Microsoft has continued its record of open-sourcing curiosities from the past and released the code behind kids' favorite 3D Movie Maker.

You can take a look here.

For anyone too young to remember the tool, it came out of Microsoft's Kids educational subsidiary in 1995 and permitted the creation of movies using props, actors and scenes, all rendered in glorious circa-1995 3D. Various camera angles could be used, and while sample voices and music were included, users could import their own audio to add to the fun.

Various expansions and versions were produced (including a Nickelodeon themed incarnation) before 3D Movie Maker did that thing that all neat stuff produced by Microsoft does, and shuffled off into the Redmond cupboard where the Band, Media Center and Groove were locked away.

However, in April, Twitter user (and self-described "software necromancer") @foone suggested that perhaps Microsoft might like to open-source the old thing for purposes of extension and expansion. And Microsoft, in the guise of Scott Hanselman and friends, responded.

Hey friends - we've open sourced the code to 1995's Microsoft 3D Movie Maker https://t.co/h4mYSKRrjK Thanks to @jeffwilcox and the Microsoft OSS office as well our friends in legal and those who continue to put up with me being a nudzh. Thanks to @foone for the idea! Enjoy. https://t.co/6wBAkjkeIP

Before Reg readers gets too excited, it is important not to confuse 3D Movie Maker with the much-missed Windows Movie Maker, which was a handy tool for playing with video files and released as part of the Windows Essentials suite at around the same time as Windows Me and then XP.

The code also won't build with modern tools. "Modern compilers dislike some of the pre C++98 conventions," notes the README, and a short folder name on root is needed ever if interested users can gather the requisite components. Those were the days, eh?

You'll also need to manually pop the infamous Comic Sans font files into the directory structure due to licensing issues.

Licensing issues have generally stymied the open-sourcing of many an elderly codebase, and so it is heartening to see a build of Argonaut Software's BRender included in the repo along with an anecdote attributed to Jez San, former CEO of Argonaut:

When Sam Littlewood designed BRender, he didn't write the code and then document it (the way most things were built at the time). First, he wrote the manual – the full documentation that served as the spec. Then the coding started.

This writer well remembers Argonaut from the Starglider series on the Commodore Amiga of the late 1980s. Later games, such as 1993's Super NES hit, Star Fox, will also trigger a shiver of recollection among those of a certain age.

As for 3D Movie Maker, the code is very much "as is", albeit with cleaning to remove developer identifying information. The repo is also a historical record, although forking is encouraged for experimentation purposes.

The full archive, which included alternate builds and products, is also not present. However, there is enough there for someone with the right tools and sufficient ambition to bring the old thing back to life.

The open-sourcing of 3D Movie Maker comes hot on the heels of the open-sourcing of the likes of File Manager and early versions of MS-DOS.

We can't but help wonder what else could be ripe for dragging up from the basement of Redmond and uploading to GitHub. Media Center, anyone? ®

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.

Updated The IT services arm of UK comms giant BT has won a contract extension worth up to £26 million ($32 million) for up to five years – without competition – to support Northern Ireland's government accounting system.

It first worked on the system nearly 20 years ago.

Planned since 2002, the procurement and implementation of a centralized accounting system began in 2006. BT was initially contracted to build the Oracle E-Business Suite-based system for £52 million ($64 million).

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