Personal Tech

• We're making F# more normal as a language, says its creator

  Loved by users, impenetrable to others, but 6.0 update aims to change that
  Tim Anderson Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 15:01 UTC

  F# designer Don Syme said this week that the new version, 6.0, aims to be "more normal as a language" in order to improve take-up.

  There was a telling moment in the .NET Conf virtual event, just after the presentation of F# 6 from Syme and his colleague, principal program manager Kathleen Dollard. A developer asked: "What is the best way to do optional values in records in F#?"

  Tireless .NET evangelist Scott Hanselman, with commendable honesty, acknowledged that "I know how to say the words but I don't know what they mean," while even Dollard was uncertain how to answer. "Just use the F# option value," said Syme. "Then you can create a helper method to create the record where you can take optional arguments."

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• Brit analysts formed pact to crash Autonomy's market valuation, ex-CFO tells US court

  Eye-catching claim in an eye-catching case
  Gareth Corfield Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 13:01 UTC 3

  Autonomy's former chief financial officer has alleged the firm collapsed partly because two financial analysts agreed to badmouth it in the hope of making a profit from its demise, according to US court filings.

  Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy founder Mike Lynch's co-defendant in US criminal proceedings over the company's collapse, made the extraordinary claims in filings to the San Francisco district court [PDF and PDF] earlier this month.

  He accused former JP Morgan analyst Daud Khan and industry colleague Paul Morland, once of analyst firm Peel Hunt, of carrying out "concerted and improper efforts to depress Autonomy's share price for their and their short-selling clients' benefit" and being "vehemently antagonistic towards Autonomy and its management."

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• Google denies Gmail users an early start to the weekend after problems accessing service

  Prolonged outage in Europe and beyond dampens productivity
  Liam Proven in Prague Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 12:11 UTC 9

  If you struggled to get into your Gmail this morning, it wasn't just you. Unhappy users from Europe all the way to South Africa reported a significant outage.

  The issues kicked off at around 8.30 UTC and left some users flummoxed, with many taking to the anger echo chamber that is Twitter.

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• Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it an Electron rocket descending to the ocean?

  Everything but catching the thing: Rocket Lab prepares for recovery
  Richard Speed Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 11:12 UTC 2

  Interview New Zealand's Rocket Lab is set to launch another Electron rocket - a precursor to the rocketeer's first attempt at catching a descending booster. The Register caught up with CEO Peter Beck to discuss helicopters, Mars and visiting Venus.

  The launch, dubbed "Love at First Insight", is currently scheduled for no earlier than 16 November (owing to an "out of family ground sensor reading" when the launch window opened yesterday morning) and has the primary objective of popping a pair of Earth-observation satellites into orbit for Black Sky. Also featuring on the launch is Rocket Lab's latest evolution of its recovery technology.

  Unlike SpaceX's crowd-pleasing propulsive antics, the first stage of the Rocket Lab Electron will descend by parachute and attempt a controlled splashdown into the ocean, making it the third ocean recovery (if all goes well.) The eventual plan is for a helicopter to snag the stage as it descends. This time, however, everything will be done except an attempt to catch the rocket.

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• HP's solution to running GPU-accelerated Linux apps on high-end Z workstations: Rely on Microsoft's WSL2

  Because Windows is what Linux users really want, right?
  Liam Proven in Prague Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 10:15 UTC 14

  Facing rising demand for high-end Linux boxes but also issues supporting the software on its high-end kit, HP is trying solve the problem for customers by using Windows as a universal shim.

  That is, it enables Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) out of the box on some of its own high-end Z workstations, boosted by Nvidia graphics processors.

  GPU pass-through features in modern hypervisors, such as Microsoft Hyper-V, make it possible to use GPU-accelerated applications in Linux VMs. This feature extends to Redmond's WSL2. HP is using this to enable customers who want to do fancy GPU-accelerated stuff with Linux apps on the more familiar (familiar to HP, that is) basis of Windows.

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• BOFH: You drive me crazy... and I can't help myself

  Service provider? You sure about that second bit?
  Simon Travaglia Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 09:15 UTC 44

  Episode 20 >knock< <knock<

  "Come in."

  "Hey there," I say. "I'm just here to fix your desktop machine."

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• The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

  Weekend upgrade shows how many MoD staff made personal use of tech
  Richard Speed Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 08:30 UTC 77

  On Call A reader takes us back to a bygone era, when Blighty's brass inhabited wood-panelled offices, and the air was thick with pipe smoke and WW2 anecdotes. Welcome to On Call.

  Our story takes place in the 1980s as the era of officers that served in the Second World War was coming to an end and computerisation was slithering into departments that had been hitherto resolutely manual.

  Register reader "Nigel" was dealing with a software update for some Ministry Of Defence (MoD) kit. "The software," he said, "was Uniplex ported to a modified secure version of Unix running on Honeywell Bull XPS-100s."

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• WTF is 'Computing First Networking'? Think load balancers for the age of edge

  The 'pre-process data on the edge' idea turns out not to be that simple
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 07:14 UTC 10

  A new buzzphrase crossed your correspondent's desk: "Computing First Networking."

  WTF is it?

  According to a brief from analyst firm Gartner, it's "an emerging networking solution that provides services for computational tasks by sharing computing resources from multiple edge sites" and "a new type of decentralized computing solution that optimizes the efficiency of edge computing."

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• AMD reveals an EPYC 50 flaws – 23 of them rated High severity. Intel has 25 problems, too

  Think of an attack – DDOS, arbitrary code execution, memory corruption – and one of these problems allows it
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 06:02 UTC 9

  Microsoft may have given us a mere 55 CVEs to worry about on November's Patch Tuesday, but AMD and Intel have topped that number with fixes for their products.

  AMD alone dropped 50 new CVEs on Thursday, 23 of them rated of "High" concern, meaning they're rated at between 7.0 and 8.9 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System.

  Let's start with the 27 flaws in the AMD Graphics Driver for Windows 10 – 18 of them rated High – because at least they're in software and Microsoft and Adobe's patch cadence means readers could be in the mood to fix code.

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• Huawei hands its cloud Linux to China's only open source foundation

  OpenEuler now an Open Atom Foundation project, China Telecom has released a cut, tech minister loves the idea
  Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 02:58 UTC

  Huawei has donated the cut of Linux it created to run on its cloud, and silicon, to China's only open source foundation.

  The Chinese giant's OS is called EulerOS and is derived from CentOS. EulerOS runs on x86 silicon but is tuned for top performance on the Arm64 architecture – which is what Huawei uses in the Kunpeng 920 CPUs it designed to power its own servers, cloud, and even the occasional laptop.

  Huawei's list of the operating system's features and benefits states it includes KVM virtualization, ext4, the GFS2 cluster file system, systemd, Linux containers, and can manage user identities across Linux, UNIX, and Windows domains to help with your SSO needs.

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• Apps made with Google's Flutter may fritter away CPU cycles. Here's what the web giant intends to do about it

  Chocolate Factory's cross-platform framework seems to struggle to craft efficient desktop software
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Fri 12 Nov 2021 // 01:44 UTC 17

  Google's Flutter cross-platform app framework appears to have a thinking problem: in certain situations, Flutter desktop apps consume too much processing power.

  How much is too much? Try an extra six to ten per cent CPU usage just to recreate the blink of a cursor in the style of a native macOS app. That's an improvement over the 100 per cent CPU usage reported in 2019, though that was when Flutter desktop app support was in alpha stage.

  This would be a showstopper on mobile devices, where users won't tolerate apps that make their phones go dark from battery exhaustion. But energy inefficiency hasn't proven to be a common problem in Flutter Android and iOS builds recently, though it was something of a concern as Flutter has matured. The more pressing issue on mobile devices for Flutter devs is still trying to reduce "jank" – lag created by shader compilation.

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