The BBC reports that British tech tycoon Mike Lynch "has been cleared of fraud charges he faced in the U.S. over the $11bn (£8.6bn) sale of his software firm to Hewlett-Packard in 2011." A jury in San Francisco found him not guilty on all counts in a stunning victory for Mr Lynch, who had been accused of inflating the value of Autonomy, his company, ahead of its sale. Mr Lynch, who faced more than 20 years in prison if convicted, had denied the charges and took the stand to defend himself. In his testimony, he maintained he had focused on technology not accounting, distancing himself from other executives, including the company's former chief financial officer who was already successfully prosecuted for fraud... Mr Lynch made £500m from the sale. Just a year later, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by $8.8bn. Years of legal battles followed. The company's chief financial officer, Sushovan Hussain, was found guilty of fraud in 2018 and later sentenced to five years in prison... Mr Lynch's team pushed the argument that HP had failed to properly vet the deal and mismanaged the takeover, while he testified he was uninvolved with the transactions being described. Lynch's lawyers said the verdict "closes the book on a relentless 13-year effort to pin HP's well-documented ineptitude on Dr Lynch. Thankfully, the truth has finally prevailed." Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the news.

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HP announced today that it will resurrect the "Omni" branding it first coined for its business-oriented laptops introduced in 1993. The vintage branding will now be used for the company's new consumer-facing laptops, with HP retiring the Spectre and Dragonfly brands in the process. Furthermore, computers under consumer PC series names like Pavilion will also no longer be released. "Instead, every consumer computer from HP will be called either an OmniBook for laptops, an OmniDesk for desktops, or an OmniStudio for AIOs," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The computers will also have a modifier, ranging from 3 up to 5, 7, X, or Ultra to denote computers that are entry-level all the way up to advanced. For instance, an HP OmniBook Ultra would represent HP's highest-grade consumer laptop. "For example, an HP OmniBook 3 will appeal to customers who prioritize entertainment and personal use, while the OmniBook X will be designed for those with higher creative and technical demands," Stacy Wolff, SVP of design and sustainability at HP, said via a press announcement today. [...] So far, HP has announced one new Omni computer, the OmniBook X. It has a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 16GB or 32GB of MPDDR5x-8448 memory, up to 2TB of storage, and a 14-inch, 2240x1400 IPS display. HP is pointing to the Latin translation of omni, meaning "all" (or everything), as the rationale behind the naming update. The new name should give shoppers confidence that the computers will provide all the things that they need. HP is also getting rid of some of its commercial series names, like Pro. From now on, new, lower-end commercial laptops will be ProBooks. There will also be ProDesktop desktops and ProStudio AIOs. These computers will have either a 2 modifier for entry-level designs or a 4 modifier for ones with a little more power. For example, an HP ProDesk 2 is less powerful than an HP ProDesk 4. Anything more powerful will be considered either an EliteBook (laptops), EliteDesk (desktops), or EliteStudio (AIOs). For the Elite computers, the modifiers go from 6 to 8, X, and then Ultra. A Dragonfly laptop today would fall into the Ultra category. HP did less overhauling of its commercial lineup because it "recognized a need to preserve the brand equity and familiarity with our current sub-brands," Wolff said, adding that HP "acknowledged the creation of additional product names like Dragonfly made those products stand out, rather than be seen as part of a holistic portfolio." [...] As you might now expect of any tech rebranding, marketing push, or product release these days, HP is also announcing a new emblem that will appear on its computers, as well as other products or services, that substantially incorporate AI. The two laptops announced today carry the logo. According to Wolff, on computers, the logo means that the systems have an integrated NPU "at 40+ trillions of operations per second." They also come with a chatbot based on ChatGPT 4, an HP spokesperson told me.

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The PHP programming language has sunk to its lowest position ever on the long-running TIOBE index of programming language popularity. It now ranks #17 — lower than Assembly Language, Ruby, Swift, Scratch, and MATLAB. InfoWorld reports: When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. PHP even reached the top 3 spot in the index, ranking third several times between 2006 and 2010. But as competing web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and React arrived in other languages, PHP's popularity waned. "The major driving languages behind these new frameworks were Ruby, Python, and most notably JavaScript," Jansen noted in his statement accompanying the index. "On top of this competition, some security issues were found in PHP. As a result, PHP had to reinvent itself." Nowadays, PHP still has a strong presence in small and medium websites and is the language leveraged in the WordPress web content management system. "PHP is certainly not gone, but its glory days seem to be over," Jansen said. A note on the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index argues that the TIOBE Index "is a lagging indicator. It counts the number of web pages with the language name." So while "Objective-C" ranks #30 on TIOBE's index (one rank above Classic Visual Basic), "who is reading those Objective-C web pages? Hardly anyone, according to Google Trends data." On TIOBE's index, Fortran now ranks #10. Meanwhile, PHP ranks #7 on Pypl (based on the frequency of searches for language tutorials). TIOBE's top ten? Python C C++ Java C# JavaScript Go Visual Basic SQL Fortran The next two languages, ranked #11 and #12, are Delphi/Object Pascal and Assembly Language.

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HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant. The Register: Lawyers representing the aggrieved were responding in an Illinois court to an earlier HP motion to dismiss a January lawsuit. Among other things, the plaintiffs' filing stated that the printer buyers "never entered into any contractual agreement to buy only HP-branded ink prior to receiving the firmware updates." They allege HP broke several anti-competitive statutes, which they claim: "bar tying schemes, and certain uses of software to accomplish that without permission, that would monopolize an aftermarket for replacement ink cartridges, when these results are achieved in a way that 'take[s] advantage of customers' sunk costs.'" In the case, which began in January, the plaintiffs are arguing that HP issued a firmware update between late 2022 and early 2023 that they allege disabled their printers if they installed a replacement cartridge that was not HP-branded. They are asking for damages that include the cost of now-useless third-party cartridges and an injunction to disable the part of the firmware updates that prevent the use of third-party ink.

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