Microsoft's new, more collaborative approach to the computing industry was on display at VMware's annual conference in San Francisco Tuesday, when executives from both companies shared the stage to talk about new device management features in Windows 10.As VMware Executive Vice President Sanjay Poonen explained, VMware and Microsoft, historically fierce rivals, have been working together more closely under the leadership of Satya Nadella. That work has now borne fruit in the form of Project A2, a new service that brings together VMware's AirWatch device management service and its App Volumes application delivery technology. Using Project A2, Windows 10 users can log in to their corporate account, get their device set up for use with a company's resources and then get all the applications they need provided straight from IT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ten years ago, the Gulf Coast was completely devastated by Hurricane Katrina, leaving thousands of businesses in New Orleans and the surrounding area under water and without power for weeks.But while most disasters — natural or otherwise — can’t compare with the magnitude of Katrina, there were some hard lessons learned that could help organizations be better prepared for the next catastrophe.IT leaders in New Orleans and nearby cities share how they maintained or resumed business operations in the wake of Katrina and what the experience taught them. Here are their disaster recovery do’s and don’ts — sage words of wisdom from the trenches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Attivo Networks, a startup launched last year, has upgraded its deception technology so businesses can deploy it within the portion of their corporate cloud that is hosted by Amazon Web Services.That means customers can lure attackers to what looks like legitimate physical and virtual machines among their production AWS resources. It lets attackers carry out their exploits harmlessly to see what damage they are trying to do. This information can be used to find instances of the attack against real physical and virtual machines that are in use.+More on Network World: FBI: Major business e-mail scam blasts 270% increase since 2015+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hottest products at VMworld 2015Image by Thinkstock, VWwareVirtualization, cloud, security are storage are among the hot trends of this year’s VMworld 2015 in San Francisco. Check out the latest and greatest of the new products being announced or displayed by vendors at VMworld 2015.Unity EdgeConnectManufacturer name: Silver PeakTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Will the EMC Federation break up, as a flurry of recent reports have suggested? VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, for one, believes one of the most prominent alliances of companies in the technology industry is still the best management structure.
“My view on this hasn’t changed,” Gelsinger told Network World in a wide-ranging interview. “Being bigger and more strategic as a whole is a more powerful position for the companies and we believe that, through this period, the Federation structure is the best one for both customers as well as for the companies and employees themselves.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI this week said an e-mail scam that tricks businesses into paying invoices from what looks like established partners is growing exponentially.The FBI last year even gave the scam its own name -- business e-mail compromise (BEC) – which is a variant of the timeworn “man-in-the-middle” scam and usually involves chief technology officers, chief financial officers, or comptrollers, receiving an e-mail via their business accounts purportedly from a vendor requesting a wire transfer to a designated bank account, the FBI said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Waiting for the right build has been a historical problem with test environments, while differences between development, test and production have caused defects to escape in production. Virtual Machines solve these problems by sharing a copy of system data, but they can be slow and take gigabytes of disk space. Enter Docker, a lightweight, fast virtualization tool for Linux. The opportunity Docker presents
First, anyone on a technical staff can create a test environment on the local machine in a few seconds. The new process hooks into the existing operating system, so it does not need to “boot.” With a previous build stored locally, Docker is smart enough to only load the difference between the two builds. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Boeing's portable drone-destroying laser system is one step closer to the battlefield after a recent test.
Earlier this month in California, Boeing's second-generation, compact-laser weapons system disabled a moving, untethered drone. That's important as enemies can easily acquire commercially available drones -- also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) -- and use them to deliver explosives or perform reconnaissance. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A decade ago New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the United States were devastated by the sixth strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claims Hurricane Katrina was the most destructive storm to ever strike the United States.The destruction from the hurricane itself, and the subsequent flooding that put most of New Orleans underwater knocked many businesses out of commission—and more than a few completely out of existence. Thankfully, we have learned a lot of hard lessons in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that businesses can use to be better-prepared for the next major disaster.An article from USA Today in 2007—two years after Hurricane Katrina—estimates that 7,900 businesses in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana went out of existence as a result of Katrina. Some of those businesses failed as a result of lost revenue resulting from nearly half a million people displaced from the region, but many of those businesses failed as a direct result of the destruction and impact the storm had on their ability to continue operating.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An energy storage study claims that prices for certain battery technologies will plunge by as much as 60% over the next five years. The report was prepared by Australian consultancy AECOM and published by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
The 130-page study, originally published last month, expects all battery technologies to drop in price. However, the largest reductions are forecast for Li-ion and flow-battery technologies, which are expected to plummet by 60% and 40%, respectively by 2020.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.AppFolio Property Manager, Common Area Maintenance (CAM) featureKey features: Cloud-based business software provider AppFolio expanded the feature set within AppFolio Property Manager. CAM allows property managers to easily track and allocate common area expenses within commercial leases. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier this week was awarded 560,000 shares, worth approximately $57.7 million, receiving the full amount of a grant due him because of Apple's performance on Wall Street over the last two years.
As it did in 2014, Apple withheld just over half of the total shares -- 290,836, worth about $30 million on Monday -- for tax purposes.
The half-million shares were this year's allotment under a revised schedule designed at Cook's request in 2013. Then, Apple's board modified the executive's vesting plan, which had set two large stock handouts for a massive 1 million-share grant -- after last year's stock split, equal to 7 million -- when Cook assumed the lead role at the Cupertino, Calif. company just weeks before co-founder Steve Jobs' death.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Though implementing one-to-one initiatives such as having a laptop for every student continues to be a primary focus for many school systems across the country, those who have already a 1:1 program are discovering new ways to shape student learning. Impressive technology trends are transforming traditional classrooms for students at every grade level.Robotics, makerspaces and wearables will be a few of the trends that join the ranks alongside teachers and students in the fall. “Research shows that this group of kids learns very differently from past generations,” says GB Cazes, vice president at Cyber Innovation Center recognized, Cazes says.“The use of cyber as a way to provide a context for the content is rapidly growing. We are putting them on a cyber-highway and providing them with on and off ramps,” says Cazes, who added that this is especially true in science and math. One exciting new tool, the Boe Bot robot, allows students to build a robot with a microcontroller. “There are no textbooks for the Boe Bot. The Boe Bot is the textbook, so you provide teachers with all they need and the students are learning programming and coding as they build,” Cazes says.To read this Continue reading
Petroleum engineering majors earn the highest mid-career salaries, followed by nuclear engineering majors, according to a new ranking from PayScale.The research company, which specializes in compensation data, ranked 319 majors at the bachelor level based on how much money graduates in each field are making. The top 25 bachelor-level majors all have mid-career median pay numbers above $100,000, and the vast majority of them are STEM majors.
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Among many disciplines in the compsci arena, graduates who earn a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering were ranked highest (6th place), reporting a median mid-career salary of $115,000. Computer science majors (ranked 18th) earn a median mid-career salary of $105,000. (See also: Top 25 computer science colleges)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Real-time computing means much more than getting a seemingly immediate response after hitting Enter. In fact, its real meaning involves interfacing to real machines doing real things in, well, their own real time.Take, for example, the Gleason 600HTL Turbo Lapper, whose controller was designed by Viewpoint Systems in Rochester, N.Y. Basically, it laps beveled gears (that is, polishes them by grinding an abrasive slurry between them) until they mesh so perfectly they purr rather than clatter -- an attribute important to the car makers that use the beveled gears in car differentials, explains John Campbell, vice president at Viewpoint.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It would be difficult to come up with a better illustration of the profound effect data can have on people's lives than the Ashley Madison hack, which has not only sparked numerous lawsuits but also been associated with several suicides.On Tuesday, many of the world's experts in computer science and mathematics spent an afternoon at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany trying to figure out how the widespread collection of data about consumers can be prevented from causing more harm in the future.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Big data's biggest challenges
"In the U.S., there are now states where jail sentencing guidelines are being set by data," said Jeremy Gillula, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Data has a huge impact on people's lives, and that's only going to increase."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
University of California, Santa Barbara, is the top computer science school in the U.S., according to a new salary-centric report from compensation specialist PayScale.The research company ranked 187 colleges and universities with computer science programs based on the median pay of the schools' compsci alumni. By that measure, University of California, Santa Barbara, led the pack, with its graduates reporting a median mid-career salary of $147,000, PayScale said. (PayScale also ranked the highest-paying college majors.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft
Microsoft's Albert Greenberg
Last week was a big one for Microsoft's Albert Greenberg: The networking expert delivered the keynote address at SIGCOMM 2015 in London AND received the annual SIGCOMM Award, recognizing lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP this week unveiled networking products aligned with its strategy to disaggregate hardware and software, opening up choices for its customers.HP is introducing two new branded bare metal switches based on the Accton AS5712-54X. HP and Accton revealed their partnership in February.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Enterprise disaggregation is inevitable+The first switch is the Altoline 5712, a 10G switch, and the second is the Altoline 6712, a 40G switch. Both are powered by Intel’s Atom CPU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Cirba support for NetApp storage solutionsKey features: Through integration to NetApp OnCommand Insight (OCI), Cirba provides organizations with better visibility into storage utilization vs. actual VM requirements and can optimize VM placements in order to balance demand across storage resources. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here