President Obama’s secret plan to protect the “open Internet” is locked inside the Federal Communications Commission. We don’t know what’s in the 322 pages, but we are told it includes a transparency rule. We think it also includes a no-blocking rule, which is crucial because the commission's own website has been blocking access to the press releases of its minority commissioners. The FCC, consisting of five appointed members, is celebrating the democratic process used in formulating the 332-page plan. In a campaign coordinated with the White House, commission staff solicited several million form letters from activists cheering the ever-popular “Title II reclassification.” Nearly 1 million voters responded furiously with comments of their own, advocating the exact opposite policy, one of Internet freedom. Many senators and congressmen are skeptical an “independent, expert” agency is supposed to work this way. Commission staff, however, are warning Congress, and its 535 elected representatives, to buzz off, lest it intrude on democracy. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Uber Technologies is offering free rides on its uberX ride-sharing service in the South Korean capital of Seoul, after city authorities intensified their crackdown on illegal drivers by offering a reward to residents who report Uber drivers to police.Last December, the city of Seoul offered rewards of 1 million won (about US$910) to people who report Uber drivers, and called all services by Uber “blatantly illegal.” In the last three months of operating the service for sale, about 100 reports have been made although no rewards were provided by the city yet, according to Uber Korea’s spokeswoman. Seoul city was not available for immediate response.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New technologies affecting enterprise IT continue to be invented, commercialized and adopted. The latest batch of techs looming on the horizon, examined in greater detail below, include quantum computing, gamification, reactive programming, augmented reality, transient computing electronics and Named Data Networking.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Few technologies have had a greater impact on business efficiency and IT productivity than virtualization. While most of the impact has been felt in the data center and in the cloud, virtualization has also transformed IT work on the desktop, where it retains an important role. Here I compare the two leading products in this category: VMware Workstation and Oracle VirtualBox.In executing tests on Workstation 11, I ran into almost no headaches, and in the few cases an item surprised me, I found useful information in the ample VMware documentation. Good documentation has for years been one of the hallmarks of VMware products. This continues to be true.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
While Chrome OS started life as a simple, stripped-down browser and little else, Google's operating system now has tons of tools, tweaks, and customizations that let you tailor your Chromebook to your specific workflow needs.Just like Windows or OS X, Google's built additional functionality into Chrome OS's app launcher, the taskbar-like shelf, window sizing, and other functions to help you stay productive. These tips will show you how to make the most of those tools and start getting stuff done on your Chromebook.Let's dig in!Arrange your shelf
The shelf has many of the features you may know from the Windows taskbar. You can even relocate it to the left or right side of the screen, though not the top. Just right-click it and choose your desired location.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD microprocessors are relatively cheap and powerful, and they consume little power. So why aren’t they featured in the latest generation of low-cost computers, Chromebooks?The answer, according to AMD chief technical officer Mark Papermaster, is that they just aren’t worth it—yet.“You have to really look at the Chromebook, and what Google’s objective with it is,” Papermaster said, speaking with a small group of reporters on Monday evening during the ISSCC conference. “For us, it's just a business decision, when you need our type of CPU and graphics technology that can make a difference.” AMD
Mark Papermaster, the chief technology officer at AMDTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If all the well-publicized hacks over the past year or so have had any effect on the corporate world, it’s been to make enterprises more worried than ever about security. Throw in the bring-your-own-device trend, and that concern gets compounded considerably.Such issues were part of the motivation for the recent launch of the Confide app for confidential enterprise messaging, and they’re also a big piece of the thinking behind the NetSfere messaging service that Infinite Convergence rolled out on Tuesday.Though Infinite Convergence launched its cloud-based messaging service for enterprises on a trial basis last fall, the security-minded offering just became globally available. Device-to-device encryption and administrative controls are among the service’s key features, which add up to end-to-end secure messaging capabilities, the company says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett-Packard has lowered its financial outlook for the year after another quarter of declining sales and profit.CEO Meg Whitman is trying to get HP in shape before the company splits itself in two later this year. One half will sell PCs and printers and the other will focus on back-end business products.But the strengthening dollar has been making life tough for U.S. multinationals, and HP is no exception. A strong dollar can have several negative effects, including making overseas sales seem smaller when they’re translated back into the home currency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Kenyan government has abandoned its school laptop program, valued at more than US$600 million, following a controversy over the manner in which the contract for the project was awarded to India’s Olive Telecommunications.Kenya’s Public Procurement Administrative Review Board (PPARB) revoked the bid award last year, prompting Olive to take the matter to court.PPARB ruled after a review of the bidding that the project was wrongly awarded to Olive because the Indian company is not an original equipment manufacturer, as required by the Kenyan project requirement.Olive reportedly uses Chinese subcontractors to manufacture Olive-branded devices, and allegedly added computers to its list of products only after it was shortlisted by the Kenyan government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Spouses of U.S. immigrants holding high-skill H-1B visas will be able to work in the country later this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced.The DHS decision will benefit holders of H-4 visas, which allow spouses of H-1B and other employment visa holders to legally live in the U.S. Until now, H-4 visa holders could not work in the U.S. until they received a green card, granting them permanent residency.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I took the above picture after dropping the kids off at school this morning.Now I understand that in places where some of you folks live a temperature reading of eight degrees below zero is called Tuesday. I do get that.However, I am also certain that this is the coldest outdoor temperature that I have ever experienced personally in my 50-plus years of living here in Massachusetts.In fact, I don’t recall anything close.The good news? It took my mind off all the snow for a few minutes.
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Avaya this week extended its SDN arsenal with an architecture and supporting products designed to simplify enterprise connectivity and application provisioning.Avaya’s SDN Fx architecture is comprised of new and existing products intended to ease the onboarding of users and devices to the network. The Fx architecture is built on Avaya’s existing Shortest Path Bridging-based fabric networking technology but also includes new offerings to extend SDN from the data center to the network edge.Those new products and features include an Open Networking Adapter, which is designed to provide a plug-n-play network connection for any device with an Ethernet port, including medical devices, manufacturing machines and branch office switches. The ONA is a card deck-sized appliance that Avaya says provisions a QoS-customized virtual path across the network and manages thousands of devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Your old smartphone has a greater destiny than your junk drawer. Believe it or not, you can turn it into, say, a mini-PC or media streamer. Assuming it packs both USB On The Go support (OTG) and a Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) compatible port, there’s a ton of additional functionality lurking under that its hood. Heck, you can even use a smartphone with a broken screen for this.Without further ado, here’s how to transform your old smartphone into the brains of an Android-powered PC.It starts with MHL ports and USB OTG support
Many smartphones from companies like Google, Samsung, LG, HTC, and Sony—among others—ship with MHL ports and have built-in compatibility for USB OTG as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As more sensors get added to the Internet of Things, power consumption can pose a problem, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a way to reduce the energy that such components require.The researchers have created a new circuit design that could lead to more power-efficient sensors, which are driving growth in the Internet of Things (IOT). About 1.2 billion IOT devices receive or transmit data wirelessly for alerts or analysis, and the number could grow to 5.4 billion by 2020, according to a study by Verizon.Many sensors remain idle most of the time and become active when they send or receive data. The researchers have designed a circuit for a transmitter that could reduce energy leakage by up to 100 times when a sensor is in that idle state. That could extend the battery life of sensors by many months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the Federal Communications Commission set to vote in three days on reclassifying broadband as public regulated utility, Twitter made its support for stronger net-neutrality rules official Monday.In a blog post laying out its case, Twitter struck the theme of free speech, but also said that an Internet that supports Web businesses without barriers imposed by ISPs is critical for the economic competitiveness of the U.S.“We need clear, enforceable, legally sustainable rules to ensure that the Internet remains open and continues to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers. This is the heart of Twitter,” the post said. Net neutrality rules would prevent ISP from determining what content, services and applications get used and shared on the Web, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some headlines practically require a click, such as this one from Mashable: “Target undercuts Amazon on free shipping.”
How do you undercut free? Is Target going to pay me for the privilege of shipping a package to my house?
No, silly, you do it like this:
The retail chain announced Monday that customers can qualify for free shipping on all orders of $25 or more placed through Target's website "with virtually no exclusions," down from a $50 minimum previously.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you still harbored any doubts that the web is now driving the future of IT, last week's announcement that HP will offer disaggregated products for web-scale data centers via deals with Cumulus and Accton should be enough to convince you.See also: HP latest to unbundle switch hardware, software
The deal itself is hardly monumental. HP inked a pair of "partnerships that will produce a branded white box switch capable of running multiple network operating systems." And it comes on the heels of HP's deal with Foxconn last year to build inexpensive cloud computing servers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple plans to open two European data centers running on renewable energy in 2017, following similar moves by Google and Facebook in the region.The new data centers will host a number of Apple services for European customers, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iMessage text messaging service, Apple Maps and Siri, its voice-controlled personal assistant. By hosting the data within the European Union, Apple could avoid the need to export EU users’ data to the U.S. or other data protection regimes, a sensitive issue as EU legislators discuss renewing the bloc’s data protection regime.Apple plans to spend a total of €1.7 billion (US$1.9 billion) on the two data centers, which will each cover around 166,000 square meters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In Silicon Valley, where software startups are the rage, it’s unusual to see a new hardware company set up shop. But venture capital-backed chip design company Flex Logix has some big ideas about how to speed up a whole range of software applications and hardware.Flex Logix is establishing a business around FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reconfigurable chips that can help hardware run specific applications faster. A notable FPGA user is Microsoft, which has implemented the chips in data centers to quickly deliver more relevant Bing search results.PCs and servers today run on general-purpose processors like CPUs, but FPGAs are different, with functionality defined mainly through software on the chip. Flex Logix claims it has designed a new type of FPGA, which it hopes will be used in networking, telecommunications, servers, military equipment and other hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Shortly after Branndon Kelley joined American Municipal Power (AMP) as CIO, the company's financial system went down.It took four days to restore the system and Kelley, who had previously consulted with state governments on business continuity issues, immediately started exploring AMP's backup and recovery strategy.He quickly discovered that there was none. No coherent plan. "We had a whole bag of tricks," Kelley says, including more than 10 different backup systems and processes. There were outdated off-the-shelf packages and hand-coded scripts--none of them documented or interconnected. There were backups of backups, and fewer than half of the backups succeeded on the first try.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here