“Congratulations”Let’s say you’re a scientist, and you’ve worked your entire adult life at your discipline. You do a sort of offbeat study, for valid scientific reasons, and figure, hey, this’ll get a laugh in whatever journal is relevant to your field, and then somebody calls you from Cambridge, Mass., and tells you you’ve won science’s equivalent of a Razzie. These are this year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners. Enjoy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“Congratulations”Let’s say you’re a scientist, and you’ve worked your entire adult life at your discipline. You do a sort of offbeat study, for valid scientific reasons, and figure, hey, this’ll get a laugh in whatever journal is relevant to your field, and then somebody calls you from Cambridge, Mass., and tells you you’ve won science’s equivalent of a Razzie. These are this year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners. Enjoy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The internet in North Korea is an unsurprisingly small and circumscribed place – there are just 28 TLDs on the entirety of the country’s .kp domain, compared to almost 335 million globally.A misconfiguration early Tuesday morning allowed outsiders to get a rare look into the hermit kingdom’s vestigial online infrastructure, which is connected to the broader internet via China. It was detected by the TLDR Project, an automated, ongoing effort to track all global zone transfer requests among DNS providers, and log them to GitHub.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Why this hospital is moving to Amazon’s cloud + Be careful not to fall for these ransomware situationsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The organization with the largest number of contributors to open-source projects over the past year on GitHub is, surprisingly, Microsoft, GitHub announced today.Fully 16,419 contributors affiliated with Microsoft worked on open-source GitHub projects during the past 12 months, GitHub said, ahead of 15,682 from Facebook, 14,059 from Docker and 12,841 from Angular.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: LinuxCon: Q&A with inventor of, um, Microsoft PowerShell + Open source-happy Microsoft joins Eclipse FoundationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The challenges as the head of IT for a major international law firm with 700 attorneys, 1,500 total employees and 20 separate offices around the world aren’t exactly small, but Baker Donelson CIO John D. Green is up to the task – even when that task changes a little every day.Different parts of Baker Donelson’s sprawling practice have different needs, said Green, who sat down with Network World Tuesday at Riverbed’s Disrupt event in New York. The real estate practice, tax, and patent and trademark practices, among others, have their own software, all of which Donelson has to support.MORE: Riverbed upgrades set sights on the SD-WAN edge, cloud integrationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The challenges as the head of IT for a major international law firm with 700 attorneys, 1,500 total employees and 20 separate offices around the world aren’t exactly small, but Baker Donelson CIO John D. Green is up to the task – even when that task changes a little every day.Different parts of Baker Donelson’s sprawling practice have different needs, said Green, who sat down with Network World Tuesday at Riverbed’s Disrupt event in New York. The real estate practice, tax, and patent and trademark practices, among others, have their own software, all of which Donelson has to support.MORE: Riverbed upgrades set sights on the SD-WAN edge, cloud integrationTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At Riverbed’s Disrupt event in New York’s upscale Conrad Hotel today, the company announced new products designed to help customers move their enterprise network more fully into the cloud arena.At the heart of the announcements, Version 2.0 of Riverbed’s SteelConnect software-defined WAN product which adds router capabilities to the gateway hardware for the first time, letting users replace legacy routers.Version 2.0 also integrates SteelCentral – the company’s application performance management system - features into the SteelConnect front end, and introduces two new gateway models, which feature up to 10Gbps of throughput capability.SteelConnect, which was initially launched earlier this year, is Riverbed’s ambitious attempt to broaden its presence in the network management arena. In addition to its SD-WAN management capabilities, SteelConnect lets IT departments manage cloud and LAN deployments from the same interface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At Riverbed’s Disrupt event in New York’s upscale Conrad Hotel today, the company announced new products designed to help customers move their enterprise network more fully into the cloud arena.At the heart of the announcements, Version 2.0 of Riverbed’s SteelConnect software-defined WAN product which adds router capabilities to the gateway hardware for the first time, letting users replace legacy routers.Version 2.0 also integrates SteelCentral – the company’s application performance management system - features into the SteelConnect front end, and introduces two new gateway models, which feature up to 10Gbps of throughput capability.SteelConnect, which was initially launched earlier this year, is Riverbed’s ambitious attempt to broaden its presence in the network management arena. In addition to its SD-WAN management capabilities, SteelConnect lets IT departments manage cloud and LAN deployments from the same interface.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The signs were there at the Raspberry Pi’s launch. The debut of the beloved little card-computer was marked by overwhelming demand, so much so that the Raspberry Pi Foundation, “punch-drunk” at the response, had to suspend orders temporarily.Now, more than four years after the fact, 10 million Raspberry Pis have been sold and the demand shows no signs of slowing down. It represents orders of magnitude more success than project founder Eben Upton anticipated.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Ultimate guide to Raspberry Pi operating systems, Part 3 | 10 more fascinating things to do with a Raspberry Pi +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s that time againYes, it’s the harvest season again, which can mean only one thing – Apple has released the latest generation of the iPhone. The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are an evolutionary step forward, rather than a revolutionary one, but there are still plenty of differentiators from the last generation. Have a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s annual iPhone event is mere hours away, but the rumor mill has, true to form, been churning busily away for months. So there’s no shortage of information, spurious or otherwise, about the forthcoming announcements from San Francisco.
And Apple has been a bit more predictable in recent years, hasn’t it? There’s going to be at least one uplifting video presentation with aspirational music playing in the background, CEO Tim Cook is going to use words like “magical” and “journey” a lot, and he’ll show us some cool new iPhones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The goal of technology is to make the world a better place. Sometimes, you can do that by making a gigantic breakthrough that solves a big problem in one fell swoop or opens major new horizons to the whole of humanity.Much more often, however, you can solve a much smaller problem right at home. That’s what Makoto Koite, a cucumber farmer in Japan, did when he used Google’s open-source AI software TensorFlow, an Arduino, and a Raspberry Pi to automatically sort his produce by size and shape.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data salaries set to rise in 2017 + Why these victims decided not to pay the ransomTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the institutional use of open-source software continues to expand like an octopus, the public sector remains a key target market.Government users like Linux and other open-source software for several reasons, but the most important ones are probably that total cost of ownership is often lower than it is for proprietary products and that open-source projects don’t vanish if the company providing them goes under.Government IT folks are likely quite familiar with the perils of proprietary legacy systems - a recent Congressional hearing revealed that there are computers that date back to 1976 still in use at the federal level, and that critical taxpayer data is stored on a system written more than 50 years ago, in assembly language.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An EU regulatory group Tuesday imposed tough new rules on European ISPs, in a move that advocates for net neutrality are hailing as a great victory.The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications published a 45-page report that essentially bans paid prioritization of network traffic, and imposes strict requirements on any specialized services that ISPs want to offer.MORE: Net Neutrality may be unenforceable – here’s whyISPs, the new rules say, “should treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender or receiver, content, application or service, or terminal equipment.” Quality of service measures are allowed, according to the EU, but those measures have to be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate,” as well as being targeted strictly towards technical service quality, and not commercial gain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An EU regulatory group Tuesday imposed tough new rules on European ISPs, in a move that advocates for net neutrality are hailing as a great victory.The Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications published a 45-page report that essentially bans paid prioritization of network traffic, and imposes strict requirements on any specialized services that ISPs want to offer.MORE: Net Neutrality may be unenforceable – here’s whyISPs, the new rules say, “should treat all traffic equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender or receiver, content, application or service, or terminal equipment.” Quality of service measures are allowed, according to the EU, but those measures have to be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate,” as well as being targeted strictly towards technical service quality, and not commercial gain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
According to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, the prevailing narrative about the growth and spread of Linux is only half-true.The idea that a doughty community of coding geniuses, led by an irascible commissar in Linus Torvalds, quietly created a technological asset that eventually spread to the biggest users in the land is actually a little misleading, he told Network World at LinuxCon North America 2016 in Toronto.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Linux at 25: A retrospective + Linux at 25: Linus Torvalds on the evolution and future of LinuxTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What a long, strange 25 years it’s beenImage by Reuters: USA Today Sports/Baz Ratner, WikimediaFrom its obscure origins to its present primacy, Linux is now old enough to rent a car without having to pay extra for insurance. It has also been described as the “the greatest shared technology asset in history,” and it’s the chassis upon which a sizeable proportion of all the software on the planet is built. Here’s a quick look back at Linux’s history.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yes, the idea of sitting down with a Microsoft technical fellow at a Linux conference is still somewhat counterintuitive, but times have changed – Redmond is no longer the inimical enemy of all things open-source. Twitter
Jeffrey Snover, PowerShell creator
Quite the opposite, these days, Microsoft, under the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, has begun to embrace open-source in a big way, releasing key software components like .NET as open-source, making its Azure cloud Linux-compatible, and acquiring companies that boost its presence in the open-source world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the biggest Linux events of the year opened with a look at the social role of the largest open-source project in history, as well as Linux’s potential place in the history books.LinuxCon North America 2016 kicked off today in Toronto with keynotes from Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin and Ainissa Ramirez, an author and former Bell Labs researcher who works to make technology accessible to the mainstream.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: 10 sci-fi technologies we are close to having + ARM has a new weapon in race to build world's fastest computersTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not all web browsers are created equal. In fact, it might startle you a little to realize how diverse the range of top-end browser software has become, if you came of age in the era of “Internet Explorer or go home.”
With about a third of all Windows traffic on the web coming from Windows 10 installs, according to figures from U.K.-based analytics firm GoSquared, and with Microsoft distancing itself from Internet Explorer in favor of the Edge just as fast as it can, it seems like as good a time as any to survey a few of the best browsing options for Windows 10 users.
A word on methodology – I ran each contestant here through three benchmarks (higher scores are better in all of them – see graphic below) to give a broad sense of overall performance, and put each of them through their paces by using them for both work and play. With the exception of the benchmarks, what follows are the subjective opinions of a working reporter who nevertheless does a great deal of web browsing. The five browsers – note that Apple Safari isn't a real option on Win10 -- are Continue reading
Jon Gold