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Microsoft has put back the release to manufacture of Windows 2000 Service Pack 1. Originally due earlier this week, the monstro 83MB patch is now scheduled for release on 24 July and should be available for web download a few days later.
The software giant is keeping mum on the actual causes of the delay, but the word on the street seems to point to some kind of security issue. ®
Win 2K service pack due Monday
Memory-maker Micron intends to implement extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography in its fabrication plants by 2024.
Designed to keep Moore's Law alive by allowing the fabrication of ever-smaller chip features, extreme ultraviolet lithography is still relatively unusual in the semiconductor industry - helped by the high cost of the required equipment. Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) both have EUV fabs online, and they're going to be joined by Micron - but only starting in 2024.
"We had always said that we monitor EUV progress. We have actually engaged in EUV evaluation. We have had EUV tool in the past," said Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron president and chief executive, during the company's Q3 fiscal '21 earnings call.
The auction of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's source code for the World Wide Web as a cryptographically backed Non-Fungible Token (NFT) has concluded, with the web daddy pocketing $5,434,500 for something already public.
Sir Tim is widely recognised as the inventor of the modern web, having proposed the melding of Hypertext with the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Domain Name System (DNS) in 1989. The late nights he spent hacking away on a NeXTcube workstation at CERN brought about the first web server, web browser, and website – and both the core concept and underlying source code were given away freely.
That latter point is, perhaps, why eyebrows were raised when Sir Tim announced he was to sell off that very same source code as an NFT – an offshoot of the cryptocurrency craze in which simple hyperlinks to hosted content are cryptographically signed and assigned to an "owner" who receives, as The Register put it, "bragging rights for stuff that's public."
South Korea's capital and largest metropolis has turned to AI for suicide detection and prevention on popular bridges along the prominent Han River, according to the system's developers at the Seoul Institute of Technology (SIT).
There are 27 bridges that cross the Han River, also known as the Hangang river, in the Seoul National Capital Area (divided into Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon). Many of the city's pedestrians walk on them every day. Unfortunately, only counting suicide attempts from Seoul bridges, researchers said there are an average of 486 people trying to end their lives in the Han's waters every year. This translates to a large amount of required rescue resources, which thankfully are quite successful, at 96 per cent. A more efficient spread of resources, however, would mean being able to potentially save more lives.
With the current setup, which according to an SIT document went live in February, the bridges are monitored by an array of CCTV screens at a control centre, with each small box depicting a different part of the bridge. An employee watches these screens for unusual behaviour that may require interference or a rescue worker. The AI collaboration between SIT and Seoul Fire and Disaster Headquarters is aimed at helping the technicians to better shift their focus by using machine learning to alert them to the scenes most likely to need intervention.
Boffins have laid claim to a "ground-breaking invention" which they say will make it considerably easier to recycle batteries from electric vehicles, laptops, and the like – an ultrasonic delaminator.
Electric vehicles may come with impressive green credentials, at least while they're being driven, but as any laptop owner knows batteries come with a finite lifespan. End-of-life EV batteries may find a second use as backing storage for power grids but there will come a time when they need to be recycled – and the current process is neither clean nor easy.
Enter ultrasonic delamination, a new technique for separating the materials in lithium-ion batteries for reuse, as discovered by researchers at the Faraday Institution, the University of Leicester, Swansea University, and the University of Birmingham.
Exoskeleton startup Auxivo is aiming to encourage the next generation of cyborgs with the launch of an educational kit dubbed the EduExo Pro, a complete exoskeleton for one arm.
Founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab at ETH Zürich, Auxivo's industrial products – the LiftSuit and CarrySuit, with the more powerful CarrySuit Advanced on the way – are designed to assist workers with lifting and carrying tasks.
Its EduExo range, by contrast, focuses less on functionality in the workplace and more on making the entire concept of exoskeletons mainstream through education. A crowdfunding campaign launched in May 2017 brought the original EduExo to life: a low-cost, 3D-printed partial exoskeleton driven by an Arduino microcontroller.
UK businesses must prepare for the retirement of the copper-based phone network that may cause devices to stop working.
Or so said BT-owned Openreach as it urged businesses to audit their systems for devices that use the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), which is scheduled to be switched off in December 2025. While some products may function normally after the transition, others won't.
In the case of any ambiguities, Openreach told customers to contact the vendor that manufactured their device and seek clarification. Addressing this issue ahead of the switchover may limit disruption, it said.
Column Five years ago I visited Shanghai, to see what the future might look like. I came back wondering how the rest of us had missed QR codes.
In Shanghai every billboard, poster, and newspaper advertisement bore QR codes, all linking off to their respective web sites. It felt simultaneously old-fashioned (QR codes had been around for years, but never taken off anywhere else) and startlingly new — a QR code makes an excellent partner to a smartphone’s camera. I returned home to Australia and a life without QR codes, where we relied on humans typing away at tiny glass keyboards to enter data.
COVID-19 changed all of that.
Sponsored Innovation in ICT is becoming a key driver of the global economy and its value is moving beyond the telecoms industry, the head of Huawei’s carrier business told MWC Barcelona 2021 this week.
Ongoing innovation in 5G, in particular, will bring more value to operators, the ICT industry, and the global economy, and will light up the future of every industry, Huawei executive director and president of carrier BG Ryan Ding told the audience.
Ding said the pandemic has created a new normal in which the digital economy is the driving force for the global economy. ICT infrastructure, as the cornerstone of the digital economy, is playing an increasingly important role. Ding said that the value of ICT now transcends the telecoms industry and has transformative implications for the global economy as a whole.
America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will now require details of any and all crashes involving self-driving cars from automakers within one day of them knowing about the accident.
“NHTSA’s core mission is safety,” Steven Cliff, acting administrator of the transportation watchdog, said this week. “By mandating crash reporting, the agency will have access to critical data that will help quickly identify safety issues that could emerge in these automated systems.”
The new rules [PDF] apply to vehicles classified between Level 2 and 5 autonomy. That means serious prangs involving everything from Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD-enabled cars to Waymo’s driverless taxi test fleets must be disclosed to the NHTSA on the double.
NASA has been set the ambitious targets of taking humans back to the Moon by 2024, then to later make the order-of-magnitude leap on to Mars. Even for the globally renowned space agency, it is a struggle.
According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) it still isn't quite sure how much this will cost, nor how long it will take to get the equipment ready. Hardware challenges abound, including testing an electric ion propulsion system for the orbiting capsule, dubbed Gateway.
On top of all that, there is the question of whether NASA has the right people in place to take on the Moon mission and the trip to the Red Planet beyond. Trying to come up with some answers is David Meza, senior data scientist within the agency’s people analytics group, who has begun employing graph database technologies to try and help.
Robinhood, the app that looks like the lovechild of a stock-trading platform and a video game, was hit with a record $70m bill by a US watchdog for causing investors to lose millions in total from misleading financial information and system outages.
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) ordered the software biz to cough up $57m in fines plus pay back $12.6m to customers to cover their losses with interest.
“The fine imposed in this matter, the highest ever levied by FINRA, reflects the scope and seriousness of Robinhood’s violations, including FINRA’s finding that Robinhood communicated false and misleading information to millions of its customers,” Jessica Hopper, the head of FINRA’s Department of Enforcement, said in a statement.
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