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takyon writes:

Lenovo invests nearly US$50 million into its chip-design ambitions

A new company called Dingdao Zhixin has been registered as a business entity in Shanghai, China as of January 26, 2022. According to its new listings, it will concern itself with PC hardware, software and some retail equipment - not to mention the sale and design of integrated circuits.

The establishment of a new firm in this sector would be interesting enough, and gets even more so in the wake of reports that this company is in fact wholly owned by Lenovo China. Therefore, this subsidiary might be an early sign that this OEM has ambitions of matching other companies like Apple with its M-series of in-house processors.

Also at WRAL TechWire (Lenovo is headquartered in Beijing and Morrisville, North Carolina).

Original Submission

owl writes:

Preserving a floppy disk with a logic analyzer and a serial cable:

Being involved with retro computers, I have a few floppy disks (of the 3.5-inch variety) that I would like to preserve as faithfully as possible. Of course, I know there are dedicated devices for doing that, such as the Kryoflux or the SuperCard Pro. But it occurred to me that I already own the required hardware to capture the low-level data from a floppy disk: my Saleae Logic 8 logic analyzer.

Side note: While I can only highly recommend the Saleae analyzers for their features and easy-to-use software, the things described here can also be done with other logic analyzers – including those available for less than 10 € from your favorite Chinese online store – and using, for example, the free Sigrok software.

Contrary to more modern mass storage devices such as ATA hard drives or USB sticks, the interface to a floppy drive is much more low-level. E.g., you can ask a modern hard drive to read sector 1337 and it will return you the bytes stored in that sector. In contrast, as soon as it is selected for reading and the disk is rotating, a floppy drive will simply give you a pulse each time the magnetic flux changes, i.e. whenever the magnetic field changes orientation. It is important to know that the magnetic field orientation does not directly represent the individual bits that are stored on the disk. Instead, an encoding scheme is always used. The details of the encoding differ between systems – which is why you cannot read an Amiga disk in an Atari ST, for example. Regardless of the implementation, the encoding always needs to take care of several things: 1. Encode the data bits, obviously. 2. Clock recovery. This is essential because different drives may rotate at slightly different speeds and the floppy disk controller thus needs to determine the actual data rate. 3. Marking the start of a sector. This is often achieved by flux patterns that do not occur in regular data.

Raise your hand if you remember storing data on a floppy disk. Or was that on a floppy disc?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Microsoft: Windows needs at least 8 hours online to update reliably:

Microsoft says that Windows devices need to be online for at least eight hours to get the latest updates and have them correctly installed after they're released through Windows Update.

The amount of time devices running Windows are powered on and connected to Windows Update is tracked by Microsoft as 'Update Connectivity.'

This measurement correlates the systems' lack of enough connected time with why they're not up to date while also making it easier to understand why some devices are unlikely to get recently released updates successfully.

According to David Guyer, a Microsoft Program Manager for Windows Updates in MEM, Windows devices need at least 8 hours online to get the latest updates and successfully install them.

"One of the most impactful things we explored was how much time a device needs to be powered on and connected to Windows Update to be able to successfully install quality and feature updates," said Guyer.

"What we found is that devices that don't meet a certain amount of connected time are very unlikely to successfully update. Specifically, data shows that devices need a minimum of two continuous connected hours, and six total connected hours after an update is released to reliably update.

"This allows for a successful download and background installations that are able to restart or resume once a device is active and connected."

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

Surgical robot performs world-first autonomous laparoscopic procedure:

Known as the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), the robotic-arm-equipped device was designed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

[...] In the more recent experiments, an improved and more autonomous version of STAR successfully performed the procedure laparoscopically – this means that only small incisions were required for the entry and exit of the surgical tools. What's more, the robot did so four times (on four pigs), producing "significantly better results than humans performing the same procedure."

Intestinal anastomosis is said to be a particularly tricky operation, as it requires multiple sutures to be made in soft tissue with a consistently high rate of precision. If any of the sutures are misplaced, intestinal leakage may occur, which can have very serious consequences for the patient.

Among the new features on this version of STAR are specialized suturing tools, better imaging systems (which include a 3D endoscope) and perhaps most notably, an autonomous control system. The latter adapts the surgical plan in real time, based on the often unpredictable movements of the soft intestinal tissue.

Journal Reference:
H. Saeidi, J. D. Opfermann, M. Kam, et al. Autonomous robotic laparoscopic surgery for intestinal anastomosis, Science Robotics (DOI: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abj2908)

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Intel fails to get Spectre, Meltdown chip flaw class-action super-suit tossed out:

Intel will have to defend itself against claims that the semiconductor goliath knew its microprocessors were defective and failed to tell customers.

On Wednesday, Judge Michael Simon, of the US District Court of Oregon, partially denied the tech giant's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit arising from the 2018 public disclosure of Meltdown and Spectre, the family of data-leaking chip microarchitecture design blunders.

The Register broke the Meltdown story on January 2, 2018, as Intel and those who confidentially reported the security vulnerabilities were preparing to disclose them. The following day, Google's Project Zero published details of Meltdown and its cousin Spectre, revealing that efforts to make CPU cores faster using speculative execution have opened them up to side-channel attacks that can read memory that should be out of reach and leak confidential information.

To defend against Meltdown and Spectre, Intel and other affected vendors have had to add software and hardware mitigations that for some workloads make patched processors mildly to significantly slower."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

What wintering squirrels can teach astronauts: The unique way that ground squirrels burn almost no energy when they hibernate – with no loss of muscle mass – has implications for space travel:

Now, in research published in Science, an Université de Montréal biologist has figured out why, and his findings could have implications for, of all things, the future of space travel . By studying a variety called the 13-lined ground squirrel that is common in North America, Matthew Regan has confirmed a theory known as "urea nitrogen salvage" dating back to the 1980s.

The theory posits that hibernators harness a metabolic trick of their gut microbes to recycle the nitrogen present in urea, a waste compound that is usually excreted as urine, and use it to build new tissue proteins.

How could this discovery be of use in space? Theoretically, Regan posits, by helping astronauts minimize their own muscle-loss problems caused by microgravity-induced suppression of protein synthesis and which they now try to reduce by intensively exercising.

If a way could be found to augment the astronauts' muscle protein synthesis processes using urea nitrogen salvage, they could be able to achieve better muscle health during long voyages into deep space in spacecraft too small for the usual exercise equipment, the argument goes.

"Because we know which muscle proteins are suppressed during spaceflight, we can compare these proteins with those that are enhanced by urea nitrogen salvage during hibernation," said Regan, who carried out this research while a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Journal Reference:
Matthew D. Regan, Edna Chiang, Yunxi Liu , et al. Nitrogen recycling via gut symbionts increases in ground squirrels over the hibernation season, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abh2950)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Surveys with repetitive questions yield bad data, study finds:

The study found that people tire from questions that vary only slightly and tend to give similar answers to all questions as the survey progresses. Marketers, policymakers, and researchers who rely on long surveys to predict consumer or voter behavior will have more accurate data if they craft surveys designed to elicit reliable, original answers, the researchers suggest.

"We wanted to know, is gathering more data in surveys always better, or could asking too many questions lead to respondents providing less useful responses as they adapt to the survey," said first author Ye Li, a UC Riverside assistant professor of management. "Could this paradoxically lead to asking more questions but getting worse results?"

[...] In one of the studies, respondents were asked about their preferences for varying configurations of laptops. They were the sort of questions marketers use to determine if customers are willing to sacrifice a bit of screen size in return for increased storage capacity, for example.

"When you're asked questions over and over about laptop configurations that vary only slightly, the first two or three times you look at them carefully but after that maybe you just look at one attribute, such as how long the battery lasts. We use shortcuts. Using shortcuts gives you less information if you ask for too much information," said Li.

upstart writes:

Microsoft Azure customer hit by largest 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack:

A Microsoft Azure cloud computing customer in Asia was a victim of a massive 3.47 Tbps DDoS attack (distributed denial of service attack) in November 2021, the software and technology giant Microsoft revealed on January 25, 2022.

The DDoS attack lasted approximately 15 minutes and included a botnet of more than 10,000 compromised IoT (Internet of Things) devices from countries across the globe. These included Iran, India, China, Russia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and the United States.

Attack vectors were UDP reflection on port 80 using Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP), Connection-less Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (CLDAP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Network Time Protocol (NTP) comprising one single peak.

Alethea Toh Product Manager, Azure Networking

Microsoft's report further disclosed that there has been a surge in DDoS attacks with the United States and India being prime targets. The company noted that Hong Kong has also become a popular hotspot for attackers however there has been a decrease in DDoS activity in Europe.

[...] A DDoS attack involves sending a huge amount of illegal traffic from compromised machines to the intended target and therefore disrupting them completely. The system can crash and lead to a massive loss of data, particularly, in the case of companies that host a significant amount of information regarding their clients and customers.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Prequel app is yassifying our selfies into hot cartoons:

If you're in need of a massive ego boost, this is your sign to turn yourself into a cartoon.

Twitter is currently full of people who are discovering the glorious effects of the Cartoon filter on the editing app Prequel. The free app takes any existing photo and turns it into a cartoon – simple, right? The cartoon animation effect isn't a new idea, but something about Prequel's version makes literally any photo a million times hotter.

[...] Of course, as with any viral app, we were curious about Prequel's privacy policy. The app doesn't make clear exactly what it does with the gorgeous selfies being uploaded, so there may be mild concern there.

[...] If you've decided to submit your personal data to the powers that be and really just want to get in on the hot cartoon fun, all you have to do is download the Prequel app on the App Store or Google Play store. Make sure to click out of the sneaky premium paid version that pops up when you first open the app, select the Cartoon filter, and choose a selfie to cartoonify. We found the effect works best with photos that only have one person and shows your face almost entirely.

[*] What Does It Mean to 'Yassify' Anything? at The New York Times.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Windows 11 frame rate stuttering reported by some users with AMD CPUs:

Some Windows 11 users are running into trouble with sporadic stuttering issues (accompanied with audio glitches), which according to reports are related to AMD processors and the necessary TPM [*] security required by Microsoft's newest operating system.

Specifically, on AMD PCs, there's an implementation of TPM which is fTPM – meaning it's integrated in firmware, rather than on a separate TPM module – and this is what folks who are affected believe is causing the issue, finding that when it's turned off in the BIOS, the stuttering disappears.

Unfortunately, some people don't have the option to turn off fTPM – that switch simply isn't present in the BIOS – so they're out of luck on that score. The other alternative solution appears to be installing a discrete TPM module, rather than relying on the firmware integrated functionality, and this also works to fix the issue – at least according to reports. Assuming you have the ability to install a separate TPM module in your PC.

[...] the stuttering frame rates hit at random times and last for a few seconds in some cases – longer in others – and audio is garbled at the same time.

upstart writes:

A Crunching Multiverse To Solve Two Fundamental Physics Puzzles at Once:

A duo of theorists proposes a new theory to explain both the surprisingly small mass of the Higgs boson and the puzzling symmetry properties of the strong force.

The discovery of the Higgs boson was a landmark in the history of physics. It explained something fundamental: how elementary particles that have mass get their masses. But it also marked something no less fundamental: the beginning of an era of measuring in detail the particle's properties and finding out what they might reveal about the nature of the universe.

One such property is the particle's mass, which at 125 GeV is surprisingly small. Many theories have been put forward to explain this small mass, but none has so far been confirmed with data. In a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, Raffaele Tito D'Agnolo of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Daniele Teresi of CERN propose a new theory to explain both the lightness of the Higgs boson and another fundamental physics puzzle.

In broad brushes, the duo's theory works like this. In its early moments, the universe is a collection of many universes each with a different value of the Higgs mass, and in some of these universes the Higgs boson is light. In this multiverse model, universes with a heavy Higgs boson collapse in a big crunch in a very short time, whereas universes with a light Higgs boson survive this collapse. Our present-day universe would be one of these surviving light-Higgs universes.

Labor Regulator Accuses Amazon of Intimidation as Union Drives Move Forward

upstart writes:

Labor regulator accuses Amazon of intimidation as union drives move forward:

Amazon interrogated and surveilled warehouse workers in Staten Island, where some workers are seeking to form a union, prosecutors for the National Labor Relations Board said in a complaint Wednesday. The allegations come one day after the agency said the warehouse workers have collected enough signatures to move forward with a union election.

According to Bloomberg, the NLRB complaint alleges that an Amazon consultant promised to fix problems for workers if they opposed the union and called the workers leading the union push "thugs."

"Workers have the right under federal labor law to join and form unions and employers are prohibited from interfering with that right," said Kathy Drew King, the director of NLRB region 29, where the complaint originated. "The complaint seeks to stop and remedy this unlawful conduct to ensure that Amazon's employees can freely and fairly exercise their rights under the National Labor Relations Act."

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said the allegations are false, adding, "we look forward to showing that through this process."

The situation isn't Amazon's only union battle. In a separate organizing drive in Alabama, a union asked the labor board Wednesday to make Amazon get rid of a mailbox that the agency previously ruled tainted a union election last year. A redo election is scheduled for early February.

upstart writes:

Look who's talking now: The fishes! Widespread sound communication among fish:

"We've known for a long time that some fish make sounds," said lead author Aaron Rice, a researcher at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. "But fish sounds were always perceived as rare oddities. We wanted to know if these were one-offs or if there was a broader pattern for acoustic communication in fishes."

The authors looked at a branch of fishes called the ray-finned fishes. These are vertebrates (having a backbone) that comprise 99% of the world's known species of fishes. They found 175 families that contain two-thirds of fish species that do, or are likely to, communicate with sound. By examining the fish family tree, study authors found that sound was so important, it evolved at least 33 separate times over millions of years.

"Thanks to decades of basic research on the evolutionary relationships of fishes, we can now explore many questions about how different functions and behaviors evolved in the approximately 35,000 known species of fishes," said co-author William E. Bemis '76, Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "We're getting away from a strictly human-centric way of thinking. What we learn could give us some insight on the drivers of sound communication and how it continues to evolve."

The scientists used three sources of information: existing recordings and scientific papers describing fish sounds; the known anatomy of a fish -- whether they have the right tools for making sounds, such as certain bones, an air bladder, and sound-specific muscles; and references in 19th century literature before underwater microphones were invented.

Journal Reference:
Aaron N. Rice, Stacy C. Farina, Andrea J. Makowski, et al. Evolutionary Patterns in Sound Production across Fishes [open], Ichthyology & Herpetology (DOI: 10.1643/i2020172)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

JEDEC Publishes HBM3 Update to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Standard:

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in the development of standards for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of the next version of its High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM standard: JESD238 HBM3, available for download from the JEDEC website.  HBM3 is an innovative approach to raising the data processing rate used in applications where higher bandwidth, lower power consumption and capacity per area are essential to a solution's market success, including graphics processing and high-performance computing and servers.

Key attributes of the new HBM3 include:

• Extending the proven architecture of HBM2 towards even higher bandwidth, doubling the per-pin data rate of HBM2 generation and defining data rates of up to 6.4 Gb/s, equivalent to 819 GB/s per device
• Doubling the number of independent channels from 8 (HBM2) to 16; with two pseudo channels per channel, HBM3 virtually supports 32 channels
• Supporting 4-high, 8-high and 12-high TSV stacks with provision for a future extension to a 16-high TSV stack
• Enabling a wide range of densities based on 8Gb to 32Gb per memory layer, spanning device densities from 4GB (8Gb 4-high) to 64GB (32Gb 16-high); first generation HBM3 devices are expected to be based on a 16Gb memory layer
• Addressing the market need for high platform-level RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability), HBM3 introduces strong, symbol-based ECC on-die, as well as real-time error reporting and transparency
• Improved energy efficiency by using low-swing (0.4V) signaling on the host interface and a lower (1.1V) operating voltage

"With its enhanced performance and reliability attributes, HBM3 will enable new applications requiring tremendous memory bandwidth and capacity," said Barry Wagner, Director of Technical Marketing at NVIDIA and JEDEC HBM Subcommittee Chair.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Players needed to solve puzzles and help advance cancer research:

The game, out today on iOS and Android and available in English, Spanish, Catalan and Italian, is the result of a two-and-a-half-year long citizen science project developed by a team of researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) and game professionals.

The game was created to boost worldwide research efforts that depend on cancer cell lines, a critical resource used by scientists to study cancer and test new drugs to treat the disease. One of the limitations of cancer cell lines are a lack of high-resolution genome reference maps, which are necessary to help researchers interpret their scientific results, for example pinpointing the location of genes of therapeutic interest or potential mutation sites.

[...] To play GENIGMA, players have to solve a puzzle involving a string of blocks of different colours and shapes. Each string represents a genetic sequence in the cancer cell line, and how players organise the blocks is a potential solution to the location of genes.

Players have to reorganise the blocks so that they attain the highest-score possible. The higher the number of players and high scores, the higher likelihood that researchers have found the correct sequence for this particular location in the reference map.