WSJ: Broadcom’s VMware Overhaul ‘Draws Attention of CIOs’

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Moves by Broadcom to shore up its $69 billion VMware acquisition, completed in November, include a streamlining of product bundles and new billing models — efforts in line with the chip giant’s past acquisitions, but not necessarily welcomed by all of VMware’s customers… Broadcom has also recently laid off at least hundreds of VMware workers, disclosures from the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification show….

VMware has approximately 330,000 customers, according to the company. Chief information officers say they are closely monitoring what comes next.

“Any CIO that’s not taking stock of what they have and mentally considering alternatives and monitoring what else is out there is probably not doing their job,” said Jay Ferro, executive vice president and chief information, technology and product officer at clinical research data-management company Clario. All these changes, plus past remarks by Broadcom that its go-to-market strategy is to focus completely on the needs and priorities of its top 600 customers, has left some CIOs rethinking the relationship. Price increases and degrading levels of support are among their biggest concerns. “I’m not one of their top, probably 600 customers, so they’ve been very clear to me where I fit in that pecking order,” said Todd Florence, CIO of trucking company Estes Express Lines. Florence said he’s started looking into alternatives. “It certainly doesn’t make you feel good, like you’re going to get lots of support going forward….”

Goya Foods CIO Suvajit Basu said he is thinking about how to reduce the food company’s reliance on VMware as the sole and longtime dominant provider of virtualization for the data center. “They’re going to increase their prices or change their licensing so the customer pays more,” he said. “And I think this is starting to hit us right now….” Forrester estimates that in 2024, 20% of VMware customers will begin the process of exiting VMware in favor of alternatives.

On the other hand, a group VP at market researcher IDC tells the Journal that on the upside, now VMware and Broadcom will have to engage more actively with customers on the value of new produces included in their bundles…

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Most CEOs Won’t Priorities Return-to-Office Policies, Survey Finds

The pandemic may have proved to employeers that remote and flexible-work arrangements were viable — and changed the way we work forever. Axios writes:

Just 6 out of 158 U.S. CEOs said they’ll prioritize bringing workers back to the office full-time in 2024, according to a new survey released by the Conference Board. Executives are increasingly resigned to a world where employees don’t come in every day, as hybrid work arrangements — mixing work from home and in-office — become the norm for knowledge workers. “Maintain hybrid work,” was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey, conducted in October and November. A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year.

“Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic,” write Goldman Sachs economists in a recent note. About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, according to data Goldman cites. That’s below a peak of 47% during the pandemic but well above its prior average of around 3%.

“The battle is over,” said Diana Scott, human capital center leader at The Conference Board. “There are so many other issues CEOs are facing.” Headlines about CEOs determined to get butts in seats get attention, but they are the exception, says Brian Elliott, the cofounder of Future Forum, a future of work think tank. “There are a lot more CEOs that are actually quietly becoming more flexible….” Though the labor market has softened, employers still do care about keeping employees satisfied — and they don’t want to fight with them. “It’s not worth the fight,” says Elliott.

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NPM Users Download 2.1B Deprecated Packages Weekly, Say Security Researchers

The cybersecurity site SC Media reports that NPM registry users “download deprecated packages an estimated 2.1 billion times weekly, according to a statistical analysis of the top 50,000 most-downloaded packages in the registry.”

Deprecated, archived and “orphaned” NPM packages can contain unpatched and/or unreported vulnerabilities that pose a risk to the projects that depend on them, warned the researchers from Aqua Security’s Team Nautilus, who published their findings in a blog post on Sunday… In conjunction with their research, Aqua Nautilus has released an open-source tool that can help developers identify deprecated dependencies in their projects.

Open-source software may stop receiving updates for a variety of reasons, and it is up to developers/maintainers to communicate this maintenance status to users. As the researchers pointed out, not all developers are transparent about potential risks to users who download or depend on their outdated NPM packages. Aqua Nautilus researchers kicked off their analysis after finding that one open-source software maintainer responded to a report about a vulnerability Nautilus discovered by archiving the vulnerable repository the same day. By archiving the repository without fixing the security flaw or assigning it a CVE, the owner leaves developers of dependent projects in the dark about the risks, the researchers said…

Taking into consideration both deprecated packages and active packages that have a direct dependency on deprecated projects, the researchers found about 4,100 (8.2%) of the top 50,000 most-downloaded NPM packages fell under the category of “official” deprecation. However, adding archived repositories to the definition of “deprecated” increased the number of packages affected by deprecation and deprecated dependencies to 6,400 (12.8%)… Including packages with linked repositories that are shown as unavailable (404 error) on GitHub increases the deprecation rate to 15% (7,500 packages), according to the Nautilus analysis. Encompassing packages without any linked repository brings the final number of deprecated packages to 10,600, or 21.2% of the top 50,000. Team Nautilus estimated that under this broader understanding of package deprecation, about 2.1 billion downloads of deprecated packages are made on the NPM registry weekly.

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Ultra-Large Structure Discovered In Distant Space Challenges Cosmological Principle

“The discovery of a second ultra-large structure in the remote universe has further challenged some of the basic assumptions about cosmology,” writes SciTechDaily:

The Big Ring on the Sky is 9.2 billion light-years from Earth. It has a diameter of about 1.3 billion light-years, and a circumference of about four billion light-years. If we could step outside and see it directly, the diameter of the Big Ring would need about 15 full Moons to cover it.

It is the second ultra-large structure discovered by University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) PhD student Alexia Lopez who, two years ago, also discovered the Giant Arc on the Sky. Remarkably, the Big Ring and the Giant Arc, which is 3.3 billion light-years across, are in the same cosmological neighborhood — they are seen at the same distance, at the same cosmic time, and are only 12 degrees apart on the sky. Alexia said: “Neither of these two ultra-large structures is easy to explain in our current understanding of the universe. And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes, and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important — but what exactly?

“One possibility is that the Big Ring could be related to Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). BAOs arise from oscillations in the early universe and today should appear, statistically at least, as spherical shells in the arrangement of galaxies. However, detailed analysis of the Big Ring revealed it is not really compatible with the BAO explanation: the Big Ring is too large and is not spherical.” Other explanations might be needed, explanations that depart from what is generally considered to be the standard understanding in cosmology…

And if the Big Ring and the Giant Arc together form a still larger structure then the challenge to the Cosmological Principle becomes even more compelling… Alexia said, “From current cosmological theories we didn’t think structures on this scale were possible. ”

Possible explanations include a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or the effect of cosmic strings passing through…
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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Do Electric Vehicles Fail at a Lower Rate Than Gas Cars In Extreme Cold?

In a country experiencing extreme cold — and where almost 1 in 4 cars are electric — a roadside assistance company says it’s still gas-powered cars that are experiencing the vast majority of problems starting.

Electrek argues that while extreme cold may affect chargers, “it mainly gets attention because it’s a new technology and it fails for different reasons than gasoline vehicles in the cold.”

Viking, a road assistance company (think AAA), says that it responded to 34,000 assistance requests in the first 9 days of the year. Viking says that only 13% of the cases were coming from electric vehicles (via TV2 — translated from Norwegian) [“13 percent of the cases with starting difficulties are electric cars, while the remaining 87 percent are fossil cars…”]

To be fair, this data doesn’t adjust for the age of the vehicles. Older gas-powered cars fail at a higher rate than the new ones and electric vehicles are obviously much more recent on average.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the article.

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Google To Invest $1 Billion In UK Data Center

Google announced today that it will invest $1 billion building a data center near London. Reuters reports: The data centre, located on a 33-acre (13-hectare) site bought by Google in 2020, will be located in the town of Waltham Cross, about 15 miles north of central London, the Alphabet-owned company said in a statement. The British government, which is pushing for investment by businesses to help fund new infrastructure, particularly in growth industries like technology and artificial intelligence, described Google’s investment as a “huge vote of confidence” in the UK.

“Google’s $1 billion investment is testament to the fact that the UK is a centre of excellence in technology and has huge potential for growth,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in the Google statement. The investment follows Google’s $1 billion purchase of a central London office building in 2022, close to Covent Garden, and another site in nearby King’s Cross, where it is building a new office and where its AI company DeepMind is also based. In November, Microsoft announced plans to pump $3.2 billion into Britain over the next three years.

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Bing Gained Less Than 1% Market Share Since Adding Bing Chat, Report Finds

BMW Will Employ Figure’s Humanoid Robot At South Carolina Plant

Figure’s first humanoid robot will be coming to a BMW manufacturing facility in South Carolina. TechCrunch reports: BMW has not disclosed how many Figure 01 models it will deploy initially. Nor do we know precisely what jobs the robot will be tasked with when it starts work. Figure did, however, confirm with TechCrunch that it is beginning with an initial five tasks, which will be rolled out one at a time. While folks in the space have been cavalierly tossing out the term “general purpose” to describe these sorts of systems, it’s important to temper expectations and point out that they will all arrive as single- or multi-purpose systems, growing their skillset over time. Figure CEO Brett Adcock likens the approach to an app store — something that Boston Dynamics currently offers with its Spot robot via SDK.

Likely initial applications include standard manufacturing tasks such as box moving, pick and place and pallet unloading and loading — basically the sort of repetitive tasks for which factory owners claim to have difficulty retaining human workers. Adcock says that Figure expects to ship its first commercial robot within a year, an ambitious timeline even for a company that prides itself on quick turnaround times. The initial batch of applications will be largely determined by Figure’s early partners like BMW. The system will, for instance, likely be working with sheet metal to start. Adcock adds that the company has signed up additional clients, but declined to disclose their names. It seems likely Figure will instead opt to announce each individually to keep the news cycle spinning in the intervening 12 months.

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Apple Again Banned From Selling Watches In US With Blood Oxygen Sensor

A U.S. Court of Appeals said Apple will again be barred from selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 beginning Thursday. These models both contain a blood oxygen sensor that infringes on the intellectual property of medical device company Masimo.

“The court order Wednesday did not rule on Apple’s effort to overturn a U.S. International Trade Commission ban on the company selling the affected watches in the United States,” notes CNBC. “But it lifted an injunction that had blocked the ban from taking effect while that appeal is pending.” From the report: In December, Apple chose to briefly remove the affected watches from its online and retail stores, though retailers with those devices in stock may still sell them. Earlier this week, court filings suggested that Apple had received approval from U.S. Customs for a modified version of its Apple Watches that lack the blood oxygen feature and therefore no longer infringe on Masimo’s intellectual property. It could open a path for a modified Apple Watch to return to U.S. store shelves.

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Sheryl Sandberg To Exit Meta’s Board After 12 Years

According to Axios, former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg plans to leave Meta’s board of directors after holding a seat for the past 12 years. From the report: “With a heart filled with gratitude and a mind filled with memories, I let the Meta board know that I will not stand for reelection this May,” Sandberg wrote In a Facebook post announcing her departure. “After I left my role as COO, I remained on the board to help ensure a successful transition,” Sandberg said. Acknowledging CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership, Sandberg said he and Meta’s current leadership team “have proven beyond a doubt that the Meta business is strong and well-positioned for the future, so this feels like the right time to step away.” “I will always be grateful to Mark for believing in me and for his partnership and friendship; he is that truly once-in-a-generation visionary leader and he is equally amazing as a friend who stays by your side through the good times and the bad,” Sandberg added. She also expressed gratitude to her colleagues and teammates at Meta as well as Meta’s board members.

Sandberg left the company she helped build as an executive in September 2022 after 14 years. She remained on Meta’s board following her departure, a seat she held for the past 12 years. In announcing her departure, Sandberg said she aimed to focus on more philanthropic work. In the time since leaving the company as an executive, she has focused more her time on her women’s leadership philanthropy, Lean In. More recently, Sandberg has also focused on the conversation around rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war, particularly as it pertains to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Axios notes that Meta’s revenue “grew 43,000% from $272 million in 2008 to nearly $118 billion in 2021” under Sandberg’s business leadership.

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