According to the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia's French offices were raided this week on suspicion the chipmaker engaged in anticompetitive practices. Reuters reports: The French competition authority, which disclosed the dawn raid on Wednesday, did not say what practices it was investigating or which company it had targeted, beyond saying it was in the "graphics cards sector." The French competition authority said that its operation this week followed a broader inquiry into the cloud-computing sector. The broader inquiry revolves around concerns that cloud-computing companies could use their access to computing power to exclude smaller competitors.

This week's operation had targeted Nvidia, which is the world's largest maker of chips used both for artificial intelligence and for computer graphics, the WSJ report added, citing people familiar with the raid. Chips originally made for computer graphics are suited for AI-related computing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Burkey Belser, a graphic designer who created the ubiquitous nutrition facts label -- a stark rectangle listing calories, fat, sodium and other content information -- that adorns the packaging of nearly every digestible product in grocery stores, died Sept. 25 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 76. The cause was bladder cancer, said his wife Donna Greenfield, with whom he founded the Washington, D.C., design firm Greenfield/Belser.

Mr. Belser's nutrition facts label -- rendered in bold and light Helvetica type -- was celebrated as a triumph of public health and graphic design when it debuted in 1994 following passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. Although some products had previously included nutritional information, there was no set standard, and the information was of little public health value in helping consumers make better food choices. The new law, drafted as obesity and other diet-related illnesses were surging, required mandatory food labels with nutrients presented in the context of a healthy 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.

Writing in a journal published by the Professional Association for Design, Massimo Vignelli, the renowned Italian designer, called Mr. Belser's creation a "clean testimonial of civilization, a statement of social responsibility, and a masterpiece of graphic design." The Food and Drug Administration chose Mr. Belser to design the nutrition label following his success creating the black and yellow energy guide label for appliances. Once dubbed the "Steve Jobs of information design," Mr. Belser's fondness for exceedingly simple design perfectly suited him for a job that required stripping down nutritional facts to the bare essentials. The report proceeds to tell the tale of how Mr. Belser worked pro bono with his team to labor through three dozen iterations of the label, ultimately settling on "simplicity in itself."

"There's a harmony about it, and the presentation has no extraneous components to it," Belser told The Washington Post. "The words are left and right justified, which gave it a kind of balance. There was no grammatical punctuation like commas or periods or parentheses that would slow the reader down."

He compared the finished product -- which he later adapted to over-the-counter drugs -- to the Apple iPod. "The detail is so important that you wouldn't even notice it and if you didn't notice it's a sign that it succeeded," he said. "I don't know if anybody's heart beats faster when they see nutrition facts, but they sense a pleasure that they get the information they need."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPUs from all six of the major suppliers are vulnerable to a newly discovered attack that allows malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites, researchers have demonstrated in a paper (PDF) published Tuesday. The cross-origin attack allows a malicious website from one domain -- say, example.com -- to effectively read the pixels displayed by a website from example.org, or another different domain. Attackers can then reconstruct them in a way that allows them to view the words or images displayed by the latter site. This leakage violates a critical security principle that forms one of the most fundamental security boundaries safeguarding the Internet. Known as the same origin policy, it mandates that content hosted on one website domain be isolated from all other website domains. [...]

GPU.zip works only when the malicious attacker website is loaded into Chrome or Edge. The reason: For the attack to work, the browser must:

1. allow cross-origin iframes to be loaded with cookies
2. allow rendering SVG filters on iframes and
3. delegate rendering tasks to the GPU

For now, GPU.zip is more of a curiosity than a real threat, but that assumes that Web developers properly restrict sensitive pages from being embedded by cross-origin websites. End users who want to check if a page has such restrictions in place should look for the X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy headers in the source. "This is impactful research on how hardware works," a Google representative said in a statement. "Widely adopted headers can prevent sites from being embedded, which prevents this attack, and sites using the default SameSite=Lax cookie behavior receive significant mitigation against personalized data being leaked. These protections, along with the difficulty and time required to exploit this behavior, significantly mitigate the threat to everyday users. We are in communication and are actively engaging with the reporting researchers. We are always looking to further improve protections for Chrome users."

An Intel representative, meanwhile, said that the chipmaker has "assessed the researcher findings that were provided and determined the root cause is not in our GPUs but in third-party software." A Qualcomm representative said "the issue isn't in our threat model as it more directly affects the browser and can be resolved by the browser application if warranted, so no changes are currently planned." Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and ARM didn't comment on the findings.

An informational write-up of the findings can be found here.

Mark Tyson writes via Tom's Hardware: A future version of [Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology] is likely to include full neural rendering, hinted Bryan Catanzaro, a Nvidia VP of Applied Deep Learning Research. In a round table discussion organized by Digital Foundry (video), various video game industry experts talked about the future of AI in the business. During the discussion, Nvidia's Catanzaro raised a few eyebrows with his openness to predict some key features of a hypothetical "DLSS 10." [...]

We've seen significant developments in Nvidia's DLSS technology over the years. First launched with the RTX 20-series GPUs, many wondered about the true value of technologies like the Tensor cores being included in gaming GPUs. The first ray tracing games, and the first version of DLSS, were of questionable merit. However, DLSS 2.X improved the tech and made it more useful, leading to it being more widely utilized -- and copied, first via FSR2 and later with XeSS. DLSS 3 debuted with the RTX 40-series graphics cards, adding Frame Generation technology. With 4x upscaling and frame generation, neural rendering potentially allows a game to only fully render 1/8 (12.5%) of the pixels. Most recently, DLSS 3.5 offered improved denoising algorithms for ray tracing games with the introduction of Ray Reconstruction technology.

The above timeline raises questions about where Nvidia might go next with future versions of DLSS. And of course, "Deep Learning Super Sampling" no longer really applies, as the last two additions have targeted other aspects of rendering. Digital Foundry asked that question to the group: "Where do you see DLSS in the future? What other problem areas could machine learning tackle in a good way?" Bryan Catanzaro immediately brought up the topic of full neural rendering. This idea isn't quite as far out as it may seem. Catanzaro reminded the panel that, at the NeurIPS conference in 2018, Nvidia researchers showed an open-world demo of a world being rendered in real-time using a neural network. During that demo the UE4 game engine provided data about what objects were in a scene, where they were, and so on, and the neural rendering provided all the on-screen graphics. "DLSS 10 (in the far far future) is going to be a completely neural rendering system," Catanzaro added. The result will be "more immersive and more beautiful" games than most can imagine today.

"Huawei is emulating Apple in developing the processors that power its latest smartphone," reports Ars Technica, "a breakthrough that will help the Chinese company to reduce its reliance on foreign technology as it confronts US sanctions." Analysis of the main chip inside the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which launched at the end of last month and immediately sold out, reveals that Huawei has joined the elite group of Big Tech companies capable of designing their own semiconductors. Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro's "system on a chip" (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones. The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei's own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate's development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer look at the main chip...

While Huawei is still licensing Arm's basic designs, its own HiSilicon chip design business has improved on them to build its own processor cores on the Mate's Kirin 9000S SoC. This will give it the flexibility needed to produce high-end smartphones despite the constraints of US export controls, said analysts and industry insiders. The Kirin 9000S also features a graphics processing unit and neural processing unit developed by HiSilicon. Its predecessor, the Kirin 9000 SoC, had relied completely on Arm for its CPUs and GPU...

Huawei was able to produce its own phone processors by adapting CPU core designs that were originally used in its data center servers, according to people with direct knowledge of its development. The strategy resembles Apple's moves to turn its iPhone processors into chips capable of powering its Mac computers — but in reverse. "No one ever did this before," said analyst Brady Wang of Counterpoint Research of Huawei's server-to-phone innovation...

Various testing teams, including Geekerwan's, have found that Huawei's semiconductor capabilities are one to two years behind those of chips made by the US's Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipmaker. Huawei's chips also consume more power than its competitors', according to measurements, and can cause the phone to heat up.
Reuters reports that "The United States has no evidence that Huawei can produce smartphones with advanced chips in large volumes, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Tuesday."

But meanwhile, a Huawei Technologies unit "is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras, in a fresh sign the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of U.S. export controls, two sources briefed on the unit's efforts said." The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company's HiSilicon chip design unit started this year, according to one of the sources, and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said at least some of the customers were Chinese...

"These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors," said the source familiar with the surveillance camera industry's supply chain, adding that HiSilicon's return would shake up the market... Before the U.S. export controls, it was the dominant chip supplier to the surveillance camera sector, with brokerage Southwest Securities estimating its global share in 2018 at 60%. By 2021, HiSilicon's global market share plummeted to just 3.9%, according to data from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan...

TechInsights analyst Dan Hutcheson said their analysis of the Mate 60 Pro and other components such as its radio frequency power chip also suggested that Huawei had access to sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) tools that "they are not supposed to have".

"We don't know if they got them illicitly, or more probably the Chinese developed their own EDA tools," he said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Intel has taken the wraps off its forthcoming next-gen Meteor Lake processors following its successful 12th (Alder Lake) and 13th Gen (Raptor Lake) processors with its new E- and P-core design. WindowsCentral: Its first chip built on the Intel 4 process node with Foveros 3D packaging, Intel calls Meteor Lake its "biggest architectural shift in 40 years" and that it will "lay the foundation for innovations for the PC," as noted by Tim Wilson, VP, Design and Engineering Group and GM, SoC Design at Intel. Meteor Lake is Intel's next-gen CPU and the first built on the Intel 4 process, which is part of Intel's long-term goal of "5 nodes in 4 years." Previous generation naming would suggest it would be called Intel 14th Gen, but Intel is moving away from its older naming schema. Some reports have suggested Meteor Lake may reflect a reboot in generation numbers. Current rumors suggest Intel 14th Gen is simply a refresh of Raptor Lake, although Meteor Lake may play a part in that for laptops.

Meteor Lake processors are expected to ship in late 2023 or early 2024 in new laptops with thinner and lighter designs, better cooling, and much better battery life. The significant change for Meteor Lake is what Intel calls disaggregation, which means the breaking down of core components into separate 'tiles' on the SoC. Meteor Lake features four Tiles, including:
Compute Tile: New E-core and P-core microarchitecture, built on Intel 4 process technology
SoC Tile: Low power island E-cores, NPU, Wi-Fi 6E/7, native HDMI 2.1 and 8K HDR AV1 support
Graphics Tile: Integrated Intel Arc architecture
IO Tile: Thunderbolt 4 (and presumably Thunderbolt 5) and PCIe Gen5

Earlier this year, Singapore-based embedded security researcher yeokm1 built a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS.

Now they're back with a new project: HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter.

Two years ago, I learned of an open-source project called Graphics Gremlin by Eric Schlaepfer who runs the website Tubetime.us. It is an 8-bit ISA graphics card that supports display standards like Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) and Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA). CGA and MDA are display standards used by older IBM(-compatible) PCs in the 1980s. The frequencies and connectors used by CGA and MDA are no longer supported by modern monitors hence it is difficult for older PCs of the 1980s era to have modern displays connected to them without external adapters. Graphics Gremline addresses this problem by using techniques like scan doubling (for CGA) and increasing the vertical refresh rate (for MDA) then outputing to a relatively newer but still old VGA port.

I fabricated and assembled the design then installed it into my IBM5155... I decided to modify the Graphics Gremlin design so it can connect natively to an external HDMI monitor and service the internal Composite-based CRT at the same time.
The post concludes triumphantly with a photo of their IBM 5155 running the CGA Compatibility Tester displaying the color palette.

Dennis Austin, the principal software developer of PowerPoint, passed away from lung cancer on Sept. 1. He was 76. The Washington Post reports: Released in 1987 by Forethought, a small software firm, PowerPoint was the digital successor to overhead projectors, transforming the labor-intensive process of creating slides -- a task typically assigned to design departments or outsourced -- to one where any employee with a computer could point, click and rearrange information with a mouse. "Our users were familiar with computers, but probably not graphics software," Mr. Austin wrote in an unpublished history of the software's development. "They were highly motivated to look their best in front of others, but they weren't savvy in graphics design."

Working alongside Robert Gaskins, the Forethought executive who conceived the software, it was Mr. Austin's job as the software engineer to make PowerPoint (originally called Presenter) easy to operate. He accomplished this with a "direct-manipulation interface," he wrote, meaning that "what you are editing looks exactly like the final product." Originally targeted for Macintosh computers, which had a graphical interface, Presenter included ways for users to incorporate graphics, clip art and multiple fonts. In addition, the slides could be uniform with graphic borders, corporate logos and slide numbers. The goal, Mr. Austin wrote, was "to create presentations -- not simply slides."

In his book "Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint" (2012), Gaskins wrote that "Dennis came up with at least half of the major design ideas," and was "completely responsible for the fluid performance and the polished finish of the implementation." "It's a good bet," Gaskins added, "that if Dennis had not been the person designing PowerPoint, no one would ever have heard of it."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Historically, video game preservation efforts usually cover two types of games. The most common are very old or "retro" games from the 16-bit era or earlier, which are trapped on cartridges until they're liberated via downloadable ROMs. The other are games that rely on a live service, like Enter the Matrix's now unplugged servers or whatever games you can only get by downloading them via Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel, which shut down in 2019. But time keeps marching on and a more recent era of games now needs to be attended to if we still want those games to be accessible: indies from the late aughts to mid twenty-teens. That's right. Fez, an icon of the era and indie games scene, is now more than a decade old. And while we don't think of this type of work until we need it, Fez, which most PC players booted on Windows 7 when it first came out, is not going to magically run on your Windows 11 machine today without some maintenance.

The person doing that maintenance, as well as making sure that about 70 of the best known indie games from the same era keep running, is Ethan Lee. He's not as well known as Fez's developer Phil Fish, who was also the subject of the documentary Indie Game: The Movie, but this week Lee started publicly marketing the service he's been quietly providing for over 11 years: maintenance of older games. "The way that I've been pitching it is more of like, the boring infrastructure," he said. "Let's make sure the current build works, whereas a lot of times, people feel like the only way to bring a game into a new generation is to do a big remaster. That's cool, but wouldn't have been cool if Quake II just continued to work between 1997 and now without all the weird stuff in between? That's sort of why I've been very particular about the word maintenance, because it's a continuous process that starts pretty much from the moment that you ship it."

As he explains in his pitch to game developers: "the PC catalog alone has grown very large within the last 15 years, and even small independent studios now have an extensive back catalog of titles that players can technically still buy and play today! This does come at a cost, however: The longer a studio exists, the larger their catalog grows, and as a result, the maintenance burden also grows." Just a few of the other indie games Lee ported include Super Hexagon, Proteus, Rogue Legacy, Dust: An Elysian Tail, TowerFall Ascension, VVVVVV, Transistor, Wizorb, Mercenary Kings, Hacknet, Shenzhen I/O, and Bastion. [...] With the PC, people assume that once a game is on Windows, it can live on forever with future versions of Windows. "In reality, what makes a PC so weird is that there's this big stack of stuff. You have an x86 processor, the current-ish era of like modern graphics processors, and then you have the operating system running on top of that and its various drivers," Lee said. A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD last week announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT. AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070. AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT.

The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR, plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.

Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more... and although it's aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone. From a report: MicroVMs are a hot area of technology R&D in the last half decade or so. The core idea is a re-invention of some of concepts and technology that IBM invented along with the hypervisor in the 1960s: designing OSes specifically to run as guests under another OS. This means building the OS specifically to run inside a VM, and to talk to resources provided by a specific hypervisor rather than to fake hardware.

This means that the guest OS needs next to no support for real hardware, just VirtIO drivers which talk directly to facilities provided by the host hypervisor. In turn, the hypervisor doesn't have to provide an emulated PCI bus, emulated power management, emulated graphics card, emulated network interface cards, and so on. The result is that the hypervisor itself can be much smaller and simpler. The result of ruthlessly chopping down both the hypervisor, and the OS that runs inside it, is that both ends can be much smaller and simpler. That means that VMs can use much fewer resources, and start up much quicker.

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols shares what's new in the release of Linux 6.5: The biggest news for servers -- and cloud Linux users -- is AMD Ryzen processors' P-State support. This support should mean better performance and power use across CPU cores. Intel Alder Lake CPUs have also received improved load balancing in a related development. RISC-V architecture fans will be pleased to find Linux now has Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) support. ACPI is used in Linux and other operating systems for power management. It's vital for laptops and other battery-powered systems.

For better security, people using virtual machines or sandboxes based on Usermode Linux for testing, or running multiple versions of Linux at once, now have Landlock support. Landock is a Linux Security Module that enables applications to sandbox themselves by selecting access rights to directories. It's designed to be used by unprivileged processes while following the system security policy. To make talking with the rest of the world easier, Linux 6.5 now supports USB 4v2. This new USB-C standard will support up to an eye-watering 120Gbps. And while we're still getting used to Wi-Fi 6E, the Wi-Fi Alliance is already working on bringing us Wi-Fi 7. When Wi-Fi 7 arrives, with its theoretical maximum speed of 46Gbps, Linux will be ready. As usual, the new Linux has many more built-in audio and graphics drivers. The Bcachefs filesystem didn't make it into Linux 6.5, notes Vaughan-Nichols. "While the Bcachefs filesystem looks good, there's been a lot of developers fighting about the development process. These personal arguments have led Torvalds to decide not to incorporate Bcachefs into Linux 6.5."

Linus Torvalds announced Linux 6.5's delivery in a brief post on August 27.

For SpaceX's 11th crewed mission — its eighth flight for NASA — "A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station early Sunday," reports Space.com, "and you can watch it all live online in a free livestream." The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance is scheduled to reach the International Space Station at 8:39 a.m. EDT (1239 GMT), where it will dock itself to a space-facing port on the outpost's U.S.-built Harmony module.

The docking will mark the end of a nearly 30-hour journey for the capsule's four-person crew, which launched in the wee hours of Saturday from NASA's Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida... "SpaceX, thanks for the ride, it was awesome," Crew-7 commander Jasmin Moghbeli of NASA said after the crew reached orbit. "Go Crew-7, awesome ride." SpaceX's Crew-7 mission for NASA is ferrying Moghbeli to the ISS with a truly international crew: pilot Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency; and mission specialists Konstantin Borisov of Russia's Roscosmos agency and Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The quartet is the first all-international crew, with members from four different agencies and countries, to fly on the same Dragon capsule...

The Crew-7 astronauts are beginning a six-month expedition to the space station and will relieve the four astronauts of NASA's Crew-6 mission, who are due to return shortly after Moghbeli and her crew arrive.
SpaceX has created a "follow Dragon" web page with graphics tracking the capsule's progress to the Space Station...

"The green energy revolution still faces a huge obstacle: a lack of long-term, cost-efficient renewable storage," writes the Washington Post.

But then they check in on a Finnish start-up running the world's first commercial-scale sand battery, which uses solar panels and wind turbines to heat sand-filled vats (up to 1,000 degrees) to back up district heating networks: The sand can hold onto the power for weeks or months at a time — a clear advantage over the lithium ion battery, the giant of today's battery market, which usually can hold energy for only a number of hours.

Unlike fossil fuels, which can be easily transported and stored, solar and wind supplies fluctuate. Most of the renewable power that isn't used immediately is lost. The solution is storage innovation, many industry experts agree. In addition to their limited capacity, lithium ion batteries, which are used to power everything from mobile phones to laptops to electric vehicles, tend to fade with every recharge and are highly flammable, resulting in a growing number of deadly fires across the world. The extraction of cobalt, the lucrative raw material used in lithium ion batteries, also relies on child labor. U.N. agencies have estimated that 40,000 boys and girls work in the industry, with few safety measures and paltry compensation. These serious environmental and human rights challenges pose a problem for the electric vehicle industry, which requires a huge supply of critical minerals.

So investors are now pouring money into even bigger battery ventures. More than $900 million has been invested in clean storage technologies since 2021, up from $360 million the year before, according to the Long Duration Energy Storage Council, an organization launched after that year's U.N. climate conference to oversee the world's decarbonization. The group predicts that by 2040, large-scale, renewable energy storage investments could reach $3 trillion. That includes efforts to turn natural materials into batteries. Once-obscure start-ups, experimenting with once-humble commodities, are suddenly receiving millions in government and private funding. There's the multi-megawatt CO2 battery in Sardinia, a rock-based storage system in Tuscany, and a Swiss company that's moving massive bricks along a 230-foot tall building to store and generate renewable energy. One Danish battery start-up, which stores energy from molten salt, is sketching out plans to deploy power plants in decommissioned coal mines across three continents...

But in order to succeed, natural batteries will need to provide the same kind of steady power as fossil fuels, at scale. Whether that can be achieved remains to be seen, say energy experts. And the industry may be subject to the same pitfalls that loom over the renewables energy sector at large: Projects will need to be constructed from scratch, and they might only be adopted in developed countries that can afford such experimentation. Lovschall-Jensen, the CEO of a Danish molten salt-based storage start-up called Hyme, says the challenge will be maintaining the same standards to which the modern world has become accustomed: receiving power, on demand, with the flip of a switch.

He believes that natural batteries, though still in their infancy, can serve that goal.

72-year-old Bjarne Stroustrup invented C++ (first released in 1985). 38 years later, he gave a short interview for Honeypot.io (which calls itself "Europe's largest tech-focused job platform") offering his own advice for life: Don't overspecialize. Don't be too sure that you know the future. Be flexible, and remember that careers and jobs are a long-term thing. Too many young people think they can optimize something, and then they find they've spent a couple of years or more specializing in something that may not have been the right thing. And in the process they burn out, because they haven't spent enough time building up friendships and having a life outside computing.

I meet a lot of sort of — I don't know what you call them, "junior geeks"? — that just think that the only thing that matters is the speciality of computing — programming or AI or graphics or something like that. And — well, it isn't... And if they do nothing else, well — if you don't communicate your ideas, you can just as well do Sudoku... You have to communicate. And a lot of sort of caricature nerds forget that. They think that if they can just write the best code, they'll change the world. But you have to be able to listen. You have to be able to communicate with your would-be users and learn from them. And you have to be able to communicate your ideas to them.

So you can't just do code. You have to do something about culture and how to express ideas. I mean, I never regretted the time I spent on history and on math. Math sharpens your mind, history gives you some idea of your limitations and what's going on in the world. And so don't be too sure. Take time to have a balanced life.

And be ready for the opportunity. I mean, a broad-based education, a broad-based skill set — which is what you build up when you educate, you're basically building a portfolio of skills — means that you can take advantage of an opportunity when it comes along. You can recognize it sometimes. We have lots of opportunities. But a lot of them, we either can't take advantage of, or we don't notice. It was my fairly broad education — I've done standard computer science, I've done compilers, I've done multiple languages... I think I knew two dozen at the time. And I have done machine architecture, I've done operating systems. And that skill set turned out to be useful.
At the beginning of the video, Stroustrup jokes that it's hard to give advice — and that it's at least as difficult as it is to take advice.

Earlier this year, Bjarne also told the same site the story of how he became a programmer by mistake — misreading a word when choosing what to study afer his high school exams. Stroustrup had thought he was signing up for an applied mathematics course, which instead turned to be a class in computer science...

AMD on Friday announced its long-awaited middle members of the Radeon RX 7000 series, the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT. From a report: Today, the company is finally filling in that gap with the new Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT, both advertised as 1440p graphics cards and available starting at $449 and $499, respectively. Both cards will be available on September 6. And most Radeon RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPUs sold between now and September 30 will come with a free copy of Bethesda's upcoming "Skyrim in space" title, Starfield.

The RX 7700 XT and 7800 XT are based on the same RDNA 3 graphics architecture as the other 7000-series GPUs, which means a more efficient manufacturing process than the RX 6000 series, DisplayPort 2.1 support, and hardware acceleration for encoding with the AV1 video codec, which promises game streamers either higher-quality video at the same bitrate as older codecs or the same quality with a lower bitrate. AMD compared the 7800 XT and 7700 XT favorably to Nvidia's $600 upper-midrange RTX 4070 and the $500 16GB version of the RTX 4060 Ti. The new Radeon cards also support FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) version 3, a new version of AMD's GPU-agnostic AI upscaling technology that also promises extra AI-generated frames a la Nvidia's proprietary DLSS 3 and DLSS Frame Generation feature. But unlike Nvidia, AMD isn't restricting FSR 3 to its latest cards, and users of RX 6000-series cards plus recent Nvidia GeForce and Intel Arc cards will be able to benefit, too, at least when games start supporting it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Political polarization in the US has become a major issue, as Republicans and Democrats increasingly inhabit separate realities on topics as diverse as election results and infectious diseases. [...] Now, a team of researchers has tested whether social media can potentially help the situation by getting people with opposite political leanings talking to each other about controversial topics. While this significantly reduced polarization, it appeared to be more effective for Republican participants. The researchers zeroed in on two concepts to design their approach. The first is the idea that simply getting people to communicate across the political divide might reduce the sense that at least some of their opponents aren't as extreme as they're often made out to be. The second is that anonymity would allow people to focus on the content of their discussion, rather than worrying about whether what they were saying could be traced back to them.

The researchers realized that they couldn't have any sort of control over conversations on existing social networks. So, they built their own application and hired professionals to do the graphics, support, and moderation. [...] People were randomly assigned to a few conditions. Some didn't use the app at all and were simply asked to write an essay on one of the topics under consideration (immigration or gun control). The rest were asked to converse on the platform about one of these topics. Every participant in these conversations was paired with a member of the opposing political party. Their partners were either unlabeled, labeled as belonging to the opposing party, or labeled as belonging to the same party (although the latter is untrue). Both before and after use of the app, participants answered questions about their view of politicized issues, members of their own party, and political opponents. These were analyzed in terms of issues and social influences, as well as rolled into a single index of polarization for the analysis.

The conversations appeared to have an effect, with polarization lowered by about a quarter of a standard deviation among those who engaged with political opponents that were labeled accordingly. Somewhat surprisingly, conversation partners who were mislabeled had a nearly identical effect, presumably because they suggested that a person's own party contained a diversity of perspectives on the topic. In cases where no party affiliation was given, the depolarization was smaller (0.15 standard deviations). The striking thing is that most of the change came from Republican participants. There, polarization was reduced by 0.4 standard deviations. In contrast, Democratic participants only saw it drop by 0.1 standard deviations -- a change that wasn't statistically significant. The error bars of the two groups of party members overlapped, however, so while large, it's not clear what this difference might tell us. The researchers went back and ran the conversations through sentiment analysis and focused on people whose polarization had dropped the most. They found that their conversation partners used less heated language at the start of the conversation. So it appears that displaying respect for your political opponents can still make a difference, at least in one-on-one conversations. While the conversations had a larger impact on people's views of individual issues, it also influenced their opinion of their political opponents more generally, and the difference between the two effects wasn't statistically significant. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

The UK government will spend $127m to try to win a toe-hold for the nation in the global race to produce computer chips used to power artificial intelligence. From a report: Taxpayer money will be used as part of a drive to build a national AI resource in Britain, similar to those under development in the US and elsewhere. It is understood that the funds will be used to order key components from major chipmakers Nvidia, AMD and Intel. But an official briefed on the plans told the Guardian that the $127m offered by the government is far too low relative to investment by peers in the EU, US and China. The official confirmed, in a move first reported by the Telegraph, which also revealed the investment, that the government is in advanced stages of an order of up to 5,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) from Nvidia. The company, which started out building processing capacity for computer games, has seen a sharp increase in its value as the AI race has heated up. Its chips can run language learning models such as ChatGPT.

An anonymous reader shared this report from IGN: A demo for the unofficial fan game Twin Peaks: Into the Night has been released, allowing players to explore the weird and wonderful world of David Lynch and Mark Frost's '90s TV show in a PS1-style adaptation... developed by Jean Manzoni and Lucas Guibert of the Blue Rose Team. The game is now available to download on PC via itch.io, with its creators welcoming feedback on the gameplay experience... "We hope you'll enjoy playing it. As a quick reminder, this is a free fan game made by a very small team of two on our free time. Please take this into consideration... The demo is intended to show you the direction we're taking, and we've put our hearts at it. We're already working on the next release."

Although the game shares no affiliation with the show or its creators, it promises an "experience that will immerse you directly into the unique atmosphere of the show" by offering players the opportunity to step into the shoes of Cooper to solve the mystery while enjoying a slice of cherry pie and a damn fine cup of coffee.
More details from Engadget: The graphics are retro and decidedly PS1-flavored, which makes sense given how the show premiered in 1990. The gameplay looks to be full of exploration, complete with conversations with the town's many oddball residents, though there's a survival horror element reminiscent of the original Resident Evil titles. This is also an appropriate design choice, as the show pits Agent Cooper against foes both physical and supernatural...

The creators have announced that the game will be free when it launches, so that should clear up any potential legal hurdles moving forward.

Codeweavers took to its official forums today to announce the release of CrossOver 23.0.0, the new version of its software that aims to make emulating Windows software and games easier on macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS systems. From a report: CrossOver 23 has updated to Wine 8.0.1, and it's loaded with improvements across all its platforms. The most notable, though, is the addition of DirectX 12 support under macOS via VKD3D and MoltenVK. This marks the first time most Mac users have had access to software that relies on DirectX 12; previously, only DirectX 11 was supported, and that went for other software solutions like Parallels, too. This new release adds "initial support" for geometry shaders and transforms feedback on macOS Ventura. Codeweavers claims that will address a lot of problems with "missing graphics or black screens in-game" in titles like MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, and Octopath Traveler.