Facebook-owned Oculus VR has purchased Pebbles Interfaces, an Israeli company that develops gesture-control and motion-sensor technology.Pebbles’ technology is designed to create real-world objects in virtual reality environments. The company focuses on rendering virtual images of a person’s actual body, especially the hands and fingers. However, Pebbles noted its technology can display any body part and show details like wrinkles and contours or items held in a user’s hand.This would allow people who are using the Oculus Rift to see an image of their own hands in the display of the virtual reality headset. Other headsets use generic images of person’s body or don’t allow users to view themselves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
EBay has reached a deal to sell its enterprise unit, a division focused on building and running online shopping sites for bricks-and-mortar retailers, for less than half than it paid four years ago.The $925 million deal, announced Thursday, will give control of eBay Enterprise to a group of private equity firms led by Sterling Partners and Permira Funds, eBay said in a press release.EBay acquired its enterprise unit, then called GSI Commerce, in June 2011, for $2.4 billion. The unit has more than 500 customers, including Dick’s Sporting Goods, American Eagle Outfitters, Abercrombie & Fitch, PetSmart, Ikea and Major League Baseball. Many of those businesses compete for online sales with eBay itself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intel’s revenue and profit both dropped last quarter as people held off on buying new PCs ahead of the Windows 10 launch later this year.Revenue from Intel’s Client Computing Group, which sells processors for desktops, laptops and smartphones, fell 14 percent from this time last year to $7.5 billion, the chip maker said Wednesday.Its Data Center Group, which makes the Xeon server processors, performed better, but not well enough to offset the ongoing slump in the PC industry.Intel’s total revenue for the quarter ended June 27 was $13.2 billion, down 5 percent from a year earlier. Net income was $2.7 billion, down 3 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A federal judge dismissed Cisco’s indirect infringement claims against Arista Networks, a complaint that accompanied a patent and copyright infringement case against its data center rival.The patent and infringement litigation, filed late last year, still stands and is proceeding.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Suing Arista was always the plan+According to Courthouse News Service, U.S. Federal Judge Beth Labson Freeman earlier this month dismissed the pre-suit indirect infringement claims since Cisco conceded that it is not seeking damages for those claims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Good programmers are notoriously hard to find, but HackerRank thinks it has the answer. A fresh cash infusion suggests it may be on to something.Employers looking for programming talent begin by sponsoring coding “challenges” on HackerRank’s merit-based hiring platform—contests that force applicants to use the skills the company needs. For example, a company seeking a junior developer might sponsor a challenge from HackerRank’s library that says, “Given a list of points in the 2D plane, sort them in ascending order of their polar angle.” Alternatively, it could create its own and have HackerRank host and score it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1995, the top-grossing film in the U.S. was Batman Forever. (Val Kilmer as Batman, Jim Carrey as the Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face. Yeah.) The L.A. Rams were moving back to St. Louis, and Michael Jordan was moving back to the Bulls. Violence was rife in the Balkans. The O.J. trial happened.It was a very different time, to be sure. But all that was nothing compared to how different the world of supercomputing was.+ MORE: The 10 most powerful supercomputers on Earth | Can Dropbox go from consumer hit to business success? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Twitter’s stock spiked in midday trading Tuesday after a fake Bloomberg news report said the company had received an offer to be acquired for US$31 billion.The story appeared convincing, with a Bloomberg Business logo, but Bloomberg quickly tweeted that it was fake. There were some telltale signs it wasn’t authentic: the URL was businessweek.market rather than businessweek.com, and CEO Dick Costolo’s name was misspelled.That didn’t stop Twitter investors from reacting. The company’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange spiked briefly just before noon Eastern Time, surging about 10 percent from Monday’s close to more than $38 before settling back down as news spread that the report was fake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s no shortage of software vendors paying lip service to data science in this analytics-infused era, but Workday is putting its money where its mouth is.On Tuesday, the company is announcing the launch of Workday Ventures, a new fund it will use to identify, invest in and partner with young startups that apply data-science and machine-learning in the areas of analytics, applications, security and platform technologies.“We believe the last 10 years of enterprise software have been about migration to the cloud,” said Dan Beck, senior vice president of technology products at Workday. “We think the next 10 years is going to be about machine learning and companies making sense of data.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hard on the heels of the publication of the latest Top 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, IBM and Nvidia on Monday announced they have teamed up to launch two new supercomputer centers of excellence to develop the next generation of contenders.Created as part of IBM’s supercomputing contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, the new centers will be located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory and will focus on development of the forthcoming Summit and Sierra supercomputer systems, which are expected to be delivered in 2017. The Summit supercomputer will be housed at Oak Ridge, while the Sierra will be situated at Lawrence Livermore; both are due to become operational in 2018.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The biggest supercomputers out thereThe twice-yearly top500 listing of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is out, and even if there are few surprises, the presence of a brand-new system on the top 10 is intriguing. Here’s your illustrated list of the 10 mightiest computing machines on the planet, as of June 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle took another step forward in its efforts to bolster its cloud offerings Monday with the launch of two new products designed to help companies conduct their entire order-fulfillment processes in the cloud.Oracle Order Management Cloud and Oracle Global Order Promising Cloud are both extensions of the company’s Supply Chain Management Cloud and aim to provide modern order-management, visibility and fulfillment capabilities.The new Order Management Cloud focuses on order capture and fulfillment with the goal of improving order handling. Among the potential benefits for users are centralized order monitoring and the ability to proactively manage order exceptions. Companies can also define, implement and maintain their own fulfillment policies without the need for technical programming tools, Oracle said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chinese networking giant Huawei has bought the software-defined networking (SDN) division of Irish telecom software maker Amartus.Amartus’ senior team and product staff in Ireland will join Huawei, which sees the acquisition as a way to expand its investment in research and development in Ireland and Europe, it said in a news release.The part of privately held Amartus that remains unsold will continue serving current customers and will focus on providing telecom software development, integration expertise and services to vendors and service providers.Amartus’s main product is Chameleon SDS, which it describes as a “service orchestration platform” for cloud and network services. It allows telecom operators to control networks virtually and automate the delivery of network services.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.Unified Communications Command Suite 8.1Key features: UCCS 8.1 helps gain insights into workforce activity, email usage and trends, and communication consumption across multiple UC platforms. It also drives cross-platform adoption and usage to realize maximum ROI. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A supercomputer developed by China’s National Defense University remains the fastest publically known computer in the world while the U.S. is close to an historic low in the latest edition of the closely followed Top 500 supercomputer ranking, which was published on Monday.The Tianhe-2 computer, based at the National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, has been on the top of the list for more than two years and its maximum achieved performance of 33,863 teraflops per second is almost double that of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray Titan supercomputer, which is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.The IBM Sequoia computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is the third fastest machine, and fourth on the list is the Fujitsu K computer at Japan’s Advanced Institute for Computational Science. The only new machine to enter the top 10 is the Shaheen II computer of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, which is ranked seventh.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ellen Pao is resigning as Reddit’s interim chief executive after a week of tumult on the online message board with many users calling for her ouster.Pao is resigning under a mutual agreement with Reddit’s board, the company announced. She will be succeeded by Steve Huffman , Reddit’s co-founder and original chief executive, who will work alongside Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.Pao leaves the company after a storm of furor from users after Reddit’s termination of Victoria Taylor, a key employee who helped facilitate Reddit’s popular Ask Me Anything sessions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management resigned on Friday, a day after her agency announced hackers had stolen information on 21.5 million current, former and prospective government employees and their families.Katherine Archuleta said she had informed President Barack Obama of her plans to step down, and he had accepted her resignation.“I conveyed to the President that I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in, enabling the agency to move beyond the current challenges and allowing the employees at OPM to continue their important work,” she said in an email to employees.Archuleta had been at the agency for less than two years, joining in November 2013 at about the time the agency began an upgrade of its cyberdefenses. It was as part of that upgrade that it discovered two separate ongoing breaches that, investigators concluded, were unprecedented in their size and seriousness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber Technologies gathered the support of over 400 drivers across California and a law professor to back its argument in court that its platform gives its contractors the flexibility and independence they want.The ride-hailing company faces a proposed class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which aims to show that its drivers are indeed employees under the applicable legal standard, and not independent contractors. A reclassification of drivers as employees could potentially increase the costs for the company in terms of reimbursement of expenses and employee benefits.In a filing Thursday, Uber said the three complainants failed to establish that their own claims are typical of those that might be asserted by the over 160,000 drivers they seek to represent, as they signed only a handful of the 17 operative service agreements between Uber and drivers in California, and their experiences with the company’s app differ considerably from many or most drivers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An incompatibility with a software update and subsequent attempt to fix it were the root cause of glitch that forced a nearly four hour long suspension of trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.The exchange traced the problems back to an update applied to a single system on Tuesday evening. The new software was related to an upcoming industry-wide test of a new timestamp procedure for communications.On Wednesday morning as customers began connecting to the system, communications issues arose because of an incompatibility between the new software and configurations in customer systems. The software in the customer systems was updated prior to the market open at 9:30 a.m. EDT, but that update caused additional issues, the NYSE said in a statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday’s grounding of the United Airlines fleet, which the company has blamed on a routing mishap of some kind, has prompted readers of Reddit’s section devoted to networking to share their worst workplace screw-ups and the consequences of same. There are almost 200 tales and comments, but there is one that stands out from the rest:
We were removing old trading workstations in the Chicago pits during a Globex/Dealing upgrade. We were told to just use snips to cut the towers free. I cut the wrong damn line. An entire wall of stations and displays went down including the big index board. Commodities quotes from NY went dead. Trading was halted at CME/CBOE for 3 f***ing hours. I single handedly caused the most expensive technical market glitch in Chicago exchange history up to that point. I halted an estimated $3b in trades.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NYSE halts trading as IT systems go down... but it’s no cyberattackTrading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for over three hours Wednesday due to unspecified computer problems. The exchange quickly ruled out a cyberattack, which means there are likely to be red faces in the NYSE IT department when the cause is uncovered.Microsoft lays off 7,800 staff as it dials down its smartphone ambitionsA little over a year after buying Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft is laying off all but one-sixth of the division’s staff, and writing off $7.6 billion, almost all of its purchase price. CEO Satya Nadella reportedly never liked the acquisition, set in motion by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, and now plans to slim down the bewildering array of Lumia phones the company makes, more tightly integrating them with Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here