SonicSpike shares a report from Space.com: A giant cloud of magnetized plasma exploded from a sunspot hidden on the far side of the sun that might turn to face Earth only two days from now, so get ready for some solar fireworks. The explosion that erupted from behind the sun's eastern edge in the early morning of Tuesday (Jan. 3) was a so-called coronal mass ejection (CME), a burst of particles from the sun's upper atmosphere, or corona. The CME was accompanied by a powerful solar flare that lasted an overwhelming six hours, solar scientist Keith Strong said on Twitter. Neither the flare nor the CME were directed at Earth, but experts warn that the hidden sunspot that produced them will soon be facing the planet as the sun rotates.

Yesterday's flare and CME were detected by multiple sun-observing spacecraft including the joint NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory mission (SOHO) and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The measurements helped scientists to determine that the sunspot, or active region, that produced the bursts, will move to the Earth-facing portion of the sun's disk within two days, according to Space Weather. [...] The British space weather forecaster Met Office predicts low solar activity in the next couple of days with a potential increase expected toward the end of this week as the mysterious sunspot emerges at the sun's eastern edge.

Salesforce said on Wednesday it would lay off about 10% of its employees and close some offices, becoming the latest tech firm to undertake cost cuts amid an economic slowdown. From a report: The company expects the move to lead to about $1.4 billion to $2.1 billion in charges, of which about $800 million to $1 billion will be recorded in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2023. "The environment remains challenging and our customers are taking a more measured approach to their purchasing decisions," co-Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff said in a letter to employees. Companies from Meta Platforms to Amazon.com have in the past year taken steps to prepare for a deep downturn as global central banks have aggressively raised interest rates to tame decades-high inflation. Businesses that relied on cloud services during the pandemic are now trying to reduce expenses through job cuts or delaying new projects, which has hurt companies such as Salesforce, which owns office messaging app Slack, and Teams parent Microsoft. "As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we're now facing, and I take responsibility for that," Benioff said.

Microsoft is in the works to launch a version of its search engine Bing using the artificial intelligence behind OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Reuters reports: Microsoft could launch the new feature before the end of March, and hopes to challenge Alphabet-owned search engine Google, the San Francisco-based technology news website said in a report. Microsoft said in a blog post last year that it planned to integrate image-generation software from OpenAI, DALL-E 2, into Bing.

Microsoft had in 2019 backed San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, offering $1 billion in funding. The two had formed a multi-year partnership to develop artificial intelligence supercomputing technologies on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. Further reading: ChatGPT Is a 'Code Red' For Google's Search Business

NVIDIA has announced that it's bringing GeForce Now game streaming to cars using the company's Drive platform. Engadget reports: The rollout will offer access to titles like Cyberpunk 2077 on a driver display while you're charging or parked, or any time from the backseat. The cloud gaming option already has initial support from major brands like the Hyundai group (including Genesis and Kia), Polestar and China's BYD. NVIDIA didn't offer a timeframe for GeForce Now access, although it noted that BYD would offer Drive Hyperion-powered cars in the first half of 2023. The Polestar 3 SUV (built using Drive Orin) arrives in late 2023.

The in-car GeForce Now client works on either Android or web-based infotainment systems. NVIDIA's service provides a catalog of 1,500 games, over 1,000 of which are playable using gamepads. While most of the selection is paid, there are free-to-play options like Destiny 2 and Fortnite. As with other game streaming services, this could get costly if you plan to use it often. While basic GeForce Now use is free, you can pay up to $200 per year for the full experience before you factor in the cost of the games themselves. In some cases, though, this might make more sense than buying a handheld console or tablet. Further reading: Nvidia Unveils GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs for Laptops

The Southwest Airlines meltdown that stranded thousands of passengers during one of the busiest travel weeks of the year exposed a major industry shortcoming: crew-scheduling technology that was largely built for a bygone era and is due for a major overhaul. From a report: Southwest relies on crew-assignment software called SkySolver, an off-the-shelf application that it has customized and updated, but is nearing the end of its life, according to the airline. The program was developed decades ago and is now owned by General Electric. During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work, executives of the Dallas-based carrier said.

Southwest's software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with hub-and-spoke networks, Southwest planes hopscotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor. Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say. Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft. The airline sector has been among the slowest to adopt cloud-based and analytics technologies that could help solve complicated transportation network problems, those analysts say.

The new year has just begun, but the cosmos are already set to make history in 2023. From a report: A comet discovered less than a year ago has traveled billions of miles from its believed origins at the edge of our solar system and will be visible in just a few weeks during what will likely be its only recorded appearance. The comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was first seen in March 2022 as it made its way through Jupiter's orbit. According to NASA, it's a long-period comet believed to come from the Oort Cloud, the most distant region of Earth's solar system that's "like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris" that can get even bigger than mountains. The inner edge of this region is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units (AUs) from the sun -- between 186 billion and 465 billion miles.

This means that C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has made a rare, once-in-a-lifetime journey to be close to Earth. "Most known long-period comets have been seen only once in recorded history because their orbital periods are so, well, long," NASA says. "Countless more unknown long-period comets have never been seen by human eyes. Some have orbits so long that the last time they passed through the inner solar system, our species did not yet exist."

Now, the recently discovered E3 comet, which has been seen with a bright greenish coma and "short broad" dust tail, is set to make its closest approach to the sun on January 12. It will make its closest approach to Earth on February 2. Astrophotographer Dan Bartlett managed to capture an image of the comet in December from his backyard in California. He was able to see "intricate tail structure" in the comet's plasma tail, he said, and "conditions are improving."

January's Communications of the ACM includes an essay predicting "the end of programming," in an AI-powered future where "programming will be obsolete."

But IT analyst and ZDNet contributor Joe McKendrick remains skeptical, judging by a new essay sardonically titled "It's the end of programming as we know it — again." Over the past few decades, various movements, paradigms, or technology surges — whatever you want to call them — have roiled the software world, promising either to hand a lot of programming grunt work to end users, or automate more of the process. CASE tools, 4GL, object-oriented programming, service oriented architecture, microservices, cloud services, Platform as a Service, serverless computing, low-code, and no-code all have theoretically taken the onerous burdens out of software development. And, potentially, threaten the job security of developers.

Yet, here we are. Software developers are busier than ever, with demand for skills only increasing.

"I remember when the cloud first started becoming popular and companies were migrating to Office 365, everyone was saying that IT Pros will soon have no job," says Vlad Catrinescu, author at Pluralsight. "Guess what — we're still here and busier than ever."

The question is how developers' job will ultimately evolve. There is the possibility that artificial intelligence, applied to application development and maintenance, may finally make low-level coding a thing of the past.... Catrinescu believes that the emerging generation of automated or low-code development solutions actually "empowers IT professionals and developers to work on more challenging applications. IT departments can focus on enterprise applications and building complicated apps and automations that will add a lot of value to the enterprise."
Even the man predicting "the end of programming" in an AI-powered future also envisions new technology that "potentially opens up computing to almost anyone" (in ACM's video interview). But in ZDNet's article Jared Ficklin, chief creative technologist and co-founder of argodesign, even predicts the possibility of real-time computing.

"You could imagine asking Alexa to make you an app to help organize your kitchen. AI would recognize the features, pick the correct patterns and in real time, over the air deliver an application to your mobile phone or maybe into your wearable mobile computer."

CNN reports: Mars may seem like a dry, desolate place, but the red planet transforms into an otherworldly wonderland in winter, according to a new video shared by NASA....

"Enough snow falls that you could snowshoe across it," said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement from a NASA release. "If you were looking for skiing, though, you'd have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface."

So far, no orbiters or rovers have been able to see snow fall on the red planet because the weather phenomenon only occurs at the poles beneath cloud cover at night. The cameras on the orbiters can't peer through the clouds, and no robotic explorers have been developed that could survive the freezing temperatures at the poles. [ -190 degrees Fahrenheit, or -123 degrees Celsius) ] However, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can detect light that's invisible to the human eye. It has made detections of carbon dioxide snow falling at the Martian poles. The Phoenix lander, which arrived on Mars in 2008, also used one of its laser instruments to detect water-ice snow from its spot about 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) away from the Martian north pole....

"Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped," Piqueux said. "Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair."

Ice and carbon dioxide-based frosts also form on Mars, and they can occur farther away from the poles. The Odyssey orbiter (which entered Mars' orbit in 2001) has watched frost forming and turning to a gas in the sunlight, while the Viking landers spotted icy frost on Mars when they arrived in the 1970s. At the end of winter, the season's buildup of ice can thaw and turn into gas, creating unique shapes that have reminded NASA scientists of Swiss cheese, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, spiders and other unusual formations.
That's just the beginning, according to a press release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab: This "thawing" also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
And they also note that the camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter also captured some surprisingly colorful images of sand dunes covered by frost

VentureBeat's lead gaming writer made 10 predictions for 2023. Prediction #8? "Gaming will become more open in 2023." There are many forces at play that will make gaming more open. The web browser is poised for a comeback. Companies are working on ways to get around the restrictions of the app stores by turning to the open web. In the past, this meant bad graphics and limited interactivity. But new standards like glTF and proprietary technologies could enable speedier delivery.

The open web could be succeeded one day by the open metaverse. That won't happen real soon, but enough people are talking about this that the conversation is top of mind at some of the biggest and most important companies in the industry....

Gatekeepers who create platforms still take a 30% cut of royalties. Matthew Ball, author of the bestselling book The Metaverse, has argued that this stands in the way of progress as it weakens the developers who are in the best position to push forward ideas like the metaverse. While the industry isn't going to change overnight, the added awareness to the costs of closed platforms is a catalyst for change.

Epic isn't fighting for this all by itself. The Open Metaverse Standards group has formed to push for better open standards, and USD is making progress as an interoperable 3D file format. Forte and Lamina1 have raised a lot of money and they believe that blockchain technology infrastructure can also improve the openness of sectors such as gaming, enabling players to finally own their stuff.

Overall, more business models and technologies — like Web3 or cloud gaming or subscriptions — will yield more choice for both developers and consumers.

Last week, LastPass announced that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. "While the company insists that your login information is still secure, some cybersecurity experts are heavily criticizing its post, saying that it could make people feel more secure than they actually are and pointing out that this is just the latest in a series of incidents that make it hard to trust the password manager," reports The Verge. Here's an excerpt from the report: LastPass' December 22nd statement was "full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies," reads a blog post from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher known for helping originally develop AdBlock Pro, among other things. Some of his criticisms deal with how the company has framed the incident and how transparent it's being; he accuses the company of trying to portray the August incident where LastPass says "some source code and technical information were stolen" as a separate breach when he says that in reality the company "failed to contain" the breach. He also highlights LastPass' admission that the leaked data included "the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," saying that could let the threat actor "create a complete movement profile" of customers if LastPass was logging every IP address you used with its service.

Another security researcher, Jeremi Gosney, wrote a long post on Mastodon explaining his recommendation to move to another password manager. "LastPass's claim of 'zero knowledge' is a bald-faced lie," he says, alleging that the company has "about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with." LastPass claims its "zero knowledge" architecture keeps users safe because the company never has access to your master password, which is the thing that hackers would need to unlock the stolen vaults. While Gosney doesn't dispute that particular point, he does say that the phrase is misleading. "I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted."

Palant also notes that the encryption only does you any good if the hackers can't crack your master password, which is LastPass' main defense in its post: if you use its defaults for password length and strengthening and haven't reused it on another site, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology" wrote Karim Toubba, the company's CEO. "This prepares the ground for blaming the customers," writes Palant, saying that "LastPass should be aware that passwords will be decrypted for at least some of their customers. And they have a convenient explanation already: these customers clearly didn't follow their best practices." However, he also points out that LastPass hasn't necessarily enforced those standards. Despite the fact that it made 12-character passwords the default in 2018, Palant says, "I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it."

Microsoft has announced it's making Excel's autocomplete even smarter, at least in the web version that comes with Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365). The Verge reports: Formula suggestions are pretty much what they say on the tin: if you type the equal sign into a cell, Excel for web will try to intelligently suggest what type of formula you should be using, given the data that's around it. For example, if you have a full of quarterly sales numbers and a column at the end labeled "total," Excel might suggest summing the range of cells. According to a blog post from Microsoft, the feature currently only works in English, and will suggest sum, average, count, counta, min, and max formulas. It's not a groundbreaking feature, to be sure -- Google Sheets has had something similar for a while, and Excel's AutoSum has long been a quick way to apply formulas to data -- but for some use cases, it could be a nice timesaver.

Then there's Formula by Example, which is similar to the Flash Fill feature that can automatically detect patterns in data and fill out the rest of a column. The feature is a bit hard to explain succinctly, but this video from Microsoft gives you an idea of what it's about; detecting a pattern where you're combing information from cells and then automatically generating a formula that will save you some typing.

Microsoft's blog post also includes several other feature announcements [...]. There's a function for adding images with alt-text into your tables coming to Windows, Mac, and web, and the company's also adding nested Power Query data types and the ability to get data from dynamic arrays to the Insider version of the Windows app for testing. One other potentially useful (and thankfully easy to understand) feature coming to the web is "suggested links," which will automatically help you fix broken links to other workbooks stored in the cloud.

Meanwhile, over in the Microsoft ecosystem, CNET reports: You can ditch the subscription (with recurring charges) and snag a lifetime license of access to Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher and Access for just $30...

That's back at the lowest price we've ever seen, and a whopping 91% off the usual price of $349.

However, this deal expires in just a few days, so be sure to get your order in soon.The offer, from StackSocial, applies to both the Windows and Mac version of the software.

Now, you can always opt to use the free online version of Microsoft Office (which has far fewer features). But compared to the online Microsoft 365 subscription suite that costs $10 per month or $100 per year, this downloadable version is a phenomenal bargain.
The Mac deal ends today, but the Windows deal extends through December 28th, according to CNET's article. "The two big caveats: You get a single key — which only works on a single computer — and there's no Microsoft OneDrive Cloud Storage included."

Justin Garrison works at Amazon Web Services on the Kubernetes team (and was senior systems engineer on several animated films).

This week he spotted a new milestone for Linux in the 2022 StackOverflow developer survey: [Among the developers surveyed] Linux as a primary operating system had been steadily climbing for the past 5 years. 2018 through 2021 saw steady growth with 23.2%, 25.6%, 26.6%, 25.3%, and finally in 2022 the usage was 40.23%. Linux usage was more than macOS in 2021, but only by a small margin. 2022 it is now 9% more than macOS.
Their final stats for "professional use" operating system:

• Windows: 48.82%
• Linux-based: 39.89%
• MacOs: 32.97%

But Garrison's blog post notes that that doesn't include the million-plus people all the Linux-based cloud development environments (like GitHub Workspaces) — not to mention the 15% of WSL users on Windows and all the users of Docker (which uses a Linux VM).

"It's safe to say more people use Linux as part of their development workflow than any other operating system."

®Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang (through his AME Cloud Ventures) contributed to $6 million in seed funding in November for startup Caden, which plans to pay users to share their personal data -- including what they buy or watch on mobile apps.

The Wall Street Journal reports: The startup, Caden Inc., operates an app by the same name that helps users download their data from apps and servicesâ"whether thatâ(TM)s Amazon.com Inc. or Airbnb Inc. â"into a personal âoevault.â Users who consent to share that data for advertising purposes can earn a cut of the revenue that the app generates from it. They also can access personal analytics based on that data....

Caden, which has been testing with a limited group of users, plans to begin a public beta test of 10,000 users early next year.... One option in the public beta test will anonymize and pool the data before sharing it with outside parties in exchange for $5 to $20 a month, according to Caden founder and Chief Executive John Roa. The amount of compensation will be determined by a âoedata scoreâ reflecting factors such as whether consumers answer demographic survey questions and which apps and servicesâ(TM) data consumers are sharing. Consumers will eventually be given the option to share more specific information for more tailored advertising. A marketer could then form audience segments and tailor their ad targeting and messaging to those groups. For instance, a user could consent to sharing his ride-share history so advertisers could create segments of people who ride a certain amount. That would eventually pay consumers up to $50 a month, Caden said.

A third option would let advertisers take a direct action based on the data that Caden understands about a specific user. If a consumer were part of a department storeâ(TM)s loyalty program, for example, the store might reward her for sharing her individual Amazon shopping history and use it to provide more personalized offers.ÂThat could generate thousands of dollars a year for participating users, the company said.

 Caden also hopes that the data it can aggregate will be compelling for consumers. Users could search for restaurants theyâ(TM)ve eaten at in a certain city, for instance, or how much they spent in certain categories across different apps, executives said. âoeItâ(TM)s like Spotify Wrapped for your whole life,â said Amarachi Miller, Cadenâ(TM)s head of product, referring to the streaming music serviceâ(TM)s year-end distillation of each userâ(TM)s listening....

Caden said it will initially sell only anonymized and aggregated data that doesnâ(TM)t tie back to individuals. As it starts to let brands do more personal promotions for users, it said it will let users see which brands and partners itâ(TM)s working with, and will let users control which brands can access their information.
The digital ad industry has been seeking new marketing-guiding data, the article points out, especially since Apple began require apps to ask for permission before tracking users.

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article.

While "this proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee," Phoronix reports: Red Hat and Fedora engineers are plotting a path to supporting Unified Kernel Images (UKI) with Fedora Linux and for the Fedora 38 release in the spring they are aiming to get their initial enablement in place.

Unified Kernel Images have been championed by the systemd folks for better securing and trusting Linux distributions. Unified kernel images are a combination of the kernel image, initrd, and UEFI stub program all distributed as one.... The initial phase would focus on shipping a UKI as an optional sub-RPM that users can opt into initially, updating kernel install scripts so unified kernels are installed and properly updated, and bootloader support for unified kernel images. Adding systemd-boot support to the installers, better measurement and remote attestation support, and switching Fedora Cloud images to using unified kernels are among the additional goals but of lower priority.
Fedora's wiki includes a detailed description of the change proposal: The goal is to move away from initrd images being generated on the installed machine. They are generated while building the kernel package instead, then shipped as part of a unified kernel image. A unified kernel image is an all-in-one efi binary containing kernel, initrd, cmdline and signature....

Main motivation for this move is to make the distro more robust and more secure.

LastPass revealed today that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. BleepingComputer reports: This follows a previous update issued last month when the company's CEO, Karim Toubba, only said that the threat actor gained access to "certain elements" of customer information. Today, Toubba added that the cloud storage service is used by LastPass to store archived backups of production data. The attacker gained access to Lastpass' cloud storage using "cloud storage access key and dual storage container decryption keys" stolen from its developer environment.

"The threat actor copied information from backup that contained basic customer account information and related metadata including company names, end-user names, billing addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," Toubba said today. "The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data."

Fortunately, the encrypted data is secured with 256-bit AES encryption and can only be decrypted with a unique encryption key derived from each user's master password. According to Toubba, the master password is never known to LastPass, it is not stored on Lastpass' systems, and LastPass does not maintain it. Customers were also warned that the attackers might try to brute force their master passwords to gain access to the stolen encrypted vault data. However, this would be very difficult and time-consuming if you've been following password best practices recommended by LastPass. If you do, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology," Toubba added. "Your sensitive vault data, such as usernames and passwords, secure notes, attachments, and form-fill fields, remain safely encrypted based on LastPass' Zero Knowledge architecture."

OpenAI, the Elon Musk-founded artificial intelligence startup behind popular DALL-E text-to-image generator, announced (PDF) on Tuesday the release of its newest picture-making machine POINT-E, which can produce 3D point clouds directly from text prompts. Engadget reports: Whereas existing systems like Google's DreamFusion typically require multiple hours -- and GPUs to generate their images, Point-E only needs one GPU and a minute or two. Point-E, unlike similar systems, "leverages a large corpus of (text, image) pairs, allowing it to follow diverse and complex prompts, while our image-to-3D model is trained on a smaller dataset of (image, 3D) pairs," the OpenAI research team led by Alex Nichol wrote in Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts, published last week. "To produce a 3D object from a text prompt, we first sample an image using the text-to-image model, and then sample a 3D object conditioned on the sampled image. Both of these steps can be performed in a number of seconds, and do not require expensive optimization procedures."

If you were to input a text prompt, say, "A cat eating a burrito," Point-E will first generate a synthetic view 3D rendering of said burrito-eating cat. It will then run that generated image through a series of diffusion models to create the 3D, RGB point cloud of the initial image -- first producing a coarse 1,024-point cloud model, then a finer 4,096-point. "In practice, we assume that the image contains the relevant information from the text, and do not explicitly condition the point clouds on the text," the research team points out. These diffusion models were each trained on "millions" of 3d models, all converted into a standardized format. "While our method performs worse on this evaluation than state-of-the-art techniques," the team concedes, "it produces samples in a small fraction of the time." OpenAI has posted the projects open-source code on Github.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Audi is preparing to convert its entire network of global production factories to manufacture electric vehicles as it gears up to compete in the auto industry's future. ;...] Audi announced last year that its last combustion car would roll off the line in 2033 (if they are still around then), launching only electric vehicles from 2026. To better compete in the new EV era and ease the transition, Audi will convert all exiting existing production factories to build electric vehicles by 2029. Audi board member for production and logistics Gerd Walker said, "Step by step, we are bringing all our sites into the future" as the automaker prepares to go all in on electric vehicles.

In a press release Tuesday, Audi presented the "plan for the production of the future," including converting its network of global factories to produce purely electric vehicles. Walker added: "The path Audi is taking conserves resources and accelerates our transformation to a provider of sustainable premium mobility. Rather than building new facilities like some competitors, Audi will work to incorporate the flexibility these new state-of-the-art plants provide into its existing operations."

A primary focal point of Audi's production plan is to cut annual factory costs in half by 2033, aligning with when it plans to phase out combustion models. To do so, the company will continue to digitalize and streamline its manufacturing processes with solutions like Edge Cloud 4 Production. According to Audi, less expensive industrial PCs will result in lower IT costs with software updates and OS changes. To have the ability to respond to fluctuating consumer demand, Walker says: "We want to structure both product and production so we get the optimum benefit for our customers." He adds an example of building the new Audi Q6 e-tron on the same line as the A4 and A5 as it phases out its gas models.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: European antitrust regulators have opened an in-depth investigation into U.S. chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $61 billion bid for cloud computing company VMware, the European Commission said on Tuesday. "The Commission is particularly concerned that the transaction would allow Broadcom to restrict competition in the market for certain hardware components which interoperate with VMware's software," the Commission said in a statement.

The Commission said its preliminary investigation indicates the transaction may allow Broadcom to restrict competition for the supply of certain components by degrading interoperability between VMware software and competitors' hardware to the benefit of its own hardware. This and other factors could lead to higher prices, lower quality and less innovation for business customers, and ultimately consumers, the Commission said. The Commission now has 90 working days, until May 11, 2023, to take a decision. Broadcom on Tuesday reiterated that it continued to expect the transaction would close in its fiscal year 2023, adding it would continuing to work with the European Commission.

It said it was making progress with regulatory filings around the world, having received legal merger clearance in Brazil, South Africa, and Canada and foreign investment control clearance in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. "The combination of Broadcom and VMware is about enabling enterprises to accelerate innovation and expand choice by addressing their most complex technology challenges in this multi-cloud era, and we are confident that regulators will see this when they conclude their review," it said in a statement. The proposed acquisition underlines Broadcom's ambition to diversify into enterprise software, but comes as regulators worldwide ramp up scrutiny of deals by Big Tech.

Amazon Web Services has secured a five-year contract with the US Navy for cloud services, just weeks after scoring its share of a major US Department of Defense deal for cloud computing. From a report: The cloud division of online marketplace Amazon has been awarded a contract worth $723.9 million by the Department of the Navy as a single-award fixed-price enterprise software license blanket purchase agreement. The details were disclosed in a contract notice posted on the Department of Defense website. According to the notice, the agreement is for AWS to provide the Department of the Navy with access to its commercial cloud environment, Professional Services, and AWS training and certification courses. The Department of the Navy indicated that the purchase agreement will not obligate funds at the time of award, but instead these will be committed as task orders are issued using a variety of Navy funding types, including operation and maintenance and working capital funds.