California has become the first state in the U.S. to mandate energy-efficiency standards for monitors and a variety of computers, including notebooks, desktops, workstations and servers.The standards, which come into force starting from from Jan. 1, 2018, focus on the performance of computers in idle, sleep and off modes rather than putting limits on when they are in active operation, said the California Energy Commission, which on Wednesday adopted the new standards.California has more than 25 million computer monitors installed in homes and businesses, and the new standards recommend the use of higher efficiency LED backlights and screen technologies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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IBM and NASA have had one of the longest, most successful relationships in the high-tech world and it looks like the future holds much the same.While the relationship has its roots in the very beginnings of the space program as well as large-scale computing, its current incarnation in many cases revolves around the cognitive computing specialties found in IBM’s Watson system.+More on Network World: NASA: Top 10 space junk missions+Watson uses machine learning and natural language and image recognition to develop all manner of intelligent answers to tough challenges. The system has been successfully deployed in the healthcare industry where the system has become a trusted adviser to hospitals and research centers working for people fighting cancer. The CBS news program “60 Minutes” recently devoted a large segment on Watson and the success it has had in this battle (See more here).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sending Internet of Things, or IoT messages using liquids, such as vodka or glass cleaner, could replace light as the next go-to network carrier for the Internet.Pulses of liquid chemicals, replicating the ones-and-zeros of traditional electron-based data streams are better than copper wires, wireless or fiber because they’re cheaper, and aren’t susceptible to the same kind of interference, claim the inventors from Stanford University. Wireless signals, for example, can run into problems among large masses of metals.Vodka was the liquid of choice for the first of the pH-based messaging tests run by the school, but amusingly failed due to the receiving computer getting “too saturated with vodka to receive more messages,” according to fellow Nariman Farsad, who has been working on the concept.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cyber incidents dominated headlines this year, from Russia’s hacking of Democrat emails to internet cameras and DVRs launching DDoS attacks, leaving the impression among many that nothing should be entrusted to the internet.
These incidents reveal technical flaws that can be addressed and failure to employ best practices that might have prevented some of them from happening.
+More on Network World: Gartner Top 10 technology trends you should know for 2017+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Adobe Systems has released security updates for several products, including one for Flash Player that fixes a critical vulnerability that's already known and exploited by attackers.The Flash Player update fixes 17 vulnerabilities, 16 of which are critical and can be exploited to execute malicious code on affected systems. One of those vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2016-7892 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) catalogue, is already being used by hackers."Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for CVE-2016-7892 exists in the wild, and is being used in limited, targeted attacks against users running Internet Explorer (32-bit) on Windows," the company said in a security advisory.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
OK Google, you’re now inside my home, paying attention to my requests (at least when I say “OK Google” or “Hey Google”), learning even more about me. Let’s just make sure that you don’t learn too much.As part of my testing of the Google Wifi wireless mesh system, Google also sent me the $129 Google Home device, which acts as a voice-controlled personal assistant. Much like the Google app on your smartphone, you can ask the Google Home questions and it will try to either give you an answer or perform a task (depending on other things connected to your network).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft will extend support for the Windows Server and SQL Server product lines to keep customers, and ultimately convince them to move their workloads into the cloud, an analyst said today.Last week, Microsoft unveiled "Premium Assurance," which will add up to six more years to the support lifespan of Windows Server 2008 and later, and SQL Server 2008 and later. Enterprises with existing Software Assurance agreements will be able to purchase the additional support starting in March 2017.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, will also have charge of the nation’s largest supercomputers. These systems are used to investigate “national challenges,” which includes climate change. But Perry is a climate change skeptic, as is Trump, and believes the science is unsettled.Perry’s skepticism about the science of climate change may be a problem for the department he's been tapped to run; the Department of Energy (DOE) considers climate a major research focus.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers
“DOE plays an important role in climate change research -- a very large role,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of meteorology at the University of Washington.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Netgear stepped up by publishing a list of routers which are vulnerable to attack as well as releasing beta firmware to patch some of those models.The company confirmed the existence of the flaw which US-CERT believed was dangerous enough to advise users to stop using vulnerable routers. In addition to the originally announced vulnerable Netgear routers models R6400, R7000, R8000, Netgear warned that nine other router models are also vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM will hire 25,000 workers in the U.S. over the next four years, the company's CEO said Tuesday on the eve of a meeting between technology industry leaders and President-Elect Donald Trump. The pledge comes just over a month after Trump criticized IBM for moving some jobs out of the country, an allegation IBM denied.Domestic job creation is likely to be a major topic at the meeting. Trump has called for U.S. corporations to keep jobs in the country and last month asked Apple CEO Tim Cook to build iPhones in the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What does it take to fly high in the world of drones? Is it convenience, safety, beauty, or adaptability? Our picks for the coolest drones of 2016 have it all.DHL's Parcelcopter and Rakuten's delivery drone will distribute goods to the most remote regions, while Altus Intelligence's drones will sail to safety on a parachute.And bumping into things? That's so last year thanks to obstacle avoidance systems developed by Intel and DJI. Intel's Shooting Star drones take the fire out of fireworks. Plus a drone that operates on land and water. What a year! To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Is artificial intelligence and conversational computing the next great frontier in IT? Microsoft believes so; the company is bullish on AI and is doubling down on opportunities it sees for the technology.At an event in San Francisco, Microsoft paraded a multitude of technologies focusing on bots, the Cortana personal digital assistant, and application development in these realms. "Our goal here is democratizing AI so that we make AI available for everyone," including developers, consumers, and businesses, said Harry Shum, executive vice president in Microsoft's AI and Research Group.[ The InfoWorld review: TensorFlow shines a light on deep learning. | Start here with TensorFlow. | Get a digest of the day's top tech stories in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. ]
The company officially introduced its Zo chatbot, an AI-driven, English-speaking conversation partner that is a follow-up to Tay, which had been contorted into misuse and abuse. More than 115,000 people have already been using Zo, according to Microsoft.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Deep learning, which is basically neural network machine learning with multiple hidden layers, is all the rage—both for problems that justify the complexity and high computational cost of deep learning, such as image recognition and natural language parsing, and for problems that might be better served by careful data preparation and simple algorithms, such as forecasting the next quarter’s sales. If you actually need deep learning, there are many packages that could serve your needs: Google TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and MXNet, for starters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
With digital transformation dominating the business agenda, IT pros are under pressure to create a modern-day tech foundation sturdy enough to drive that change as they head into 2017. What milestones are they aiming for in the year ahead? Where should they direct their limited resources?According to Computerworld's Forecast 2017 survey, IT professionals will prioritize security, analytics, XaaS or "as a service" technology, virtualization and mobile apps in the coming year. If you're thinking of adding those technologies to your own 2017 to-do list, read on for findings from our survey, along with real-world advice from other IT leaders.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking into the crystal ballImage by ThinkstockIt is once again, as the song doesn’t quite say, “the most predictive time of the year.” Not that anybody knows for sure what will be happening even a month from now, never mind six months to a year.But that does not, and should not, stop organizations from trying. The way to get ahead and stay ahead, especially in online security, is to look ahead.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For most businesses, IT has traditionally operated separately from the rest of the business -- employees knew to submit a ticket when something wasn't working, but for the most part, IT worked behind the scenes.Now, technology is in the hands of every employee, which means IT can no longer control all the hardware, software and apps coming through the door. With more departments relying on technology, it will require more collaboration with IT to help find the best products and to educate workers on security risks.But this demand for collaboration has also caused a shift in the skills employers value in IT workers. Businesses are looking to hire candidates with soft skills, who are "versatile and willing to collaborate with each other to solve problems as a team, rather than as individual experts," says Patric Palm, CEO and co-founder of Favro, a company that offers project management and collaboration tools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The enterprise collaboration market is increasingly crowded with apps and services that target distinct needs for messaging and communication. With its growing suite of apps that target the market from many different angles, Microsoft represents the challenge of modern collaboration.Collaborative work-related activities increased significantly during the last five years, and apps such as Microsoft's Yammer, Skype for Business and the recently launched Teams are quickly becoming a bigger part of the way people work, according to Bryan Goode, Microsoft's general manager of Office 365. As the average age of today's worker trends younger and more employees work remotely, businesses flock to cloud-based collaboration tools, Goode says. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In today's competitive war for talent, employers are using substantial benefits packages to give them an edge when recruiting and retaining talent, according a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey report.The report, which surveyed 738 randomly selected HR professionals, showed that 95 percent rated healthcare as one of the three most important benefits to employees; 71 percent say retirement savings and planning are top-rated employee benefits and 50 percent say leave is an important benefit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s been a whole bunch of conversation in the database world in recent years around what the best type of database is for modern applications. Over the past couple of years this has mainly centered around the SQL verses NoSQL wars.On the one hand are the traditional SQL-based databases, which all follow a traditional row and column format. These are the databases that have existed since pretty much year dot and have proved themselves to be good all-around tools.+ Also on Network World: IT wants (but struggles) to operationalize big data +
With the advent of social media and the need for database approaches that worked well within the unstructured data landscape that these properties work within has led to the rise of the NoSQL databases. These databases don’t follow, or at least don’t only follow, the standard tabular approach towards data. Hence storage and retrieval of data doesn’t follow the rigid row and column, tabular approach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here