ICT news

• Impossible Foods Plans To Lay Off About 20% of Workers

  30-01-2023 23:40 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Impossible Foods, which makes plant-based nuggets, burgers and patties, is reportedly laying off 20% of its staff, Bloomberg reported first. TechCrunch reports: According to the story, the 12-year-old company currently employs about 700 workers, which could then affect over 100 employees. This comes as the company made a 6% reduction in its workforce last October. While we know layoffs can happen anytime, it seems like the company was doing well. Earlier this month, the Redwood City, California-
  
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• PikaOS Is a Next-Gen Linux Distribution Aimed Specifically Towards Gamers

  30-01-2023 23:02 via linux.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Jack Wallen: PikaOS is very similar to that of Nobara Linux, which opts for a Fedora base. But what are these two Linux distributions? Simply put, they are Linux for gamers. [...] So, what does PikaOS do that so many other distributions do not? The most obvious thing is that it makes it considerably easier to install the tools needed to play games. Upon first logging in, you're greeted with a Welcome app. In the First Steps tab, you have
  
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• Philips To Cut 13% of Jobs in Safety and Profitability Drive

  30-01-2023 22:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Dutch health technology company Philips will scrap another 6,000 jobs worldwide as it tries to restore its profitability and improve the safety of its products following a recall of respiratory devices that knocked off 70% of its market value. From a report: Half of the job cuts will be made this year, the company said on Monday, adding that the other half will be realised by 2025. The new reorganisation brings the total amount of job cuts announced by new Chief Executive Roy Jakobs in recent mo
  
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• US Renewable Energy Farms Outstrip 99% of Coal Plants Economically

  30-01-2023 21:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Coal in the US is now being economically outmatched by renewables to such an extent that it's more expensive for 99% of the country's coal-fired power plants to keep running than it is to build an entirely new solar or wind energy operation nearby, a new analysis has found. From a report: The plummeting cost of renewable energy, which has been supercharged by last year's Inflation Reduction Act, means that it is cheaper to build an array of solar panels or a cluster of new wind turbines and conn
  
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• Taxes Slow India's Solar Power Rollout But Boost Manufacture

  30-01-2023 21:01 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: In May last year Fortum India, a subsidiary of a Finnish solar developer, won the bid for a solar power project in the state of Gujarat. The project was due to be completed three months ago and would have generated enough electricity for 200,000 homes. But like many other solar power projects in the country, it's been delayed as Fortum India struggles to source and pay for necessary components. "For the last six months, we have not been able to finish develop
  
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• Japan Plans New Government Unit To Deal With Disinformation Campaigns

  30-01-2023 20:21 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Japan's government is making arrangements to launch a new unit next year that deals with the spread of disinformation. From a report: Experts say disinformation spread through social media networks could influence public opinion and cause social turmoil. Some analysts say Russia has employed such methods against Ukraine and that China has done so against Taiwan. Chief Cabinet Secretary Matsuno Hirokazu says spreading fake information not only threatens universal values but could also affect secu
  
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• China Smartphone Market Slumps To 10-Year Low

  30-01-2023 19:41 via slashdot.org
  
  After a decade of frantic growth, China's smartphone market is hitting a speed bump as COVID-19 roils the world's second-largest economy. From a report: The country's smartphone shipments dropped 14% year-over-year in 2022, reaching a ten-year low, according to research firm Counterpoint. It was also the first time that China's handset sales had slid below 300 million units in ten years, according to Canalys. Even in December, which has historically seen seasonal jumps in sales, China recorded a
  
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• EU Weighs Proposal To Charge Data-Heavy Streamers for Telecom Upgrades

  30-01-2023 19:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  The European Union is weighing a proposal to make technology companies that use the most bandwidth, like Netflix and Alphabet, to help pay for the next generation of internet infrastructure, according to a draft document seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The suggestions are part of a "fair-share" vision from the EU's executive arm that could require large tech businesses, which provide streaming videos and other data-heavy services, to help pay for the traffic they generate.
  The draft document
  
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• What Time Is It On the Moon?

  30-01-2023 18:20 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Satellite navigation systems for lunar settlements will require local atomic clocks. Scientists are working out what time they will keep. From a report: It's not obvious what form a universal lunar time would take. Clocks on Earth and the Moon naturally tick at different speeds, because of the differing gravitational fields of the two bodies. Official lunar time could be based on a clock system designed to synchronize with UTC, or it could be independent of Earth time. Representatives of space a
  
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• Cash-strapped EV Startup Arrival is Laying Off Half Its Workforce

  30-01-2023 17:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Arrival, an electric vehicle startup based in the UK, said it was laying off 50 percent of its employees in a bid to reduce costs. The company also named a new CEO, Igor Torgov, who previously served as executive vice president of digital at the company. From a report: Arrival, which announced last year that it was winding down its UK operations in favor of refocusing its business in the US, became a publicly traded company in March 2021 after merging with a special purpose acquisition company,
  
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• DOJ Suit To Break Up Google Was Years in the Making for Antitrust Chief

  30-01-2023 17:04 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Jonathan Kanter has been one of Google's main legal foes for nearly 15 years. Last week, as the nation's top antitrust cop, he delivered a threat to break up the internet company. Mr. Kanter, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general for antitrust, filed a lawsuit alleging that Google is an illegal monopolist in the market for brokering ads on the internet. Some of the complaints trace back to early 2000s, when Mr. Kanter started questioning Google'
  
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• US FAA Adopts New Safeguards After Computer Outage Halted Flights

  30-01-2023 16:36 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) told lawmakers Monday it had made a series of changes to prevent a repeat of a key computer system outage that forced a nationwide Jan. 11 ground stop disrupting more than 11,000 flights. From a report: The FAA said it has implemented "a one-hour synchronization delay for one of the backup databases. This action will prevent data errors from immediately reaching that backup database." The FAA also said it "now requires at least two individuals to be pres
  
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• Chinese Search Giant Baidu To Launch ChatGPT-Style Bot

  30-01-2023 15:45 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Baidu is planning to roll out an artificial intelligence chatbot service similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT potentially China's most prominent entry in a race touched off by the tech phenomenon. From a report: China's largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information. The tool, whose name hasn't been decided, will allow users to get convers
  
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• Foldable iPad Could Arrive as Early as Next Year

  30-01-2023 15:00 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple could be on track to release a foldable iPad as early as next year, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. From a report: "I'm positive about the foldable iPad in 2024 and expect this new model will boost shipments and improve the product mix," he tweeted early Monday. Kuo expects it to be joined by a revamped iPad Mini, due to enter mass production in early 2024. Kuo didn't offer many new details on the rumored iPad foldable, but said that it will feature a "carbon fiber" kicksta
  
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• A Drug Company Made $114 Billion Gaming America's Patent System

  30-01-2023 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  The New York Times looks at the AbbVie's anti-inflammatory drug Humira and their "savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system." Though AbbVie's patent was supposed to expire in 2016, since then it's maintained a monopoly that generated $114 billion in revenue by using "a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year."AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; c
  
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• Can Stack Overflow's Survey Predict Next Year's Most Loved Programming Language?

  30-01-2023 09:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  What happens when Stack Overflow's senior research analyst delves more deeply into results from their annual Developer Survey?Rust, Elixir, Clojure, Typescript, and Julia are at the top of the list of Most Loved Programming Languages. However, in looking at the last three years, we see a bit of movement. [While Rust has remained #1 since 2020, Elixir has risen to #2, while Clojure and TypeScript have dropped.]
  In 2022, we added a drill-down to specifically show popularity amongst those learning
  
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• Amazon is Selling Its 29-Acre Bay Area Property as Return to Office Stalls

  30-01-2023 06:34 via it.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon is "selling a vacant Bay Area office complex purchased about 16 months ago," reports Bloomberg, "the company's latest effort to unwind a pandemic-era expansion that left it with a surfeit of warehouses and employees."
  Amazon in October 2021 paid $123 million for the 29-acre property in Milpitas, California, part of a strategy to lock up real estate near big cities that could be used for new warehouses and facilitate future growth.... Amazon is expected to take a loss on the sale of the Me
  
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• Do 'Layoffs By Email' Show What Employers Really Think of Their Workers?

  30-01-2023 03:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  When Google laid off 6% of its workforce — some of whom had worked for the company for decades — employees "got the news in their inbox," writes Gawker's founding editor in a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times:That sting is becoming an all-too-common sensation. In the last few years, tens of thousands of people have been laid off by email at tech and digital media companies including Twitter, Amazon, Meta and Vox. The backlash from affected employees has been swift.... It's
  
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• Anti-Microbial Proteins Are Being Developed With AI By... Salesforce?

  30-01-2023 01:57 via science.slashdot.org
  
  segaboy81 shares a report from Neowin:
  What do you get when the world's largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins...."The artificia
  
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• Anti-Microbial Proteins Are Being Developed With AI By... Saleforce?

  30-01-2023 01:57 via science.slashdot.org
  
  segaboy81 shares a report from Neowin:
  What do you get when the world's largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins...."The artificia
  
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• How to Handle Web Sites Asking for Your Email Address

  30-01-2023 00:24 via yro.slashdot.org
  
  When you share your email, "you're sharing a lot more," warns the New York Times' lead consumer technology writer:
  [I]t can be linked to other data, including where you went to school, the make and model of the car you drive, and your ethnicity....
  For many years, the digital ad industry has compiled a profile on you based on the sites you visit on the web.... An email could contain your first and last name, and assuming you've used it for some time, data brokers have already compiled a comprehe
  
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