Amazon is giving out funding and support to more startups developing technology that points us in the direct of net-zero emissions, as part of its AWS Clean Energy Accelerator program.

The accelerator will provide 12 eco-minded companies with guidance on how to get more out of the AWS cloud, by training their employees on machine learning, analytics, and high-performance computing. Each startup will also get up to $100,000 in AWS Activate credits, double what was offered to the program's first cohort of ten startups announced in July 2021.

Howard Gefen, GM of AWS' energy industry business unit, said in a canned statement that despite climate change being the defining issue of our age, the technology needed to achieve today's grand environmental goals isn't there. The Clean Energy Accelerator program is supposed to help foster the development of this green tech we're lacking.

"Technologies available today support less than 40 percent of the CO2 reductions needed, and many of these technologies are not yet commercially deployed on a mass-market scale," he opined. 

Amazon's own carbon footprint has been growing, and it's attempted to deflect its own problems by framing emissions against business growth (less carbon emitted per dollar earned), or simply refusing to report emission statistics. Amazon has also stated its use of renewable energy reduced its carbon footprint by four percent from 2019 to 2020, and that it became the largest corporate purchaser of green energy, which it said powered 65 percent of its operations in 2020.

More than 420 companies in 58 countries applied, of which AWS selected 12 businesses to be part of the second cohort of its Clean Energy Accelerator. They are:

Along with AWS credits and training, Amazon said the dozen companies that are part of the accelerator will have access to mentoring from Amazon, the European Innovation Council, the Global Warming Mitigation Project and other partner organizations. All 12 participants will show off their work at AWS' Clean Energy Accelerator 2.0 Innovation Showcase taking place in Lisbon, Portugal, in June. ®

The astonishing PicoPuter emulation project can run a transputer emulator on multiple Raspberry Pi Picos, clustering them using the transputer's native inter-processor link protocol.

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a surprisingly capable device at $4 apiece, and one of its less well-known features is its eight programmable IO state-machines on board. As programmer-archaeologist Andrew Menadue wrote in a blog post:

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has open-sourced a federated learning platform it claims protects privacy by enabling the development of machine learning algorithms without having to share training data.

FederatedScope was developed by Alibaba's DAMO Academy, the global science and technology research outfit it founded in 2017, and the source code for this is now published under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.

The platform is described as a comprehensive federated learning platform that provides flexible customization for a variety of machine learning tasks in both academia and industry.

Nvidia has paid a $5.5 million fine to settle charges that the GPU maker withheld the true impact of cryptocurrency mining on 2017 revenue.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made the settlement public Friday, saying the chip designer "failed to disclose that cryptomining was a significant element of its material revenue growth" for GPUs that are designed and marketed for PC gaming.

"Nvidia's disclosure failures deprived investors of critical information to evaluate the company's business in a key market," said Kristina Littman, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit.

Data warehousing specialist Teradata is taking a $60 million hit by ending sales, operations and support in Russia following the country's invasion of Ukraine.

CFO Claire Bramley told investors that of the $60 million, around $10 million was removed from first quarter revenue, leaving a $50 million impact expected across the remaining three quarters of 2022.

Teradata CEO Steve McMillan said: "In the quarter, we stopped conducting business in Russia, ceased customer interactions and services with all Russian accounts, and confirmed that we do not have any suppliers critical to our supply chain from Russia or Ukraine. Our actions were managed with a priority of support and care for our employees who were directly affected.

The Fedora Project has changed its collective mind, and Fedora 37 won't require UEFI – it will still install and run on BIOS-only systems.

Last month we reported on some simplifications planned for Fedora 36 and 37. Aside from the changes to console graphics support, there was a proposal to require UEFI firmware, as a step towards removing support for booting using the old-style legacy BIOS boot process.

Apparently, this generated more discussion than several previous wildly contentious changes, including, in the words of project lead Matthew Miller, "systemd-resolved, btrfs-by-default, and even switching the default editor to nano."

The UK's chief finance minister, Rishi Sunak, has blamed legacy IT for his decision not to increase social security payments as inflation hits the highest rate in 30 years.

According to reports, the Conservative politician in charge of The Treasury was prevented from raising some benefits because of aging systems at the country's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), which has overall responsibility for social security.

Some benefits were increased by 3.1 percent last month. The chancellor was told he could not introduce further increases because the systems at the benefits agency could not support this, said The Times. A government source said: "The system was simply not built to be flexible."

Germany's government is looking to attract chipmakers to the country by offering €14 billion ($14.7 billion) in financial support, apparently spurred on by global semiconductor supply chain problems.

The move follows the European Chips Act from the European Commission and Intel's decision earlier this year to build a new fabrication plant in Germany.

The latest announcement was made by Germany's vice chancellor and federal minister for Economic Affairs Robert Habeck at a business event in Hanover, according to Reuters, who said that his government wants to attract chip makers with €14 billion ($14.7 billion) in state aid.

RAD Basic has edged a little closer to bringing Visual Basic 6 back to your PC with the release of 0.5.0 Alpha 3.

We last looked at RAD Basic a year ago and soaked in a warm bath of nostalgia for a time when Windows applications could be knocked out with the same skills needed to persuade Sinclair or Commodore hardware to display naughty words in a 1980s computer shop.

While Microsoft ditched Visual Basic 6 in favor of .NET and C# many years ago, there remain plenty of IT professionals who owe their career to the language and an abundance of lashed-up solutions still underpinning substantial chunks of the corporate world.

Supply chain issues and other disruptions in China caused by strict COVID-19 lockdown measures have seen 23 percent of European businesses operating in the Middle Kingdom consider moving elsewhere, according to a recent report.

The report, from the European Chamber of Commerce in China and released on Thursday, said the number of European businesses considering leaving nearly doubled since the onset of 2022, a mere five months ago.

"The introduction of more stringent COVID-19 containment measures in 2022, with China imposing full or partial lockdowns in at least 45 cities, is causing massive uncertainty for businesses," said the authors.

Google has deployed a pair of AI-related services to woo factories and assembly lines onto its cloud.

These offerings are: Manufacturing Connect (MC), an automation tool and data processor that supports more than 250 machine-communication protocols, and can thus receive data from a wide variety of sources; and a Manufacturing Data Engine (MDE), an analytics tool that reports on data gathered from Manufacturing Connect in what is intended to be an easy-to-use format by staff. The overall goal is to help manufacturers better understand what's happening at their plants, and monitor their incomings and outgoings.

According to Google Cloud Tech director of manufacturing, industrial and transportation Charlie Sheridan, manufacturing businesses as a group are digitally transforming, though many of their efforts stall when scaling up. 

Nokia’s "significant" contributions to Microsoft's open-source SONiC project and ongoing supply-chain challenges undoubtedly played a role in the Windows giant's decision to deploy the Finns' network switches, despite their relative inexperience in the arena, Dell'Oro analyst Sameh Boujelbene told The Register.

The deal, announced in mid-April, will see Microsoft use Nokias 400Gbit/sec 7250 IXR appliances as spine switches, alongside the Finnish biz's fixed form factor equipment for top-of-rack (ToR) applications.

At the time, Nokia touted the deal as recognition of its ability to meet and exceed Redmond's evolving datacenter requirements.

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