photography and camera gear review site DPReview, writing in a blog post: After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview will be closing in the near future. This difficult decision is part of the annual operating plan review that our parent company shared earlier this year. The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content. Everyone on our staff was a reader and fan of DPReview before working here, and we're grateful for the communities that formed around the site. Thank you for your support over the years, and we hope you'll join us in the coming weeks as we celebrate this journey.

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OpenAI's ChatGPT has enraptured the business world since its November release and OpenAI is signing up customers eager to pay to use its artificial intelligence models in their own products. But the Microsoft-backed startup faces a surprising rival: Microsoft itself. From a report: As part of its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft has the rights to sell the startup's software through its Azure cloud business, even as OpenAI licenses its own software directly to customers. Microsoft also gets a share of OpenAI's profits. The offerings cost the same, a fraction of a cent per query. Meanwhile, all of OpenAI's technology runs on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure rent free. The dual offerings mean the companies are at times pitching the same customers on nearly identical products, putting salespeople at Microsoft in the uneasy position of trying to lure customers away from OpenAI while touting its technology. While the profit-sharing agreement means sales of either offering theoretically benefit both companies, OpenAI pursues direct relationships with big customers, such as Microsoft rival Salesforce, which has licensed ChatGPT for a new suite of customer service software. It's not clear whether the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft dictates the price each company sets for the models. Microsoft gets 75% of OpenAI's profits until its investment is paid back and 49% of subsequent profits up to a certain cap, The Information previously reported. It's also not clear how much profit Microsoft returns to OpenAI for the models it sells through Azure OpenAI Service. [...] An internal Microsoft document, viewed by The Information, instructs Azure salespeople to tell potential customers that OpenAI's own licenses are "great [for] experimentation" but have "limited enterprise-grade capabilities" and fewer "security/privacy features."

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Don’t need a 700W fire-breathing GPU? It also launched an itty-bitty AI chip too

GTC Nvidia's strategy for capitalizing on generative AI hype: glue two H100 PCIe cards together, of course.…

Microsoft today announced that its new AI-enabled Bing will now allow users to generate images with Bing Chat. From a report: This new feature is powered by DALL-E, OpenAI's generative image generator. The company didn't say which version of DALL-E it is using here, except for saying that it is using the "very latest DALL-E models." Dubbed the "Bing Image Creator," this new capability is now (slowly) rolling out to users in the Bing preview and will only be available through Bing's Creative Mode. It'll come to Bing's Balanced and Precise modes in the future. The new image generator will also be available in the Edge sidebar. The right prompts will generate the now-familiar square of four high-res DALL-E images. There's one major difference, though: there will be a small Bing logo in the bottom left corner. The early Bing AI release was missing a few guardrails, but Microsoft quickly fixed those. The company is clearly hoping to avoid these issues with this release.

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What's next – AI designing AI chips? Oh wait... that's exactly what's next

GTC Nvidia's latest gambit? Entrenching itself as a key part of the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain.…

Still tumbleweed for PC industry right now, but maybe folks will buy computers-on-bikes?

Acer is racing into virgin territory and – everybody look out – it's coming armed with AI: the Taiwanese PC maker is launching an E-bike that is apparently designed for urban commuting.…

Strains in the banking sector are roiling a roughly $8 trillion bond market considered almost as safe as U.S. government bonds. From a report: So-called agency mortgage bonds are widely held by banks, insurers and bond funds because they are backed by the mortgage loans from government-owned lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The bonds are far less likely to default than most debt and are easy to buy and sell quickly, a crucial reason they were Silicon Valley Bank's biggest investment before it foundered.ÂBut agency mortgage-backed securities, like all long-term bonds, are vulnerable to rising interest rates, which pushed their prices down last year and saddled banks such as SVB with unrealized losses. Now that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has taken over SVB, investors expect the bonds to be sold off in coming months, adding supply to the weakened market and pushing prices lower. Last week, the risk premium on a widely followed Bloomberg index of agency MBS hit its highest level since October, when climbing interest rates turned global markets topsy-turvy. The move reflected fears that other regional banks might have to sell their holdings, bond-fund managers said. [...] When benchmark interest rates rise, bonds that were sold at times of lower rates lose value. Prices of such "low coupon" agency MBS started dropping about a year ago, when the Federal Reserve raised rates to fight inflation and indicated it might start selling MBS it owned. Some of the bonds lost 15% or more in a matter of months, trading as low as 80 cents on the dollar, according to data from FactSet.

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The war in Ukraine is bad and wrong… but does blocking these contributions help Ukraine?

Opinion Code is being refused if it comes from developers in sanctioned Russian companies… but it's not clear if this is an effective move. Cui bono?…

Google says it's ready to let the public use its generative AI chatbot,Bard. The company will grant tens of thousands of users access to the bot in a gradual rollout that starting Tuesday. From a report: Google says people will use the chatbot, which will be available online and as a mobile app, for things like generating ideas ("Bard, how do I keep my plants alive?"), researching ideas (in combination with Search), and drafting first drafts of letters, invites, or proposals. Google originally announced Bard February 6, alongside some generative AI search functions and developer tools. On March 14, it announced that it will integrate generative AI features across the apps in its Workspace productivity suite. But today marks the first time that Google has released a generative AI chatbot powered by a large language model to the public. Google says the bot is powered by a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time.

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India will not tolerate use of abusive language and display of obscene content in movies and TV shows on on-demand video streaming services, a key minister has warned in a move that illustrates how the nation's IT rules have "handed over direct ministerial power for censorship." From the report: Anurag Thakur, Union Minister of Information Broadcasting and Sports and Youth Affairs, said at a press conference that use of abusive language in the name of creativity will not be tolerated and that the government is receiving a growing list of complaints about increasing abusive and obscene content. Thakur warned that New Delhi will not shy away from "making any changes" in the rules to address this situation.

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65 AA batteries and $10 Arduino processor power space debris solution

A tiny satellite with a drag chute built by a team of students has been held up as one small possible solution to the thorny issue of space junk caused by defunct hardware cluttering up Earth’s orbit.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CoinDesk: Crypto ads in Belgium must be accurate and warn investors of the risks under new laws announced by the country's financial regulator Monday. Powers published in Belgium's Official Gazette on Friday mean any mass-media campaign to promote a digital currency would have to be submitted to the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) 10 days in advance, allowing the regulator to intervene if needed. "Virtual currencies are all the rage at the moment, but they involve considerable risk," the FSMA said in a statement. "They are often subject to wild price fluctuations and are vulnerable to fraud and IT-related risks." The new rules, which will take effect on May 17, require ads to state that "the only guarantee in crypto is risk." Belgium joins European countries such as Spain and the U.K. in imposing restrictions on publicity campaigns, which often mirror those already in place for traditional finance.

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The hope? Reducing piles of admin for clinicians freeing them up for medical work

The University of Kansas Health System is set to trial software designed to help doctors automatically generate notes from conversations with patients, a move billed as "the most significant rollout to date of generative AI in healthcare" yet.…