We like this one, especially the strange effect provoked by flicking your eyes to and fro between the two takes of the bloke carrying the holdall. Good work by Stephen Hunt in London:
Hewlett Packard Enterprise "substantially succeeded" in its multi-billion pound lawsuit against Autonomy founder Mike Lynch for fraud over that company's accounts.
Giving a summary of his full judgment this morning, trial judge Mr Justice Hildyard said that HPE "substantially succeeded" in its case. The full financial damages are yet to be announced publicly.
The finding is a massive victory for HPE, which saw its corporate reputation dragged through the mud during the trial as queues of ex-execs testified they didn't read due diligence documents before agreeing to the deal.
The UK's European Scrutiny Committee has published the government's response to concerns over the Brexit divorce bill and the impact on the UK's participation in EU programmes.
The original report turned up in October 2021 and highlighted the costs incurred as Brexit negotiations went on. The UK was given the nod for participation in the likes of Horizon (the EU's big research fund) and Copernicus (the EU's Earth Observation programme), however approval allowing UK entities to actually bid is still lacking.
The maximum financial endowment of Horizon Europe is €95.5bn. Copernicus was reported as being €5.4bn in the original report. The majority of the UK's contribution to these and other programmes would normally have been expected to flow back into Blighty's coffers. But these are not normal times.
Poll Boffins from UCL's Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) have linked arms with London e-scooter providers to decide on a "universal sound" for the silent but deadly transport mode.
It remains illegal in the UK to use a privately owned battery-powered deathtrap, but that hasn't stopped the great unwashed – as anyone who has suddenly had to dive off the path during a parkland walk will tell you.
However, to allow the craze in a regulated environment, rental firms have been popping up all over the country – including TIER, Lime and Dott in London – as evidenced by the amount of scooters cluttering pedestrian walkways or, indeed, the local river.
Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Is it in yet?"
There you go! It's working now! "There's no need to push it," I explain calmly. "Just put it right here and it should insert itself automatically, see?"
Mme D is trying to connect two social media accounts so she won't have to upload the same photo twice. Frankly, she doesn't even want to upload it once. She'd rather not have to deal with it at all.
Episode 2
>Ding!< >shudder<
"Hi there – it's Gary isn't it?" I ask, stepping into the lift. "One of our new breed of beancounters?"
On Call Some users are less than bright, and some are just slightly dim. But few are quite as dim as this high-flying employee of the world's formerly favourite airline. Welcome to On Call.
Today's story of tribulation by telephone comes from "James" (for that is not his name). It takes us back 10 years or so, when James was making a nice enough living as a self-employed computer repair person. Got a busted bit of kit? He was the local man to see.
"I had replaced a screen in a Dell laptop for a new customer who lived in a nice area, with a rather large house," he told us.
Apple is hauling in the cash as Mac users escape Intel x86 processors and upgrade to Cupertino's homegrown Arm-compatible M1 chips in record numbers.
For the first quarter of its fiscal 2022 – the three months to December 25 – Apple reported [PDF] revenue of $123.9 billion, up 11 per cent year-over-year. Cupertino made $34.6 billion in profit (or $384M a day) through the quarter, growing 25 per cent from $28.76 billion at this time last year. The US giant's earnings per diluted share were set at $2.10.
Mac sales totaled $10.9 billion, growing by 25 per cent year-over-year. That was record growth, according to Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, on an earnings call with analysts on Thursday.
Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) and the Japanese space agency have conducted an experiment to transmit data from the stratosphere to space and declared the results promising as a complete file was delivered at 446 megabits per second.
Data networking is hard in space, because distances and latency are substantial and radiation can impact transmissions. Those challenges have led to efforts like the Interplanetary networking SIG and its delay-tolerant networking (DTN) tech that makes internet standards work despite the challenges of space.
DTN also addresses the problem of network nodes disappearing over the horizon – and therefore beyond the reach of radio or optical signals – by (as its name implies) not getting grumpy if packets take a while to reach their intended destinations.
Silk could become a means of authentication and unbreakable encryption, according to South Korean boffins.
Silk can take on this role, as explained in Nature Communications, because security boffins are increasingly interested in "physical unclonable functions" (PUFs) – physical objects whose properties are impossible to replicate. As we explained in 2018, the electrical variation present in individual semiconductors has seen them used to generate keys unique to each device, making each chip a PUF.
The authors of the Nature paper, from South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, think we need more PUFs to help with tasks ranging from better encryption keys to providing unique identifiers for physical objects.
VMware has restored availability of vSphere 7 Update, a release that it withdrew in late 2021 after driver dramas derailed deployments.
Paul Turner, Virtzilla's veep for vSphere product management, told The Register that the source of the problem was Intel driver updates that arrived out of sync with VMware's pre-release testing program. When users adopted the new drivers – one of which had been renamed – vSphere produced errors that meant virtual server fleet managers could not sustain high availability operations.
Turner said around 30,000 customers had adopted the release, of which around eight per cent encountered the issue. That collection of around 2,400 impacted users was enough for VMware to pull the release before the other 270,000 vSphere users hit trouble. That level of potential problems, Turner admitted, was considered a sufficient threshold to justify a do-over and the embarrassment of a pulled release.
A US Air Force director of ops this week blasted the Pentagon for failing to overhaul its outdated computer IT infrastructure after his work machine apparently took an hour to send an email and completely froze when he tried to use Microsoft Excel.
"I am writing an open letter echoing some recent service member frustrations regarding computers in the Department of Defense. It's titled: 'Fix Our Computers', Michael Kanaan wrote in a post circulated widely on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Kanaan, who is a director of operations at the USAF-MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator in Boston, lamented how he and his colleagues are facing an uphill battle trying to do their jobs due to old, slow computers and laptops packed with bloatware.
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