The James Webb Space Telescope is perhaps mankind’s greatest achievement (so far). It is a magnificent space telescope originally designed and planned in the late 1990s but not completed and launched until late 2021.
Now the giant telescope is 930,000 miles out of Earth orbit, collecting data using its light-gathering technique, which is 25 square meters and consists of 18 hexagonal mirrors made of gold-plated beryllium.
It aims to give scientists the opportunity to study the history of the universe and explore distant worlds and stars that we have not been able to observe before. Now some of the first images have been revealed and the results are stunning.
Before the official images from the James Webb Telescope were released, Nasa released this image to give a taste of what’s to come.
The image shows part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Shown on the left is an image taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared camera. On the right you can see the same area taken by the James Webb telescope. The JWST promises an unprecedented level of detail that we have never seen before.
Stockholders of Activision Blizzard voted to sale for $68.7 Billion sale to Microsoft
At a special meeting, the stockholders of Activision Blizzard approved Microsoft’s proposal to sell the gaming company for $68.7 billion.
This all-cash transaction values the creator of games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Candy Crush at $95 per share.
“Today’s overwhelmingly supportive vote by our stockholders confirms our shared belief that, combined with Microsoft, we will be even better positioned to create great value for our players,” said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.
He added that the deal would provide “even greater opportunities for our employees, and to continue our focus on becoming an inspiring example of a welcoming, respectful and inclusive workplace.” The company is facing numerous lawsuits for sexual harassment, retaliation and discriminatory workplace practices. Kotick himself has been accused of knowing for years about sexual misconduct and rape allegations at his company but not doing anything about it.
In light of these conflicts, Kotick announced a zero-tolerance policy against harassment and $250 million investment in recruiting gender diverse talent. At that time, only 23% of employees are identifying as women or non-binary people. But employee dissatisfaction has prevailed.
When the acquisition was announced in January, quality assurance testers at Raven Software, a division of Activision, had been on strike for five weeks. They protested the layoffs of 12 contractors, which came after over a month of consistent overtime work.
“We realized in that moment that our day-to-day work and our crucial role in the games industry as QA was not being taken into consideration,” Onah Rongstad, a QA tester at Raven Software, told TechCrunch at the time.
Intel says its desktop GPUs are still coming this summer
CEO tells shareholders the company’s discrete graphic cards will finish in in Summer 2022
According to Intel CEO Patrick Gelsinger, Intels discrete graphic cards will come to the market in a couple of months. He told Intel shareholders that the Arc desktop GPUs are coming in the second quarter 2022.
Gelsinger’s precise words, as spotted by PC Gamer, in response to a question about the company’s stated timeline of delivering four million discrete graphics cards in 2022:
“And overall, AXG is on track. And we launched the mobile SKUs. We’ll have the desktop SKUs coming in Q2. And we’ll have more SKUs as we go through the year as well. We’ll be filling out the product line. A lot of work, right, in qualifying games. And if you’re a gamer, you know that there’s just a lot of individual optimization work on some of the key titles so that work is underway, working with our OEMs to populate their portfolios of products as well. So I’ll say you’re going to see more and more of that hitting the market, and we’ll be filling out — we have the 3 versions. We’ll have the 5, 7 and 9 versions of the year products coming out as we go build up that portfolio this year.”
“AXG” is Intel’s Advanced Computing Systems and Graphics Group. It just sounds a lot cooler than “ACSGG.” Intel had previously indicated that the initial Arc discrete cards would arrive in the summer of this year.
Bitcoin miners say: energy efficiency and regulatory certainty are crucial for success of Crypto Industry
Bitcoin mining is often criticized as an imperfect process due to its energy expenditure, but major firms in the industry are trying to maximize efficiency and sustainability while seeking regulatory clarity.
Image by TeX9.net: Cryptocurrency Revolution
In a dimly lit room at the FTX and SALT’s Crypto Bahamas event, some of the largest crypto miners in the world took the stage to discuss the future of the nascent but growing industry in the “Crypto Mining: Maximizing Efficiency and Sustainability” panel.
Crypto miners are looking to improve their market through efforts ranging from improving hashrate efficiency, which is the amount of power that a machine requires to produce a bitcoin, to data mining centers becoming more specialized and optimized for lower energy consumption, Marco Streng, CEO and co-founder of Genesis Digital Assets, said at the event.
Computers that mine bitcoin are 58 times more efficient than they were eight years ago, according to a report by the Bitcoin Mining Council. In addition to machines becoming more efficient, the engineering of the facilities and the sources of power have become much more efficient, which improves the productivity of an individual bitcoin mining computer, Mike Levitt, co-chairman, co-founder and CEO of Core Scientific, said.
Some miners are even using excess heat and converting it into close to 100% heat-generated energy, which would otherwise be wasted but instead is being channeled into energy, Streng said.
“It’s clear now that miners are converging toward renewable sources,” Streng said.
Out of all the energy that gets generated and used in the U.S., about 65% was wasted in 2021, according to a chart by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a research facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and UC Berkeley.
Miners can be a solution to the problem of unconsumed energy, Streng said.
Jaime Leverton, CEO of Hut 8, agreed.
“By working together with a local power grid, we actually are a stabilizer,” Leverton said.
The amount of energy that it takes for Bitcoin to produce $1 billion worth of value is significantly less than the amount of energy it takes for something like an airline to produce $1 billion worth of value, Brian Brooks, CEO of Bitfury, said.
A key point that’s hurting the crypto mining industry right now is the lack of regulatory clarity, all the panelists said.
Microsoft warns: Chinese shutdowns could mean new problems for PC supply chains
Microsoft is taking a conservative approach to ongoing shutdowns in China, which threaten to extend the instabilities in the existing PC supply chain that have persisted throughout the pandemic. But company executives sounded the alarm that these new shutdowns will have an effect on PC and console sales.
During its earnings report for the first calendar quarter of 2022, Microsoft said that revenue in its More Personal Computing division was $14.5 billion, up 11 percent over the same period a year ago. Microsoft Surface revenue increased by 13 percent. Overall, Microsoft reported net income of $16.73 billion (up 8 percent year over year) on revenue of $49.36 billion, up 18 percent.
In comments to analysts during the call, Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood noted that revenue in both search and in Windows exceeded expectations, but that that was “offset by Surface,” which the company apparently expected to perform better.
In describing the company’s outlook, however, Hood went on to offer more detail. For the current quarter, Microsoft said it expects revenue for More Personal Computing to be between $14.65 billion and $14.95 billion, just slightly higher than the current quarter, which will be the fourth quarter of the company’s fiscal 2022 year. “Our guidance reflects the current constraints from the shutdowns in China, which has negatively impacted Q4 supply for OEM, Surface and Xbox consoles, and Windows OEM,” she said.
