In a groundbreaking move, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE have come together to announce the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA). From a report: The goal of this new collaborative trade association is to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free enterprise Linux source code."

The inception of OpenELA is a direct response to Red Hat's recent alterations to RHEL source code availability. This new Delaware 501(c)(6) US nonprofit association will provide an open process for organizations to access source code. This will enable it to build RHEL-compatible distributions. The initiative underscores the importance of community-driven source code, which serves as a foundation for creating compatible distributions.

Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of Red Hat Core Platforms, sparked this when he announced Red Hat would be changing how users can access RHEL's source code. For the non-Hatters among you, Core Platforms is the division in charge of RHEL. McGrath wrote, "CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal."

This made it much more difficult for RHEL clone vendors, such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux, to create perfect RHEL variant distributions. AlmaLinux elected to try to work with Red Hat's new source code rules. Oracle restarted its old fighting ways with IBM/Red Hat; SUSE announced an RHEL-compatible distro fork plan; and Rocky Linux found new ways to obtain RHEL code. Now the last two, along with CIQ, which started Rocky Linux, have joined forces.

In February of 1994 Jon "maddog" Hall interviewed a young Linus Torvalds (then just 24). Nearly three decades later — as Hall approaches his 73rd birthday — he's shared a long essay looking back, but also assessing today's controversy about Red Hat's licensing of RHEL. A (slightly- condensed] excerpt: [O]ver time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the "bug-for-bug" compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution. This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work. This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded. So recently Red Hat/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers. Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL.

Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! "

Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...]

I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started.

My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...]

I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business.

However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).

Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL.

For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address.
Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013.

Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.

Slashdot reader AndrewZX quotes Ars Technica: Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they're dinosaurs, they're T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It's estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They're used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we'll look at the IBM mainframe computer -- what it is, how it works, and why it's still going strong after over 50 years.
"Today's mainframe can have up to 240 server-grade CPUs, 40TB of error-correcting RAM, and many petabytes of redundant flash-based secondary storage. They're designed to process large amounts of critical data while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime -- that's a bit over five minutes' worth of outage per year..."

"RAM, CPUs, and disks are all hot-swappable, so if a component fails, it can be pulled and replaced without requiring the mainframe to be powered down."

SiliconANGLE reports that Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources "has sparked outrage in some circles," but observers contacted by the publication "were mostly sympathetic" to Red Hat's position: Most acknowledged that the company's explanation that it couldn't keep funding the development of software that competitors then gave away for free was reasonable. But not Bill Ottman, founder and chief executive officer of Minds Inc., a social network built on open-source code." They are completely embarrassing themselves by betraying the community and their own model," he said. "Their best bet is to immediately reverse course and apologize."

Others were more inclined to agree with Josh Amishav, founder and CEO of data breach monitoring firm Breachsense. "If we want commercial entities to support our underlying operating system, they need to find ways to be profitable," he said. "If you disagree with Red Hat's policy change, then there are plenty of excellent Linux alternatives to choose from."

Some saw the move as a consequence of pressure inside IBM to justify the $34 billion it paid to buy Red Hat nearly five years ago. "Red Hat has to change to protect its business," said Joe Brockmeier, head of community at open-source developer Percona LLC and a former Red Hat employee. "They seem to have tried to find the least harmful way to do that. It's a necessary decision, although one that could have been communicated a little better." Brockmeier agreed with Red Hat's argument that it can't continue to fund innovations and give them away for free. "Copying a company's product isn't what open source is about," he said. "The code is what allows every company and individual to run, study, modify and distribute work based on a project. The members of the community can do those things; what they are finding harder to do is to 'clone' RHEL."

Not everyone buys the argument that IBM needed to wring more revenue out of its subsidiary. "Considering IBM's gross profit for [fiscal 2022] was $32.863 billion, this certainly wasn't a make-or-break decision for IBM's profitability," said Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer at Komodo, developer of a cryptocurrency and blockchain platform. And there's some risk to Red Hat in closing down source code access. "By totally removing free and open-source software, Red Hat may not necessarily increase revenues that much while alienating its large community of open-source developers," Stadelmann said.

There's evidence that's already happening, at least for now. Red Hat's action has both energized and elevated the profiles of some open-source alternatives.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: I'd been waiting for Oracle to throw its hat into the ring for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Linux source-code fight. I knew it was only a matter of time. On July 10, Oracle's Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, and Wim Coekaerts, head of Oracle Linux development, declared: "IBM's actions are not in your best interest. By killing CentOS as a RHEL alternative and attacking AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, IBM is eliminating one way your customers save money and make a larger share of their wallet available to you."

In fact, Oracle now presents itself as an open-source Linux champion: "Oracle has always made Oracle Linux binaries and source freely available to all. We do not have subscription agreements that interfere with a subscriber's rights to redistribute Oracle Linux. On the other hand, IBM subscription agreements specify that you're in breach if you use those subscription services to exercise your GPLv2 rights." As of June 21, IBM no longer publicly releases RHEL source code -- in short, the gloves are off, and the fight's on. But this is also just the latest move in a fight that's older than many of you. [...]

Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of core platforms, explained why Red Hat would no longer be releasing RHEL's code, but only CentOS Stream's code, because "thousands of [Red Hat] people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time ... We have to pay the people to do that work." That sentiment is certainly true. But I also feel that Oracle takes the worst possible spin, with Screven and Coekaerts commenting: "IBM doesn't want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion."

So, what will Oracle do now? For starters, Oracle Linux will continue to be RHEL-compatible through RHEL 9.2. After that release -- and without access to the published RHEL source code -- there are no guarantees. But Screven and Coekaerts suggest that "if an incompatibility does affect a customer or ISV, Oracle will work to remediate the problem." As for Oracle Linux's code: "Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community, and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling a past Computer History Museum look at the evolution of programming languages, Doug Meil ponders the age-old question of Why Are There So Many Programming Languages? in a new Communications of the ACM blog post.

"It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964)," Meil writes, "which was aiming to be that 'one good programming language.' The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. [Meil expands on this thought in Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language.] Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's."

One of PL/I's biggest fans was Digital Research Inc. (DRI) founder Gary Kildall, who crafted the PL/I-inspired PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) in 1973 for Intel. But IBM priced PL/I higher than the languages it sought to replace, contributing to PL/I's failure to gain traction. (Along the lines of how IBM's deal with Microsoft gave rise to a price disparity that was the undoing of Kildall's CP/M OS, bundled with every PC in a 'non-royalty' deal. Windows was priced at $40 while CP/M was offered 'a la carte' at $240.) As a comp.lang.pl1 poster explained in 2006, "The truth of the matter is that Gresham's Law: 'Bad money drives out good' or Ruskin's principle: 'The hoi polloi always prefer an inferior, cheap product over a superior, more expensive one' are what govern here."

CNBC reports: On Friday, the Nasdaq wrapped up the first six months of the year with a 1.5% rally, bringing its gains so far for 2023 to 32%. That's the sharpest first-half jump in the tech-heavy index since 1983, when the Nasdaq rose 37%...

[M]omentum is always a driver when it comes to tech, and investors are notoriously fearful of missing out, even if they simultaneously worry about frothy valuations. Coming off a miserable 2022, in which the Nasdaq lost one-third of its value, the big story was cost-cutting and efficiency. Mass layoffs at Alphabet, Meta and Amazon as well as at numerous smaller companies paved the way for a rebound in earnings and a more realistic outlook for growth. Meta and Tesla, which both got hammered last year, have more than doubled in value so far in 2023. Alphabet is up 36% after dropping 39% in 2022... Nvidia shares soared 190% in the first half, lifting the 30-year-old company's market cap past $1 trillion.

"I think you're going to continue to see tech dominate because we're still all abuzz about AI," said Bryn Talkington, managing partner at Requisite Capital Management, in an interview with CNBC's "Closing Bell" on Thursday. Talkington, whose firm holds Nvidia shares, said the chipmaker has a unique story, and that its growth is not shared across the industry. Rather, large companies working on AI have to spend heavily on Nvidia's technology. "Nvidia not only owns the shovels and axes of this AI goldrush," Talkington said. "They actually are the only hardware store in town."

Apple hasn't seen gains quite so dramatic, but the stock is still up 50% this year, trading at a record and pushing the iPhone maker to a $3 trillion market cap.
The article points out that the last time Nasdaq stocks had a better first-half of the year, "Apple was touting its Lisa desktop computer, IBM was the most-valuable tech company in the U.S. and Mark Zuckerberg hadn't been born."

Cyberattacks on US hospitals are on the rise, adding a layer of financial pressure onto an industry still struggling to recover from the pandemic. From a report: Health facilities have been hit with 226 digital incursions affecting 36 million people this year, on track to be more widespread than 2022 attacks, according to John Riggi, the national advisor for cybersecurity and risk at the American Hospital Association. Cyber raids on hospitals more than tripled in the past five years and have become more sophisticated, just when hospitals are coping with higher costs for labor and supplies and grappling with staff shortages. The industry in 2022 had what Moody's Investors Service analyst Matthew Cahill called "arguably the worst year in health-care history" for financial performance. "There's really no wiggle room for hospitals to deal with this," Cahill said in an interview. He said cyber risk has contributed to downgrades, including one at Missouri's Capital Region Medical Center last year following a breach.

Health-care facilities are attractive targets for cybercriminals because they hold ample personal data on patients, Matt Fabian and Lisa Washburn of Municipal Market Analytics wrote in a research note. Staffing shortages and wide use of third-party technology make the sector particularly vulnerable. The problem is particularly dire at smaller and rural hospitals, which have more financial distress and tend to use older technology. In an April note, Moody's cited an IBM survey that showed hospitals for 12 years have had the highest average cyberattack cost per industry, with $10.1 million in 2022. The AHA's Riggi said that while most hospitals have insurance, the cost to recover from attacks could be up to 10 times what insurance pays out.

Because of their intrinsic ability to consider many possibilities at once, quantum computers do not have to be very large to tackle certain prickly problems of computation, and on Wednesday, IBM researchers announced that they had devised a method to manage the unreliability in a way that would lead to reliable, useful answers. From a report: "What IBM showed here is really an amazingly important step in that direction of making progress towards serious quantum algorithmic design," said Dorit Aharonov, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was not involved with the research. While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved "quantum supremacy" -- a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one -- IBM's researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named. "We're entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility," said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. "The era of utility." A team of IBM scientists who work for Dr. Gambetta described their results in a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

[...] The IBM researchers in the new study performed a different task, one that interests physicists. They used a quantum processor with 127 qubits to simulate the behavior of 127 atom-scale bar magnets -- tiny enough to be governed by the spooky rules of quantum mechanics -- in a magnetic field. That is a simple system known as the Ising model, which is often used to study magnetism. This problem is too complex for a precise answer to be calculated even on the largest, fastest supercomputers. On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable -- fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors -- but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly.

Intel has announced Intel One Mono, a new font catering to "the needs of developers" with an "expressive" monospace for clarity and legibility" It's easier to read, and available for free, with an open-source font license.

Identifying the typographically underserved low-vision developer audience, Frere-Jones Type designed the Intel One Mono typeface in partnership with the Intel Brand Team and VMLY&R, for maximum legibility to address developers' fatigue and eyestrain and reduce coding errors. A panel of low-vision and legally blind developers provided feedback at each stage of design.
The Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu calls the new font "pretty decent," adding that "Between IBM Plex Mono, Hack, Fira Code, and JetBrains Mono I think we Linux users are spoilt for choice when it comes to open-source monospace fonts that look good and work great.

"Still, there's always room for more, right...?" Better yet, it's not only free to download and use but free to edit, and free to redistribute... Overall, I think Intel One Mono looks great, especially in a text editor (GUI or CLI). There's a noticeable upper and lower margin to the font that in dense text situations allows text to breathe, but in some terminal tools, like Neofetch, the gaps can seem a bit too happy.
The Intel One Mono repository on GitHub includes instructions for activating the font in VSCode and Sublime Text, and lists some extra features accessible in some applications and via CSS:

• There is an option for a raised colon, either applied contextually between numbers or activated generally.

• Superior/superscript and inferior/subscript figures are included via their Unicode codepoints, or you can produce them from the default figures via the sups (Superscript), subs (Subscript), and si (Scientific Inferior) features.

• Fraction numerals are similarly available via the numr (Numerator) and dnom (Denominator) features. A set of premade fractions is also available in the fonts.

The Washington Post writes that "Some economists predict artificial intelligence technology like ChatGPT could replace hundreds of millions of jobs, in a cataclysmic reorganization of the workforce mirroring the industrial revolution.

"For some workers, this impact is already here." Those that write marketing and social media content are in the first wave of people being replaced with tools like chatbots, which are seemingly able to produce plausible alternatives to their work.

Experts say that even advanced AI doesn't match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality. "We're really in a crisis point," said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at University of California in Los Angeles specializing in digital labor. "[AI] is coming for the jobs that were supposed to be automation-proof..."

The technology's ability to churn out human-sounding prose puts highly paid knowledge workers in the crosshairs for replacement, experts said. "In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs," said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. "This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that ... require the most educational background." In March, Goldman Sachs predicted that 18 percent of work worldwide could be automated by AI, with white-collar workers such as lawyers at more risk than those in trades such as construction or maintenance. "Occupations for which a significant share of workers' time is spent outdoors or performing physical labor cannot be automated by AI," the report said...

Mollick said it's too early to gauge how disruptive AI will be to the workforce. He noted that jobs such as copywriting, document translation and transcription, and paralegal work are particularly at risk, since they have tasks that are easily done by chatbots. High-level legal analysis, creative writing or art may not be as easily replaceable, he said, because humans still outperform AI in those areas.
The article notes that one copywriter lost all 10 of his clients over the last four months — and though one later hired him back, he's now training to be a plumber.

IBM has announced its goal to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computing machine within the next 10 years in collaboration with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago. MIT Technology Review reports: Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years. IBM made the announcement on May 22 at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. The company will partner with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago in a $100 million dollar initiative to push quantum computing into the realm of full-scale operation, where the technology could potentially tackle pressing problems that no standard supercomputer can solve.

Or at least it can't solve them alone. The idea is that the 100,000 qubits will work alongside the best "classical" supercomputers to achieve new breakthroughs in drug discovery, fertilizer production, battery performance, and a host of other applications. "I call this quantum-centric supercomputing," IBM's VP of quantum, Jay Gambetta, told MIT Technology Review in an in-person interview in London last week. [...] IBM has already done proof-of-principle experiments (PDF) showing that integrated circuits based on "complementary metal oxide semiconductor" (CMOS) technology can be installed next to the cold qubits to control them with just tens of milliwatts. Beyond that, he admits, the technology required for quantum-centric supercomputing does not yet exist: that is why academic research is a vital part of the project.

The qubits will exist on a type of modular chip that is only just beginning to take shape in IBM labs. Modularity, essential when it will be impossible to put enough qubits on a single chip, requires interconnects that transfer quantum information between modules. IBM's "Kookaburra," a 1,386-qubit multichip processor with a quantum communication link, is under development and slated for release in 2025. Other necessary innovations are where the universities come in. Researchers at Tokyo and Chicago have already made significant strides in areas such as components and communication innovations that could be vital parts of the final product, Gambetta says. He thinks there will likely be many more industry-academic collaborations to come over the next decade. "We have to help the universities do what they do best," he says.

IBM and Google are giving $150 million for quantum-computing research at the University of Chicago and the University of Tokyo as the U.S. and Japan try to stay ahead of a fast-rising China. From a report: Quantum computers are a hot area of research because they could help solve problems that classical computers alone can't, such as modeling how a drug molecule interacts with the body's proteins or how batteries work at an atomic scale. China has invested heavily in quantum computing, which also has possible military applications in cryptology and materials for weapons. U.S. researchers said Chinese laboratories have shown progress recently -- often touted in state media -- and are competitive in some areas. However, quantum-computing specialists say more basic study is needed before anyone can be sure the technology delivers real-world benefits.

The U.S.-Japan partnership is an example of how scientific research with implications for security and economic growth is increasingly split between China and a U.S.-led camp that includes allies such as Japan and Western European nations. "We have to count on our allies more for primary research," said Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. ambassador to Japan. Until recently, he said, the U.S. was too lax in allowing Chinese students to work at American universities in advanced scientific fields. "We were funding them. We were not only funding them, we were training them, educating them to come back and compete against us," he said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, along with IBM chief privacy officer Christian Montgomery and NYU professor Gary Marcus, to testify about the dangers posed by generative artificial intelligence. Altman said he'd welcome legislation in the space and urged Congress to work with OpenAI and other companies in the field to figure out rules and guardrails. Axios reports: Altman argued that generative AI is different and requires a separate policy response. He called it a "tool" for users that cannot do full jobs on its own, merely tasks. Altman called for a government agency that would promulgate rules around licensing for certain tiers of AI systems "above a crucial threshold of capabilities." He said: "My worst fear is we cause significant harm to the world."

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it "historic" that a company was coming to Congress pleading for regulation. IBM's Montgomery said it was important to regulate risks, not tech itself. "This cannot be the era of move fast and break things," she said.

More than a decade ago engineers at AMD "began toying with a radical idea," remembers the New York Times. Instead of designing one big microprocessor, they "conceived of creating one from smaller chips that would be packaged tightly together to work like one electronic brain."

But with "diminishing returns" from Moore's Law, packaging smaller chips suddenly becomes more important. [Alternate URL here.] As much as 80% of microprocessors will be using these designs by 2027, according to an estimate from the market research firm Yole Group cited by the Times: The concept, sometimes called chiplets, caught on in a big way, with AMD, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, IBM and Intel introducing such products. Chiplets rapidly gained traction because smaller chips are cheaper to make, while bundles of them can top the performance of any single slice of silicon. The strategy, based on advanced packaging technology, has since become an essential tool to enabling progress in semiconductors. And it represents one of the biggest shifts in years for an industry that drives innovations in fields like artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and military hardware. "Packaging is where the action is going to be," said Subramanian Iyer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped pioneer the chiplet concept. "It's happening because there is actually no other way."

The catch is that such packaging, like making chips themselves, is overwhelmingly dominated by companies in Asia. Although the United States accounts for around 12 percent of global semiconductor production, American companies provide just 3 percent of chip packaging, according to IPC, a trade association. That issue has now landed chiplets in the middle of U.S. industrial policymaking. The CHIPS Act, a $52 billion subsidy package that passed last summer, was seen as President Biden's move to reinvigorate domestic chip making by providing money to build more sophisticated factories called "fabs." But part of it was also aimed at stoking advanced packaging factories in the United States to capture more of that essential process... The Commerce Department is now accepting applications for manufacturing grants from the CHIPS Act, including for chip packaging factories. It is also allocating funding to a research program specifically on advanced packaging...

Some chip packaging companies are moving quickly for the funding. One is Integra Technologies in Wichita, Kan., which announced plans for a $1.8 billion expansion there but said that was contingent on receiving federal subsidies. Amkor Technology, an Arizona packaging service that has most of its operations in Asia, also said it was talking to customers and government officials about a U.S. production presence... Packaging services still need others to supply the substrates that chiplets require to connect to circuit boards and one another... But the United States has no major makers of those substrates, which are primarily produced in Asia and evolved from technologies used in manufacturing circuit boards. Many U.S. companies have also left that business, another worry that industry groups hope will spur federal funding to help board suppliers start making substrates.

In March, Mr. Biden issued a determination that advanced packaging and domestic circuit board production were essential for national security, and announced $50 million in Defense Production Act funding for American and Canadian companies in those fields. Even with such subsidies, assembling all the elements required to reduce U.S. dependence on Asian companies "is a huge challenge," said Andreas Olofsson, who ran a Defense Department research effort in the field before founding a packaging start-up called Zero ASIC. "You don't have suppliers. You don't have a work force. You don't have equipment. You have to sort of start from scratch."

ZDNet reports that Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, recently noted rounds of tech-industry layoffs "in the name of cost-cutting." But then Zemlin added that "open source is countercyclical to these trends. The Linux Foundation itself, for instance, had its best first quarter ever."

As Hilary Carter, SVP of research and communications at the Linux Foundation, said in her keynote speech at Open Source Summit North America in Vancouver, Canada: "In spite of what the headlines are saying, the facts are 57% of organizations are adding workers this year." Carter was quoting figures from the Linux Foundation's latest job survey, which was released at the event.

Other research also points to brighter signs in tech employment trends. CompTIA's recent analysis of the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data suggests the tech unemployment rate climbed by just 2.3% in April. In fact, more organizations plan to increase their technical staff levels rather than decrease.

The demand for skilled tech talent remains strong, particularly in fast-developing areas, such as cloud and containers, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence and machine learning. So, what do these all areas of technology have in common? The answer is they're all heavily dependent on open source and Linux technologies.
While layoffs are happening at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, and even Red Hat, "the Linux Foundation found senior technical roles are seeing the biggest cuts," the article points out. "New hiring is focused on developers and IT managers." And companies are also spending more on training for existing technical staff, "driven by the fact that there aren't enough experts in hot technologies, such as Kubernetes and generative AI, to go around." Interestingly, a college degree is no longer seen as such a huge benefit. Businesses responding to the Linux Foundation's research felt upskilling (91%) and certifications (77%) are more important than a university education (58%) when it comes to addressing technology needs.

"A new experiment uses superconducting qubits to demonstrate that quantum mechanics violates what's called local realism," reports Ars Technica, "by allowing two objects to behave as a single quantum system no matter how large the separation between them." The experiment wasn't the first to show that local realism isn't how the Universe works — it's not even the first to do so with qubits. But it's the first to separate the qubits by enough distance to ensure that light isn't fast enough to travel between them while measurements are made. And it did so by cooling a 30-meter-long aluminum wire to just a few milliKelvin. Because the qubits are so easy to control, the experiment provides a new precision to these sorts of measurements.

And the hardware setup may be essential for future quantum computing efforts... Everyone working with superconducting qubits says that we will ultimately need to integrate thousands of them into a single quantum computer. Unfortunately, each of these qubits requires a considerable amount of space on a chip, meaning it gets difficult to make chips with more than a few hundred of them. So major players like Google and IBM ultimately plan to link multiple chips into a single computer (something the startup Rigetti is already doing).

For tens of thousands of qubits, however, we're almost certainly going to need so many chips that it gets difficult to keep them all in a single bit of cooling hardware. This means we're going to eventually want to link chips in different refrigeration systems — exactly what was demonstrated here. So this is an important demonstration that we can, in fact, link qubits across these sorts of systems.
Or, as long-time slashdot reader nounderscores puts it, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.

"The Qbits that Simon Storz et al at ETH Zurich entangled at the ends of 30m of cryogenically chilled wire not only put the last nail into the coffin of hidden variable theory by being so far apart, they also allow quantum computing to scale to multiple refrigeration systems."

IBM on Tuesday launched watsonx, a new artificial intelligence and data platform to help companies integrate AI in their business. From a report: The new AI platform launch comes over a decade after IBM's software called Watson got attention for winning the game show Jeopardy. IBM at the time said Watson could "learn" and process human language. But Watson's high cost at the time made it a challenge for companies to use, according to Reuters reporting. Fast forward a decade, chatbot ChatGPT's overnight success is making AI adoption at companies a focus, and IBM is looking to grab new business. This time, the lower cost of implementing the large language AI models means the chances of success are high, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Reuters ahead of the company's annual Think conference.

"When something becomes 100 times cheaper, it really sets up an attraction that's very, very different," said Krishna. "The first barrier to create the model is high, but once you've done that, to adapt that model for a hundred or a thousand different tasks is very easy and can be done by a non-expert." Krishna said AI could reduce certain back office jobs at IBM in the coming years. "That doesn't mean the total employment decreases," he said about some media reports talking about IBM pausing hiring for thousands of jobs that AI could replace. "That gives the ability to plow a lot more investment into value-creating activities...We hired more people than were let go because we're hiring into areas where there is a lot more demand from our clients."

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said he's not forcing any of the company's remote workers to come into the office just yet, but warns those who don't "would be hard-pressed to get promoted, especially into managerial roles," reports Bloomberg. From the report: "Being a people manager when you're remote is just tough because if you're managing people, you need to be able to see them once in a while," he said in an interview Monday in New York. "It doesn't need to be every minute. You don't need to function under those old 'Everybody's under my eye' kind of rules, but at least sometimes." "It seems to me that we work better when we are together in person," said Krishna, who described the company's return-to-office policy as "we encourage you to come in, we expect you to come in, we want you to come in." Three days a week is the number they encourage, he said.

While about 80% of IBM's employees work from home at least some of the time, Krishna said remote arrangements are best suited for specific "individual contributor" roles like customer service or software programmers. "In the short term you probably can be equally productive, but your career does suffer," he said. "Moving from there to another role is probably less likely because nobody's observing them in another context. It will be tougher. Not impossible, but probably a lot tougher."

Krishna, who became CEO right after the pandemic hit in April 2020, said people make a choice to work remotely, but it need not be "a forever choice -- it could be a choice based on convenience or circumstance." Remote workers, he said, don't learn how to do things like deal with a difficult client, or how to make trade-offs when designing a new product. "I don't understand how to do all that remotely," he said.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg that it expects to pause hiring for roles as roughly 7,800 jobs could be replaced by AI in the coming years. Reuters reports: Hiring specifically in back-office functions such as human resources will be suspended or slowed, Krishna said, adding that 30% of non-customer-facing roles could be replaced by AI and automations in five years. The reduction could include not replacing roles vacated by attrition, the PC-maker told the publication.