Linux fréttir

Redmond’s last mostly sane OS nears end-of-life as AI nags take over

It has been ten years since Microsoft made Windows 10 generally available. With mere months left until the plug is unceremoniously pulled on support for many versions, let's take a look at how the last decade went for the one-time flagship operating system.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Anthropic is nearing a deal to raise as much as $5 billion in a new round of funding that would value the AI startup at $170 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. Investment firm Iconiq Capital is leading the round, which is expected to total between $3 billion and $5 billion, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Anthropic has also been in discussions with the Qatar Investment Authority and Singapore's sovereign fund GIC about participating in the round, the person said. The new financing would mark a significant jump in valuation for the company and cement its status as one of world's leading AI developers. Anthropic was valued at $61.5 billion in a $3.5 billion round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners earlier this year.

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Another week, another protest over budget proposals

A letter protesting the imminent demise of US research vessel and icebreaker the Nathaniel B. Palmer was this week sent to the National Science Foundation (NSF) amid proposed funding reductions.…

The Airbus A380, the world's largest commercial passenger jet, faces mounting maintenance challenges as regulatory authorities issue an increasing number of safety directives. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has listed 95 airworthiness directives for the A380 since January 2020, approximately double the number issued for large Boeing aircraft during the same period. The directives address problems including leaking escape slides, cracked seals, and a ruptured landing-gear axle. A comprehensive maintenance check of the massive plane requires 60,000 hours of labor, according to aircraft repairer Lufthansa Technik. Airlines remain committed to operating the twin-deck aircraft due to limited large-capacity alternatives, with Boeing's 777X years behind schedule and Airbus unable to produce long-haul A350s quickly enough. British Airways plans to overhaul A380 cabins starting next year, while Emirates intends to keep flying the aircraft until the end of the next decade.

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Some users keen while others point out pile of unresolved bugs in core product

The open source Blender 3D editing suite may be adapted to run on Apple's iPad and other tablets, despite concern from one contributor that the team is already stretched with "thousands of bugs languishing in the tracker."…

schwit1 writes: The Apple Manufacturing Academy will be located in downtown Detroit and will be administered by Michigan State University. The academy will offer workshops on manufacturing and artificial intelligence to small and medium-sized businesses, Apple said. Trump has called for Apple to move iPhone production to the U.S. and is implementing tariffs that will likely raise the company's costs.

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Mostly minor changes under the hood – a lot of them

Over the weekend, the world's most famous Finn pushed out the latest version of the Linux kernel – and warned of upcoming disruption.…

India has overtaken China to become the top source of smartphones sold in the US, after Apple shifted to assemble more of its iPhones in the South Asian country. From a report: In the quarter through June, India was the largest manufacturer of smartphones shipped to the US for the first time, accounting for 44% of the market, according to Canalys data. Vietnam, home to much of Samsung's production, came in second. China fell from having more than 60% of all estimated shipments a year ago to just 25%. The stark change comes as Apple ramped up its production in India and smartphone makers "frontload device inventories amid tariff concerns," Canalys researchers wrote. The volume of made-in-India devices more than tripled in the past quarter from a year earlier. Apple's iPhone shipments to the US declined by 11%, reflecting distortions to its usual pattern due to unusually high shipments to stockpile units earlier in the year.

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Bumper's 1950 liftoff paved way for thousands of missions from iconic spaceport

It is 75 years since the first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral: a two-stage rocket consisting of a German V-2 missile and a US sounding rocket.…

Utilities across the U.S. are demanding tech companies pay larger shares of electricity infrastructure costs as AI drives unprecedented data center construction, creating tensions over who bears the financial burden of grid upgrades. Virginia utility Dominion Energy received requests from data center developers requiring 40 gigawatts of electricity by the end of 2024, enough to power at least 10 million homes, and proposed measures requiring longer-term contracts and guaranteed payments. Ohio became one of the first states to mandate companies pay more connection costs after receiving power requests exceeding 50 times existing data center usage. Tech giants Microsoft, Google, and Amazon plan to spend $80 billion, $85 billion, and $100 billion respectively this year on AI infrastructure, while utilities worry that grid upgrade costs will increase rates for residential customers. Further reading: The AI explosion means millions are paying more for electricity

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5 V-tolerant GPIO opens the way to some intriguing retro-nerdery

The Raspberry Pi team has released an update to the RP2350 microcontroller with bug fixes, hardening, and a GPIO tweak that will delight retro hardware enthusiasts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: During the 2010s' boom in on-demand services such as Uber and DoorDash, Wag staked a claim to the market for dog walking. It became a buzzy, high-flying company, at one point gaining a valuation of around $650 million, and grew to offer a whole range of tech products for pet care. But as the years passed, struggles mounted and profits remained elusive. On July 21, Wag filed (PDF) for bankruptcy. To stay alive, the San Francisco-headquartered company is now using bankruptcy court to restructure in what's known as a Chapter 11 process. Its lines of business -- including gig-work dog walking and sitting, pet insurance, and the veterinary tool "Furscription" -- will remain open, according to a news release. If a judge approves Wag's restructuring plan, it will take the company off the public markets and into the private hands of a company called Retriever. On the same day of the bankruptcy filing, Wag's chief financial officer, Alec Davidian, submitted a document (PDF) supporting and explaining the move. He wrote that Wag's "monthly revenues declined rapidly after March 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic" and pointed to $69.5 million in losses from 2022 through 2024. The losses weren't Wag's only problem. The company had taken out debt in 2022 when it went public, and in that loan agreement, it had set a minimum level of cash Wag would need to have on hand at all times. This year, Wag dropped below that amount, Davidian wrote. Wag also failed to find a third-party deal to get more money, the CFO noted, and its debt obligations are set to mature in August, meaning the company was "facing a dire liquidity crisis." So, Wag opted for the bankruptcy proceeding, in which it plans to eliminate the 2022 debt, which is currently held by Retriever. "Through the Restructuring," Davidian wrote, "[Wag] will emerge from these Chapter 11 Cases a stronger company, with a more sustainable capital structure that is better aligned with [Wag's] present and future operating prospects."

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Changes enacted in Trump's budget cover cost of penalty

Electronic design biz Cadence has agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $140 million in fines over charges that it unlawfully sold semiconductor design tools to a university linked with the Chinese military.…

Support for migrations to be scrapped come October

The clock is ticking for administrators pondering a migration path to Exchange Online from an elderly version of Microsoft's email server. Support for public folder migrations from Exchange Server 2010 and older is set for deprecation.…

Troopers to swap radios for Turtle Beaches in preparation for ‘21st century challenges’

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is doubling down on its endorsement of esports by tasking the British Esports Federation to establish a new tournament to upskill existing servicepeople in the digital skirmishes.…

Google's AI Overviews are wrecking its old ad model, but Google's revenue is increasing with ads based on it

Opinion Alphabet, Google's parent company, is making money hand over fist. In its latest quarterly report, Google's revenue grew 14 percent year-over-year to $96.4 billion. While Google's cloud revenue, $13.6 billion, with 31 percent year-over-year growth, is growing fast, the bulk of its cash, $54.2 billion worth, still comes from advertising.…

PayPal has launched "Pay with Crypto" for U.S. merchants, enabling acceptance of over 100 cryptocurrencies with lower cross-border transaction fees and instant conversion to USD or its stablecoin PYUSD. "Businesses of all sizes face incredible pressure when growing globally, from increased costs for accepting international payments to complex integrations," said Alex Chriss, president and chief executive of PayPal. "Today, we're removing these barriers and helping every business of every size achieve their goals. [...] By enabling seamless cross-border crypto payments, we're breaking longstanding barriers in global commerce." SiliconANGLE reports: Using the new Pay with Crypto, merchants can now accept payments in the form of numerous cryptocurrency tokens, including bitcoin, Ethereum, USD Tether and Solana. The transaction fee rate will be 0.99% for the first year, increasing to 1.5% thereafter. The company said that rate is significantly lower than international credit card fees. "Imagine a shopper in Guatemala buying a special gift from a merchant in Oklahoma City," added Chriss. "Using PayPal's open platform, the business can accept crypto for payments, increase their profit margins, pay lower transaction fees, and get near instant access to proceeds." Merchants who accept cryptocurrency tokens can instantly convert them to dollars or PYUSD, the company's stablecoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency that maintains parity with USD so that every token is always worth $1. Funds stored as PYUSD on PayPal also earn 4% annual rewards. The company said the new service will roll out for U.S. merchants in the coming weeks. [...] Pay with Crypto will initially support cryptocurrency wallets from Coinbase, OKX, Binance, Kraken, Phantom, MetaMask and Exodus, with more planned.

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Advocacy group tells UK competition watchdog proposal favors Google

Exclusive Movement for an Open Web (MOW), an advocacy group that supports web publishers, has filed a complaint with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) challenging the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) call to eliminate third-party cookies.…

Replacement deal not ready, so old one gets 6 more months and budget bump

The UK government is extending two major cloud purchasing agreements due to delayed replacement arrangements under frameworks that could be worth an additional £1.65 billion.…

A new study analyzing distorted sound waves from the early universe suggests we may live in a massive cosmic void "with roughly 20% lower than the average density of matter," writes Indranil Banik in an article for The Conversation. "Not every physicist is convinced that this is the case. But our recent paper analyzing distorted sounds from the early universe, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, strongly backs up the idea." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: My colleagues and I previously argued that the Hubble tension might be due to our location within a large void. That's because the sparse amount of matter in the void would be gravitationally attracted to the more dense matter outside it, continuously flowing out of the void. In previous research, we showed that this flow would make it look like the local universe is expanding about 10% faster than expected. That would solve the Hubble tension. But we wanted more evidence. And we know a local void would slightly distort the relation between the BAO angular scale and the redshift due to the faster moving matter in the void and its gravitational effect on light from outside. So in our new paper, Vasileios Kalaitzidis and I set out to test the predictions of the void model using BAO measurements collected over the last 20 years. We compared our results to models without a void under the same background expansion history. In the void model, the BAO ruler should look larger on the sky at any given redshift. And this excess should become even larger at low redshift (close distance), in line with the Hubble tension. The observations confirm this prediction. Our results suggest that a universe with a local void is about one hundred million times more likely than a cosmos without one, when using BAO measurements and assuming the universe expanded according to the standard model of cosmology informed by the CMB. Our research shows that the ACDM model without any local void is in "3.8 sigma tension" with the BAO observations. This means the likelihood of a universe without a void fitting these data is equivalent to a fair coin landing heads 13 times in a row. By contrast, the chance of the BAO data looking the way they do in void models is equivalent to a fair coin landing heads just twice in a row. In short, these models fit the data quite well. In the future, it will be crucial to obtain more accurate BAO measurements at low redshift, where the BAO standard ruler looks larger on the sky -- even more so if we are in a void. The average expansion rate so far follows directly from the age of the universe, which we can estimate from the ages of old stars in the Milky Way. A local void would not affect the age of the universe, but some proposals do affect it. These and other probes will shed more light on the Hubble crisis in cosmology.

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