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Is stuck-down memory forgivable if it's for the sake of performance?

Framework's modular mini desktop has received glowing approval from the repair experts at iFixit, despite having non-upgradeable memory because of its Ryzen AI Max processor.…

The boss of The Pokemon Company believes the series can last for at least another 50 years if it continues to innovate. From a report: First launched on Nintendo's Game Boy in 1996, the video game has expanded into films, TV and toys to become one of the world's highest-grossing media franchise. Most recently, the trading card game based on the cute creatures at the centre of its universe has seen a surge in popularity -- but it has also brought scalpers and frauds to the hobby. [...] Pokemon has continued to bring new fans to the franchise by expanding into anime, card games, movies and toys alongside its video game titles. CEO Tsunekazu Ishihara says fans now "span several generations" and believes "the biggest reason behind their success is the fact that Pokemon became a tool of communication." Last weekend, about 13,000 Pokemon fans headed to the European leg of the International Championships at London's Excel Centre. It demonstrates Mr Ishihara's point that people have found their way into the series through various means.

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How to make them, and what to use them for

The US Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for "large bio-mechanical space structures."…

When developers boast "I could write that in a weekend," they're missing the painful reality that haunts software maintainers for years. In a candid blog post, Construct developer Ashley explains why maintaining large software projects is a burden most programmers fail to appreciate. "Writing the initial code for a feature is only a fraction of the work," Ashley explains, estimating it represents just "25% of the total work" in Construct's 750,000-line codebase. The rest? A grinding cycle of "testing, diagnosing and fixing bugs, optimizing performance, upgrading it to work with other changes, refactoring, customer support, writing documentation and similarly revising the documentation over time." Ashley describes how accepting code contributions feels like someone offering to build you a free extension -- initially attractive until the roof starts leaking years later and the original builder is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, your tenants (users) are furious, and you're stuck with "no good options." The post recounts Construct's own bruises: a community-contributed storage plugin still causing compatibility headaches a decade later, and third-party libraries that became maintenance nightmares after their creators vanished. These experiences explain why seasoned maintainers eye large code contributions with deep suspicion rather than gratitude. "If you suggest some software project uses some code -- even a small amount -- will you be there in literally 10 year's time sorting out all the issues that arise from it?" Ashley asks. "Usually the answer is no."

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New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Google have successfully tested technology that uses smartphone sensors to detect subway track defects, the MTA said Thursday. The four-month experiment, dubbed TrackInspect, mounted six Google Pixel phones on four A train subway cars traversing Manhattan and Queens. The phones' accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes and external microphones collected 335 million sensor readings and 1,200 hours of audio data, which were processed through 200 prediction models. The system identified 92% of defects later confirmed by human inspectors, including broken rails and loose bolts. "The goal with this [project] is to find issues before they become a major issue in terms of service," said Demetrius Crichlow, the agencyâ(TM)s president. Following the successful trial, the MTA plans to expand to a full pilot where Google will build a production version for track inspectors.

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What Chris Horsley expected to be a 10-minute washing machine installation stretched to four hours and required five trips to the hardware store. The CTO of security consultancy firm documented how unexpected obstacles -- drilling through shelves, replacing incompatible hoses, and removing hidden caps -- derailed his timeline. Horsley draws a direct parallel to software development, where estimation regularly fails despite experience. "While 90% of the project will be the same, there's going to be one critical difference between the last 5 projects and this project that seemed trivial at the time of estimation but will throw off our whole schedule," he writes in a blog. These disruptions often appear as unmaintained frameworks, obsolete development tools, or incompatible infrastructure components that weren't visible during planning. The software development environment changes rapidly, creating what Horsley describes as "unknown unknowns." Despite thorough requirements gathering, developers inevitably encounter unanticipated blockers, transforming familiar-looking tasks into complex challenges.

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Chipmaker touts high-core, low-power Altra processors as the future of 5G and AI inferencing

Ampere Computing is looking to target the telecoms market with its Arm-based server chips, hoping to take a slice of the growing compute needs of 5G and edge processing, which it believes Intel is no longer best served to meet.…

The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since records began 125 years ago as the country's demographic crisis deepens and government efforts to reverse the decline continue to fail. Financial Times [non-paywalled source]: Japan recorded 720,988 births in 2024, according to preliminary government figures published on Thursday. The number has declined for nine straight years and appears to be largely unaffected by financial and other government incentives for married couples to produce more children.

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Yet growth in its AI agent biz not enough to improve numbers

Salesforce will not hire any more engineers this year after investment in AI coding tools provided a 30 percent productivity boost, its CEO claimed as he sought to charm investors.…

The JavaScript package world is heating up as startups attempt to challenge npm's long-standing dominance. While npm remains the backbone of JavaScript dependency management, Deno's JSR and vlt's vsr have entered the scene with impressive backing and even more impressive leadership -- JSR comes from Node.js creator Ryan Dahl, while npm's own creator Isaac Schlueter is behind vsr. Neither aims to completely replace npm, instead building compatible layers that promise better developer experiences. Many developers feel GitHub has left npm to stagnate since its 2020 acquisition, doing just enough to keep it running while neglecting innovations. Security problems and package spam have only intensified these frustrations. Yet these newcomers face the same harsh reality that pushed npm into GitHub's arms: running a package registry costs serious money -- not just for servers, but for lawyers handling trademark fights and content moderation.

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The Australian government has banned all Kaspersky Lab products and web services from its systems and devices following an analysis that claims the company poses a significant security risk to the country. From a report: "After considering threat and risk analysis, I have determined that the use of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. products and web services by Australian Government entities poses an unacceptable security risk to Australian Government, networks and data, arising from threats of foreign interference, espionage and sabotage," justified Stephanie Foster, Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs. "I have also considered the important need for a strong policy signal to critical infrastructure and other Australian governments regarding the unacceptable security risk associated with the use of Kaspersky Lab, Inc. products and web services."

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It looks like you have died. Would you like help?

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the nod to the Loss of Pulse Detection feature of the Pixel Watch 3.…

Microsoft is pushing the Trump administration to loosen and simplify a new system that would restrict the sales of cutting-edge U.S. artificial-intelligence chips to much of the world. From a report: In a blog post that is scheduled to be released Thursday, Microsoft will call for Trump's team to ease the limits on chips that can be used in data centers for training AI models so they no longer apply to a group of U.S. allies including India, Switzerland and Israel [non-paywalled source], company officials said. Those countries are in the second tier of a three-tier system that underpins the export controls. Microsoft says the unintended consequence of that proposed system would be that allies facing limited U.S. chip supply would turn to China to get the tech infrastructure they need. China is using the proposed rule to argue to other countries that it would be a better long-term partner for AI infrastructure than the U.S., Microsoft President Brad Smith said in an interview. "Their message is these countries can't rely on the U.S., but China is willing to provide what they need," he said. "That is not good for American business or American foreign policy."

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Some businesses sticking with Windows 10, AI boxes not reviving demand

President Trump's tariffs on goods imported from China, in addition to faltering consumer purchases, are forecast to result in slower-than-expected global shipments of personal computers, according to IDC.…

Sophisticated electronic devices used by criminals to steal cars are set to be banned under new laws in England and Wales. From a report: More than 700,000 vehicles were broken into last year -- often with the help of high-tech electronic devices, including so-called signal jammers, which are thought to play a part in four out of 10 vehicle thefts nationwide. Until now, police could only bring a prosecution if they could prove a device had been used to commit a specific offence, but under new laws in the Crime and Policing Bill the onus will be on someone in possession of a device to show they had it for a legitimate purpose. Making or selling a signal jammer could lead to up to five years in prison or an unlimited fine.

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Bit barn developer says your real estate can't take the heat, and forget nuking it to change that

APRICOT 2025 Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you own real estate and think you can cash in by using it to host an AI datacenter, you're probably wrong.…

Thousands of order lines not picked, causing delays to hospital deliveries

A state-owned company that handles £4.5 billion ($5.7 billion) annual spending on behalf of the NHS has suffered 35 high-priority computer system alerts in 2024, leading to delays in shipping thousands of products to UK hospitals.…

Amazon has introduced its first-ever quantum processor, dubbed Ocelot, designed specifically to reduce quantum error correction costs by up to 90% compared to existing approaches. The prototype chip uses "cat qubits" -- named after Schrodinger's cat thought experiment -- which intrinsically suppress certain types of quantum errors. Unlike conventional approaches that add error correction after designing the architecture, AWS built Ocelot with quantum error correction as the primary requirement. The chip consists of two stacked 1cm2 silicon microchips containing 14 core components: five data qubits, five buffer circuits for stabilization, and four qubits dedicated to error detection. Quantum computers are notoriously sensitive to environmental noise -- including vibrations, heat, and electromagnetic interference -- which disturbs qubits and generates computational errors. These errors multiply as quantum systems scale up, creating a significant barrier to practical quantum computing. Ocelot's high-quality oscillators, made from a thin film of superconducting Tantalum processed using specialized techniques developed by AWS material scientists, generate the repetitive electrical signals that maintain quantum states. "We're just getting started and we believe we have several more stages of scaling to go through," said Oskar Painter, AWS director of Quantum Hardware, whose team published their findings in Nature. Industry analyst Heather West of IDC was more measured, categorizing Ocelot as "much more of an advancement and less of a breakthrough," noting that superconducting qubits designed to resist certain error types aren't completely novel.

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With a generation of networking engineers set to retire, is this how to give their successors a faster start?

APRICOT 2025 The networking industry should address its perennial staff shortage by giving early-career techies the kind of hands-on training delivered during apprenticeships for trainee carpenters or electricians.…

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said next-gen AI will need 100 times more compute than older models as a result of new reasoning approaches that think "about how best to answer" questions step by step. From a report: "The amount of computation necessary to do that reasoning process is 100 times more than what we used to do," Huang told CNBC's Jon Fortt in an interview on Wednesday following the chipmaker's fourth-quarter earnings report. He cited models including DeepSeek's R1, OpenAI's GPT-4 and xAI's Grok 3 as models that use a reasoning process. Huang pushed back on that idea in the interview on Wednesday, saying DeepSeek popularized reasoning models that will need more chips. "DeepSeek was fantastic," Huang said. "It was fantastic because it open sourced a reasoning model that's absolutely world class." Huang said that company's percentage of revenue in China has fallen by about half due to the export restrictions, adding that there are other competitive pressures in the country, including from Huawei. Developers will likely search for ways around export controls through software, whether it be for a supercomputer, a personal computer, a phone or a game console, Huang said. "Ultimately, software finds a way," he said. "You ultimately make that software work on whatever system that you're targeting, and you create great software." Huang said that Nvidia's GB200, which is sold in the United States, can generate AI content 60 times faster than the versions of the company's chips that it sells to China under export controls.

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