Microsoft brings Jenny, Aria, and more interface tweaks to new Windows 11 Insider build

The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome back to The Register Plays Games, our monthly gaming column. Long may this trajectory of PlayStation titles eventually coming to PC continue – because we now have God of War.

How do you make a flawless PlayStation exclusive even better? The answer seems to be to port it to PC, which is what happened with God of War on 14 January. Back in 2018, The Register was lucky enough to receive a copy ahead of its original release. We played it and loved it, though without a dedicated spot on the site for gaming it would have felt strange to suddenly write about the experience.

Things have changed. The RPG has entered its third year as God of War becomes the latest in a number of erstwhile “exclusives” that have made the leap to the desktop. In that vein, this column has previously covered the PC releases of Death Stranding (not for everyone) and Days Gone (not perfect), and we’ve learnt that the measure of a port is “how badly have they fucked this up?”

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel tonight approved Autonomy founder Mike Lynch’s extradition to America to face criminal charges over the multi-billion-dollar sale of his tech biz to Hewlett-Packard.

The British businessman is wanted in the United States to stand trial on 17 charges of fraud and false accounting. American prosecutors claim Lynch overstated his firm’s value and cheated Hewlett Packard investors when he sold his firm Autonomy to the US IT giant in 2011 for $11bn – an acquisition that led to a staggering $8.8bn writedown by HP the following year.

Lynch denies any wrongdoing.

Semiconductor shortage issues will continue through the first half of 2022 as the industry attempts to build up inventory to normal levels, according to research firm IDC.

It cites limited investment in mature process technology as one reason, with many vital components for the automotive industry and other sectors manufactured using these older processes.

The semiconductor market continues to experience uneven shortages and tight supply, IDC noted, and the research firm highlights that one of the key supply constraints for semiconductors has been in mature process nodes.

The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday upheld a lower court’s refusal to block California’s net neutrality law (SB 822), affirming that state laws can regulate internet connectivity where federal law has gone silent.

The decision is a blow to the large internet service providers that challenged California’s regulations, which prohibit network practices that discriminate against lawful applications and online activities. SB 822, for example, forbids “zero-rating” programs that exempt favored services from customer data allotments, paid prioritization, and blocking or degrading service.

In 2017, under the leadership of then-chairman Ajit Pai, the US Federal Communications Commission tossed out America’s net neutrality rules, to the delight of the internet service providers that had to comply. Then in 2018, the FCC issued an order that redefined broadband internet services, treating them as “information services” under Title I of the Communications Act instead of more regulated “telecommunications services” under Title II of the Communications Act.

While Microsoft’s Azure Quantum continues to hover between vapourware and hardware – a state of quantum if you will – NASA boffins have been putting tech inspired by the research to work in spacecraft communications.

As for those that think the Moon landings never happened, just wait until you hear about scalable quantum computing.

In this instance, the fabled hardware is not being put to use by engineers and scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Instead, the team is looking for ways of optimising communication with missions via the very finite resource of the Deep Space Network (DSN).

The JEDEC Solid State Technology Association has published the official standards for HBM3 memory, the latest update to the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) Standard.

HBM is a high-performance memory type that uses vertically stacked memory chips that are typically mounted on the same substrate close to a CPU or GPU. There are just a few suppliers of HBM memory: SK hynix, Micron, and Samsung spring to mind.

The HBM3 standard was designed for greater bandwidth, doubling the per-pin data rate of HBM2 generation components up to 6.4Gbps, equivalent to 819GBps bandwith per device, according to JEDEC, which is in line with the HBM3 DRAM design SK hynix announced last year.

SAP’s operating profit has fallen 45 per cent year-on-year in the fourth calendar quarter pf 2021 to €1.47bn as cloud investments drag on profitability.

Despite boasting 17 per cent growth in cloud revenue to £9.4bn, the full-year results also show the pain involved as one of the world’s largest software vendors attempts to transition to a new business model.

On a call with investors, CEO Christian Klein said: “These are very strong results during a challenging time for most businesses. They demonstrate the confidence our customers have in SAP and in the unique value we offer in helping them address an unprecedented set of challenges. We are optimistic about the year ahead and we are well on track to achieving our 2025 ambitions.”

Engineer Nelson Elhage offers several reasons Kubernetes is so complex but this does at least mean that multiple companies offer tools to try to help you master it.

The Google-backed container-management system is famously difficult, even to spell or pronounce. (It’s often called “k8s” for short: since “kubernetes” is 10 letters long, “k8s” signifies “k” + eight letters + “s”, and is pronounced “kates”.) The Mountain View mammoth even commissioned a comic to explain what it is. (It’s long, but quite good.)

K8s is a set of tools for managing clusters – but not everyone has a spare cluster lying around that they can play with.

The great International Organization for Standardization outage is entering its third day as consultants find themselves bereft of technical documents with which to beat engineers.

Problems first appeared as 26 January drew to a close and the organisation noted: “We are currently facing a technical outage impacting our application’s availability and performance. This outage is under investigation.”

The following day brought good news. At 0822 CET on 27 January the group announced it had identified the issue (something to do with IT infrastructure) and a couple of hours later reported that some applications were being brought back up.