NEW YORK (ANP) - Tennisster Arantxa Rus heeft het Nederlandse onderonsje tegen Suzan Lamens in de tweede kwalificatieronde van de US Open met 6-3 6-4 gewonnen. Ze treft in de derde en laatste ronde de Zwitserse Susan Bandecchi.

Rus, die op de wereldranglijst de 203e plaats inneemt, brak Lamens in de eerste set bij 4-3 en serveerde de set vervolgens uit. In de tweede set sloeg Rus direct bij de eerste opslagbeurt van Lamens, de mondiale nummer 164, toe. Ze gaf de voorsprong niet meer weg en besliste de partij na een kleine vijf kwartier spelen.

De nederlaag is een volgende tegenvaller voor Lamens, die vorig jaar in het hoofdtoernooi van alle grandslamtoernooien stond. Ze haalde op de Australian Open, Wimbledon en de US Open de tweede ronde. Dit jaar vallen de prestaties tegen. Ze werd in Australië in de eerste ronde uitgeschakeld en strandde eerder ook in de kwalificaties op Wimbledon en Roland Garros.

Het hoofdtoernooi van de US Open begint zondag.

SANTA CLARA (ANP) - Chipbedrijf Nvidia heeft in het afgelopen kwartaal de omzet en winst meer dan verdubbeld in vergelijking met dezelfde periode vorig jaar. Grote techbedrijven investeren gigantische bedragen in datacenters voor AI-toepassingen en kopen daarvoor halfgeleiders van Nvidia, 's werelds belangrijkste chipverkoper voor kunstmatige intelligentie. Volgens topman Jensen Huang blijft de vraag naar extra rekenkracht voor AI-toepassingen sneller groeien.

In het tweede kwartaal van Nvidia's gebroken boekjaar kwam de omzet uit op 96,2 miljard dollar, 106 procent meer dan een jaar eerder. De nettowinst steeg 126 procent tot 59,7 miljard dollar. De resultaten overtroffen de verwachtingen op de financiële markten.

De kwartaalcijfers van Nvidia worden gezien als barometer voor de mate waarin techbedrijven blijven investeren in AI-infrastructuur. De ogen zijn daarom ook gericht op de prognose voor het lopende derde kwartaal. Nvidia verwacht dan zo'n 108 miljard omzet te boeken, ook meer dan analisten hadden verwacht.

It’s painful to see Northern Irish police bang their heads against the wall as they hunt for the journalist’s killer. But there are still important moments here – including remarkable footage from an MTV show that never aired

The killing of Lyra McKee, a journalist shot while observing a riot in the Creggan area of Derry, Northern Ireland, on 18 April 2019, is a case that remains officially unsolved. Last month, three men were found not guilty of her murder after a two-year trial; so far, there has been only one conviction, for possessing the gun that killed her.

That a member of the republican paramilitary group the New IRA fired the weapon is not in question. Many of the approximately 150 people who were standing within metres of him at the time must know who he is. But this is a part of Northern Ireland where police work is still, more than 25 years since the Good Friday agreement, met with violent intimidation or resolute silence. The extinguishing of McKee’s bright, hopeful talent is a story destined not to end in relief or resolution.

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A new season at the snazziest modern stadium in England and something extremely welcome for Tottenham. A home win over domestic opposition. There were only four of them last time out; three in the Premier League with the final one – over Everton on the last day – helping them to avoid relegation. Had they lost that, this Carabao Cup fixture against Charlton would also have been played in the Championship.

Spurs needed this tonic for another reason – to begin the clean-up operation after Saturday’s awful 3-0 defeat at Brentford.

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BertvB posted a photo:

A fun and vibrant shot captured during the Ballon Fiesta in Barneveld, Netherlands. The photo features the iconic Belgian special shape hot air balloon "Baby Girl" (OO-BHW) soaring high against a crisp, clear blue sky.

Wednesday's release of Kubernetes v1.37 shows how the team behind the popular open source resource orchestrator is prioritizing production readiness, pruning outdated features even while it adds new ones. Overall, the release, nicknamed Garhwal after India’s lush Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, includes 67 changes: 16 features that have graduated to stable, production-ready status, along with 23 features being tested as beta, 27 new alpha features, and 1 deprecation. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which stewards (but does not manage) Kubernetes among more than 220 cloud native projects, has to be mindful of its user base, which may be growing out of its infatuation with the bleeding edge. Approximately 82 percent of container users run Kubernetes in production, up from 66 percent in 2023, according to a CNCF January survey. Kubernetes has also become a big driver of AI workloads, with CNCF reporting that 66 percent of organizations hosting generative AI models use Kubernetes to manage some or all of their inference workloads. Metrics ratified One of the first rules of maintaining production software is to keep the betas moving along. This release finally bumps the Metrics API to general availability, after being in beta status for the last nine years of K8s’ 12 years of public existence. In 2020, the maintainers of the Kubernetes resource orchestration platform set down the law: Any new API-based feature must not linger in beta status for more than three Kubernetes minor releases (about 12 months in the current release cadence). After three releases, the beta must move to general availability, or be replaced by another attempt at offering the same functionality. The thinking was that forcing a technology off beta status would inspire the maintainers to finish the work. If beta APIs stick around too long, temporary designations (“v1beta1”) might become embedded in automated systems and require changes later. Their temporary status will also trip up security software, which frowns on the production use of “pre-production” software. The CNCF declined to comment on why this particular API beta got lodged in the slipstream of new releases. A CNCF spokesperson noted that the organization does not interfere in the decisions of the projects under its purview. "Despite the Beta label, the metrics.k8s.io API has been widely used in production for years," commented Kubernetes 1.37 Release Lead Dipesh Rawat in a statement to The Register. Like the millionaires who found a loophole in New York City’s pied-à-terre tax, the Metrics API skirted out of these mandates perhaps due to a technicality, in that it isn’t managed by the API server itself, but rather is an aggregated API served out-of-tree by a separate metrics server. Also, the Instrumentation Special Interest Group was busy refining the underlying performance of the metrics serving engine after replacing the previous version, Heapster. The API provides CPU and memory usage for pods and nodes. These numbers can be used not only for compiling reports but also as input for other features, such as pod autoscaling. It’s stable, everybody uses it, and now it’s official. "No functional changes [are] expected," the release notes state. "Its move into v1 in this release formally recognizes that the API has already proven itself in production, and this is simply a mature project addressing a long-standing permanent Beta status." Unloading the baggage Other technical debt has been addressed in this release as well. The software’s original built-in DNS server, kube-dns, is being retired in favor of CoreDNS, the default cluster DNS add-on since Kubernetes v1.13. Those running kube-dns must update their clusters before Kubernetes 1.40, or they will stop working. Also, word has been handed down that kube-proxy, which handles the routing amongst the pods, will no longer support the Linux IPVS (IP Virtual Servers), beginning with Kubernetes 1.43. This load balancer software was introduced to solve the bottlenecks caused by iptables-based routing. Well, IPVS didn’t work out, and nftables has now been decreed as the way forward. Also on the way out is the first version of Linux control groups (cgroup v1), which Kubernetes uses to group server processes into hierarchies for easier management. The updated cgroup v2 offers more granular oversight of container resources. Since v1.35, Kubernetes won’t initialize nodes that still rely on cgroup v1 (though there is a temporary work-around that will be supported for a limited time). KYAML flow The v1.37 development cycle ran for 15 weeks, with contributions from over 1,700 individuals and 212 different companies. Of the new features, many ease deployment, which is always appreciated in production environments. Brand new is pod-level checkpoint and restore (Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal 5823), introduced as Alpha. Entire pods can be checkpointed, capturing the runtime state of their containers so they can later be restored from that checkpoint. It’s up to the container runtimes to manage this. Autoscaling is getting a boost with HPAScaleToZero (KEP #2021), a beta feature now enabled by default that allows the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to scale workloads down to zero pods when idle, using object or external metrics as indicators that they can then be restored upon demand. The resilient watch cache initialization (KEP #4568) manages the thundering herd problem during API server startup and recovery. Previously, an uninitialized watch cache caused the kube-apiserver to either hang on long-running watch requests or delegate heavy LIST queries directly to etcd, overwhelming the backend database. This fix essentially acts as a bouncer, rejecting watchcache-dependent read requests with retryable errors until the cache is fully initialized. Lastly, there's a bit of news that will please anyone fed up with working with Kubernetes’ occasionally ambiguous YAML-based configuration. KYAML (KEP 5295) is a new subset of YAML that restricts formatting to Kubernetes norms, making manifests parseable by other tools. Mostly, it’s super-strict about string quoting and indifferent to whitespace. It’s stable, you don’t have to make any changes to existing manifests, it doesn’t replace YAML, and is already understood by the kubectl command line. “It is less of a migration and more of a better habit,” explained computer science student Kashish Verma in a recent Kubernetes blog item. It’s just better to be consistent across large repositories and team projects. ®

Dat er een Europa met meerdere snelheden komt, waarin een groepje landen soms op de troepen vooruitloopt, ziet Tom Berendsen wel zitten, bleek uit de Europatoespraak van de minister van Buitenlandse Zaken woensdag in Maastricht. Een van de grootste uitdagingen voor de EU is volgens hem de uitbreiding van met kandidaten als Oekraïne en Moldavië.

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