Crowds gather at Douglas cenotaph in its 100th year to pay tribute to those killed in world wars.

Dougie sets sail for Coll, and Cammy visits the abandoned Orkney island of Swona.

The wreck of HMS Hawke was discovered by a team of divers about 70 miles east of Fraserburgh earlier this year.

Deputy Raluca Kovacs is recognised for her "contribution to promoting parliamentary democracy".

The boss of Britain's biggest pubs group urges the chancellor to extend business rates relief.

The chancellor says businesses will "contribute more" as she raises employer National Insurance to 15%.

A number of major firms have warned over the impact of higher National Insurance costs.

Hospital waiting times hit record levels this year raising concerns about the NHS during winter.

Awards include a long service commendation for member of staff who has fielded 999 calls for 40 years.

The Cobblers' Community Trust will receive £27,000 to help boost the confidence and wellbeing of children.

Businesses in a high rise in Brighton fear their Christmas trading could be ruined.

Sark Dairy is looking for new tenants as their current farmers return home

Community services could be lost in the wake of the Budget, a charity tells MPs.

Paul Waring birdies the final two holes to win the Abu Dhabi Championship by two shots from fellow Englishman Tyrell Hatton.

Sheffield United boss Chris Wilder puts his side's early-season success down to the togetherness at the club.

An anti-spiking charity says it has not seen a fall in reports although official figures are down.

Blackpool's £65m regeneration depends upon planning permission being granted, a public inquiry hears.

The pair started campaigning after Joanna Simpson was killed by her husband in Ascot in 2010.

Luton boss Rob Edwards still has his players' backing but admits his future is "out of my hands" after Saturday's 5-1 defeat at Middlesbrough.

Former Worcester Warriors women's coach Ashley Beck says he would consider returning to the revived club in a coaching capacity.

Westmorland and Furness Council trading standards safe shopping advice.

The memorial is moved to a prominent location after consultation with the Royal British Legion.

Dr Rebecca Harrison is looking at how the Andor series affected Winspit Quarry.

Ryan Ward, 31, is wanted in connection with incidents of assault and criminal damage.

The streaming wars are what the mainstream press like to focus on (Spotify v Apple etc.) but I think the distribution landscape is much more exciting and interesting. It’s reported that DIY artists will earn more than $1 Billion this year and Goldman Sachs has just issued a report estimating that by 2030 1.15 Billion...

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Igloos, rooftops and ski lodges.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has finally dropped for gamers to get stuck into. The Call of Duty (CoD) series is one of the best-selling in history with more […]

The post Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches, Kia EV3 scoops EV award appeared first on ShinyShiny.

In the round-up: New simulator 'like Star Wars' - Krack • Pirelli likes 'flexibility' of new C6 • Play NZ anthem when McLaren wins - Lawson

We're excited to announce a Search Central Live event in Warsaw, Poland on April 24, 2024. Search Central Live is our global Google Search event series specifically for site owners, publishers, and SEOs.

This is my presentation from ApacheCon. I hope you enjoy it.

Ross Mason of Mulesoft recently blogged: "OSGi - no thanks". Ross is a smart guy and he usually has something interesting to say. In this case, I think Ross has made a lot of good points:

1. Ross is right - OSGi is a great technology for middleware vendors.
2. Ross is right - Developers shouldn't be forced to mess with OSGi.
3. Ross is wrong - You can make both of these work together.

At WSO2 we went through exactly the same issues. We simply came to a different conclusion - that we can provide the benefits of OSGi (modularity, pluggability, dynamic loading) without giving pain to end-users. In WSO2 Carbon, customers can deploy their systems in exactly the same way that worked pre-OSGi.

Why did we choose OSGi? We also looked at building our own dynamic loading schemes. In fact, we've had dynamic classloading capabilities in our platform from day one. The reasons we went with OSGi are:

• A structured and versioned approach to dynamic classloading
• An industry standard approach - hence better understood, better skills, better resources
• It solves more than just dynamic loading: as well as providing versions and dynamic loading, it also really gives proper modularity - which means hiding classes as much as exposing classes.
• It provides (through Equinox p2) a proper provisioning model.

It wasn't easy. We struggled with OSGi to start with, but in the end we have a much stronger solution than if we had built our own. And we have done some great improvements. Our new Carbon Studio tooling gives a simple model to build complete end-to-end applications and hides OSGi completely from the end-user. The web admin consoles and deployment models allow complete deployment with zero OSGi. Drop a JAR in and we take care of the OSGi bundling for you.

The result - the best of both worlds - ease of use for developers and great middleware.

These days, commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software are used to build high-end and powerful workstations and servers to be deployed in today's local area networks of private homes and small- to medium-sized business. Typically, these servers are multipurpose and shared - running networking functionalities involving IP packet forwarding in addition to other CPU intensive applications. In this paper we study and investigate the impact of running CPU-bound applications on the performance of IP packet forwarding. We measure and compare the impact and performance for the two operating systems of choice for home and small-business users, namely Linux and Windows XP. The performance is studied in terms of key performance metrics which include throughput, packet loss, round-trip delay, and CPU availability. For our measurements, we consider today's typical home network hosts of modern processors and Gigabit network cards. We also consider different configuration setups and utilize open-source tools to generate relatively high traffic rates. Our empirical results show that Linux exhibits superior performance over Windows XP in terms of IP forwarding performance. Results also show that, unlike Windows XP, the IP forwarding performance of Linux is not significantly impacted by running CPU-bound applications.

Interactive video is increasingly becoming a more and more dominant feature of our media platforms. Especially due to the popular YouTube annotations framework, integrating graphical annotations in a video has become very fashionable these days. However, the current options are limited to a few graphical shapes for which the user can define as good as no dynamic behaviour. Despite the enormous demand for easy-creatable, interactive video there are no such advanced tools available.

In this article we describe an innovative approach, to realize dynamics and interactivity of video annotations. First we explain basic concepts of video-markup like the generic element model and visual descriptors. After that we introduce the event-tree model, which can be used to define event-handling in an interactive video formally as well as visually. By combining these basic concepts, we can give an effective tool to the video community for realizing interactive and dynamic video in a simple, intuitive and focused way.

One of the challenges in Dynamic Software Product Line (DSPL) is how to support the coordination of multiple instances of a service feature. In particular, there is a need for a decentralized decision-making capability that will be able to seamlessly integrate new instances of a service feature without an omniscient central controller. Because of the need for decentralization, we are investigating principles from self-organization in biological organisms. As an initial proof of concept, we have applied three bio-inspired techniques to a simple smart home scenario: quorum sensing based service activation, a firefly algorithm for synchronization, and a gossiping (epidemic) protocol for information dissemination. In this paper, we first explain why we selected those techniques using a set of motivating scenarios of a smart home and then describe our experiences in adopting them.

Using pre-existing software components (COTS) to develop software systems requires the composition and adaptation of the component interfaces to solve mismatch problems. These mismatches may appear at different interoperability levels (signature, behavioural, quality of service and semantic). In this article, we define an approach which supports composition and adaptation of software components based on model transformation by taking into account the four levels. Signature and behavioural levels are addressed by means of transition systems. Context-awareness and semanticbased techniques are used to tackle quality of service and semantic, respectively, but also both consider the signature level. We have implemented and validated our proposal for the design and application of realistic and complex systems. Here, we illustrate the need to support the variability of the adaptation process in a context-aware pervasive system through a real-world case study, where software components are implemented using Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). We apply our model transformation process to extract transition systems (CA-STS specifications) from WF components. These CA-STSs are used to tackle the composition and adaptation. Then, we generate a CASTS adaptor specification, which is transformed into its corresponding WF adaptor component with the purpose of interacting with all the WF components of the system, thereby avoiding mismatch problems.

Feature modeling is an approach to represent commonalities and variabilities among products of a product line. Context-aware applications use context information to provide relevant services and information for their users. One of the challenges to build a context-aware product line is to develop mechanisms to incorporate context information and adaptation knowledge in a feature model. This paper presents UbiFEX, an approach to support feature analysis for context-aware software product lines, which incorporates a modeling notation and a mechanism to verify the consistency of product configuration regarding context variations. Moreover, an experimental study was performed as a preliminary evaluation, and a prototype was developed to enable the application of the proposed approach.

The massive growth in ontology development has opened new research challenges such as ontology management, search and retrieval for the entire semantic web community. These results in many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch2, that facilitate tasks user have to perform. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use the traditional text classification algorithms for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using the semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer from many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define an ontology classification problem and categorize it into many sub-problems. We present a new ontological methodology for the classification of web ontologies, which has been guided by the requirements of the emerging Semantic Web applications and by the lessons learnt from previous systems. The proposed framework, OntClassifire, is tested on 34 ontologies with a certain degree of overlapping domain, and effectiveness of the ontological mechanism is verified. It benefits the construction, maintenance or expansion of ontology directories on the semantic web that help to focus on the crawling and improving the quality of search for the software agents and people. We conclude that the use of a context specific knowledge hidden in the structure of ontologies gives more accurate results for the ontology classification.

Data warehouses integrate and aggregate data from various sources to support decision making within an enterprise. Usually, it is assumed that data are extracted from operational databases used by the enterprise. Cloud warehousing relaxes this view permitting data sources to be located anywhere on the world-wide web in a so-called "cloud", which is understood as a registry of services. Thus, we need a model of dataintensive web services, for which we adopt the view of the recently introduced model of abstract state services (AS2s). An AS2 combines a hidden database layer with an operation-equipped view layer, and thus provides an abstraction of web services that can be made available for use by other systems. In this paper we extend this model to an abstract model of clouds by means of an ontology for service description. The ontology can be specified using description logics, where the ABox contains the set of services, and the TBox can be queried to find suitable services. Consequently, AS2 composition can be used for cloud warehousing.

1. Stop Using Chrome On Your iPhone, Warns Apple—Millions Of Users Must Now Decide  Forbes
2. 4 new Chrome improvements for iOS  The Keyword
3. Chrome on your iPhone can search using pictures and words at the same time  The Verge
4. Google Rolls Out Four New Chrome Features for iOS  iPhone in Canada
5. Chrome 131 for iOS adding new Google Drive, Maps integrations  9to5Google

1. Bear encounter recorded in Whistler Village prompts conservation officer warning  CTV News Vancouver
2. Tourists 'shocked' to see man approach black bear in Whistler  Pique Newsmagazine

1. UN chief warns COP29 summit to pay up or face climate-led disaster for humanity  The Globe and Mail
2. Climate Summit, in Early Days, Is Already on a ‘Knife Edge’  The New York Times
3. At COP29 summit, nations big and small get chance to bear witness to climate change  The Globe and Mail
4. Terence Corcoran: COP29 hit by political ‘dunkelflaute’  Financial Post
5. COP29: Albania PM goes off script to ask 'What on Earth are we doing?'  Euronews

With the rapid development and application of driverless technology, the number and location of vehicles, the channel and bandwidth of wireless network are time-varying, which leads to the increase of offloading delay and energy consumption of existing algorithms. To solve this problem, the vehicle terminal task offloading decision problem is modelled as a Markov decision process, and a task offloading algorithm based on DDQN is proposed. In order to guide agents to quickly select optimal strategies, this paper proposes an offloading mechanism based on task feature. In order to solve the problem that the processing delay of some edge server tasks exceeds the upper limit of their delay, a task scheduling mechanism based on buffer delay is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed method has greater performance advantages in reducing delay and energy consumption compared with existing algorithms.

This paper presents a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) system over multicast Software-Defined Networking (SDN), which focuses on, transmission management for the sender-receiver model. Our approach reduces bandwidth usage by allowing the receiver to select various video resolutions in a multicast group, which helps avoid a video freezing issue during bandwidth congestion. Moreover, the SVC Multiple Sessions Transmission Bandwidth thresholds Quantised Level Balance (SVC-MST BWQLB) routes different layers of the SVC stream using distinct paths and reduces storage space and bandwidth congestion problems in different video resolutions. The experimental results show that the proposed model provides better display quality than the traditional Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing technique. Furthermore, it reduced transmission delays by up to 66.64% for grouped resolutions compared to SVC-Single Session Transmission (SVC-SST). Additionally, the modified Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) header and the sorting buffer for SVC-MST are proposed to deal with the defragmentation problem.

We propose that technological, service-dominant and design logics must interplay for an IT artefact to succeed. Based on data from a project aiming at a B2B platform for manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Europe, we explore these three logics in an agile software design context. By using an inductive approach, we theorise about what is needed for the alignment of the three logics. We contribute with a novel theoretical lens, the Framework for Adaptive Space. We offer insights into the importance of continuously reflecting on all three logics during the agile software design process to ensure mutual understanding among the agile team and the B2B platform end-users involved.

In order to further improve the public health assurance system and the infectious diseases early warning system to give play to their positive roles and enhance their collaborative capacity, this paper, based on the big and thick data analytics technology, designs a 'rolling-type' data synergy model. This model covers districts and counties, municipalities, provinces, and the country. It forms a data blockchain for the public health assurance system and enables high sharing of data from existing system platforms such as the infectious diseases early warning system, the hospital medical record management system, the public health data management system, and the health big and thick data management system. Additionally, it realises prevention, control and early warning by utilising data mining and synergy technologies, and ideally solves problems of traditional public health assurance system platforms such as excessive pressure on the 'central node', poor data tamper-proofing capacity, low transmission efficiency of big and thick data, bad timeliness of emergency response, and so on. The realisation of this technology can greatly improve the application and analytics of big and thick data and further enhance the public health assurance capacity.

Elections hold immense significance in shaping the leadership of a nation or organisation, serving as a pivotal moment that influences the trajectory of the entity involved. Despite their centrality to modern democratic systems, elections face a significant hurdle: widespread mistrust in the electoral process. This pervasive lack of confidence poses a substantial threat to the democratic framework, even in the case of prominent democracies such as India and US, where inherent flaws persist in the electoral system. Issues such as vote rigging, electronic voting machine (EVM) hacking, election manipulation, and polling booth capturing remain prominent concerns within the current voting paradigm. Leveraging blockchain for electronic voting systems offers an effective solution to alleviate the prevailing apprehensions associated with e-voting. By incorporating blockchain into the electoral process, the integrity and security of the system could be significantly strengthened, addressing the current vulnerabilities and fostering trust in democratic elections.

Software start-ups generally use development practices that are adapted to their agile and innovative environment. However, these practices, although consolidated, may not be the best ones for a specific context. This paper aims to present a set of guidelines for software development in start-ups. It also aims to show the results of three studies to validate and refine the proposed guidelines: a confirmatory survey, a focus group, and an expert panel. The participants were actors from both the industry and the academia. The results revealed that the guidelines obtained a positive perception from the participants of both contexts. Based on their approval, we can infer that those guidelines can increase the quality of products generated by start-ups and the chances of success for these organisations. Besides, the need for some improvements has been identified, and they will be implemented in the next version of the guidelines.

A number of studies have applied social network analysis (SNA) to show that the patterns of social interaction between software developers explain important organisational outcomes. However, these insights are based on a single network relation (i.e., uniplex social ties) between software developers and do not consider the multiple network relations (i.e., multiplex social ties) that truly exist among project members. This study reassesses the understanding of software developer networks and what it means for performance in software development settings. A systematic review of SNA studies between 1990 and 2020 across six digital libraries within the IS and management science domain was conducted. The central contributions of this paper are an in-depth overview of SNA studies to date and the establishment of a research agenda to advance our knowledge of the concept of multiplexity on how a multiplex perspective can contribute to a software developer's coordination of tasks and performance advantages.

This study aimed to assess the level of GW in Jordanian university students and compare the level of awareness of students according to their academic level (high and low), faculty (science and humanities), gender (male and female), and year of study (first and final years). This study is quantitative research that provides a comprehensive view of GW in Jordanian universities. A total of 383 university students of currently registered undergraduate programs from six independent universities in Jordan were recruited. An online questionnaire covering three aspects of GW was sent to participants in December 2020. Inferential and descriptive statistics were used to analyse data. Participants had 'good' (67%) overall knowledge about GW, a 'very good' level of GW causes (81%), and a 'poor' level of knowledge about the GW impacts on humans and the environment (47%) and knowledge about GW possible solutions (59%). Significant differences were founded between males and females, students from scientific faculties and students from other faculties, students with higher academic achievement than lower achievement in the total GW knowledge. But no significant differences were between students in the first year and the final years.