This now constitutes a rocky start for Sébastien Pocognoli as Scotland’s manager.

The claiming of four points from three Nations League games was adequate until Slovenia inflicted this defeat. It was the abject nature of Scotland’s display this time that was so stark. Pocognoli’s team were comprehensively outplayed by a side who themselves are no better than functional.

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Israeli communities shattered by Hamas masacres are torn between rebuilding their lives and remembering lost friends and relatives

Keith Siegel spent many of his long hours in Hamas captivity in Gaza etching everything that happened after 7 October 2023 into his memory. For 484 days, he recited to himself every place he was held, the dates he was moved and every attack or humiliation he endured or witnessed.

He aimed to store intelligence that could help Israeli forces free other hostages if he was released, to keep track of time as the days slid by and be able to tell his family what happened to him. Now his body is free, but he cannot loosen those memories.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey -- What's Next for VMware Users." The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there's an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers. For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini's survey said they're exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware's higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.

Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today's announcement, Rimini pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). "These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini's announcement said.

[...] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals." "In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for 'best of both worlds' workload placement," the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren't planning to move any of their assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Het kabinet heeft de ambitie om tenminste 50 procent van het militair materieel voortaan in Europa te kopen. Maar de trend gaat een andere kant op.

Direct na de aanslag van Hamas op 7 oktober 2023 was Israël eensgezind, maar daar is inmiddels weinig van over. Met verkiezingen in aantocht zijn Israëliërs sterk verdeeld, zowel over de toekomst van het land als over de herinnering aan de slachtoffers. „Ze zouden niet moeten dansen op hun bloed.”

The world is entering an era of supercharged industrial capacity with fast-shrinking human input, reckons Jeff Schneider.

Arutemu has added a photo to the pool:

Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Sony A7R II + Katana MC Auto 28mm f/2.8 via Techart AF adapter.

Arutemu has added a photo to the pool:

Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Sony A7R II + Katana MC Auto 28mm f/2.8 via Techart AF adapter.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

President Trump is pushing hard for the US Senate to make daylight saving time permanent so, among other things, golfers can stay on the course longer, but it may not be such a bright idea. New research out of Canada suggests that, even if Americans would get an extra hour of daylight in the evening, the ill health effects of permanent daylight saving time could outweigh the benefits. A paper published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday reviewed evidence on the health effects of permanent daylight saving time (pDST) as several Canadian jurisdictions move to stop changing their clocks. It finds that the opposite approach - adoption of permanent standard time (pST) - would actually be better for people’s health. Sorry, night owls and after-work social butterflies, but the science simply isn’t with you on this one. “Permanent DST preserves later evening light that may facilitate commuting, recreation, social participation, and some economic activity, but it also prolongs darkness on winter mornings,” the authors note. Prolonged morning darkness doesn't really jibe with the inner workings of the human body and light’s essential role in regulating the circadian rhythm. Sure, no one wants to drive home from work in the dark, but we really need morning light to get us functioning properly. Our circadian rhythms, the authors explain, actually run on a slightly longer schedule than a full day - 24.2 hours. For that reason, we rely on natural sunlight to keep us synchronized with the world around us. Morning light is some of the most important, the authors note, because it jump starts that rhythm, wakes us up and gets us moving. Evening light, on the other hand, delays the circadian rhythm, messing with our sense of “social time” and making it tougher to get to sleep and wake up rested in the morning. The effects of later evening light can show up in sleep, mood, education, and work productivity, the authors noted, and we don’t even need pDST to see some of those associations - we can just look at time zones. Move from east to west in the US or Canada and you’ll get some considerable differences in when the sun rises and sets in a particular time zone - in some cases, sunrise and sunset can differ by more than an hour of clock time across a single time zone. In one study cited by the Canadian analysis, residents on the western side of US time zones, where the sun sets later, got around an hour less sleep a week. The study also estimated that an additional hour of sleep per week was associated with around 5 percent higher long-term earnings. Similar results turned up in a German study, the team noted. Another study found that workers on the western end of US time zones ended up working fewer hours, too. On the educational front, an extra hour of sunlight before school was associated with higher math and reading scores in a Florida study “comparable in magnitude to meaningful class-size reductions.” “Ending biannual clock adjustments may eliminate transition harms that last a few weeks, but the health effects of permanent time are likely to be chronic,” the authors noted. “The preponderance of health evidence favors pST, which would align with the recommendations of sleep and chronobiology societies worldwide.” This isn’t the first time researchers have concluded such. British sleep scientists concluded much the same in 2024, which led to their recommendation to permanently kill DST in favor of a permanent shift to Greenwich Mean Time. That isn’t stopping the US from plowing ahead with plans for pDST, though. The Senate passed a measure to enshrine DST in 2022, but the House never acted on it. This time around, the House has passed its own bill to enact pDST, but the Senate is dithering, leading President Trump to go so far as to post the personal cellphone number of one Republican holdout on social media, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is opposed to the measure. “No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton explained in a post on X following Trump’s doxxing. He’s right, too: The US has twice enacted pDST - once during World War II, which ended after the war, and again in 1973 as an energy saving measure. Congress curtailed the experiment later in 1974 following public backlash over dark winter mornings. The US isn’t alone in trying and failing at enacting pDST, either, as the Canadian paper points out. Russia adopted pDST in 2011 and reversed it in 2014. Chile tried and reversed it as well. In those cases, the reasons for reversing course varied, but concerns included dark winter mornings, disrupted sleep and body clocks, safety, and public dissatisfaction. It’s unclear whether the US government’s latest attempt at enacting pDST will succeed despite political resistance and scientific evidence that it’s a bad idea, but the researchers sure seem to hope not: They note that, if the US makes such a change, Canada will likely be pressured to conform. At the end of the day, we might all be better off just dealing with a couple of clock changes and some short-term sleep disruption. ®

NEW YORK (ANP) - De S&P 500-index op de aandelenbeurzen in New York is dinsdag voor het eerst boven de 7800 punten gesloten. Koersstijgingen van technologieaandelen en gedaalde rentes op staatsobligaties zorgden voor een positieve stemming. Beleggers keken daarnaast uit naar het aankomende cijferseizoen, dat binnenkort begint.

"Recente cijfers over de economische groei zijn sterk geweest en de bijstellingen van de winstverwachtingen voor de bedrijven in de S&P 500 zijn overwegend positief gebleven", schreven strategen van Goldman Sachs volgens persbureau Bloomberg.

De brede S&P 500-index sloot 0,6 procent hoger tot 7818,93 punten. Het is voor het eerst sinds augustus dat deze graadmeter een nieuwe recordslotstand bereikt. De Nasdaq scherpte zijn slotrecord van maandag verder aan. De techindex steeg 0,5 procent naar 27.599,79 punten, nadat de Nasdaq maandag ruim 1 procent won. De Dow-Jonesindex klom 0,5 procent op 51.521,28 punten.

SOTSJI (ANP/RTR) - De Russische autoriteiten hebben een grote brand als gevolg van een aanval gemeld op een olietanker ongeveer 30 kilometer ten zuidoosten van de badplaats en haven Sotsji, aan de Zwarte Zee. Het onder Liberiaanse vlag varende schip Aframax Rio is door "een onbemand vaartuig" aangevallen en in brand gevlogen.

De 23-koppige bemanning is volgens het Russische ministerie van Transport gered. Het blussen kan pas beginnen als het vuur minder intens is. De olietanker is volgens gegevens van Maritime Traffic bijna 249 meter lang en 42 meter breed.

De aanvallen op de Zwarte Zee baren steeds meer zorgen, mede omdat veel graan en brandstof via de zee naar de wereldmarkt gaat. Voorzitter Ursula von der Leyen van de Europese Commissie zei dinsdag eerder dat voor de Bulgaarse kust twee koopvaardijschepen getroffen waren door drones, terwijl een dag eerder een Turks schip met Oekraïens graan voor de Roemeense kust werd geraakt en tot zinken werd gebracht.

AUSTIN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De Republikeinse gouverneur van de staat Texas, Greg Abbott, slaat woensdag een politieke bijeenkomst met president Donald Trump over. Daarmee kiest hij ervoor om niet samen met de meest prominente Republikein van het land te verschijnen. De komende verkiezingen in Texas worden spannend. Abbott hoopt herkozen te worden, maar heeft te maken met een sterke Democratische uitdager.

Abbott is een jarenlange bondgenoot van Trump. In plaats van de bijeenkomst bezoekt hij de kleine steden Jasper en College Station. Ook woont hij een barbecue bij. "Ik heb die dag al evenementen gepland staan en kan er niet bij zijn", vertelde Abbott aan verslaggevers.

Hoewel Trump Texas tijdens zijn drie presidentscampagnes makkelijk won, heeft hij er nu een negatieve populariteitsscore. Mensen zijn boos over de hoge kosten van het levensonderhoud en de oorlog met Iran. Het is in de staat ook spannend in de strijd om de senaatszetel. Daar staat de Republikeinse Ken Paxton in de peilingen achter op de Democraat James Talarico.

braart has added a photo to the pool:

Beautiful work

WinRuWorld has added a photo to the pool:

Anigozanthos is a genus of plant found naturally in the south-west of this country. They are within the bloodwort family Haemodoraceae.

There is a basal rosette of long green to greyish-green leaves. From the heart of this rosette merge long leafless stalks, which can reach 2 m, ending in a raceme of flowers. The size and height of these stalks, which can be clothed in coloured hairs, varies between the species.

The tuberous flower buds are also covered with coloured hairs, giving them a velvety feel. These hairs determine the colour of the flower, which may range from almost black to yellow, orange and red.

Some species are even dichromatic (such as Anigozanthos manglesii). The tubular form of the flower bud resembles a kangaroo paw, hence its name. The flower tip spreads fanlike into six petals.

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Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description:

In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on lockdown in 2020 turns to it as he tries to push the boundaries of perception.

It’s got a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and some good reviews on Letterboxd, including this one from film reviewer David Ehrlich:

me before seeing this movie: that is a big tree.

me after seeing this movie: that is a giant, hormonal, unbearably horned up 900-year-old virgin that understands loneliness on a level that most humans could never even begin to imagine.

The trailer and description put me in mind of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

Tags: Ildikó Enyedi · movies · Silent Friend · trailers · trees · video

In 2013, car rally preparation company Bad Obsession Motorsport posted their first video on "Project Binky" (previously on MeFi), an attempt to take the engine and running gear from a Toyota Celica ST185 GT4, and somehow cram it into the shell of an old and very broken down Austin Mini while fully rebuilding it. Thirteen years later, after many detours and side projects, like a custom hydraulic platform, 3D printing body kit prototypes, and devising a new way of prototyping circuit boards, the car known as Project Binky has finally had its very first test drive.

Legacy batch pipelines struggle to keep pace with modern data velocity, leading to midnight wake-up calls due to pipeline failures. To build trust with stakeholders, data engineers need to shift toward resilient, modular, and observable pipelines using decoupled components like Apache Kafka and Apache Airflow.

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Kinderen hebben dinsdagavond gedemonstreerd tegen het verdwijnen van twaalf speeltuinen in Alblasserdam. Met borden stonden ze, samen met ouders, bij het gemeentehuis in het dorp.