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Inventories stack up stateside as Apple and co prep for import tax tweaks

The global smartphone industry is taking a hit from increasing uncertainty and volatility in the marketplace caused by a certain US President's unpredictable trade policies.…

A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73% have been audited in the last three years. From a report: At the same time, nearly eight out of 10 Oracle Java users said they had migrated, or planned to shift, to open source Java to try to avoid the risk and high costs of the dominant vendor's development and runtime environments. Oracle introduced a paid subscription for Java in September 2018, and in January 2023, it decided to switch its pricing model to per employee rather than per user, creating a steep price hike for many users. In July 2023, Gartner recorded users experiencing price increases of between two and five times when they switched to the new licensing model. Two years later, the survey conducted by market research firm Dimensional Research showed only 14% of Oracle Java users intended to stick with the vendor's subscription model.

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Big Red’s changes to Java licensing also inspire exodus to open source

A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73 percent have been audited in the last three years.…

Nearly half of young Americans feel unprepared for future jobs as AI reshapes the workforce faster than career guidance can adapt, according to a new study from the Schultz Family Foundation and HarrisX. The survey of thousands of workers aged 16-24, along with parents, counselors and employers, revealed differences between generations about job availability and requirements. While 71% of employers say sufficient opportunities exist, only 43% of young people agree. Parents rely on outdated personal experiences when advising children, with 79% drawing from their own career paths despite 66% believing their children should pursue different directions. Employers require at least one year of experience for 77% of entry-level positions while offering internships for just 38% of roles.

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S&P 500 businesses warn investors they may never see ROI in SEC filings

America's largest corporations are increasingly listing AI among the major risks they must disclose in formal financial filings, despite bullish statements in public about the potential business opportunities it offers.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Hugging Face, a company with a multi-billion dollar valuation and one of the most commonly used platforms for sharing AI tools and resources, is hosting over 5,000 AI image generation models that are designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were all previously hosted on Civitai, an AI model sharing platform 404 Media reporting has shown was used for creating nonconsensual pornography, until Civitai banned them due to pressure from payment processors. Users downloaded the models from Civitai and reuploaded them to Hugging Face as part of a concerted community effort to archive the models after Civitai announced in May it will ban them. In that announcement, Civitai said it will give the people who originally uploaded them "a short period of time" before they were removed. Civitai users began organizing an archiving effort on Discord earlier in May after Civitai indicated it had to make content policy changes due to pressure from payment processors, and the effort kicked into high gear when Civitai announced the new "real people" model policy.

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Candy Crush-maker King is cutting approximately 200 employees, with many positions filled by AI tools the departing workers helped develop, according to multiple sources who spoke anonymously to industry publication MobileGamer.biz. The layoffs heavily target level designers, user research staff, and UX and narrative writers across King's London, Barcelona, Stockholm, and Berlin studios. The London-based Farm Heroes Saga team faces cuts of roughly 50 people, including key leadership positions. "Most of level design has been wiped, which is crazy since they've spent months building tools to craft levels quicker," one staffer said. "Now those AI tools are basically replacing the teams."

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Microsoft employs engineers in China to help maintain Defense Department computer systems, with U.S. citizens serving as "digital escorts" to oversee the foreign workers, according to a ProPublica investigation. The escorts often lack advanced technical expertise to police engineers with far more sophisticated skills, and some are former military personnel paid barely above minimum wage. "We're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we really can't tell," one current escort told the publication. The arrangement, critical to Microsoft winning federal cloud computing contracts a decade ago, handles sensitive but unclassified government data including materials that directly support military operations. Former CIA and NSA executive Harry Coker called the system a natural opportunity for spies, saying "If I were an operative, I would look at that as an avenue for extremely valuable access."

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The never Nvidia networking party just got another option

Chip vendors like AMD may be closing the gap with Nvidia on GPU FLOPS, memory bandwidth, and HBM capacity, but without a high-speed interconnect and switch, like NVLink and NVSwitch, their ability to scale that performance remains limited.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: CoreWeave is expanding a data center that is projected to double the electricity needs of a city near Dallas, another example of the strains that artificial intelligence workloads are placing on the US power supply. Local officials have grappled with how to handle the increased stress on the electricity grid from the project, according to a late 2024 presentation and emails seen by Bloomberg. The site is being developed by Core Scientific and will be used by OpenAI in Denton, Texas. Last week, CoreWeave announced it would acquire Core Scientific for about $9 billion, in part, to gain direct control of its data centers aimed at supplying AI work. Denton, about 50 miles northwest of Dallas, has almost doubled its population in the last 25 years to about 166,000 residents. To meet the spike in AI-related power demand, the city is passing on any extra costs to the data center operator and constructing additional grid infrastructure, Antonio Puente, general manager of local utility Denton Municipal Electric, said in an interview. "To serve the entire load from Core Scientific, we do have some transmission challenges," Puente said. "We will have to make some additional transmission investments." [...] Like some other large AI data center projects, the site in Denton was focused on cryptocurrency mining before pivoting to AI workloads in December. This transition means unrelenting power consumption -- the site will no longer curtail operations when power prices are high -- which will increase grid strain. "Now you're talking about a facility that has to have energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," Puente said. That challenge will be mitigated by the addition of backup generators and batteries, he added. Unlike many large projects, the Denton data center didn't receive local tax exemptions. Officials expect more than $600 million in property and sales tax from the data center expansion, more than double the costs it plans to incur, according to an analysis document seen by Bloomberg. It also anticipates that 135 new jobs will be created, according to the document. The Denton site, which is already being rented by CoreWeave, is Core Scientific's largest planned project at about 390 megawatts of power. It's "utilizing the majority of extra system capacity" in the city, wrote a utility executive in a January email seen by Bloomberg. Any additional large power users will exacerbate overloads on the grid, the executive added. "When fully built out, it will host one of the largest GPU clusters in North America," Core Scientific Chief Executive Officer Adam Sullivan said of the site during a May call. "Denton is a flagship facility." The report notes that Texas could face electricity shortages as soon as 2026 due to surging power demand from data centers, oil and gas operations, and crypto mining.

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Outfit was accused of charging for specialist IT labor performed by uncertified folks

A Maryland IT, cloud, and security consultancy will have to pay the US government at least $14.75 million to settle multiple allegations that it issued false invoices between 2018-2023.…

Simular is starting with industries like insurance and healthcare with tons of forms to fill

When Ang Li, co-founder of agent software biz Simular, started working at Google DeepMind in 2017, software engineers at the search giant were skeptical about the usefulness of machine learning, or artificial intelligence (AI) as it has come to be called.…

Uncertainty to blame as businesses wait to see what US Prez Trump does next

World War Fee Gartner has trimmed its growth forecast for worldwide IT spending in 2025 as an "uncertainty pause" hits net new spending, caused in part by the unpredctability of US President Donald Trump's trade tariff policy.…

A team of Japanese researchers has set a new world record for internet speed, transmitting data at 125,000 gigabytes per second over 1,120 miles using a new type of 19-core optical fiber. "That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S. and would allow you to download the entire Internet Archive in less than four minutes," notes Live Science. It's also "more than twice the previous world record of 50,250 Gbps, previously set by a different team of scientists in 2024." From the report: To achieve this new speed -- which has not been independently verified -- the team developed a new form of optical fiber to send information at groundbreaking speeds over roughly the distance between New York and Florida. Details about this achievement were presented April 3 at the 48th Optical Fiber Communication Conference in San Francisco, according to a statement from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology. The new type of optical fiber is equivalent to 19 standard optical fibers in its data transmission capacity. The new optical fiber is better suited to long-haul transmission than existing cables because the centers of all 19 fibers interact with light in the same way, so they encounter less light fluctuation, which results in less data loss. The new cable squeezes 19 separate fibers into a diameter of five-thousandths of an inch (0.127 millimeters), which is the same thickness as most existing single-fiber cables already in use. This effort means the new cable can transmit more data using existing infrastructure. [...] For this demonstration, the data ran through a transmission system 21 times, finally reaching a data receiver after traveling the equivalent of 1,120 miles.

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Exos and IronWolf drives show spinning rust isn't going anywhere

Seagate has released two 30 TB hard drives based on its HAMR technology, pitching them as more energy efficient cheaper options for datacenter operators dealing with AI workloads.…

Stealth jets can't fight, can't fly much, and can't shoot UK missiles, says NAO

The F-35 stealth fighter is not meeting its potential in British service because of availability issues, a shortage of support personnel, and delays in integrating key weapons that are limiting the aircraft's effectiveness.…

First, Zuck takes Manhattan. Then he might actually deliver a product that matters

Meta overlord-for-life Mark Zuckerberg has revealed he plans to build several multi-gigawatt datacenter clusters, with the first to come online in 2026.…

The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has detected the most massive black hole merger to date, forming a final black hole around 225 times the Sun's mass. Caltech reports: Before now, the most massive black hole merger -- produced by an event that took place in 2021 called GW190521 -- had a total mass of 140 times that of the Sun. In the more recent GW231123 event, the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun. In addition to their high masses, the black holes are also rapidly spinning. "The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly -- near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." Researchers are continuing to refine their analysis and improve the models used to interpret such extreme events. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," says Gregorio Carullo of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK. "Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features. Exciting times ahead!"

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Off-the-charts gravitational waves ripple out from merged dead stars

Researchers have observed the largest ever collision between two massive black holes witnessed by humans, a finding that’s sent astrophysicists back to their calculators to re-think models.…

Maybe CEO Jensen Huang's million-dollar meal at Mar-a-Lago has paid off in the form of permission to sell the H20 and a new RTX Pro GPU

Nvidia has announced the US government will allow it to resume sales of its GPUs to Chinese customers.…