Category Archives: Technology

Intel once again delays its long-awaited Ohio chip fabrication facilities

Posted on by

Intel announced that it’s further delaying plans to open two chip fabrication facilities in Ohio, pushing their completion out to 2030. The company originally announced its plans for Ohio in 2022, with an ambitious opening set for 2025.

Intel says it completed the “basement” level of its Ohio One project last quarter, which allows above-ground construction to get underway now. The $20 billion dollar project is technically split across two different chip fabs, dubbed Mod 1 and Mod 2, which won’t be completed at the same time. Mod 1 is now set to open in 2030, to “align the start of production of our fabs with the needs of our business and broader market demand,” according to Intel. Mod 2 will be completed the following year in 2031.

A photo of the Ohio One construction site from February 2025.
Intel Corporation

The justification is financial: Intel says it’s taking a “prudent approach” that will ensure the chip fabs are completed in a “financially responsible manner.” Intel previously told the state of Ohio that it was delaying the fabs until 2027. It also delayed the groundbreaking of the project seemingly to incentivize the passing of the CHIPS Act in 2022, according to a report from The Washington Post.

More delays add to what’s been a tumultuous period for Intel as a company. In December, former CEO Pat Gelsinger was pushed out, likely because he wasn’t pulling-off Intel’s aggressive plans to expand chip production. Prior to that, the funding the company was set to receive through the CHIPS Act was reduced by $600 million. Add in layoffs and the continued dominance of chip makers like AMD, and Intel remains in a tricky spot.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/intel-once-again-delays-its-long-awaited-ohio-chip-fabrication-facilities-185516274.html?src=rss

Google’s Sergey Brin Urges Workers To the Office at Least Every Weekday

Posted on by
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has urged employees working on the company’s Gemini AI products to be in the office “at least every weekday” [non-paywalled source] and suggested “60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity,” according to an internal memo cited by The New York Times. The directive comes as Brin warned that “competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot,” referring to artificial general intelligence, when machines match or surpass human intelligence.

“I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts,” Brin wrote in the Wednesday evening memo. The guidance does not alter Google’s official policy requiring employees to work in-office three days weekly. Brin, who returned to Google following ChatGPT’s 2022 launch, also criticized staff who “put in the bare minimum,” calling them “highly demoralizing to everyone else.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Commercials are still too loud, say “thousands” of recent FCC complaints

Posted on by

“Thousands” of complaints about the volume of TV commercials have flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in recent years. Despite the FCC requiring TV stations, cable operators, and satellite providers to ensure that commercials don’t bring a sudden spike in decibels, complaints around loud commercials “took a troubling jump” in 2024, the government body said on Thursday.

Under The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, broadcast, cable, and satellite TV providers are required to ensure that commercials “have the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” per the FCC. The FCC’s rules about the volume of commercials took effect in December 2012. The law also requires linear TV providers to use the Advanced Television Systems Committee’s (ATSC’s) recommended practices. The practices include guidance around production, post production, metadata systems usage, and controlling dynamic range. If followed, the recommendations “result in consistency in loudness and avoidance of signal clipping,” per the ATSC [PDF]. The guidance reads:

If all programs and commercials were produced at a consistent average loudness, and if the loudness of the mix is preserved through the production, distribution, and delivery chain, listeners would not be subjected to annoying changes in loudness within and between programs.

As spotted by PC Mag, the FCC claimed this week that The Calm Act initially reduced complaints about commercials aggressively blaring from TVs. However, the agency is seeing an uptick in grievances. The FCC said it received “approximately” 750 complaints in 2022, 825 in 2023, and “at least” 1,700 in 2024 [PDF].

Read full article

Comments

Fubo grows its subscribers and revenue as Disney deal looms

Posted on by

Fubo TV is bringing in more subscribers and revenue but still losing loads of money. Ahead of its proposed Hulu + Live TV merger, the broadcast streaming service increased its subscriber count by about four percent in Q4 2024 and its quarterly revenue by eight percent from a year earlier. And hey, it only lost about $41 million in the quarter, so things aren’t too shabby!

The streaming service ended Q4 with 1.676 million paid subscribers. That’s up from 1.61 million in Q3 and 1.45 million in Q2, so the company is doing something right in attracting new customers. Its total revenue has also grown: nearly $1.59 billion for the year (up 19 percent from 2023) and $433.8 million for the quarter (up eight percent from Q4 2023). Not too shabby!

But Fubo is losing boatloads of money — just less than before. It posted a net loss of nearly $178 million for the year, more than enough to ruin most individuals and small- or medium-sized businesses. But since this is corporate America, things are looking up there, champ! That’s because Fubo improved its losses by over $115 million from a year earlier.

The company is headed for some big changes. Pending shareholder and regulatory approval, Disney will buy a 70 percent stake in the company and merge it with Hulu + Live TV. The deal would create a new entity to manage the two brands, although the plan is for them to continue as separate services (at least at first).

Fubo is arguably the best live TV service for sports, but it still has some notable missing pieces. For starters, you won’t find any Warner Bros. Discovery content. That means subscribers will miss out on a bunch of NBA games (before TNT’s deal with the league expires at the end of the season) and MLB games on TBS.

It also recently increased its prices, with the cheapest plan coming in at $85, slightly more than YouTube TV. Like the traditional cable it’s gunning to replace, live streaming TV is increasingly an expensive hot mess.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/fubo-grows-its-subscribers-and-revenue-as-disney-deal-looms-183344157.html?src=rss

Research roundup: 7 cool science stories from February

Posted on by

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. February’s list includes dancing sea turtles, the secret to a perfectly boiled egg, the latest breakthrough in deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, and more.

Dancing sea turtles

There is growing evidence that certain migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are able to exploit the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, using it both as a compass to determine direction and as a kind of “map” to track their geographical position while migrating. A paper published in the journal Nature offers evidence of a possible mechanism for this unusual ability, at least in loggerhead sea turtles, who perform an energetic “dance” when they follow magnetic fields to a tasty snack.

Sea turtles make impressive 8,000-mile migrations across oceans and tend to return to the same feeding and nesting sites. The authors believe they achieve this through their ability to remember the magnetic signature of those areas and store them in a mental map. To test that hypothesis, the scientists placed juvenile sea turtles into two large tanks of water outfitted with large coils to create magnetic signatures at specific locations within the tanks. One tank features such a location that had food; the other had a similar location without food.

Read full article

Comments

Sergey Brin says AGI is within reach if Googlers work 60-hour weeks

Posted on by

Sergey Brin co-founded Google in the 1990s along with Larry Page, but both stepped away from the day to day at Google in 2019. However, the AI boom tempted Brin to return to the office, and he thinks everyone should follow his example. In a new internal memo, Brin has advised employees to be in the office every weekday so Google can win the AI race.

Just returning to the office isn’t enough for the Google co-founder. According to the memo seen by The New York Times, Brin says Googlers should try to work 60 hours per week to support the company’s AI efforts. That works out to 12 hours per day, Monday through Friday, which Brin calls the “sweet spot of productivity.” This is not a new opinion for Brin.

Brin, like many in Silicon Valley, is seemingly committed to the dogma that the current trajectory of generative AI will lead to the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Such a thinking machine would be head and shoulders above current AI models, which can only do a good impression of thinking. An AGI would understand concepts and think more like a human being, which some would argue makes it a conscious entity.

Read full article

Comments

US Workers See AI-Induced Productivity Growth, Fed Survey Shows

Posted on by
Workers reported saving a substantial number of work hours by using generative AI, according to research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, along with Vanderbilt and Harvard universities. From a report: The researchers, drawing from what they identified as the first nationally representative survey of generative AI adoption, measured the impact of generative AI on work productivity by how much workers used the technology and how intensely. They found users are saving meaningful amounts of time.

“On average, workers are 33% more productive in each hour that they use generative AI,” the paper found. Among respondents that used generative AI in the previous week, 21% said it saved them four hours or more in that week, 20% reported three hours, 26% said two hours and 33% reported an hour or less.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox deletes promise to never sell personal data, asks users not to panic

Posted on by

Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users’ personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:

Does Firefox sell your personal data?

Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise.

That promise is removed from the current version. There’s also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, “Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.”

The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define “sale” in a very broad way:

Read full article

Comments

DeepMind CEO Says AGI Definition Has Been ‘Watered Down’

Posted on by
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the definition of artificial general intelligence is being “watered down,” creating an illusion of faster progress toward this technological milestone. “There’s quite a long way, in my view, before we get to AGI,” Hassabis said. “The timelines are shrinking because the definition of AGI is being watered down, in my opinion.” DeepMind defines AGI as “AI systems that are at least as capable as humans at most cognitive tasks,” while OpenAI has historically described it as a “highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently declared his team is “confident we know how to build AGI,” while modifying his personal definition to an AI “system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields.” Hassabis suggested industry hype might be financially motivated: “There is a lot of hype for various reasons,” he said, including perhaps “that people need to raise money.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella separately dismissed AGI milestones as “nonsensical benchmark hacking,” preferring economic impact measurements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Get four Apple AirTags for a new low of $65, plus the rest of this week’s best tech deals

Posted on by

We’ve published our review of the new “budget” iPhone 16e, but if the savings there don’t feel like quite the bargain you were looking for, there are a few consolation deals on other Apple gear — along with a handful of sales on more tech we currently recommend. The spotlight deal highlights the lowest price yet on a four-pack of Apple AirTags (now $65 at Amazon). We also noticed Amazon is still running a deal that tosses in a free $200 gift card with the purchase of a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (we gave the new phone an 89 in our review). Other deals include a discounted Anker charger, a hefty coupon on our favorite budget cordless vacuum and more. Here are the best deals from this week that you can still get today.   

  • Apple 2024 MacBook Air M3 for $899 at B&H Photo ($200 off): The next generation of the MacBook Air with an M4 chip is likely on the horizon. But there’s little chance it’ll be $200 off. The nice thing about most Apple gear is it tends to be relatively long-lived. So if you don’t need the latest model, this deal could be one to snag. We gave the 13-inch model a high score of 90 in our review and named it the best laptop you can buy. Note that the discount applies to the Air model with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage in the Midnight colorway. Also at Amazon. 

  • Apple Pencil Pro for $99 at Amazon ($30 off): If you have a newer iPad and want a compatible Apple Pencil to go along with it, take a gander at this deal, which is $30 off and about $10 more than the record low. The Pro stylus allows for squeeze-based gestures, haptic feedback, pressure sensitivity and the ability to sense when the stylus is rolled to change the orientation of pen and brush tools.

A person wears the Apple Watch Series 10 on their wrist. It shows a blue screen with the time and other widgets.
Photo by Cherlynn Low / Engadget

  • Apple Watch Series 10 for $329 at Amazon ($70 off): This is the same deal we’ve seen for a few months now, but if you missed it the other times we mentioned it, here’s another chance to save $70 on Apple’s latest generation flagship smartwatch. It’s currently our favorite smartwatch overall and we gave it a positive review when it came out back in September of last year. It has a thinner design this time, but a larger screen. The health tracking features are great and it’s an ideal companion for an iPhone. 

  • Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with a $200 Amazon gift card for $1,300 at Amazon ($200 off): When Samsung’s latest premium phone came out this January, Amazon offered a free $200 gift card for pre-orders. The same deal is still going strong, so if you were holding out to see what the reviews said (we gave it a score of 89) before you bought it, then you still have a chance to get the same deal. If you shop at Amazon regularly, you might consider the $200 gift card akin to free money. 

  • Anker Soundcore 2 Portable Bluetooth Speaker for $38 at Amazon ($17 off): It’s not an all-time low, but still a pretty cheap price on a Bluetooth speaker. We recommend two Anker Soundcore speakers in our guide to portable speakers and this is the budget version of those. The 12-watt speaker isn’t the most powerful, but you do get 24 hours of battery life on a charge and it’s waterproof. For less than $40 it could be a good option for a knockaround speaker you don’t have to worry too much about. 

the Anker USB C Charger (Nano 65W) charges three devices at once while plugged into a table
Anker
Tineco Pure One S11 on a wood floor
Valentina Palladino for Engadget
The ROG Ally is ASUS' newest handheld gaming PC.
Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Every day, Engadget editors hunt down the best discounts on the tech we recommend. See them all on our deals page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/get-four-apple-airtags-for-a-new-low-of-65-plus-the-rest-of-this-weeks-best-tech-deals-173011789.html?src=rss