BATTERYFORPC BLOG
The strange tastes of a restaurant at the end of the world
When your restaurant is high in the Arctic Circle, and most ingredients have to come in on a boat or a plane, you have to get pretty creative with your fine dining. That means seal, whale, reindeer – and plankton? The sommelier warns me about the buckshot. "The kitchen is double-checking, but you never know," she adds, pointing out that a ptarmigan shot by a local hunter yielded the exq ... Read more
2024-07-30 03:38:34
CrowdStrike IT outage affected 8.5 million Windows devices, Microsoft says
Microsoft says it estimates that 8.5m computers around the world were disabled by the global IT outage. It’s the first time a figure has been put on the incident and suggests it could be the worst cyber event in history. The glitch came from a security company called CrowdStrike which sent out a corrupted software update to its huge number of customers. Microsoft, which is helping custome ... Read more
2024-07-21 19:21:07
Is AI the answer for better government services?
Long before ChatGPT came along, governments were keen to use chatbots to automate their services and advice. Those early chatbots "tended to be simpler, with limited conversational abilities," says Colin van Noordt, a researcher on the use of AI in government, and based in the Netherlands. But the emergence of generative AI in the last two years, has revived a vision of more efficien ... Read more
2024-07-08 19:07:45
Amazon at 30: What next for 'The Everything Company'?
Three decades on from the day it began, it is hard to get your head around the scale of Amazon. Consider its vast warehouse in Dartford, on the outskirts of London. It has millions of stock items, with hundreds of thousands of them bought every day - and it takes two hours from the moment something is ordered, the company says, for it to be picked, packed and sent on its way. Now, picture th ... Read more
2024-07-07 21:58:13
How Microsoft and Nvidia bet correctly to leapfrog Apple
Life comes at you fast. Last month, AI chip giant Nvidia briefly became the world’s richest company, overtaking Microsoft, which had in turn risen above Apple. When this news was mentioned on stage at a tech industry event I attended in Copenhagen, there was spontaneous applause from the audience. As I write, Nvidia is now back in second place, after a fall in its share price took its combi ... Read more
2024-07-02 20:36:58
Why data is being stored in glass and holograms
The year 2039 might seem like a long way off, but Ian Crawford is already planning for it. It will mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two - a big year for his employer, the Imperial War Museum. Mr Crawford is chief information officer at the museum, and oversees a project to digitise its huge collection of pictures, audio and film. With a collection of around 24,000 hou ... Read more
2024-06-11 18:56:01
Donald Trump joins TikTok despite previously wanting ban
Donald Trump has joined TikTok, despite attempting to ban it on national security grounds during his presidency. In 2020 he signed a presidential executive order attempting to ban the platform for its links to China, which was ultimately blocked by US courts. He has since criticised recent attempts to curtail it, saying this would empower Facebook-owner Meta. Mr Trump, who has amassed mor ... Read more
2024-06-04 02:59:15
Santander staff and '30 million' customers hacked
Hackers are attempting to sell what they say is confidential information belonging to millions of Santander staff and customers. They belong to the same gang which this week claimed to have hacked Ticketmaster. The bank - which employs 200,000 people worldwide, including around 20,000 in the UK - has confirmed data has been stolen. Santander has apologised for what it says is "the concern ... Read more
2024-05-31 21:20:23
Wordle in legal row with geography spinoff, Worldle
The owner of the hit online game Wordle is legally challenging a geography-based spinoff called Worldle. In the filing, the New York Times, which purchased Wordle for a seven figure sum in 2022, accuses its near-namesake of "creating confusion" and attempting to capitalise on "the enormous goodwill” associated with its own brand. But the creator of Worldle, software developer Kory ... Read more
2024-05-31 03:35:07
'The chatbot has transformed my life'
While for many of us AI chatbots are perhaps just an interesting novelty, for some people they are proving to be transformational. Yasmin Shaheen-Zaffar, from North Yorkshire, has dyslexia, dyspraxia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As a result of these conditions, she would struggle with written assignments. Then AI came into her life. “It was a few years ago that I wa ... Read more
2024-05-29 20:23:42