Computing

An international team of researchers across the UK, the US and Portugal think they've found an answer to ray tracing's steep performance requirements. And according to them, the answer lies in a hybrid of classical ray tracing algorithms with quantum computing. According to the research paper (currently in preprint), ray tracing workloads aided by quantum computing can offer an up to 190% performance improvement by slashing the number of calculations required by each ray, significantly reducing the requirements of the…

Match sued Google over Google’s Play Store payment system. Photo: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg News…

Photonic materials are the ones that emit, detect or manipulate light. These materials play a crucial role in various sectors such as telecommunications, data processing and storage, and solar cells. Because of their vast usage, there is a continuous need to make them efficient. Researchers, at the University of Central Florida (UCF), are developing new photonic materials that could one day enable ultra-fast, light-based computing. Known as topological insulators, the unique materials are like wires that have been turned…

A Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.37% search engine has made it harder in North America to look up people who are politically sensitive for China, according to a cybersecurity and surveillance group report.Bing’s autofill system, which offers guesses on what users are searching for after a few keystrokes, often fell silent in connection to names the Chinese government deems sensitive, Citizen Lab said in the report Thursday. Last year Microsoft suspended the autofill feature in…

Nevada gambling regulators approved on Thursday a limited license for MGM Resorts International shareholder Barry Diller to work in the state’s casino industry, after questioning the billionaire about a federal investigation into his purchases of Activision Blizzard Inc. shares.The Nevada Gaming Commission, which enforces anticorruption regulations in the state’s gambling industry, voted 4-1 to approve Mr. Diller for a two-year…

MicroStrategy Inc.’s new chief financial officer on Wednesday said its strategy to buy and hold bitcoin long term won’t change despite the recent selloff in the digital asset, which has dented the value of the analytics-software company’s holdings.Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have plummeted this month, in part due to investor concerns over persistent high inflation and the collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin. Bitcoin’s price has slumped by 32% over the past year to $29,128.50 through…

Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz debuted a $600 million fund dedicated to gaming startups, stepping up its bets on so-called Web3 technology just as a broader market decline underscores the volatility of the cryptocurrency-based sector. The venture firm, known as a16z, said Wednesday the fund is its first dedicated to the games industry, pointing to the billions of dollars in annual revenue that hit games such as “Fortnite” and…

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has deepened its bet on videogames by taking a 5% stake, worth about $3 billion, in Japan’s Nintendo In a Japanese regulatory filing, PIF said it held just over 5% of Nintendo as of March 31. It said the stake was purely an investment, suggesting it didn’t intend to try to influence the company’s strategy. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has deepened its bet on videogames by taking a 5% stake, worth about $3 billion, in Japan’s NintendoIn a Japanese regulatory filing, PIF…

Tencent Holdingsposted its worst-ever quarterly profit drop and slowest revenue growth in nearly two decades, as China’s pandemic resurgence hit a technology giant already struggling with a yearlong regulatory crackdown.The social-media and videogame behemoth said Wednesday that first-quarter revenue rose 0.1% from a year earlier to 135.47 billion yuan, or $21.3 billion, based on an exchange rate of 6.3482 yuan to a dollar that Tencent used. Net profit fell 51% to 23.41 billion yuan, the world’s largest videogame…

Microsoft, which had been fined EUR 1.6 billion (roughly Rs. 13,066 crore) by EU antitrust regulators, will revise its licensing terms and allow cloud service providers to better compete in response to complaints, its president Brad Smith said on Wednesday.The company was taking the first step but not the last to address the concerns, Smith told a conference organised by think tank Bruegel in Brussels.Microsoft wants to listen and act on the complaints, he said."It really starts by giving more options to European cloud…