If free speech for humans is worth fighting for, is free speech for computers worth fighting against?That's the type of question you might expect from someone who holds a doctor of philosophy degree in computer science and psychology and it's exactly what the audience at DARPA's Wait, What? conference in St. Louis heard on Thursday.Posing the question was Paul Cohen, who joined the Department of Defense-run research organization from the University of Arizona in 2013."Are you attracted or appalled by the idea of machines that have ideas and know how to express them?," he continued. "What if you were lonely? What if they were bigots? What if you could each change the other’s mind?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMworld used to be a conference to learn how to use server virtualization.+MORE VMWORLD COVERAGE FROM NETWORK WORLD: Why (and how) VMware created a whole new virtualization platform just for containers +Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti says it’s not nearly a virtualization show anymore though. This year the conference focused on a variety of topics, from cloud to network virtualization, storage virtualization and hybrid cloud enablement.In the video below Bartoletti discusses VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy, and why there’s so much hype about containers in the market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the hype about containers has mounted over the past year, it has raised questions about what this technology – which is for packaging applications - means for traditional management and virtualization vendors. Some have wondered: Will containers kill the virtual machine?VMware answered that question with a resounding no at its annual conference in San Francisco last week. But, company officials say containers can benefit from having a new type of management platform. And it’s built a whole new type of virtualization just for containers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple is re-entering the living room with the 2015 Apple TV, a new set-top box that streams video, plays games, and uses Siri to answer your every entertainment whim.+ Find out what Apple did to the new iPad +The last time Apple upgraded its living room hardware was more than two years ago, and even that was a minor refresh of the 2012 Apple TV. The new version is a significant upgrade, packing more powerful hardware and a full-blown app store.Similar look, new apps
At first glance, the new Apple TV sports a similar interface to that of its predecessor. A strip of recommendations sit on top, followed by a list of apps underneath. The big difference now is that there’s an entire App Store, rather than a preset list of Apple-curated selections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
17 Real Big Sci/Tech projectsImage by NASASome science/technology is big news like the discovery of a new gene – but sometimes its just big, like the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo era. Here we take a look at pictures of some recent BIG science and technology topics like a cool new wind turbine, a black hole discovery and more. Have fun:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Public or private cloud - why choose one when you can have both?Hybrid cloud computing is the idea of connecting a private cloud that sits inside the corporate firewall to some public cloud hosted by a service provider.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Can VMware survive in a post-virtualization world? +Doing so gives organizations all the benefits of both worlds: Private clouds can handle security-sensitive workloads, while the public cloud is great for apps that have varying demand of resources.But saying is easier than doing. At VMworld in San Francisco, we chatted with Cliqr’s Kurt Milnes to discuss how to overcome some of the chief challenges related to hybrid cloud computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A key but quiet component of Cisco’s “open” data center operating system is the ability to build applications and microservices via Linux containers.It’s not a new capability but an increasingly important one for making – and marketing – Cisco’s NX-OS as “open,” a campaign that began in June. Open NX-OS includes object store and model driven RESTful and XML/JSON API support in the NX-API; native third-party application integration of Puppet, Chef and Ganglia, among others; a software developer’s kit for application integration; and Linux utilities support for tool integration across compute and network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Interference has been a major issue when hospitals have tried to replace the cluttered, bulky wiring used to monitor patients’ conditions—those are the wires protruding from a body, along with the associated beeps, as seen in the hospital TV drama procedurals we know and love.Hard-wiring, though, has never been an ideal solution for biomedical signals—it prevents patients from moving around, for one thing. That ties up expensive hospital beds.Interference
RF interference can not only interfere with other signals, but it can apparently damage hospital equipment, say some researchers in South Korea.Those researchers, from Pukyong National University in Busan, reckon that they have a better solution. They want to use light instead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Alteryx 10.0 Pricing: Alteryx starts at $3,995 Per-User, Per-Year (3-Year Subscription); $5,194 Per-User, Per-Year (1-Year Subscription)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
e-wasteImage by REUTERS/Tyrone SiuReuters recently took a look at what the town of Guiyu in China, which is commonly known, as one of the world's largest electronic waste dump sites. A particularly polluted place as you might imagine, Guiyu exists to salvage bits of valuable metals such as gold, copper and aluminum mostly from hard drives, mobile phones, computer screens and computers from around the world though sources have changed: China now produces 6.1 million metric tons of e-waste a year second only to the US with 7.2 million tons , according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Auction house Bonhams will put a pristine Apple-1 personal computer on the block later this month, and has pegged the gavel price at between $300,000 and $500,000.Bonhams has experience selling vintage Apple-1 computers: One it sold last year went for the still-record $905,000 after commissions and taxes.The Apple-1, essentially a stand-alone circuit board sans keyboard, monitor or even power supply, was hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in 1976, and may have been one of the first lot of 50, according to a penned identifier on the back. That mark -- 01-0059 -- was probably an inventory number assigned by the Byte Shop of Mountain View, Calif., the first volume purchaser of the computer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This October, Michael Fassbender will join Ashton Kutcher among the actors to have played Steve Jobs. Aaron Sorkin's movie adaptation of Walter Isaacson's biography is one of many dramatizations of the life of Apple's co-founder, who died in 2011.This week sees a quieter yet more authentic release in Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, available Sept. 4 in theaters and on iTunes from Magnolia Pictures. Rather than offering a straight biography, Academy Award-winning documentarian Alex Gibney sets out to answer a question: Why were so many people so moved by the death of someone who he describes as "ruthless, deceitful, and cruel"? If we loved products that came from someone also described as incapable of love, what does that say about the man?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The H-1B visa program sparks debate on many fronts, but age may be at the heart of the discord: The foreign workers who use the visa to come to the U.S. are overwhelmingly young.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
The H-1B visa program sparks debate on many fronts, but age may be at the heart of the discord: The foreign workers who use the visa to come to the U.S. are overwhelmingly young.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
A fully functioning quantum computer is still twelve years off, according to Intel, but the company is already plowing research funding into the field.On Thursday, Intel promised to fund QuTech, a research unit at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, to the tune of US$50 million over 10 years, and to provide additional staff and equipment to support its work.QuTech hopes the partnership will allow it to combine its theoretical work on quantum computing with Intel's manufacturing expertise to produce quantum computing devices on a larger scale.Quantum computers are composed of qubits that can take on multiple values simultaneously, unlike the bits stored and processed in traditional computers, which are either 0s or 1s. This multiplicity of values makes quantum computing, at least in theory, highly useful for parallel computing problems such as financial analysis, molecular modelling or decryption.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Federal authorities are marching ahead with a new framework for opening government data, a process that aims to consolidate department and agency datasets into a standardized format and make them accessible for the public.Christina Ho, deputy assistant secretary for accounting policy and financial transparency at the Treasury Department, recently provided an update on the rollout of the 2014 DATA Act, a sweeping bill that for the first time mandates a holistic system for making government spending data transparent and freely available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple earlier this week expanded its push into enterprises, announcing a partnership with Cisco to sell more iPads and iPhones to businesses.But unlike the deal Apple struck with IBM last summer, the partnership with Cisco was outlined in only the broadest terms. The vagueness put off one analyst.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
SAN FRANCISCO – Companies building mobile and Web applications to support their digital businesses depend on a mix of private and public clouds to exchange data, said Bill Fathers, VMware's executive vice president and general manager of cloud services, at the company’s VMworld customer event here Monday.
Fathers said companies are struggling to deal with a "fundamental shift in application deployment patterns,” That's forced CIOs to think about "network architecture and data residency." In short: how data is moving back and forth between various on-premises systems and cloud environments the apps connect to. VMware is aiming to address these challenges with its unified hybrid cloud, which includes server, storage and network resources designed to enable companies to run any application on any device. The company announced several new software products in support of this initiative.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel announced a Core M-based version of its Compute Stick pocket PC at the IFA show, part of a small coterie of unexpected announcements Intel made at the trade show here.As expected, Intel formally announced Skylake, its sixth-generation Core processor. Kirk Skaugen, a senior vice president at Intel, called the chip its “best processor ever.”Skylake can scale from over 90 watts down to just 4.5 watts, the power consumed by the Core M, now rebranded as the Core m. That makes it ideal for two-in-ones and even tiny devices like Intel’s Compute Stick, which had used an earlier version of Intel’s Atom processor when it debuted. Intel didn’t announce a price or a ship date for the new Compute Stick, however.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMware VP of Cloud Services Mathew Lodge acknowledges that the virtualization vendor “got started later than other folks” in the IaaS public cloud market, but he flatly denies that the company is slowing investment in this area. VMware’s position is that while it has catching up to do with cloud market leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, it also has strengths that can make it stand out.VMware used its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco this week to show off some of those differentiators, and teased more advances to come. HYBRID ALL THE WAY
The company’s cloud strategy centers around VMware’s Unified Hybrid Cloud platform, as CEO Pat Gelsinger stressed in a pre-VMworld interview with Network World.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here