Paramount Global has agreed to merge with Skydance in a significant deal that will see the Redstone family relinquish control of the storied movie studio and media company. The merger, valued at over $8 billion, involves a consortium including RedBird Capital Partners and KKR, and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approval. CNBC reports: The deal gives National Amusements an enterprise value of $2.4 billion, which includes $1.75 billion in equity. Paramount's class A shareholders will receive $23 apiece in cash or stock, while class B stockholders will receive $15 per share, equating to a cash consideration totaling $4.5 billion available to public shareholders. As part of the deal Skydance will also inject $1.5 billion of capital into Paramount's balance sheet. "It's a new Paramount; it's not just a catchphrase," said RedBird's Jeff Shell, former CEO of NBCUniversal, on a call with investors Monday. "We think it's going to be a new day for these combined assets."

Skydance founder David Ellison will lead the combined company as CEO, while Shell will serve as president. The merger is subject to regulatory approval and expected to close in the third quarter of 2025. It also includes a 45-day "go-shop period," in which the Paramount special committee can solicit other offers. A completed Skydance merger would mark a major shift for the ownership of Paramount, as well as for Hollywood as a whole. The Redstone family has long controlled the movie studio -- known for films such as "The Godfather," "Top Gun" and "Forrest Gump" -- as well as the CBS broadcast network and cable TV networks including MTV and Nickelodeon. Now, Ellison, 41, son of Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison, will be at the helm of a major movie studio and among Hollywood's elite. "It's been a long time since a creative executive ran one of the big Hollywood companies," Shell said on Monday's call. "And I think it's really important when creative is the core."

This week the Linux Foundation announced a new organization for decentralized systems and technologies, with an aim of "fostering innovation and collaboration" in both their development and deployment.

It will build on existing Linux Foundation blockchain and digital identity projects, according to the announcement, while supporting "a rapidly growing decentralized technology landscape." To foster this broader ecosystem, LF Decentralized Trust will encompass the growing portfolio of Hyperledger projects and host new open source software, communities, standards, and specifications that are critical to the macro shift toward decentralized systems of distributed trust....

LF Decentralized Trust's expanded project and member ecosystem will be both essential to emerging tokenized assets classes and networks, as well as to modernizing the core infrastructure for finance, trade, government, healthcare, and more. LF Decentralized Trust will serve as a neutral home for the open development of a broad range of ledger, identity, security, interoperability, scale, implementation, and related technologies... LF Decentralized Trust will also include new directed funding models that will drive strategic investments by members into individual projects and project resources.

"With LF Decentralized Trust, we're expanding our commitment to open source innovation by embracing a wider array of decentralized technologies," said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation. "This new, elevated foundation will enable the community to build a more robust ecosystem that drives forward transparency, security, and efficiency in global infrastructure."

"After eight years of advancing the development of blockchain, decentralized identity and related technologies via the Hyperledger community, the time has come to broaden our effort and impact," said Daniela Barbosa, General Manager, Blockchain and Identity, the Linux Foundation. "Ledgers and ledger technologies are but one component of the decentralized systems that will underpin a digital-first global economy. LF Decentralized Trust is where we will gather and grow an expanded community and portfolio of technologies to deliver the transparency, reliability, security and efficiency needed to successfully upgrade critical systems around the world."
The announcement includes quotes of support from numerous companies including Oracle, Siemens, Visa, Accenture, Citi, and Hitachi. Some highlights:

• "The formation of the LF Decentralized Trust reflects the growing demand for open source resources that are critical to the management and functionality of decentralized systems." — CEO of Digital Asset

• "The adoption of decentralized infrastructure is at an inflection point, reflecting the increasing demand from both enterprises and consumers for more secure and transparent digital transactions. As the industry leader for onchain data, blockchain abstraction, and interoperability, we're excited to see the formation of the LF Decentralized Trust and to expand our collaboration with leading financial institutions on advancing tokenized assets and the onchain economy at large." — CMO at Chainlink Labs.

• "As a founding member of the Hyperledger Foundation, and given our unique position in the financial markets, we recognize the vast potential for open-source innovation and decentralized technologies when it comes to reducing risk, increasing resiliency and improving security. The expansion of Hyperledger Foundation into LF Decentralized Trust represents an exciting opportunity to continue expanding these groundbreaking technologies." — a managing director at DTCC

During its earnings call on Monday, Oracle CEO Safra Catz told analysts that it is shutting down its ads business. "In Q4, we decided to exit the advertising business, which had declined to about $300 million in revenue in fiscal year '24," said Catz, according to an earnings transcript. Adweek's Catherine Perloff reports: In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Oracle Advertising made $2 billion in revenue. At the time, revenue was only growing by 2% a year and many employees had been laid off as part of a reorganization in 2022, Business Insider reported. Oracle spent billions on entering the advertising business, acquiring nearly a dozen ad technology companies for over a decade. Notable acquisitions include data firms DataLogix, bought in 2014 for $1.2 billion, and brand safety platform Moat, purchased in 2017 for a reported $850 million. "Oracle's bet on the advertising industry was undermined when Meta [...] shut down its data to third parties including Oracle in 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal," notes Adweek. Europe's GDPR further restricted Oracle's advertising business, leading the company to shut down its 'AddThis' publisher audience tool in 2019, which relied on third-party data.

It was "a catastrophic IT failure," writes Computer Weekly. It was nearly two years ago that Birmingham City Council, the largest local authority in Europe, "declared itself in financial distress" — effectively declaring bankruptcy — after the costs on an Oracle project costs ballooned from $25 million to around $125.5 million.

But Computer Weekly's investigation finds signs that the program board and its manager wanted to go live in April of 2022 "regardless of the state of the build, the level of testing undertaken and challenges faced by those working on the programme." One manager's notes "reveal concerns that the program manager and steering committee could not be swayed, which meant the system went live despite having known flaws." Computer Weekly has seen notes from a manager at BCC highlighting a number of discrepancies in the Birmingham City Council report to cabinet published in June 2023, 14 months after the Oracle system went into production. The report stated that some critical elements of the Oracle system were not functioning adequately, impacting day-to-day operations. The manager's comments reveal that this flaw in the implementation of the Oracle software was known before the system went live in April 2022... An insider at Birmingham City Council who has been closely involved in the project told Computer Weekly it went live "despite all the warnings telling them it wouldn't work"....

Since going live, the Oracle system effectively scrambled financial data, which meant the council had no clear picture of its overall finances. The insider said that by January 2023, Birmingham City Council could not produce an accurate account of its spending and budget for the next financial year: "There's no way that we could do our year-end accounts because the system didn't work."
A June 2023 report to cabinet "stated that due to issues with the council's bank reconciliation system, a significant number of transactions had to be manually allocated to accounts rather than automatically via the Oracle system," according to the article. But Computer Weekly has seen a 2019 presentation slide deck showing the council was already aware that Oracle's out-of-the-box bank reconciliation system "did not handle mixed debtor/non-debtor bank files. The workaround suggested was either a lot of manual intervention or a platform as a service (PaaS) offering from Evosys, the Oracle implementation partner contracted by BCC to build the new IT system."

The article ultimately concludes that "project management failures over a number of years contributed to the IT failure."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Caroline Haskins: On May 7th and 8th in Washington, D.C., the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness," hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project -- better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces.

The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the U.S. military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software. At industry conferences like these, powerful people tend to be more unfiltered – they assume they're in a safe space, among friends and peers. I was curious, what would they say about the AI-powered violence in Gaza, or what they think is the future of war?

Attendees were told the conference highlight would be a series of panels in a large room toward the back of the hall. In reality, that room hosted just one of note. Featuring Schmidt and the Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, the fire-breathing panel would set the tone for the rest of the conference. More specifically, it divided attendees into two groups: those who see war as a matter of money and strategy, and those who see it as a matter of death. The vast majority of people there fell into group one. I've written about relationships between tech companies and the military before, so I shouldn't have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body. Some of the noteworthy quotes from the panel and convention, as highlighted in Haskins' reporting, include:

"It's always great when the CIA helps you out," Schmidt joked when CIA deputy director David Cohen lent him his microphone when his didn't work.

The U.S. has to "scare our adversaries to death" in war, said Karp. On university graduates protesting Israel's war in Gaza, Karp described their views as a "pagan religion infecting our universities" and "an infection inside of our society."

"The peace activists are war activists," Karp insisted. "We are the peace activists."

A huge aspect of war in a democracy, Karp went on to argue, is leaders successfully selling that war domestically. "If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any armies in the west ever," Karp said.

A man in nuclear weapons research jokingly referred to himself as "the new Oppenheimer."

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison said Tuesday that the company is moving its world headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, to be closer to a major health-care epicenter. CNBC reports: In a wide-ranging conversation with Bill Frist, a former U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Ellison said Oracle is moving a "huge campus" to Nashville, "which will ultimately be our world headquarters." He said Nashville is an established health center and a "fabulous place to live," one that Oracle employees are excited about. "It's the center of the industry we're most concerned about, which is the health-care industry," Ellison said. The announcement was seemingly spur-of-the-moment. "I shouldn't have said that," Ellison told Frist, a longtime health-care industry veteran who represented Tennessee in the Senate. The pair spoke during a fireside chat at the Oracle Health Summit in Nashville.

Nashville has been a major player in the health-care scene for decades, and the city is now home to a vibrant network of health systems, startups and investment firms. The city's reputation as a health-care hub was catalyzed when HCA Healthcare, one of the first for-profit hospital companies in the U.S., was founded there in 1968. HCA helped attract troves of health-care professionals to Nashville, and other organizations quickly followed suit. Oracle has been developing its new $1.2 billion campus in the city for about three years, according to The Tennessean. "Our people love it here, and we think it's the center of our future," Ellison said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals -- despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private -- frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today. Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals -- essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments -- and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties. Additionally, not all of these websites even had a privacy policy. And of the 71 percent that did, 56 percent disclosed specific third-party companies that could receive user information.

The researchers' latest work builds on a study they published a year ago of 3,747 US non-federal hospital websites. That found 98.6 percent tracked and transferred visitors' data to large tech and social media companies, advertising firms, and data brokers. To find the trackers on websites, the team checked out each hospitals' homepage on January 26 using webXray, an open source tool that detects third-party HTTP requests and matches them to the organizations receiving the data. They also recorded the number of third-party cookies per page. One name in particular stood out, in terms of who was receiving website visitors' information. "In every study we've done, in any part of the health system, Google, whose parent company is Alphabet, is on nearly every page, including hospitals," [Dr Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania] observed. "From there, it declines," he continued. "Meta was on a little over half of hospital webpages, and the Meta Pixel is notable because it seems to be one of the grabbier entities out there in terms of tracking."

Both Meta and Google's tracking technologies have been the subject of criminal complaints and lawsuits over the years -- as have some healthcare companies that shared data with these and other advertisers. In addition, between 20 and 30 percent of the hospitals share data with Adobe, Friedman noted. "Everybody knows Adobe for PDFs. My understanding is they also have a tracking division within their ad division." Others include telecom and digital marketing companies like The Trade Desk and Verizon, plus tech giants Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon, according to Friedman. Then there's also analytics firms including Hotjar and data brokers such as Acxiom. "And two thirds of hospital websites had some kind of data transfer to a third-party domain that we couldn't even identify," he added. Of the 71 hospital website privacy policies that the team found, 69 addressed the types of user information that was collected. The most common were IP addresses (80 percent), web browser name and version (75 percent), pages visited on the website (73 percent), and the website from which the user arrived (73 percent). Only 56 percent of these policies identified the third-party companies receiving user information. In lieu of any federal data privacy law in the U.S., Friedman recommends users protect their personal information via the browser-based tools Ghostery and Privacy Badger, which identify and block transfers to third-party domains.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Given the recent change by Redis to adopt dual source-available licensing for all their releases moving forward (Redis Source Available License v2 and Server Side Public License v1), the Linux Foundation announced today their fork of Redis. The Linux Foundation went public today with their intent to fork Valkey as an open-source alternative to the Redis in-memory store. Due to the Redis licensing changes, Valkey is forking from Redis 7.2.4 and will maintain a BSD 3-clause license. Google, AWS, Oracle, and others are helping form this new Valkey project.

The Linux Foundation press release shares: "To continue improving on this important technology and allow for unfettered distribution of the project, the community created Valkey, an open source high performance key-value store. Valkey supports the Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD platforms. In addition, the community will continue working on its existing roadmap including new features such as a more reliable slot migration, dramatic scalability and stability improvements to the clustering system, multi-threaded performance improvements, triggers, new commands, vector search support, and more. Industry participants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. are supporting Valkey. They are focused on making contributions that support the long-term health and viability of the project so that everyone can benefit from it."

"Until recently, Linux kernel developers have been the ones keeping long-term support (LTS) versions of the Linux kernel patched and up to date," writes ZDNet.

"Then, because it was too much work with too little support, the Linux kernel developers decided to no longer support the older kernels." Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux kernel maintainer for the stable branch, announced that the Linux 4.14.336 release was the last maintenance update to the six-year-old LTS Linux 4.14 kernel series. It was the last of the line for 4.14. Or was it?

Kroah-Hartman had stated, "All users of the 4.14 kernel series must upgrade." Maybe not. OpenELA, a trade association of the Linux distributors CIQ (the company backing Rocky Linux), Oracle, and SUSE, is now offering — via its kernel-lts — a new lease on life for 4.14.

This renewed version, tagged with the following format — x.y.z-openela — is already out as v4.14.339-openela. The OpenELA acknowledges the large debt they owe to Kroah-Hartman and Sasha Levin of the Linux Kernel Stable project but underlines that their project is not affiliated with them or any of the other upstream stable maintainers. That said, the OpenELA team will automatically pull most LTS-maintained stable tree patches from the upstream stable branches. When there are cases where patches can't be applied cleanly, OpenELA kernel-lts maintainers will deal with these issues. In addition, a digest of non-applied patches will accompany each release of its LTS kernel, in mbox format.
"The OpenELA kernel-lts project is the first forum for enterprise Linux distribution vendors to pool our resources," an Oracle Linux SVP tells ZDNet, "and collaborate on those older kernels after upstream support for those kernels has ended." And the CEO of CIQ adds that after community support has ended, "We believe that open collaboration is the best way to maintain foundational enterprise infrastructure.

"Through OpenELA, vendors, users, and the open source community at large can work together to provide the longevity that professional IT organizations require for enterprise Linux."

A directive known as Document 79 ramps up Beijing's effort to replace U.S. tech with homegrown alternatives. From a report: For American tech companies in China, the writing is on the wall. It's also on paper, in Document 79. The 2022 Chinese government directive expands a drive that is muscling U.S. technology out of the country -- an effort some refer to as "Delete A," for Delete America. Document 79 was so sensitive that high-ranking officials and executives were only shown the order and weren't allowed to make copies, people familiar with the matter said. It requires state-owned companies in finance, energy and other sectors to replace foreign software in their IT systems by 2027.

American tech giants had long thrived in China as they hot-wired the country's meteoric industrial rise with computers, operating systems and software. Chinese leaders want to sever that relationship, driven by a push for self-sufficiency and concerns over the country's long-term security. The first targets were hardware makers. Dell, International Business Machines and Cisco Systems have gradually seen much of their equipment replaced by products from Chinese competitors.

Document 79, named for the numbering on the paper, targets companies that provide the software -- enabling daily business operations from basic office tools to supply-chain management. The likes of Microsoft and Oracle are losing ground in the field, one of the last bastions of foreign tech profitability in the country. The effort is just one salvo in a yearslong push by Chinese leader Xi Jinping for self-sufficiency in everything from critical technology such as semiconductors and fighter jets to the production of grain and oilseeds. The broader strategy is to make China less dependent on the West for food, raw materials and energy, and instead focus on domestic supply chains.

"Oracle's plans to evolve Java in 2024 involve OpenJDK projects," writes InfoWorld, citing a recent video by Oracle Java developer relations representative Nicolai Parlog. (Though many improvements may not be usable until 2025 or later...) - For Project Babylon, Parlog cited plans for code reflection, expanding the reflection API, and allowing transformation of Java code inside a method. The goal is to allow developers to write Java code that libraries then can interpret as a mathematical function, for example. The Babylon team in coming weeks plans to publish work on use cases such as auto-differentiating, C# LINQ emulation, and GPU programming.

- In Project Leyden, which is aimed at improving startup times, plans for 2024 involve refining the concept of condensers and working toward the production-readiness of prototype condensers.

- In Project Amber, current features in preview include string templates, a simplified main method, and statements before this() and super(). "I expect all three to finalize in 2024," said Parlog. Under exploration are capabilities such as primitive types in patterns and with expressions.

- In Project Valhalla, work will focus on value classes and objects, which provide class instances that have only final instance fields and lack object identity [to] significantly reduce the run time overhead of boxed Integer, Double, and Byte objects...

- In Project Lilliput, aimed at downsizing Java object headers in the HotSpot JVM and reducing Java's memory footprint, work now centers on polishing a fast-locking scheme.

- Project Panama, for interconnecting JVM and native C code, "has three irons in the fire," Parlog said.

In 2003, Hans Reiser answered questions from Slashdot's readers...

Today Wikipedia describes Hans Reiser as "a computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer... Prior to his incarceration, Reiser created the ReiserFS computer file system, which may be used by the Linux kernel but which is now scheduled for removal in 2025, as well as its attempted successor, Reiser4."

This week alanw (Slashdot reader #1,822), spotted a development on the Linux kernel mailing list. "Hans Reiser (imprisoned for the murder of his wife) has written a letter, asking it to be published to Slashdot." Reiser writes: I was asked by a kind Fredrick Brennan for my comments that I might offer on the discussion of removing ReiserFS V3 from the kernel. I don't post directly because I am in prison for killing my wife Nina in 2006.

I am very sorry for my crime — a proper apology would be off topic for this forum, but available to any who ask.

A detailed apology for how I interacted with the Linux kernel community, and some history of V3 and V4, are included, along with descriptions of what the technical issues were. I have been attending prison workshops, and working hard on improving my social skills to aid my becoming less of a danger to society. The man I am now would do things very differently from how I did things then.
Click here for the rest of Reiser's introduction, along with a link to the full text of the letter...

The letter is dated November 26, 2023, and ends with an address where Reiser can be mailed. Ars Technica has a good summary of Reiser's lengthy letter from prison — along with an explanation for how it came to be. With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely, Fredrick R. Brennan, font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML. It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document...

It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics... Reiser asks that a number of people who worked on ReiserFS be included in "one last release" of the README, and to "delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited." He says prison has changed him in conflict resolution and with his "tendency to see people in extremes...."

Reiser writes that he understood the difficulty ahead in getting the Linux world to "shift paradigms" but lacked the understanding of how to "make friends and allies of people" who might initially have felt excluded. This is followed by a heady discussion of "balanced trees instead of extensible hashing," Oracle's history with implementing balanced trees, getting synchronicity just right, I/O schedulers, block size, seeks and rotational delays on magnetic hard drives, and tails. It leads up to a crucial decision in ReiserFS' development, the hard non-compatible shift from V3 to Reiser 4. Format changes, Reiser writes, are "unwanted by many for good reasons." But "I just had to fix all these flaws, fix them and make a filesystem that was done right. It's hard to explain why I had to do it, but I just couldn't rest as long as the design was wrong and I knew it was wrong," he writes. SUSE didn't want a format change, but Reiser, with hindsight, sees his pushback as "utterly inarticulate and unsociable." The push for Reiser 4 in the Linux kernel was similar, "only worse...."

He encourages people to "allow those who worked so hard to build a beautiful filesystem for the users to escape the effects of my reputation." Under a "Conclusion" sub-heading, Reiser is fairly succinct in summarizing a rather wide-ranging letter, minus the minutiae about filesystem architecture.

I wish I had learned the things I have been learning in prison about talking through problems, and believing I can talk through problems and doing it, before I had married or joined the LKML. I hope that day when they teach these things in Elementary School comes.

I thank Richard Stallman for his inspiration, software, and great sacrifices,

It has been an honor to be of even passing value to the users of Linux. I wish all of you well.


It both is and is not a response to Brennan's initial prompt, asking how he felt about ReiserFS being slated for exclusion from the Linux kernel. There is, at the moment, no reply to the thread started by Brennan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The world could have its first trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organization Oxfam International said Monday in its annual assessment of global inequalities timed to the gathering of political and business elites at the Swiss ski resort of Davos. Oxfam, which for years has been trying to highlight the growing disparities between the super-rich and the bulk of the global population during the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, reckons the gap has been "supercharged" since the coronavirus pandemic.

The group said the fortunes of the five richest men -- Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault and his family of luxury company LVMH, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and investment guru Warren Buffett -- have spiked by 114% in real terms since 2020, when the world was reeling from the pandemic. Oxfam's interim executive director said the report showed that the world is entering a "decade of division." "We have the top five billionaires, they have doubled their wealth. On the other hand, almost 5 billion people have become poorer," Amitabh Behar said in an interview in Davos, Switzerland, where the forum's annual meeting takes place this week.

"Very soon, Oxfam predicts that we will have a trillionaire within a decade," Behar said, referring to a person who has a thousand billion dollars. "Whereas to fight poverty, we need more than 200 years." If someone does reach that trillion-dollar milestone -- and it could be someone not even on any list of richest people right now -- he or she would have the same value as oil-rich Saudi Arabia. [...] To calculate the top five richest billionaires, Oxfam used figures from Forbes as of November 2023. Their total wealth then was $869 billion, up from $340 billion in March 2020, a nominal increase of 155%. For the bottom 60% of the global population, Oxfam used figures from the UBS Global Wealth Report 2023 and from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2019. Both used the same methodology. Some of the measures Oxfam said should be considered to reduce global inequality include the permanent taxation of the wealthiest in every country, more effective taxation of big corporations and a renewed drive against tax avoidance. "To end extreme inequality, governments must radically redistribute the power of billionaires and corporations back to ordinary people," reports Oxfam. "A more equal world is possible if governments effectively regulate and reimagine the private sector."

Linux kernel 6.7 has been released, including support for the new next-gen copy-on-write (COW) bcachefs file system. The Register reports: Linus Torvalds announced the release on Sunday, noting that it is "one of the largest kernel releases we've ever had." Among the bigger and more visible changes are a whole new file system, along with fresh functionality for several existing ones; improved graphics support for several vendors' hardware; and the removal of an entire CPU architecture. [...] The single biggest feature of 6.7 is the new bcachefs file system, which we examined in March 2022. As this is the first release of Linux to include the new file system, it definitely would be premature to trust any important data to it yet, but this is a welcome change. The executive summary is that bcachefs is a next-generation file system that, like Btrfs and ZFS, provides COW functionality. COW enables the almost instant creation of "snapshots" of all or part of a drive or volume, which enables the OS to make disk operations transactional: In other words, to provide an "undo" function for complex sets of disk write operations.

Having a COW file system on Linux isn't new. The existing next-gen file system in the kernel, Btrfs, also supports COW snapshots. The version in 6.7 sees several refinements. It inherits a feature implemented for Steam OS: Two Btrfs file systems with the same ID can be mounted simultaneously, for failover scenarios. It also has improved quota support and a new raid_stripe_tree that improves handling of arrays of dissimilar drives. Btrfs remains somewhat controversial. Red Hat banished it from RHEL years ago (although Oracle Linux still offers it) but SUSE's distros depend heavily upon it. It will be interesting to see how quickly SUSE's Snapper tool gains support for bcachefs: This new COW contender may reveal unquestioned assumptions built into the code. Since Snapper is also used in several non-SUSE distros, including Spiral Linux, Garuda, and siduction, they're tied to Btrfs as well.

The other widely used FOSS next-gen file system, OpenZFS, also supports COW, but licensing conflicts prevent ZFS being fully integrated into the Linux kernel. So although multiple distros (such as NixOS, Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, Ubuntu, and Void Linux) support ZFS, it must remain separate and distinct. This results in limitations, such as the ZFS Advanced Read Cache being separate from Linux's page cache. Bcachefs is all-GPL and doesn't suffer from such limitations. It aims to supply the important features of ZFS, such as integrated volume management, while being as fast as ext4 or XFS, and also surpass Btrfs in both performance and, crucially, reliability. A full list of changes in this release can be viewed via KernelNewbies.

According to researchers from a startup called Patronus AI, ChatGPT and other chatbots that rely on large language models frequently fail to answer questions derived from Securities and Exchange Commission filings. CNBC reports: Even the best-performing artificial intelligence model configuration they tested, OpenAI's GPT-4-Turbo, when armed with the ability to read nearly an entire filing alongside the question, only got 79% of answers right on Patronus AI's new test, the company's founders told CNBC. Oftentimes, the so-called large language models would refuse to answer, or would "hallucinate" figures and facts that weren't in the SEC filings. "That type of performance rate is just absolutely unacceptable," Patronus AI co-founder Anand Kannappan said. "It has to be much much higher for it to really work in an automated and production-ready way." [...]

Patronus AI worked to write a set of more than 10,000 questions and answers drawn from SEC filings from major publicly traded companies, which it calls FinanceBench. The dataset includes the correct answers, and also where exactly in any given filing to find them. Not all of the answers can be pulled directly from the text, and some questions require light math or reasoning. Qian and Kannappan say it's a test that gives a "minimum performance standard" for language AI in the financial sector. Patronus AI tested four language models: OpenAI's GPT-4 and GPT-4-Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 2 and Meta's Llama 2, using a subset of 150 of the questions it had produced. It also tested different configurations and prompts, such as one setting where the OpenAI models were given the exact relevant source text in the question, which it called "Oracle" mode. In other tests, the models were told where the underlying SEC documents would be stored, or given "long context," which meant including nearly an entire SEC filing alongside the question in the prompt.

GPT-4-Turbo failed at the startup's "closed book" test, where it wasn't given access to any SEC source document. It failed to answer 88% of the 150 questions it was asked, and only produced a correct answer 14 times. It was able to improve significantly when given access to the underlying filings. In "Oracle" mode, where it was pointed to the exact text for the answer, GPT-4-Turbo answered the question correctly 85% of the time, but still produced an incorrect answer 15% of the time. But that's an unrealistic test because it requires human input to find the exact pertinent place in the filing -- the exact task that many hope that language models can address. Llama 2, an open-source AI model developed by Meta, had some of the worst "hallucinations," producing wrong answers as much as 70% of the time, and correct answers only 19% of the time, when given access to an array of underlying documents. Anthropic's Claude 2 performed well when given "long context," where nearly the entire relevant SEC filing was included along with the question. It could answer 75% of the questions it was posed, gave the wrong answer for 21%, and failed to answer only 3%. GPT-4-Turbo also did well with long context, answering 79% of the questions correctly, and giving the wrong answer for 17% of them.

Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft said at an AMD investor event today that they will use AMD's newest AI chip, the Instinct MI300X, as an alternative to Nvidia's expensive graphic processors. "If AMD's latest high-end chip is good enough for the technology companies and cloud service providers building and serving AI models when it starts shipping early next year, it could lower costs for developing AI models and put competitive pressure on Nvidia's surging AI chip sales growth," reports CNBC. From the report: "All of the interest is in big iron and big GPUs for the cloud," AMD CEO Lisa Su said Wednesday. AMD says the MI300X is based on a new architecture, which often leads to significant performance gains. Its most distinctive feature is that it has 192GB of a cutting-edge, high-performance type of memory known as HBM3, which transfers data faster and can fit larger AI models. Su directly compared the MI300X and the systems built with it to Nvidia's main AI GPU, the H100. "What this performance does is it just directly translates into a better user experience," Su said. "When you ask a model something, you'd like it to come back faster, especially as responses get more complicated."

The main question facing AMD is whether companies that have been building on Nvidia will invest the time and money to add another GPU supplier. "It takes work to adopt AMD," Su said. AMD on Wednesday told investors and partners that it had improved its software suite called ROCm to compete with Nvidia's industry standard CUDA software, addressing a key shortcoming that had been one of the primary reasons AI developers currently prefer Nvidia. Price will also be important. AMD didn't reveal pricing for the MI300X on Wednesday, but Nvidia's can cost around $40,000 for one chip, and Su told reporters that AMD's chip would have to cost less to purchase and operate than Nvidia's in order to persuade customers to buy it.

On Wednesday, AMD said it had already signed up some of the companies most hungry for GPUs to use the chip. Meta and Microsoft were the two largest purchasers of Nvidia H100 GPUs in 2023, according to a recent report from research firm Omidia. Meta said it will use MI300X GPUs for AI inference workloads such as processing AI stickers, image editing, and operating its assistant. Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, said the company would offer access to MI300X chips through its Azure web service. Oracle's cloud will also use the chips. OpenAI said it would support AMD GPUs in one of its software products, called Triton, which isn't a big large language model like GPT but is used in AI research to access chip features.

"Structured concurrency is a new way to use multithreading in Java," reports InfoWorld.

"It allows developers to think about work in logical groups while taking advantage of both traditional and virtual threads." Available in preview in Java 21, structured concurrency is a key aspect of Java's future, so now is a good time to start working with it... Java's thread model makes it a strong contender among concurrent languages, but multithreading has always been inherently tricky. Structured concurrency allows you to use multiple threads with structured programming syntax. In essence, it provides a way to write concurrent software using familiar program flows and constructs. This lets developers focus on the business at hand, instead of the orchestration of threading.

As the JEP for structured concurrency says, "If a task splits into concurrent subtasks then they all return to the same place, namely the task's code block." Virtual threads, now an official feature of Java, create the possibility of cheaply spawning threads to gain concurrent performance. Structured concurrency provides the simple syntax to do so. As a result, Java now has a unique and highly-optimized threading system that is also easy to understand...

Between virtual threads and structured concurrency, Java developers have a compelling new mechanism for breaking up almost any code into concurrent tasks without much overhead... Any time you encounter a bottleneck where many tasks are occurring, you can easily hand them all off to the virtual thread engine, which will find the best way to orchestrate them. The new thread model with structured concurrency also makes it easy to customize and fine-tune this behavior. It will be very interesting to see how developers use these new concurrency capabilities in our applications, frameworks, and servers going forward.
It involves a new class StructuredTaskScope located in the java.util.concurrent library. (InfoWorld points out that "you'll need to use --enable-preview and --source 21 or --source 22 to enable structured concurrency.")

Their reporter shared an example on GitHub, and there's more examples in the Java 21 documentation. "The structured concurrency documentation includes an example of collecting subtask results as they succeed or fail and then returning the results."

Nvidia, the world's most valuable chipmaker, is updating its H100 artificial intelligence processor, adding more capabilities to a product that has fueled its dominance in the AI computing market. From a report: The new model, called the H200, will get the ability to use high-bandwidth memory, or HBM3e, allowing it to better cope with the large data sets needed for developing and implementing AI, Nvidia said Monday. Amazon's AWS, Alphabet's Google Cloud and Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure have all committed to using the new chip starting next year.

The current version of the Nvidia processor -- known as an AI accelerator -- is already in famously high demand. It's a prized commodity among technology heavyweights like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk, who boast about their ability to get their hands on the chip. But the product is facing more competition: AMD is bringing its rival MI300 chip to market in the fourth quarter, and Intel claims that its Gaudi 2 model is faster than the H100. With the new product, Nvidia is trying to keep up with the size of data sets used to create AI models and services, it said. Adding the enhanced memory capability will make the H200 much faster at bombarding software with data -- a process that trains AI to perform tasks such as recognizing images and speech.

In Raleigh, North Carolina — the home of Red Hat — local newspaper the News & Observer takes an in-depth look at the "announcement that split the open source software community." (Alternate URL here.) [M]any saw Red Hat's decision to essentially paywall Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, as sacrilegious... Red Hat employees were also conflicted about the new policy, [Red Hat Vice President Mike] McGrath acknowledged. "I think a lot of even internal associates didn't fully understand what we had announced and why," he said...

At issue, he wrote, were emerging competitors who copied Red Hat Enterprise Linux, down to even the code's mistakes, and then offered these Red Hat-replicas to customers for free. These weren't community members adding value, he contended, but undercutting rivals. And in a year when Red Hat laid off 4% of its total workforce, McGrath said, the company could not justify allowing this to continue. "I feel that while this was a difficult decision between community and business, we're still on the right side of it," he told the News & Observer. Not everyone agrees...

McGrath offered little consolation to customers who were relying on one-for-one versions of RHEL. They could stay with the downstream distributions, find another provider, or pay for Red Hat. "I think (people) were just so used to the way things work," he said. "There's a vocal group of people that probably need Red Hat's level of support, but simply don't want to pay for it. And I don't really have... there's not much we can tell them."

Since its RHEL decision, Red Hat has secured several prominent partnerships. In September, the cloud-based software company Salesforce moved 200,000 of its systems from the free CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The same month, Red Hat announced RHEL would begin to support Oracle's cloud infrastructure. Oracle was one of the few major companies this summer to publicly criticize Red Hat for essentially paywalling its most popular code. On Oct. 24, Red Hat notched another win when the data security firm Cohesity said it would also ditch CentOS Linux for RHEL.
The article delves into the history of Red Hat — and of Linux — before culminating with this quote from McGrath. "I think long gone are the times of that sort of romantic view of hobbyists working in their spare time to build open source. I think there's still room for that — we still have that — but quite a lot of open source is now built from people that are paid full time."

Red Hat likes to point out that 90% of Fortune 500 companies use its services, according to the article. But it also quotes Jonathan Wright, infrastructure team lead at the nonprofit AlmaLinux, as saying that Red Hat played "fast and loose" with the GPL. The newspaper then adds that "For many open source believers, such a threat to its hallowed text isn't forgivable."