This story has expired from The Register's archive. You can now find it at its original location on the Forbes.com website: http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/05/19/cx_de_0519ruling.html?partner=theregister.
This story has expired from The Register's archive. You can now find it at its original location on the Forbes.com website: http://www.forbes.com/technology/2005/05/19/cx_de_0519ruling.html?partner=theregister.
Analysis Here's something that should raise eyebrows in the datacenter world: Facebook parent company Meta has hired a veteran networking chip engineer from Intel to lead silicon design efforts in the internet giant's infrastructure hardware engineering group.
Jon Dama started as director of silicon in May for Meta's infrastructure hardware group, a role that has him "responsible for several design teams innovating the datacenter for scale," according to his LinkedIn profile. In a blurb, Dama indicated that a team is already in place at Meta, and he hopes to "scale the next several doublings of data processing" with them.
Though we couldn't confirm it, we think it's likely that Dama is reporting to Alexis Bjorlin, Meta's vice president of infrastructure hardware who previously worked with Dama when she was general manager of Intel's Connectivity group before serving a two-year stint at Broadcom.
Growing demand for lithium for batteries means the sector will need $42 billion of investment to meet the anticipated level of orders by the end of the decade, according to a report.
Lithium is used in batteries that power smartphones and laptops, but there is also rising use in electric vehicles which is putting additional pressure on supplies.
The report, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, predicts that demand will reach 2.4 million tons of lithium carbonate equivalent by 2030, roughly four times the 600,000 tons of lithium forecast to be produced this year.
Autonomous cars may be further away than believed. Testing of three leading systems found they hit a third of cyclists, and failed to avoid any oncoming cars.
The tests [PDF] performed by the American Automobile Association (AAA) looked at three vehicles: a 2021 Hyundai Santa Fe with Highway Driving Assist; a 2021 Subaru Forester with EyeSight; and a 2020 Tesla Model 3 with Autopilot.
According to the AAA, all three systems represent the second of five autonomous driving levels, which require drivers to maintain alertness at all times to seize control from the computer when needed. There are no semi-autonomous cars generally available to the public that are able to operate above level two.
Kubecon Veeam acquisition Kasten kicked off this year's Kubecon with an updated version of its K10 product, aimed at securing the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.
Now known as "Kasten by Veeam", the company told the Valencia-based conference that version 5 of the K10 Kubernetes backup and data protection suite includes extra ransomware defenses.
K10 has received a number of updates since Kasten's acquisition by Veeam. Version 4.5 added coverage for platforms including Kafka, Cassandra, and the K3s Kubernetes distribution.
Spanish financial giant Santander has migrated 80 percent of its core banking IT infrastructure to the cloud as part of its $20.8 billion (€20 billion ) modernization programme, with the help of in-house software created by resident developers.
Readers hoping for a tale of disaster and woe may be sorely disappointed as the bank seems to have made steady progress in the past year compared to April 2021 when some 60 percent of its infrastructure was delivered off-premise.
The $48.3 billion (€46.4 billion) revenue financing giant has a presence across Europe, South America, Asia and North America. It made $3.17 billion (€3.053 billion) of its attributable profit of $8.44 billion (€8.124 billion) in the US last year, it said in its 2021 fy results.
Updated Last week Elon Musk hit pause on his Twitter acquisition over the platform's "less than 5 percent" bot figure.
The Register asked the microblogging website how it made the estimate and was stonewalled, but in ensuing discussions over the weekend, Musk blurted out that the sample size was 100 accounts.
One Musk fan asked how the userbase might help uncover the "real percentage" of fake accounts and was told:
The next version of the standard Python interpreter, CPython, is expected in October. It will include significant performance improvements and support for running inside the browser.
Last week, the first Python language summit since 2019 took place in Salt Lake City. At the event, the language's development team announced various changes for the forthcoming version of the language, as well as its near future. The Reg has covered some future improvements before, and as they get closer, details are becoming clear, as well as what's coming in Python 3.12.
There are multiple editions of Python out there, including interpreters for the JVM and .NET CLR, as well as compilers, but the core implementation of the language is the CPython interpreter. This has some well-known limitations, including the Global Interpreter Lock or GIL, which prevents the language from taking full advantage of multicore processors.
The EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) is meeting in Paris today to discuss coordinated approaches to global supply chain issues.
This is only the second meeting of the TTC, the agenda for which was prepared in February. That highlighted a number of priorities, including securing supply chains, technological cooperation, the coordination of measures to combat distorting practices, and approaches to the decarbonization of trade.
According to a White House pre-briefing for US reporters, the EU and US are set to announce joint approaches on technical discussions to international standard-setting bodies, an early warning system to better predict and address potential semiconductor supply chain disruptions, and a transatlantic approach to semiconductor investments aimed at ensuring security of supply.
In brief Facial recognition bans passed by US cities are being overturned as law enforcement and lobbyist groups pressure local governments to tackle rising crime rates.
In July, the state of Virginia will scrap its ban on the controversial technology after less than a year. California and New Orleans may follow suit, Reuters first reported. Vermont adjusted its bill to allow police to use facial recognition software in child sex abuse investigations.
Elsewhere, efforts are under way in New York, Colorado, and Indiana to prevent bills banning facial recognition from passing. It's not clear if some existing vetoes set to expire, like the one in California, will be renewed. Around two dozen US state or local governments passed laws prohibiting facial recognition from 2019 to 2021. Police, however, believe the tool is useful in identifying suspects and can help solve cases especially in places where crime rates have risen.
Opinion Interviews with chip company CEOs are invariably enlightening. On top of the usual market-related subjects of success and failure, revenues and competition, plans and pitfalls, the highly paid victim knows that there's a large audience of unusually competent critics eager for technical details. That's you.
Take The Register's latest interview with RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond. It moved smartly through the gears on Intel's recent Platinum Membership of the open ISA consortium ("they're not too worried about their x86 business"), the interest from autocratic regimes (roughly "there are no rules, if some come up we'll stick by them"), and what RISC-V's 2022 will look like. Laptops. Thousand-core AI chips. Google hyperscalers. Edge. The plan seems to be to do in five years what took Arm 20.
RISC-V may not be an existential risk to Intel, but Arm had better watch it.
Interview In a month that has seen nearly a fifth wiped from his company's share price, Bill McDermott is remarkably cheerful.
"I see growth everywhere," ServiceNow's CEO tells The Register.
For context, it is not just ServiceNow that is getting a rocky ride. Some estimates suggest Big Tech stock has lost $1 trillion in value in the last week, with all the big players down.
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022