April 17 (Reuters) - Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) shares fell as much as 4% on Monday following a report South Korea's Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) was considering replacing Google with Microsoft-owned (MSFT.O) Bing as the default search engine on its devices.
The report, published by the New York Times over the weekend, underscores the growing challenges Google's $162-billion-a-year search engine business face from Bing - a minor player that has risen in prominence recently after the integration of the artificial intelligence tech behind ChatGPT.
Google's reaction to the threat was "panic" as the company earns an estimated $3 billion in annual revenue from the Samsung contract, the report said, citing internal messages.
Seagate Delivers First Samples of 30 TB+ HAMR HDDs To Data Center Clients
Cloud data center clients of Seagate have started to receive the first 30 TB+ HAMR-based hard disk drives (HDDs). HAMR stands for "heat-assisted magnetic recording," which is to make HDDs much more efficient for data storage. Now that the company's clients have received drives, it is time for Seagate to research the sales revenue over the following weeks to find how well the industry will adopt the new capacity HAMR drives.
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
The fact that my dad had a 66 MHz CPU in 1994, 4 MB RAM, 540 MB HDD and 1 MB on the video card, while in 2004 he had a 3 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 300 GB HDD and 128 MB on the video card, seemed only normal and logical to me back in the day. Kids these days don't experience such a change unfortunately. More recently, I went from 8 threads 4.7 GHz to 16 threads 4.7 GHz, 8 GB to 32 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD to 1 TB SSD and 1 to 12 GB on the video card in about 10 years. Much smaller change, but I still remember those larger changes, that kids these days don't remember. There is a nostalgia in it and about it for me. I wonder if it is over forever or whether it will come back one day...
Global economy doubles in product every 15-20 years. Computer performance at a constant price doubles nowadays every 4 years on average. Livestock-as-food will globally stop being a thing by ~2050 (precision fermentation and more). Human stupidity, pride and depravity are the biggest problems of our world.
Tadasuke wrote: ↑Wed May 03, 2023 9:36 am
The fact that my dad had a 66 MHz CPU in 1994, 4 MB RAM, 540 MB HDD and 1 MB on the video card, while in 2004 he had a 3 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM, 300 GB HDD and 128 MB on the video card, seemed only normal and logical to me back in the day. Kids these days don't experience such a change unfortunately. More recently, I went from 8 threads 4.7 GHz to 16 threads 4.7 GHz, 8 GB to 32 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD to 1 TB SSD and 1 to 12 GB on the video card in about 10 years. Much smaller change, but I still remember those larger changes, that kids these days don't remember. There is a nostalgia in it and about it for me. I wonder if it is over forever or whether it will come back one day...
Google rolls out passkey as password alternative
Amritpal Kaur Sandhu-Longoria
USA TODAY
Passwords can be hard to remember, so Google has rolled out a simpler and safer solution for its users – passkeys.
Google account holders will now be able to login to apps the same way they login to their devices by using a fingerprint, face scan or a screen lock PIN, which the company touts is more secure, and resistant to online attacks like phishing and one-time SMS codes.
The company's product managers wrote in a Google blog that while passwords are not totally going away yet, they are frustrating to remember, and can put people at risk should their password end up in the wrong hands.
The Google search experience has remained roughly the same for years. Not only has the engine’s list of blue links joined the multicolored Google logo in becoming a brand mainstay, but they’ve guided the development of other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo. But those blue links might not be the star of the show for much longer: According to company documents, Google is planning to revamp the presentation of its search results by adding an AI chatbot, integrated videos, and more.
The changes are part of a larger effort to adapt to younger users’ expectations. The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that internal documents and other sources indicate a major shift away from what’s unofficially called “the 10 blue links.” While those links will still be there, results will focus on a conversational AI tool codenamed “Magi,” as well as interactive video content.
Developer Creates Compact Windows 11 That Runs in GPU VRAM
The Tiny11 utility can make Windows 11 lightweight enough to run inside an RTX 3050.
By Ryan Whitwam May 9, 2023 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/d ... n-gpu-vram
Microsoft's decision to institute strict system requirements for Windows 11 was met with frustration, but PC enthusiasts don't tend to let a little thing like that stop them. It's possible to install stripped-down versions of Windows 11, and now we know just how flexible it can be. The developer of the Tiny11 Windows modifier has created a build of Windows 11 that takes up so little space it can run entirely inside a GPU's VRAM.
Yes, GPU Ram Drives are still a thing, but there's not much reason to use them anymore. In the days before ultra-fast solid-state storage was commonplace, some people living on the bleeding edge would sometimes convert GPU memory into virtual storage. This provided access to speedy storage for applications that needed extremely fast reads and writes without requiring new hardware.
Today, RAM Drives can't compete with high-speed SSDs, and GPU RAM Drives specifically come with some inefficiencies that make them slower even with high-throughput VRAM chips. Still, the open source GPU RAM Drive utility lets you create virtual storage on your card. That's what NTDev, the person behind Tiny11, used in this experiment.
Future data centers might do away with banks of hard drives and switch to a storage medium that nature has been using for billions of years – DNA. In a major step towards making that a reality, scientists have created a new system of reading and organizing files using microcapsules.
Like many things humans have built, nature beat us to data storage with a system vastly superior to anything we could come up with. DNA packs information in incredibly densely – a single gram of the stuff can hold up to 215 petabytes, or 215 million GB of data, meaning the entire contents of the internet could be kept in a shoebox full of DNA. Recent work has even found ways to double that data density by adding new letters to the alphabet soup.
Plus, DNA can be extremely long-lasting. Our current hardware tends to degrade within decades, but under the right conditions DNA could potentially be preserved for millions of years. And finally, it requires far less energy to maintain, cutting the power bills that massive data centers are running up.
Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a computer vision technology that can reconstruct a 3D image of a scene displayed in a reflection on a person’s eyeball.
