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Source:: Computer World

By Siôn Geschwindt It’s been a tough year for air taxi startups. The UK’s Vertical Aerospace is running short of cash, while Germany’s Lillium faces bankruptcy. Targets for commercialisation keep getting extended. Investors are hesitant to commit. The reason for all the struggles is pretty simple. Building, certifying, and commercialising brand-new aircraft designs like electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs) is complex, notoriously expensive, and depends on lengthy regulatory processes.  That’s partly why German startup Vaeridion is pursuing a simpler, potentially cheaper, route to electric flight using an aircraft it calls the “microliner”.  “The microliner looks like a regular plane and it…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Kirstie McDermott The Dutch labour market is experiencing a persistent talent shortage, according to a new salary survey report. The research also flags that when it comes to hiring in 2025, artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning are expected to be among the hottest functional areas companies are most likely to recruit talent for next year. In line with this, a recent study by Indeed found that over the past year, job postings mentioning generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) or related phrases have increased dramatically across the US and Europe. In Germany, for example, there has been a 3.9x increase, France has…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Siôn Geschwindt Lithium-ion batteries have served us well, powering much of the modern world. However, today’s tech — everything from drones and EVs to the wretched Tesla cyber truck — demands denser batteries that charge faster and take you further. This push is driving scientists to conjure up new battery chemistries or refine old ones. Naturally, it is also spawning a new generation of startups looking to scale the next, best battery. One of those is Molyon.  Molyon recently spun out from 15 years of research at the University of Cambridge to commercialise a lithium-sulfur battery that it claims delivers twice the…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

Nvidia on Monday showed off a new generative AI (genAI) model that can be used to create all kinds of sounds and music: Fugatto (which stands for Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1).

By entering a text prompt, a user can make Fugatto create basically any sound, such as a trumpet barking like a dog. The genAI ​​model can also be used to change the dialect of a singer or turn a piano piece into a song, according to Reuters.

Fugatto has been trained on open source data, and there is currently no official release date. However, the idea is that the ​​model will eventually be used in the production of music, films and games.

The video below from Nvidia highlights some of Fugatto can do.

Source:: Computer World

Brazil’s antitrust body has joined a chorus of regulators to demand that Apple permit external payment methods in iOS apps. It’s just the latest page in an ongoing story, but might be enough to break this camel’s backbone. 

What this means, at the risk of stating the obvious, is that Apple now faces so much pressure to open up to external payment systems, it could finally make sense for it to bite the bullet and open up across all its territories rather than continue to fight. 

Apple has already been forced to open up in this way — and also to third-party app stores — in the EU, and to let US developers sell in-app content outside the App Store. It now faces similar pressure in the UK. But while it resists each of these moves, there is a cost to the company in legal fees and reputational damage attached to each battle in this conflict — at some point, it might make better business sense to cede the field.

A potential opportunity

While I don’t expect Apple is at all thrilled at how these cookies are crumbling, perhaps there is a way to turn all of this adversity into opportunity. If there’s ever been a time to add features and improvements to the payment systems Apple already provides, this is it.

It might also be time for Apple to take its payments infrastructure to other platforms and markets. Why shouldn’t you be able to pay for Android apps using Apple’s payment systems? Why not offer Apple payments to gamers from within Fortnite? Why not turn payments into products and grab an Apple-sized slice of the wider payments pie?

Customers from inside other ecosystems might be ready to embrace Apple’s rock-solid, highly secure, privacy-first payment system. What I’m saying is that Apple has a unique chance to compete, one from which it can continue to evangelize the advantages of the services (and platforms) it already provides for in-app purchases and everything else.  At the end of the day, the best way to keep people using its payments systems is to convince them that they want to use that system — even if they have a choice of others to use. 

With choice being imposed on the company, the company has an excuse to compete right back at competitors.

Who will lose?

Apple will not be blind to this, but support for external payment systems on its platforms remains very new and is only visible in a small number of markets. Given the potential risks of fraud and worse, it makes sense for Apple (and everyone else) to take a wait-and-see approach to extending this openness to new markets. It is just good practice to monitor what scams, frauds, and other attacks will emerge as third-party services are used on iOS in the EU. It’s not inconceivable that part of Apple’s reluctance to open up more widely yet (other than the money) is a desire to assess the perils and pitfalls of doing so — a trial in which Apple’s European customers are the crash test dummies.

But regulators don’t seem terribly keen to wait and see. Regulators in India, Brazil, UK, US, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere now seem to agree that Apple must lift restrictions on payment methods for in-app purchases. It’s going to happen in the end.

What price platform integrity?

Even then, another problem Apple faces in that is that each nation could demand slightly different approaches to lifting those restrictions. The problem is that there is a development and infrastructure support cost, not to mention legal expenses, to each of those dictated approaches. What that means is that the less harmonious Apple lets payments on iOS become, the higher the cost of business. 

To avoid weakening the platform with a thousand cuts, it just makes more sense to lift the restrictions internationally, while also putting in place firm safeguards that permit Apple to swiftly remove any payment services identified as fraudulent or lax in security from its platforms. 

Now, I’m on the record arguing that I think there is a very high probability that once payment systems in apps are opened up this way we will see fraud, identity theft, and other forms of financial crime affect against Apple’s so-far highly secure platform. I think that’s inevitable.

Consumers will be damaged, and in the case of those using non-Apple payment services or app stores they cannot expect to get support from Apple. They may have accessed a non-Apple service on an Apple device, but the exchange will be between them and the service, not them and Apple. There will be confusion and broken hearts. This is what will happen.

Managed decline

But Apple can manage the experience and focus on showing the many ways it offers a better and safer system to use. It also means bowing to the inevitable and building something that satisfies regulators enough that they don’t choose to force Apple to build a system that dilutes its own platform. 

So, why has Apple resisted so much? Perhaps because it knows there are other criticisms reaching the anti-trust runway. Perhaps it feels that it makes sense to put up a fight on this particular hill in order to give it time to shore up better defenses on the other hills it currently holds.

All the same, the judgment coming out of Brazil suggests the company is running out of time to prepare for other battles, and now might be time to concede on this particular point. Despite which, if I were in Apple (or a regulator’s) shoes, I’d still try to delay any such move until the first casualties from the European experiment are identified and lessons learned. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. 

Source:: Computer World

By Nick Godt Governor Gavin Newsom says California will seek to revive state-tax rebates for EVs should Trump end existing federal incentives.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Siôn Geschwindt Vertical Aerospace has been thrown a crucial lifeline, staving off potential bankruptcy at the cash-strapped air taxi startup.  The UK-based company — which makes electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — secured the fresh funds from its largest creditor, American debt investor Mudrick Capital. The agreement, announced Monday, includes a $50mn cash injection and a substantial debt-to-equity swap. Mudrick will invest $25mn upfront and guarantee another $25mn in future funding, offset by contributions from third-party investors.  Mudrick will also convert half of its $130mn in outstanding loans into equity at $2.75 per share, taking its ownership stake in Vertical…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai For years, Realme has delivered some of the best bang-for-the-buck and flagship killer smartphones. But, I…
The post Realme GT 7 Pro Review: Snapdragon 8 Elite on a Budget appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Siôn Geschwindt Zurich-based startup Poncho has officially launched its weather insurance platform — and bagged some fresh funding to boot.   Founded in 2023, the company aims to transform how the travel and hospitality industries handle unpredictable weather.  Poncho’s tech integrates with booking systems, allowing customers to opt for weather protection at checkout. If bad weather, such as heavy rain or wind, occurs during their scheduled event or trip, a refund is processed automatically. You don’t need to file a claim. Maybe torrential rains turn your Alpine ski trip to slush or maybe you’ve splurged on a Mediterranean yacht adventure only to have…This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

The “robust computer that’s very, very tiny” — introduced by Apple CEO Steve Jobs almost 20 years ago — just got even tinier. And once again, if you’re thinking of switching from Windows, there’s little excuse not to climb aboard; the “most affordable Mac ever” is also among the fastest consumer AI desktops money can buy.

While the Mac mini in hand is considerably smaller, its cost increased just a little and computational performance improved exponentially. These impressive changes allow the it to be a gateway for switchers, a second computer for any mobile Mac user, and a highly capable desktop for everyone else.

It’s also a server, a computer to which you can offload big tasks and it’s quite capable of handling the kind of cutting-edge productivity software you might use on a MacBook Pro, though perhaps not as efficiently. 

In the interests of objectivity, I should say up from I love the new Mac mini. It’s a triumph, a culmination of everything the first Mac mini aimed to be, but much, much better. Introduced along with the also superb MacBook Pro, Apple’s Mac line-up proves that, with Apple Silicon inside, the company is a the top of its game.

What you can expect under the hood

All this capability comes because of the amazing M-series processor Apple has slotted inside and reflects the device’s extensive processor history that straddles the company’s PowerPC chips on its first release, the Intel years, and today’s super-efficient, low-power chips that put Apple ahead of the industry. There’s a lot to love, starting at $599 (though the M4 Pro with 14‑core CPU and 20‑core GPU, 48GB, and 1TB SSD model I tested costs a lot more, $2,199.) That price tag might dent the superlatives a little, but probably not fatally. 

For a company made famous by the quality of its design, the Mac mini you see today isn’t a major departure from the models of yesteryear, other than size. This third major redesign remains faithful to the breed — a compact all-in-one metal box designed to work with the mouse, keyboard and display you already own. Now just 2-in. high, the 5-in.-by-5-in. (100% carbon neutral aluminum) box remains, resolutely, a Mac mini.

Such is the classic simplicity of Apple design, if you’d been abducted by aliens two decades ago and taken to the peaceful planet Zog to hang out with and learn from an enlightened species, you’d still recognize this as a Mac mini when you returned. (Though you’d probably be disappointed at the state of enlightenment here on Terra Ferma.)

But alien adventures aside, because it aims to work with kit you already own, connectivity has always been important to the mini. The new model offers two USB-C ports, HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, three Thunderbolt 5 ports, a headphone jack, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3 — though you no longer get USB-A, putting that standard even further back in history. You also don’t get an SD card slot, but you didn’t in the last model, either.  You can now drive up to three external displays, which is amazing, really, and I bet many of us take that for granted.

The power button (which you rarely, if ever, need to touch) is on the lower left corner of the 1.6-pound device; that positioning raised many critical cat calls when it was spotted, but if that’s all the critics have then Apple has got something right.

What it does

Apple says the Mac mini with M4 Pro is up to 20x faster than the fastest Intel-based Mac mini. The benchmark results I got back that assertion up, and more. I was a little open-jawed at the results I got and had to run tests multiple times they impressed me so very much.

Time for some benchmarks:

Geekbench 6.3

Single Core: 3,8715.

Multi Core: 22,314.

OpenCL: 69,013

The CPU results are incredibly impressive. If you check the Geekbench Mac charts, you will find they mean the Mac mini delivers at least as much punch as the currently available Mac Studio, or last year’s 16-in. M3 Max MacBook Pro. There is no performance compromise whatsoever in this machine.

Cinebench R23

22,737 CPU multi core (a top three position, up there with Intel Xeon W and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2992WX).

2,137 CPU single core (leader of the pack).

Valley

FPS 101.3 

It is important to note that Valley isn’t optimized for Apple Silicon and relies on Apple’s Rosetta technology, so it’s not a fair comparative test. But it does illustrate just how performant these little Macs have become.

You’ll find additional benchmark tests at MacStadium, where new M4 Mac minis are already being put into service as servers in real-life, mission-critical environments. They note that the M4 Pro, “tears past all the previously available Mac mini models, and even puts some of the older Studio models to shame.” 

You’ll find a similarly fabulous statement from an impressed Jeff Geerling, who says: “The chip isn’t the fastest at everything, but it’s certainly the most efficient CPU I’ve ever tested. And that scales down to idle power, too — it hovers between 3-4W at idle — which is about the same as a Raspberry Pi.” 

It is worth noting that most of the time the power efficiency means it will barely feel warm to the touch, no matter how hard you push it. These results, and those of all the other M4-powered Macs, absolutely illustrate the extent to which the shift to Apple Silicon has turned the processor industry upside down, putting once last-place Apple in bidding distance for the throne.

Take it anywhere

The Mac mini is small. You can put it anywhere you need it — on a bookshelf, certainly under a reception desk, anywhere in an office, and in almost any situation where you might need a computer on warehouse or factory floors. The front-mounted USB-C ports and headphone jack make its usage flexible, too. While it is not and nor is it intended to be a portable device, it is worth noting that so long as you have a keyboard, mouse, and display wherever you intend to go, the Mac mini is a computer you can take with you.

What about Thunderbolt 5?

Apple celebrated the introduction of Thunderbolt 5 on these Macs when they were announced. All the same, for most users it means very little. Sure, if you use a compatible Thunderbolt 5 cable and a compatible device, you’ll get data transfer speeds of 120Gbps, but right now those who have those things skew toward being pro gamers and video professionals. That will change of course as Thunderbolt 5 proliferates and becomes cheaper, though it is nice to know that you can use this tiny Mac to power multiple 6K displays.

Thunderbolt 5 will also be important to those who choose to use the new macOS feature that lets them use larger Mac apps that are stored on external SSD drives.

Time to upgrade?

The new model stacks up proudly against Apple’s first M1-series Mac mini. You’ll see significant performance gains, and while the M1 Mac mini I’ve used as my daily drive ever since it was introduced has never let me down, I did experience a perceptible difference in performance.

Four years later, is it time to upgrade? I think it might be, and the fact I’ve had four trouble-free years with an M1 gives me a lot of confidence to expect more great years with an M4 model.

However, in contrast to the Intel Macs, the question of whether or whether not to upgrade shouldn’t be a question at all — of course, you should. The difference in performance was like night and day when the M1 models first appeared; with the M4 series, you’ll feel like you just swallowed a glass of iced water in hell, as someone once said.

Unlike the performance compromise Mac mini represented back in the day, with Apple Silicon you can look forward to pro performance at a price that’s more within reach. 

A dream realized

The thing about the price is important. It’s hard to ignore a computer that starts at $599 and can kick out this level of performance. As a desktop, it ticks most boxes:

Windows switchers will like that they might be able to continue using existing kit with the system, and they’ll like it even more once they realize these Macs are so powerful they’ll run Windows better in VM mode than some PCs. 

Pro users will quickly find these Macs are capable of pro level performance that matches or exceeds some of last year’s more expensive Mac models.

Enterprises can be confident that these machines can be deployed across a wide array of situations and handle their tasks really well.

And every Mac mini user will appreciate that there is enough processor “oomph” inside these devices that we will still be enjoying a great experience using them in three, four, five or more years’ time. As mentioned above, my M1 Mac mini has never missed its stride and is four years old.

With its new – and still unmistakably Apple Mac mini design — the new model looks good, is whisper quiet, runs almost every application you might want to run, and demands hardly any desk space. If you need an Apple desktop or need to put an Apple system together at as low a price as possible, then the great thing about these Macs is you won’t feel at all compromised – these things shift!

All in all, this is a triumph, an absolute accomplishment of the journey Apple set out on when the first ever Mac mini models appeared. I can’t recommend it enough. 

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. 

Source:: Computer World

Microsoft has released a new collection of tools and a guide to fix security issues that have arisen around the way the company’s generative AI (genAI) Copilot assistant handles information. Namely, the tool’s indexing of an organization’s internal data can lead to the AI ​​assistant sharing sensitive information when it shouldn’t.

A Microsoft employee familiar with customer complaints tells Business Insider: “Now, when Joe Blow logs into an account and starts Copilot, they can see everything. All of a sudden, Joe Blow can see the CEO’s email.”

Business Insider reports that the behavior prompted several organizations to delay using Copilot for security reasons. “Many data governance challenges associated with AI were not caused by AI’s arrival,” a Microsoft spokesperson told the publication.

Instead, according to the spokesperson, AI tools like Copilot highlight how companies need to take proactive responsibility for how they manage internal documents and other information.

Source:: Computer World

By Nick Godt Jeep confirms a new compact, hybrid SUV is on the way: Will it be the Cherokee?

Source:: Digital Trends

By Hisan Kidwai Let’s face it—our daily digital lives are full of frustrations: low-resolution videos, blurry images, old footage…
The post Upscale, Enhance, and Download Videos in UHD with VideoProc AI (Black Friday Deal) appeared first on Fossbytes.

Source:: Fossbytes

By Nick Godt Volkswagen remains committed to launching its affordable ID.2 EV by the end of 2025 or early 2026.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Godt Mercedes-Benz is developing a solar paint that can harness energy from the sun to power up EVs.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Godt Kia America COO says ending tax incentives on EVs would have a negative impact on U.S. jobs and the whole auto industry.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nick Godt Hyundai’s brand new Ioniq 9 electric SUV features a backseat lounge.

Source:: Digital Trends

The announcement that Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be Anthropic’s primary training partner confirms rumors of an even tighter partnership between the two companies.

They announced Friday that Anthropic will use AWS Trainium processors to train and deploy its Claude family of models. Further, as predicted earlier this month, Amazon will invest an additional $4 billion in the startup, making its total investment $8 billion.

AWS is already Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and the OpenAI rival will now also primarily use Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its foundation models. Anthropic will also contribute to Trainium development in what the companies call a “hardware-software development approach.”

While it’s unclear whether the agreement requires Anthropic to exclusively use AWS chips, it is a move by Amazon to challenge the likes of Nvidia and other dominant players as the AI chip race accelerates.

“This is a first step in broadening the accessibility of generative AI and AI models,” Alvin Nguyen, Forrester senior analyst, told Computerworld.

Accelerating Claude development

Anthropic, which launched in 2021, has made significant progress with its Claude large language models (LLMs) this year as it takes on OpenAI. Its Claude 3 family comprises three LLMs: Sonnet, Haiku (its fastest and most compact), and Opus (for more complex tasks), which are all available on Amazon Bedrock. The models have vision capabilities and a 200,000 token context window, meaning they support large volumes of data, equal to roughly 150,000 words, or 500 pages of material.

Notably, last month Anthropic introduced “Computer Use” to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. This capability allows the model to use computers as people do; it can quickly move cursors, toggle between tabs, navigate websites, click buttons, type, and compile research documents in addition to its generative capabilities. All told, the company claims that Sonnet outperforms all other available models on agentic coding tasks.

Claude has experienced rapid adoption since its addition to Amazon Bedrock, AWS’ fully-managed service for building generative AI models, in April 2023, and now supports “tens of thousands” of companies across numerous industries, according to AWS. The foundation models are used to build a number of functions, including chatbots, coding assistants, and complex business processes.

“This has been a year of breakout growth for Claude, and our collaboration with Amazon has been instrumental in bringing Claude’s capabilities to millions of end users on Amazon Bedrock,” Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, said in an announcement.

The expanded partnership between the two companies is a strategic one for both sides, signaling that Anthropic’s models are performant and versatile, and that AWS’ infrastructure can handle intense generative AI workloads in a way that rivals Nvidia and other chip players.

From an Anthropic point of view, the benefit is “guaranteed infrastructure, the ability to keep expanding models’ capabilities, and showcase them,” said Nguyen, noting that it also expands their footprint and access.

“It’s showing that they can work well with multiple others,” he said. “That increases comfort levels in their ability to get training done, to produce models, to get them utilized.”

AWS, meanwhile, has a “’premiere client, one of the faces of AI’ in Anthropic,” said Nguyen.

From silicon through the full stack

As part of the expanded partnership, Anthropic will also help to develop and optimize future versions of AWS’s purpose-built Trainium chip. The machine learning (ML) chip supports deep learning training for 100 billion-plus parameter models.

Anthropic said it is working closely with AWS’ Annapurna Labs to write low-level kernels that allow it to interact with Trainium silicon. It is also contributing to the AWS Neuron software stack to help strengthen Trainium, and is collaborating with the chip design team around hardware computational efficiency.

“This close hardware-software development approach, combined with the strong price-performance and massive scalability of Trainium platforms, enables us to optimize every aspect of model training from the silicon up through the full stack,” Anthropic wrote in a blog post published Friday.

This approach provides an advantage over more general purpose hardware (such as Nvidia’s GPUs) that do more than what is “absolutely necessary,” Nguyen pointed out. The companies’ long partnership also means they may have mitigated performance optimization advantages that Nvidia has with their CUDA platform.

“This type of deep collaboration between the software and hardware engineers/developers allows for optimizations in both the hardware and software that is not always possible to find when working independently,” said Nguyen.

Source:: Computer World

By Nick Godt Fresh off a successful launch of its Prologue electric SUV, Honda showcases its commitment to solid-state batteries, known as the ‘holy grail’ of EV batteries.

Source:: Digital Trends