ICT news

• Google Funding Electrician Training As AI Power Crunch Intensifies

  30-04-2025 23:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google is investing in training over 100,000 new U.S. electricians through a $10 million grant, aiming to address a critical labor shortage driven by AI-fueled data center growth and rising electricity demands. Reuters reports: A lack of access to power supplies has become the biggest problem for giant technology companies racing to develop artificial intelligence in energy-intensive data centers, which are driving up U.S. electricity demand after nearly 20 years of stagnation. The situation has
  
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• Raspberry Pi Cuts Product Returns By 50% By Changing Up Its Pin Soldering

  30-04-2025 23:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Raspberry Pi boards have a combination of surface-mount devices (SMDs) and through-hole bits. SMDs allow for far more tiny chips, resistors, and other bits to be attached to boards by their tiny pins, flat contacts, solder balls, or other connections. For those things that are bigger, or subject to rough forces like clumsy human hands, through-hole soldering is still required, with leads poked through a connective hole and solder applied to
  
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• New Atomic Fountain Clock Joins Elite Group That Keeps the World on Time

  30-04-2025 22:01 via science.slashdot.org
  
  NIST: Clocks on Earth are ticking a bit more regularly thanks to NIST-F4, a new atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Boulder, Colorado. This month, NIST researchers published a journal article establishing NIST-F4 as one of the world's most accurate timekeepers. NIST has also submitted the clock for acceptance as a primary frequency standard by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the body that oversees the world's time.
  NIST-F4
  
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• Microsoft CEO Says Up To 30% of the Company's Code Was Written by AI

  30-04-2025 19:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that 20%-30% of code inside the company's repositories was "written by software" -- meaning AI -- during a fireside chat with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Meta's LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. From a report: Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft's code is AI-generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C+
  
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• Finland Restricts Use of Mobile Phones During School Day

  30-04-2025 18:51 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Finland has passed legislation to restrict the use of phones and other mobile devices during the school day amid fears over their impact on student wellbeing and learning. From a report: Under the changes, which were approved by the Finnish parliament on Tuesday and will come into effect on 1 August, mobile devices will be heavily restricted during lesson times. Pupils will be allowed to use them only with the teacher's permission for healthcare or learning purposes.
  Finland is the latest Europe
  
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• Google's Sundar Pichai Calls US Remedies 'De Facto' Spinoff of Search

  30-04-2025 18:02 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a judge who found that Google illegally monopolizes online search that a Justice Department proposal to share search data with rivals would be a "de facto" divestiture of the company's search engine. From a report: If Google were required to share both its search data and the information on how it ranks results, rivals could reverse engineer "every aspect of our technology," Pichai testified on Wednesday.
  "The proposal on data sharing is so far reaching, so extrao
  
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• Wikipedia To Use AI

  30-04-2025 17:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Wikipedia will employ AI to enhance the work of its editors and volunteers, it said Wednesday, also asserting that it has no plans to replace those human roles. The Wikimedia Foundation plans to implement AI specifically for automating tedious tasks, improving information discovery, facilitating translations, and supporting new volunteer onboarding, it said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• Electronic Arts Lays Off Hundreds, Cancels 'Titanfall' Game

  30-04-2025 16:41 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Electronic Arts is laying off hundreds of workers and canceling a Titanfall game that was in development at its Respawn Entertainment subsidiary. From a report: Between 300 and 400 positions were eliminated, including around 100 at Respawn, according to a person familiar with the cuts. The company had about 13,700 employees at the end of March 2024.
  "As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we've made select changes within our organization that more effectively align
  
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• Microsoft Vows Legal Fight Against US To Protect European Cloud Customers

  30-04-2025 16:00 via slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft has pledged to take the US government to court if necessary [alternative source] to protect European customers' access to its cloud services, as concerns mount over potential technology disruptions under President Donald Trump. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice-chair, announced five "digital commitments" to Europe on Wednesday, responding to regional anxieties following Trump's temporary suspension of military support to Ukraine.
  "We as a company need to be a source of digital
  
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• Gen AI Is Not Replacing Jobs Or Hurting Wages At All, Say Economists

  30-04-2025 15:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far -- a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models. In a working paper released earlier this month, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard looked at the labor market impact of AI chatbots on 11 occupations, covering 25,000 workers and
  
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• Firefly Aerospace's Alpha Rocket Fails, Sends Satellite Falling Into Ocean

  30-04-2025 12:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Firefly Aerospace's sixth Alpha rocket launch failed on April 29, 2025, after an upper-stage anomaly prevented a Lockheed Martin satellite demo from reaching orbit. Both the stage and payload fell into the Pacific Ocean near Antarctica. Space.com reports: The two-stage, 96.7-foot-tall (29.6 meters) Alpha lifted off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base this morning (April 29), carrying a technology demonstration for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin toward low Earth orbit (LEO). But the pa
  
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• After 53 Years, a Failed Soviet Venus Spacecraft Is Crashing Back to Earth

  30-04-2025 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  
  Kosmos 482, a failed Soviet Venus probe, is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in mid-May after orbiting Earth for 53 years. Gizmodo reports: The lander module from an old Soviet spacecraft is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere during the second week of May, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. "As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Ear
  
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• Chemical In Plastics Linked To 350,000 Heart Disease Deaths

  30-04-2025 05:30 via science.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Daily exposure to certain chemicals used to manufacture household plastics may be connected to more than 356,000 cardiovascular-related deaths in 2018 alone, a new analysis has found. These chemicals, called phthalates, are present in products around the world but have particular popularity in the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific -- regions that collectively bore about 75 percent of the global death total, according to the rese
  
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• Google Play Sees 47% Decline In Apps Since Start of Last Year

  30-04-2025 02:50 via tech.slashdot.org
  Google Play's app marketplace has seen a dramatic 47% drop in available apps
  -- from 3.4 million to 1.8 million -- since the start of 2024. An analysis by app intelligence provider Appfigures attributes the decline to stricter quality standards, expanded human reviews, and increased enforcement against low-quality and deceptive apps. TechCrunch reports: In July 2024, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play St
  
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• Intel Says It's Rolling Out Laptop GPU Drivers With 10% To 25% Better Performance

  30-04-2025 02:10 via tech.slashdot.org
  Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham reports: Intel's oddball Core Ultra 200V laptop chips -- codenamed Lunar Lake -- will apparently be a one-off experiment, not to be replicated in future Intel laptop chips. They're Intel's only processors with memory integrated onto the CPU package; the only ones with a neural processing unit that meets Microsoft's Copilot+ performance requirements; and the only ones with Intel's best-performing integrated GPUs, the Intel Arc 130V and 140V.Today, Intel announced
  
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• New York Lawmakers Reach Deal On 'Bell-To-Bell' School Cellphone Ban

  30-04-2025 01:30 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul says a $254 billion state budget deal has been reached, including a "bell-to-bell" school cellphone ban. [...] The distraction-free policy would take effect next school year, making New York the largest state in the country with a "bell-to-bell" cellphone ban. Hochul says the plan will help protect children from addictive technology and improve their mental health. The New York State United Teachers union also came out
  
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• LG Will Shut Down Update Servers For Its Android Smartphones In June

  30-04-2025 00:50 via mobile.slashdot.org
  LG will permanently shut down its Android smartphone update servers on June 30, 2025, ending all software, app, and security updates for its devices. If you're still using an smartphone, you'll want to install any remaining updates before that date, as no future updates will be available afterward. 9to5Google reports: When LG called it quits for Android smartphones, the company also committed to a few more updates. That included an Android 12 update for select devices, the last major update the
  
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• OpenAI's o3 Model Beats Master-Level Geoguessr Player

  30-04-2025 00:10 via slashdot.org
  In a blog post yesterday, Master I-ranked human GeoGuessr player Sam Patterson said that OpenAI's o3 model outscored him in a head-to-head match, "correctly identifying all five countries and twice landing within a few hundred meters." Geoguessing is a game -- most popularly known through the platform GeoGuessr -- where players are dropped into a random location in Google Street View and must figure out where in the world they are using only visual clues from the environment. With the release of
  
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