Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Brenda Fitzgerald, the newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will consider allowing Coca-Cola to once again help fund the agency’s anti-obesity campaigns, according to e-mailed comments reported by the New York Times over the weekend.

Though it would be a turnabout for the agency—which ditched Coke funding in 2013—Fitzgerald's position shouldn't be surprising, as she has a controversial history of accepting funding from Coca-Cola. As health commissioner of Georgia from 2011 to this year, she accepted $1 million from the soda giant to fund an exercise program aimed at cutting the state’s childhood obesity rate—one of the highest in the country.

The exercise-based campaign seemed to fit well with Coca-Cola’s interests. The company has long appeared interested in shifting anti-obesity efforts toward improving physical activity levels rather than focusing on the role of diet, particularly sugary beverages. That’s despite many studies, including those by the CDC, that have found that sugar-loaded drinks are a prominent factor in childhood obesity, as well as the development of associated health conditions such as Type II diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease. Nevertheless, in 2015, a Times investigation revealed that Coke had been secretly funding and orchestrating a network of academic nutrition researchers, which had a suspiciously keen focus on combating obesity with exercise while downplaying the role of sweetened beverages and excess calories.

Enlarge / Who needs Aurich's artistic talents, anyway? (credit: Peter Bright)

The venerable Windows Paint program, known to many by the name of its executable, mspaint.exe, has been marked as deprecated in the forthcoming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, The Guardian reports.

Deprecation states formally that the feature is no longer actively developed, and it serves as a warning that Microsoft may remove the feature in a future release. Removal isn't guaranteed, however; there are parts of the Win32 API that have been deprecated for 20 years but still haven't been removed. It's possible that Paint will continue to ship with Windows in a kind of zombie state: not subject to any active maintenance but kept around indefinitely since it's self-contained and not a security risk.

Indeed, the end of the development of Paint is not going to surprise anyone who actually uses the thing; the last time it received any non-negligible improvements was in Windows 7, when its user interface was updated to use a ribbon control. Before that, it had an interface that had been largely untouched since Windows 3.1. As such, Microsoft's official deprecation is merely confirming something that was already obvious; it's not an indicator that anything has actually changed.

Enlarge / Samsung's chip manufacturing business goes way beyond Exynos. (credit: Samsung)

A report from Reuters says Samsung Electronics plans to "triple the market share" of its foundry business over the next five years. Samsung plans to "aggressively add new clients," with E.S. Jung, head of the Samsung foundry division, telling Reuters, "We want to become a strong No. 2 player in the market" behind TSMC.

In May, Samsung officially created a new business unit for its growing foundry operations. The business unit will fight TSMC and Intel for orders from Apple, Qualcomm, and other SoC vendors.

Despite the recent creation of the business unit, Samsung has been doing foundry work since 2005 and is a major player in the high-end SoC space. It exclusively manufactures the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, which goes into nearly every high-end Android phone. Samsung's foundry has also done business with Apple in the past, but for the A10 SoC, Apple went exclusively with TSMC.

Enlarge / Who needs connected cars when almost all of us drive around emitting Bluetooth signals? (credit: dion gillard @flickr)

One big promise of the connected car revolution has been the potential to help clear up traffic problems. When every vehicle and traffic signal is connected to the cloud, municipalities and local governments should be able to have a constant view of the traffic on their streets, aware of any problems almost instantly. The catch? It's going to take a long time before there are sufficient vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) or even vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)-equipped cars on our roads. But the city of Aarhus in Denmark has shown you don't need to wait for V2x to finally penetrate the market to start doing that; all you need are outdoor Bluetooth sensors.

For some time, Aarhus has been using Bluetooth sensors to collect traffic pattern information. As people drive around, emitting Bluetooth signals, the sensors log their movements around the city. In doing so, their traffic patterns can flag and reveal problems that the city needs to fix.

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