If you drop Dell's Latitude 5430 laptop from hip height onto vinyl flooring that covers a concrete slab, it lands with a sharp crack, bounces a little, then skitters to a halt. Drop it two meters onto sodden grass and it lands with a meaty squish on its long rear edge. The impact pushes a spray of water and flecks of mud through the crack between the screen and keyboard, with a spot or two of each making it onto the keyboard's ASDF row.
I know this, because I did it. And more.
If you put it in a domestic freezer after that drop onto wet grass, then pull it out after ten minutes, a couple of water and mud flecks freeze into little teardrops on the keyboard. The latch that holds the screen to the body of the laptop takes a little extra effort to open.
The machine is then unpleasantly cold to touch, but boots up just fine after its time on ice - and after the other indignities I inflicted.
Dell's Latitude 5430 rugged laptop Click to enlarge
This is to be expected because the Latitude 5430 is a ruggedized machine rated to survive a 90cm drop, work at temperatures from –29°C to 62°C, and survive dust and sprays of water thanks to an IP-53 rating. It's armored with wedge-shaped buffers that wrap around its cut-off corners. All the dropping and sliding I performed imparted no scratches or dents to that defensive infrastructure.
The buffers and a carbon fiber panel that protect the machine give it a look that suggests cyberpunk-influenced designer luggage rather than military fetishism.
I think that aesthetic is a head-turner – but the machine is also a spine-wrencher.
At 1.97kg and 33.6mm x 340mm x 220mm it is heavy and bulky. It is more than double the size of my workhorse – a 2019 ThinkPad X1 Carbon – and doesn't fit comfortably into the laptop compartment of my messenger bag. Even getting it into the main compartment of that bag requires locking down the waterproofing flaps covering all I/O ports – and those flaps are finicky so I was never quite sure if I had closed them properly and left the machine fully protected.
A byproduct of the laptop's bulk is the surprisingly pleasurable experience of rear-mounted ports – HDMI, Ethernet, and a pair of RS-232 outlets on the machine I tested, with other options available – that make for less cable clutter.
Dell should have put the single USB-C/Thunderbolt port out the back, too. Doing so would have left a pair of USB-A slots, a 3.5mm jack, smart card reader and SIM slot as the side-mounted ports.
The 5430 after splashing down on wet grass. Click to enlarge
The machine is very pleasant to use. Its 14-inch HD display handles colors well enough for my needs and won't preclude sneaking in a movie, thanks in part to a coating that ameliorates direct sunlight. Speakers are tolerable, as is a keyboard that includes near full-size arrow keys. The touchpad is small by current standards, but performs acceptably. The webcam does a job.
Windows 11 is nicely unobtrusive, and its base price of $1,879 does not massively exceed prices for less-rugged machines.
The machine motors through a day of work. Most other machines I have used over the years have awkward moments during a day or week of work when the fan blows and things slow down for no apparent reason. This one just pushed through – an experience I don't expect from a Core i5. Specifically, it's powered by an 11th-gen i5-1145G7 at 2.60GHz, helped along by 16GB of RAM and a 512GB NVMe drive.
Desktop tourism? PCs and alternative devices have increasingly diversified into myriad and marvelous forms, but cloud-based tools make it easy to move between machines. So I've decided that in 2022 I'll use a different one each month and share the experience. This article is the third in this series.
The machine did, however, struggle with one workload: running an Ubuntu VM under VMware Workstation Pro. The laptop just did not enjoy running that at all – the desktop hypervisor hung, and performance of the host OS suffered.
My regular slightly nasty workload test – converting a 4K video to HD using Handbrake – required 5:22 in Windows 11, just 1:02 slower than the Core i9 machine I tested on my first desktop tourism adventure. But the same chore required 26:29 in an Ubuntu VM under VMware Workstation Pro.
That blowout didn't feel right, so I ran the same workload under Hyper-V and the conversion completed in 12:43 – a little sluggish, although the laptop hardly flinched while Handbrake went about its work.
Battery life stretched to nearly eight hours with the pair of 53.5Wh Li-Ion units I was provided, but as they're hot swappable, longer battery-powered ops are possible.
I think Dell missed a trick by employing Philips head screws to secure the removable batteries and carry handle, because airport security frowns upon carry-on screwdrivers. Other parts of the laptop are held together with hex bolts. The machine is put together with sufficient cleverness that I feel Dell's engineers could have built an interior niche to house an Allen key – they've already created one to store a stylus that I imagine would be very useful to keep dirty hands away from the pleasingly responsive touch screen. An inbuilt Allen key would mean one less thing to remember before taking this machine into the field, making it more portable and practical.
If you're looking for a laptop that can survive a lot of buffeting and the presence of water or ice, I believe this machine won't let you down.
But I feel most users will also find its bulk and weight frustrating – both in the field and once they return to civilization. In the latter setting, some will be able to tolerate its foibles because the machine performs well and will be a conversation piece.
Overall, however, this one feels destined to be shelved and shared among users when they head into the messy parts of the world – the smart card reader is the clue for that scenario – rather than a daily tool that does double duty in suits and boots. ®
Russian crooks are selling network credentials and virtual private network access for a "multitude" of US universities and colleges on criminal marketplaces, according to the FBI.
According to a warning issued on Thursday, these stolen credentials sell for thousands of dollars on both dark web and public internet forums, and could lead to subsequent cyberattacks against individual employees or the schools themselves.
"The exposure of usernames and passwords can lead to brute force credential stuffing computer network attacks, whereby attackers attempt logins across various internet sites or exploit them for subsequent cyber attacks as criminal actors take advantage of users recycling the same credentials across multiple accounts, internet sites, and services," the Feds' alert [PDF] said.
Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft often support privacy in public statements, but behind the scenes they've been working through some common organizations to weaken or kill privacy legislation in US states.
That's according to a report this week from news non-profit The Markup, which said the corporations hire lobbyists from the same few groups and law firms to defang or drown state privacy bills.
The report examined 31 states when state legislatures were considering privacy legislation and identified 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms working on behalf of Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with industry groups like TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition.
America's financial watchdog is investigating whether Elon Musk adequately disclosed his purchase of Twitter shares last month, just as his bid to take over the social media company hangs in the balance.
A letter [PDF] from the SEC addressed to the tech billionaire said he "[did] not appear" to have filed the proper form detailing his 9.2 percent stake in Twitter "required 10 days from the date of acquisition," and asked him to provide more information. Musk's shares made him one of Twitter's largest shareholders. The letter is dated April 4, and was shared this week by the regulator.
Musk quickly moved to try and buy the whole company outright in a deal initially worth over $44 billion. Musk sold a chunk of his shares in Tesla worth $8.4 billion and bagged another $7.14 billion from investors to help finance the $21 billion he promised to put forward for the deal. The remaining $25.5 billion bill was secured via debt financing by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, and others. But the takeover is not going smoothly.
Cloud security company Lacework has laid off 20 percent of its employees, just months after two record-breaking funding rounds pushed its valuation to $8.3 billion.
A spokesperson wouldn't confirm the total number of employees affected, though told The Register that the "widely speculated number on Twitter is a significant overestimate."
The company, as of March, counted more than 1,000 employees, which would push the jobs lost above 200. And the widely reported number on Twitter is about 300 employees. The biz, based in Silicon Valley, was founded in 2015.
A researcher at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence team found eight vulnerabilities in the Open Automation Software (OAS) platform that, if exploited, could enable a bad actor to access a device and run code on a targeted system.
The OAS platform is widely used by a range of industrial enterprises, essentially facilitating the transfer of data within an IT environment between hardware and software and playing a central role in organizations' industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) efforts. It touches a range of devices, including PLCs and OPCs and IoT devices, as well as custom applications and APIs, databases and edge systems.
Companies like Volvo, General Dynamics, JBT Aerotech and wind-turbine maker AES are among the users of the OAS platform.
Nvidia is expecting a $500 million hit to its global datacenter and consumer business in the second quarter due to COVID lockdowns in China and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Despite those and other macroeconomic concerns, executives are still optimistic about future prospects.
"The full impact and duration of the war in Ukraine and COVID lockdowns in China is difficult to predict. However, the impact of our technology and our market opportunities remain unchanged," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO and co-founder, during the company's first-quarter earnings call.
Those two statements might sound a little contradictory, including to some investors, particularly following the stock selloff yesterday after concerns over Russia and China prompted Nvidia to issue lower-than-expected guidance for second-quarter revenue.
HPE is lifting the lid on a new AI supercomputer – the second this week – aimed at building and training larger machine learning models to underpin research.
Based at HPE's Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, the new supercomputer is to be named Champollion after the French scholar who made advances in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 19th century. It was built in partnership with Nvidia using AMD-based Apollo computer nodes fitted with Nvidia's A100 GPUs.
Champollion brings together HPC and purpose-built AI technologies to train machine learning models at scale and unlock results faster, HPE said. HPE already provides HPC and AI resources from its Grenoble facilities for customers, and the broader research community to access, and said it plans to provide access to Champollion for scientists and engineers globally to accelerate testing of their AI models and research.
HR and finance application vendor Workday's CEO, Aneel Bhusri, confirmed deal wins expected for the three-month period ending April 30 were being pushed back until later in 2022.
The SaaS company boss was speaking as Workday recorded an operating loss of $72.8 million in its first quarter [PDF] of fiscal '23, nearly double the $38.3 million loss recorded for the same period a year earlier. Workday also saw revenue increase to $1.43 billion in the period, up 22 percent year-on-year.
However, the company increased its revenue guidance for the full financial year. It said revenues would be between $5.537 billion and $5.557 billion, an increase of 22 percent on earlier estimates.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is lining up yet another investigation into Google over its dominance of the digital advertising market.
This latest inquiry, announced Thursday, is the second major UK antitrust investigation into Google this year alone. In March this year the UK, together with the European Union, said it wished to examine Google's "Jedi Blue" agreement with Meta to allegedly favor the former's Open Bidding ads platform.
The news also follows proposals last week by a bipartisan group of US lawmakers to create legislation that could force Alphabet's Google, Meta's Facebook, and Amazon to divest portions of their ad businesses.
Microsoft has hit the brakes on hiring in some key product areas as the company prepares for the next fiscal year and all that might bring.
According to reports in the Bloomberg, the unit that develops Windows, Office, and Teams is affected and while headcount remains expected to grow, new hires in that division must first be approved by bosses.
During a talk this week at JP Morgan's Technology, Media and Communications Conference, Rajesh Jha, executive VP for the Office Product Group, noted that within three years he expected approximately two-thirds of CIOs to standardize on Microsoft Teams. 1.4 billion PCs were running Windows. He also remarked: "We have lots of room here to grow the seats with Office 365."
Enterprises are still kitting out their workforce with the latest computers and refreshing their datacenter hardware despite a growing number of "uncertainties" in the world.
This is according to hardware tech bellwethers including Dell, which turned over $26.1 billion in sales for its Q1 of fiscal 2023 ended 29 April, a year-on-year increase of 16 percent.
"We are seeing a shift in spend from consumer and PCs to datacenter infrastructure," said Jeff Clarke, vice-chairman and co-chief operating officer. "IT demand is currently healthy," he added.
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