The price of DVD players is set to plummet over the next year as Taiwanese manufacturers implement an Acer Labs Inc (ALi) solution. At Computex last week, ALi introduced a chipset for MPEG-2m Dolby Digital decode and DVD channel control. ALi claims it is the first chipset which provides a complete solution. The Acer subsidiary has struck deals with manufacturers in Taiwan and mainland China, it said. ® Computex 99 coverage
Twitter has officially entered the post-Dorsey age: its founder and two-time CEO's board term expired Wednesday, marking the first time the social media company hasn't had him around in some capacity.
Jack Dorsey announced his resignation as Twitter chief exec in November 2021, and passed the baton to Parag Agrawal while remaining on the board. Now that board term has ended, and Dorsey has stepped down as expected. Agrawal has taken Dorsey's board seat; Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor has assumed the role of Twitter's board chair.
In his resignation announcement, Dorsey – who co-founded and is CEO of Block (formerly Square) – said having founders leading the companies they created can be severely limiting for an organization and can serve as a single point of failure. "I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction," Dorsey said. He didn't respond to a request for further comment today.
IPO darling Snowflake's share price took a beating in an already bearish market for tech stocks after filing weaker than expected financial guidance amid a slowdown in orders from some of its largest customers.
For its first quarter of fiscal 2023, ended April 30, Snowflake's revenue grew 85 percent year-on-year to $422.4 million. The company made an operating loss of $188.8 million, albeit down from $205.6 million a year ago.
Although surpassing revenue expectations, the cloud-based data warehousing business saw its valuation tumble 16 percent in extended trading on Wednesday. Its stock price dived from $133 apiece to $117 in after-hours trading, and today is cruising back at $127. That stumble arrived amid a general tech stock sell-off some observers said was overdue.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's first shareholder meeting was a rousing success for Amazon leadership and Jassy's bank account. But for activist investors intent on making Amazon more open and transparent, it was nothing short of a disaster.
While actual voting results haven't been released yet, Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky told Reuters that stock owners voted down fifteen shareholder resolutions addressing topics including workplace safety, labor organizing, sustainability, and pay fairness. Amazon's board recommended voting no on all of the proposals.
Jassy and the board scored additional victories in the form of shareholder approval for board appointments, executive compensation and a 20-for-1 stock split. Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021.
Broadcom has confirmed it intends to acquire VMware in a deal that looks set to be worth $61 billion, if it goes ahead: the agreement provides for a “go-shop” provision under which the virtualization giant may solicit alternative offers.
Rumors of the proposed merger emerged earlier this week, amid much speculation, but neither of the companies was prepared to comment on the deal before today, when it was disclosed that the boards of directors of both organizations have unanimously approved the agreement.
Michael Dell and Silver Lake investors, which own just over half of the outstanding shares in VMware between both, have apparently signed support agreements to vote in favor of the transaction, so long as the VMware board continues to recommend the proposed transaction with chip designer Broadcom.
The much-anticipated Perl 7 continues to twinkle in the distance although the final release of 5.36.0 is "just around the corner", according to the Perl Steering Council.
Well into its fourth decade, the fortunes of Perl have ebbed and flowed over the years. Things came to a head last year, with the departure of former "pumpking" Sawyer X, following what he described as community "hostility."
Part of the issue stemmed from the planned version 7 release, a key element of which, according to a post by the steering council "was to significantly reduce the boilerplate needed at the top of your code, by enabling a lot of widely used modules / pragmas."
European privacy campaigner Max Schrems is warning that enhancements to the EU-US Privacy Shield data-sharing arrangements might face a legal challenge if negotiators don't take a new approach.
In an open letter, Schrems – the lawyer behind the Schrems II ruling which put an end to the transatlantic data-sharing agreement – said that US assurances of EU citizens' data privacy would be insufficient to avoid another legal challenge.
"We understand that the US has rejected any material protections for non-US persons and is continuing to discriminate against non-US persons by refusing baseline protections, such as judicial approval of individual surveillance measures," the lawyer wrote.
Windows Server 2022 now supports Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, as long as you don't mind installing a preview patch.
Less than a week after users posted glum comments such as: "I don't think it's going to happen," it did, with the news coming from Microsoft Program Manager Craig Loewen last night.
The chip industry is on course for an inventory correction in the second half of 2022 or early 2023 with steep inflation, signs of end-user demand slowing, and companies building stockpiles among the causes.
This is according to a report from analysts at Jefferies Group, which advises investors on where to place their bets. And seemingly the smart money isn't currently on all suppliers in the semiconductor sector.
Infineon and STMicroelectronics, for example, were de-rated by the Group in February to an "underperform recommendation." It said today this was in the expectation that the share price of those companies wobbles before calendar year-end "as they price-in likely earnings cuts in 2023 from an inventory correction."
Elon Musk must personally secure $33.5 billion to fund his $44 billion Twitter purchase after allowing a $12.5 billion margin loan against Tesla stock to expire.
Regulatory filings released Wednesday show the Tesla and SpaceX boss agreeing to secure "an additional $6.25 billion in equity financing" on top of the original $27.3 billion.
The Tesla boss's Twitter purchase originally relied on $21bn of equity that he had to provide along with $12.5bn in margin loans secured by his Tesla stock. That margin loan was dropped to $6.25bn on May 5, and this additional financing would eliminate it altogether.
The UK government has kicked off a national security assessment on the investment in BT by French telco tycoon Patrick Drahi, who via his Altice UK organisation topped up his stake to 18 percent late last year.
Announced today, the probe is understood to be one of the first such uses of new powers the UK government granted itself under the National Security and Investment Act, which came into force at the start of the year.
In a statement, the government said the acquisition by Altice UK in December of a further 6 percent of shares in BT was called in for a full national security assessment by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng.
Version 3.16.0 of Alpine Linux is out – one of the most significant of the many lightweight distros.
Version 3.16.0 is worth a look, especially if you want to broaden your skills.
Alpine is interesting because it's not just another me-too distro. It bucks a lot of the trends in modern Linux, and while it's not the easiest to set up, it's a great deal easier to get it working than it was a few releases ago.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
