Sony has finally released an update to its PS4 system software that lets you add an external hard drive to the console to help extend storage capacity on the gaming console. On behalf of the millions of PS4 owners who have been performing data management surgery on their console every time they wanted to play a new game, let me say “Hallelujah!”.Before you email me, I know that storage capacity improvement could be done with the PS4 before this update. But this involved grabbing a screwdriver and cracking open the case to install a higher capacity internal hard disk drive. This approach involved too much time needed for my limited-free-time-available lifestyle. This from a guy who likes tech – for other parents and PS4 owners with limited time and experience with hardware, the external HDD approach makes more sense than messing around with screws and slots and such.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sometimes it's obvious when it's time to move on from a job. Other times it's not so clear. If you're not sure if the time is right to search for a new job, here are 10 reasons to consider making a change.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
A few years ago, ESG (and other) research indicated that security concerns posed the biggest impediment for more pervasive use of cloud computing. What happened next? Business executives and CIOs found that cloud agility, flexibility and potential cost savings were too good to pass up, creating a “cloud or bust” mentality. Naturally, CISOs had to do their best and go along for the ride whether they were ready or not.+ Also on Network World: The top 12 cloud security threats +
So, how’s cloud security going at this point? ESG research indicates it is still a work in progress. As part of a recent survey, cybersecurity professionals were presented with a series of statements about cloud security and asked whether they agreed or disagreed with each one. Here are some of the results:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you are a fan of virtual assistants and Android phones, then you might regard Samsung’s jump into the race as better late than never. If you are not a fan of virtual assistants, then you might not like the Samsung Galaxy S8, which will have a dedicated button on the side of the phone to summon the assistant. Like it or not, Samsung said its virtual assistant will eventually be part of all its appliances.Yesterday, Samsung announced that its intelligent voice assistant Bixby will run on the Galaxy S8, which will launch next week. But Bixby is coming to all-things-Samsung, as the company said it will gradually be applied to all of its appliances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Can ARM chips compete neck-and-neck with Intel and AMD on benchmarks? That could be happening sooner than you think.Starting next year, ARM processors will get significantly faster thanks to big changes in the company's Cortex-A chip designs. ARM is taking a page from rivals like AMD that have focused on raising the performance threshold in chips.ARM isn't known for superfast chips; it is instead mainly associated with power-efficient chips that give long battery life to devices. That focus has helped the company succeed in mobile devices, an area where Intel's power hungry chips failed.But applications like virtual reality and machine learning need more performance, and ARM is preparing its processors to take on those emerging applications. ARM is adding more cores, instructions, and faster pipelines in smaller spaces to boost performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
China’s push to take over global technology leadership is relentless. It wants to lead in computing, semiconductors, research and development, and clean energy. It is accelerating science investment as the U.S. retreats.China may be planning a moon base. Surprised? Don’t be. It will soon have a manned space station. It is investing heavily in quantum technologies and it wants to be first to build an exascale supercomputer.In 2010, Computerworld looked at “Five reasons why China will rule tech.” Here's an update, and the case for China has grown stronger.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Why Have a BYOD Policy?Image by ThinkstockIn today’s work environment, employees are increasingly expected to be constantly available and communicating. Regardless of whether the company permits it, employees will use their personal devices for work. Instead of ignoring the inevitable, companies should develop and implement a BYOD policy that protects the company and balances productivity with security. Brandon N. Robinson Partner, Balch & Bingham LLP - Privacy and Data Security Practice, provides some tips.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has ordered that passengers on flights departing for the U.S from 10 airports in the Middle East and Africa will have to carry personal electronics larger than a smartphone as checked baggage, citing increased terror threats.Giving the approximate size of a commonly available smartphone as a guideline for passengers, the DHS said that laptops, tablets, e-readers, cameras, portable DVD players, electronic game units larger than smartphones, and travel printers or scanners were the kind of personal electronics that would not be allowed in the cabin and would have to be carried as checked baggage.Approved medical devices may be brought into the cabin after additional screening. The size of smartphones is well understood by most passengers who fly internationally, according to the DHS, which in any case asked passengers to check with their airline if they are unsure whether their smartphone is impacted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Just a few doors down the street from the iconic corner of Haight and Ashbury, ground zero for San Francisco’s Summer of Love 50 years ago, sits a most unusual store. On the ground floor of a building once occupied by Jimi Hendrix, Ashbury Tech is a unique melding of old and new San Francisco.From tobacco to tech
That’s because the three-level is store is not your garden-variety electronics shop. Until earlier this year, in fact, it had been known as Ashbury Tobacco Center for the past 23 years. And approximately half of its floor space is still dedicated to bongs, pipes, vapes and other accouterments of what is commonly known as a head shop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s hard to fathom and may be even harder for it to happen but a couple NASA-funded scientists say Mars might have had Saturn-like rings around it in the past and may have them again sometime in the distant future.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said Purdue University scientists David Minton and Andrew Hesselbrock developed a model that suggests debris that was pushed into space from an asteroid or other body slamming into Mars around 4.3 billion years ago alternates between becoming a planetary ring and clumping together to form a moon.
More on Network World: Elon Musk’s next great adventure: Colonizing Mars+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, was the world's richest person in 2016, the fourth year in a row he has headed the list, Forbes said today.But Gates' fortune did not rely on the Microsoft shares he held, filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.Forbes pegged Gates' total worth at $86.8 billion, more than $9 billion more than the next-richest person on the planet, Warren Buffet. However, in a February filing with the SEC, Gates said that he owned 174,992,934 Microsoft shares. At Monday's opening price, that portfolio would be worth approximately $11.4 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Future U.S. elections may very well face more Russian attempts to interfere with the outcome, the FBI and the National Security Agency warned on Monday.“They’ll be back,” said FBI director James Comey. “They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018.”Comey made the comment during a congressional hearing on Russia’s suspected efforts to meddle with last year’s presidential election. Allegedly, cyberspies from the country hacked several high-profile Democratic groups and people, in an effort to tilt the outcome in President Donald Trump’s favor.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenStack and storage teams are partnering to integrate their products and in doing so are creating a compelling hybrid offering for open source-minded customers.The announcement came at IBM’s InterConnect conference in Las Vegas, where an estimated 20,000 developers, customers and IBM partners are gathering.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How IBM wants to bring blockchain from Bitcoin to your data center +The crux of the partnership is that customers who use Red Hat’s OpenStack private cloud platform and Ceph Storage product will now be able to run both of those in IBM’s cloud. Don Bulia, a general manager in IBM’s cloud division says the idea behind the partnership is that Red Hat customers would be able to extend their Red Hat-based environments into the IBM public cloud, which will run the same management and software tools they have on premises.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two teams of researchers managed to win the biggest bounties at this year's Pwn2Own hacking contest by escaping from the VMware Workstation virtual machine and executing code on the host operating system.Virtual machines are in used in many scenarios to create throw-away environments that pose no threat to the main operating system in case of compromise. For example, many malware researchers execute malicious code or visit compromise websites inside virtual machines to observe their behavior and contain their impact.One of the main goals of hypervisors like VMware Workstation is to create a barrier between the guest operating system that runs inside the virtual machine and the host OS where the hypervisor runs. That's why VM escape exploits are highly prized, more so than browser or OS exploits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, I was fortunate to participate in SREcon17 Americas, a conference organized by USENIX for site reliability engineers. What’s a site reliability engineer (SRE)? Ben Treynor, founder of Google's site reliability team, once explained it’s "what happens when a software engineer is tasked with what used to be called operations."An important role in the DevOps practice, these engineers concentrate on reliability (of course) and scalability (at amazing levels) in highly distributed systems (microservices multiplying like rabbits). They run some of the largest websites on the planet and are inventing a new field of expertise while they do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Growing in stature among the many iPhone 8 (or iPhone X) rumors is that Apple might bring augmented reality to iOS 11 this summer and to its 10th anniversary iPhone this coming fall. After all, CEO Tim Cook has absolutely gushed about AR, even saying it will become an essential part of your daily life.A Bloomberg report this week that details the personnel hires, company buyouts and other efforts underway at Apple involving AR is fueling speculation that big doings are indeed afoot. Apple — which declined to comment for Bloomberg — has hired those who have worked on technologies such as Oculus, HoloLens and THX audio, and has a cross-departmental group of hundreds of engineers on the project, the report says. Gene Munster, a longtime Apple watcher who recently formed Loup Ventures to invest in companies focused in areas such as AR, VR and robotics, tells Bloomberg that AR devices could even someday replace iPhones. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether strictly the creation of an algorithm run amok or an inexplicable human error, Google News right now is demonstrating the kind of news judgment that has made it one of the company’s weakest products … and may well speak to the state of our celebrity-worshipping society.As Congress simultaneously holds hearings on Russian interference in last year’s presidential election and the pending confirmation of a justice to the United States Supreme Court, topping both stories in terms of importance, at least according to Google News, is the recovery of Tom Brady’s missing Super Bowl jerseys. Google News
I’ve been a Patriots fan longer than I’ve been a journalist and I’ve been both for longer than I’d like to admit. This is nuts. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A German auction house that hopes to rap the gavel on an antique Apple-1 personal computer in May has pegged its likely sales price at between $190,000 and $320,000.(networkworld.com)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Gear 360 is smaller than a baseball, so you can just hold it and shoot. Or set it down on the included tripod and live in the moment. Look all around you -- that’s what you capture with the Gear 360. Every angle, all at once, every time. Play videos back, trim and instantly share your creation on YouTube, Facebook or Samsung VR. Right now the Gear 360 is significantly discounted from its typical list price of $350. With the current 39% off deal you can get it now for just $214 on Amazon, where it averages 4 out of 5 stars (read recent reviews). See the discounted Samsung Gear 360-degree camera now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
At its InterConnect conference in Las Vegas this week, IBM is announcing new features for its open source cloud-hosted blockchain service in an attempt to bring this distributed database technology from its initial use of powering Bitcoin to a broader market, including the financial services industry.Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continually growing list of records that can be verified using hashing techniques. Vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are attempting to commercialize it by offering customers a platform for hosting their own implementations. Analysts say the market to do so is just emerging.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: The future of networking is in a white box | How to get the most out of data and services in a multi-cloud world +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here