Kurt DelBene, who left his role as president of Microsoft’s Office Division back in 2013, is returning to Microsoft as executive vice president of corporate strategy and planning, and will report to CEO Satya Nadella.Following his departure from Microsoft, DelBene was tapped by President Obama to take charge of the troubled rollout of the HealthCare.gov website at the Department of Health and Human Services.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Incumbent networking gear makers have often designed their own chips. It's what has created differentiation between products.That custom networking chip design, in some cases, was also behind growth in the technology bubble of the '90s. Some companies were considered better than others because of their silicon design.However, a new breed of manufacturers aren't doing this custom work. Those suppliers, like up-and-coming player Arista, are simply using off-the-shelf silicon.Their ASIC, or Application-Specific Integrated Circuits, are still designed for networking, but they are generic. They're called "merchant" chips, or merchant silicon. They're in switches, along with the included software to run them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) Memory ModuleImage by RR Auction It’s not often that vintage space memorabilia becomes available, but if you have any money left after paying your taxes or that refund is burning a hole in your pocket, starting April 16th you might want to check out RR Auction’s Online Space Exploration Auction. They’ve got stuff that’s been in orbit and to the moon and back. What’s that piece of hardware? It’s the Saturn V Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) Memory Module, which has a starting bid of just $500! So, here’s some insanely cool space stuff that you probably didn’t know existed and never thought would be available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S.’s recent denial of Intel chips for China’s fastest supercomputer could derail an upgrade to double the machine’s processing power.China’s Tianhe-2 is the world’s fastest supercomputer with a theoretical peak speed of 54.9 petaflops. It was scheduled to be expanded, and reach a new peak speed of 100 petaflops this year.Now those plans may be in jeopardy. The U.S. government claims the Tianhe-2 has been used in “nuclear explosive activities”, and has forbidden Intel from shipping its Xeon chips to four related Chinese supercomputing centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A participant in Reddit’s forum devoted to networking asks: “Has anyone here ever destroyed anything via ESD (electronic static discharge)?”Oh, yes, indeed they have, as a sampling of the anecdotes will reveal, though there were also skeptics and one fellow who told me via email “that most failures claimed to be ESD-related are probably covers for something else.”First time for everything
I recently had a user plug an HDMI cable into a Dell E7440. He was touching the shielding and a nice big blue spark jumped from the cable to the laptop and cooked the motherboard. It was the first time in 12 years doing IT that I've ever seen something die from ESD.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. Aerohive AP130Key features: Aerohive’s AP130 is an enterprise-grade 2x2, 2-stream, 802.11ac access point. With the AP130, organizations can now upgrade their wireless networks to 802.11ac without having to upgrade existing Power over Ethernet (PoE) infrastructure. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Modern mobile technology may have been born with the first iPhone, a quintessential consumer device, but it wasn’t long before the business possibilities began to emerge. Fast forward to today, and it’s difficult to find a company that hasn’t embraced phones and tablets for its employees to some degree.It’s not difficult to see why. After all, the potential is nothing if not compelling: an untethered workforce equipped with easy-to-use tools for workers to be productive no matter where they are and at any time of day.That allure, indeed, is surely part of the reason IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budgets to mobile application development, deployment and management by 2017, according to IDC. By that same year, in fact, the vast majority of line-of-business apps will be built for mobile-first consumption, IDC predicts—and for competitive necessity at least as often as for efficiency or productivity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination approaches, a massive online archive has gone live containing 99,525 documents related to the Civil War-era commander-in-chief.The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, a joint digitization project sponsored by The University of Illinois and the Abraham Lincoln Association, is dedicated to identifying, imaging, transcribing, annotating, and publishing all documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln during his lifetime. Lincoln was assassinated in Ford' Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865. Creative Commons Lic.
President Lincoln with Gen. George B. McClellan and group of officers at Antietam, Md.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tokyo Electric Power on Friday sent a robot where no machine has gone before—inside the highly radioactive heart of a reactor at the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant.The robot, developed by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning (IRID), was inserted into the primary containment vessel (PCV) of reactor No. 1 at the plant, which was heavily damaged by the 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated northern Japan.Tokyo Electric is taking the unprecedented step to better determine the state of melted-down fuel in the reactor as part of plans to dismantle the plant, a spokesman said. The No. 2 and No. 3 reactors also suffered meltdowns.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
U.S. government agencies have stopped Intel from selling microprocessors for China’s supercomputers, apparently reflecting concern about their use in nuclear tests.In February, four supercomputing institutions in China were placed on a U.S. government list that effectively bans them from receiving certain U.S. exports.The four institutions, which include China’s National University of Defense Technology, have been involved in building Tianhe-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer, and Tianhe-1A.The two supercomputers have been allegedly used for ”nuclear explosive activities,” according to a notice posted by the U.S. Department of Commerce.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM and Fujifilm have figured out how to fit 220TB of data on a standard-size tape that fits in your hand, flexing the technology’s strengths as a long-term storage medium.The prototype Fujifilm tape and accompanying drive technology from IBM labs packs 88 times as much data onto a tape as industry-standard LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open) systems using the same size cartridge, IBM says. LTO6 tape can hold 2.5TB, uncompressed, on a cartridge about 10 by 10 centimeters (4 by 4 inches) across and 2 centimeters thick.The new technologies won’t come out in products for several years and may not be quite as extreme when they do, but the advances show tape can keep getting more dense into the future, said Mark Lantz, manager of IBM’s Advanced Tape Technologies Group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM and Fujifilm have figured out how to fit 220TB of data on a standard-size tape that fits in your hand, flexing the technology’s strengths as a long-term storage medium.The prototype Fujifilm tape and accompanying drive technology from IBM labs packs 88 times as much data onto a tape as industry-standard LTO-6 (Linear Tape-Open) systems using the same size cartridge, IBM says. LTO6 tape can hold 2.5TB, uncompressed, on a cartridge about 10 by 10 centimeters (4 by 4 inches) across and 2 centimeters thick.MORE: What's behind Microsoft's not-so-crazy startup spending spreeTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jawbone’s latest activity tracker, the UP3, will finally ship April 20 after being delayed for months, though without a core feature the company had hoped for.Water resistance issues led to delays in the product’s launch, Jawbone said Thursday. The company was hoping for a product that could be submerged up to 10 meters underwater, but Jawbone couldn’t achieve that. The shipping product will withstand everyday splashing and showers, like other trackers, but will be unsuitable for swimming or submerged use, Jawbone said in a blog post.Customers who want to cancel their pre-order can do so with no charge, the company said. Jawbone had originally planned on launching the UP3 late last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s coming up on two years since Salesforce acquired Pardot, and on Thursday the company enriched its resulting Sales Cloud B2B marketing-automation product with two new key capabilities.Intelligent Engagement Studio, for instance, offers granular targeting, testing and reporting capabilities designed to help marketers and sales teams connect with prospects in new ways. For example, the new feature enables adaptive lead-nurturing campaigns that evolve based on more than 100 triggers.Previously, B2B marketers could see only basic behavioral data such as the rates at which prospects opened their emails; sales-stage data from their CRM systems was not integrated with it. Now, with Intelligent Engagement Studio, marketers can act on the combination of those data points. So, when someone advances to a new sales stage and also views a specific piece of content, Intelligent Engagement Studio will analyze those data points to proactively route the prospect to a new lead-nurturing path.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins trial shone a light on discrimination in the tech industry, but for a more immediate look at the challenges women face in corporate America, look no further than a Google Images search.Doing a search at the site for “CEO” reveals just one female face in the top results: CEO Barbie. The doll (which may not even be a real Barbie product) appears way down in the results, under a sea of male, mostly white faces.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Anyone who’s ever worked in professional services knows that the focus there on people and billable projects can open up a world of specialized requirements from any supporting business software. With that very distinction in mind, Workday on Thursday unveiled a new suite of financial and human-resources tools designed specifically for professional services users.Offering functionality for both financial management and human capital management, Workday Professional Services Automation aims to give companies a unified alternative to the patchwork of often-disconnected solutions that many currently rely on. A single system delivers insights and analytics regarding people, revenue, expenses and profitability, allowing customers to optimize project performance, Workday said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell is looking ahead to Windows 10 and planning to release a tablet with the OS and other new technologies in September or October.A refreshed Venue 11 Pro will have the USB Type-C port, which first appeared in Apple’s 12-inch MacBook and in Google’s Chromebook Pixel last month, said Kelli Hodges, a manager at Dell.Although Microsoft hasn’t given a specific release date for Windows 10, Dell’s plans shed light on when PCs and tablets might start shipping with Windows 10 pre-installed. One thing is clear: PC makers are eager to move away from the unpopular Windows 8. Windows 10 will run in smartphones, tablets, PCs, wearables and other devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said announced a new program aimed at building software systems that can adapt and survive more than a century years on the job.The program, called Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability by developing the computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust in excess of 100 years.The program looks to address the issues of high costs and frustration with current software systems which continue to grow in complexity and require users to become accustomed to constant update cycles.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
LinkedIn is acquiring online learning company lynda.com for US$1.5 billion in cash and stock, the social networking site announced Thursday.Lynda.com offers professional development courses on design, creative and business topics. Some of the courses, for example, teach how to write HTML, negotiate better, or use design software like Photoshop. The site was launched by Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin in 1995 as a way to teach Web publishing and design.Integrating lynda.com with LinkedIn would allow job seekers to know what skills are required for a position they’re interested in and immediately be prompted to take a course in that subject, Ryan Roslansky, LinkedIn’s head of content, said in a blog post. Further details on whether lynda.com would be combined with LinkedIn, or if the training site would continue to operate independently weren’t provided.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s no secret that algorithms power much of the technology we interact with every day, whether it’s to search for information on Google or to browse through a Facebook news feed. What’s less widely known is that algorithms also play a role when we apply for a loan, for example, or receive a special marketing offer.Algorithms are practically everywhere we are today, shaping what we see, what we believe and, to an increasing extent, what our futures hold. Is that a good thing? The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, like many others, isn’t so sure.“Consumers interact with algorithms on a daily basis, whether they know it or not,” said Ashkan Soltani, the FTC’s chief technologist. “To date, we have very little insight as to how these algorithms operate, what incentives are behind them, what data is used and how it’s structured.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here