Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Grace Hopper: The United States has produced some of the greatest software engineers who have ever lived.But outside the United States computer technology and education have become far more accessible over the last 20 years or so, and that means that in China and many other less developed countries there are now plenty of young minds that have been trained to become skilled programmers.So which countries produce the best coders is an interesting question to ask. Perhaps more importantly why do some countries lead the way?
[ Also on CIO.com: The 13 developer skills you need to master now ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Earlier this year Forbes posted an article speculating that Avaya’s private equity firm, Silver Lake was exploring a sale of the company or at least parts of it. Private equity companies typically hold its portfolio companies for three to five years and then divest themselves of it through an IPO or a sale to another organization. The Avaya situation is somewhat of a rarity because it’s coming up on 10 years since Silver Lake took ownership of it.Avaya is a strong company with good products that has been trying to transform itself into more of a software and services company, but it is saddled with debt. A sale of its contact center and/or networking business could help offset that debt and put the rest of Avaya in a much better position.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amnesty International set out to determine which technology companies met “their human rights responsibilities in the way they use encryption to protect users’ online security.” The research resulted in ranking messaging apps of 11 tech companies based on the use of encryption to protect users’ privacy.According to the detailed list of Message Privacy Rankings (pdf), Facebook did the best, scoring 73 out of 100 for WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Both Apple for iMessage and FaceTime and Telegram for the Telegram Messenger scored 67. Google came in with a score of 53 for Allo, Duo and Hangouts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you watched any football yesterday, chances are you saw the latest in Southwest Airlines’ “Wanna get away?” commercial series, this one featuring a military general and his comical willingness to surrender his network access password.While funny on its face, the commercial is not exactly a lesson in proper password management. Watch or read the transcript that follows:
Transcript:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the old adage states: People are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. This is a problem because strong cybersecurity depends upon both individual skills and organizational collaboration between cybersecurity, business, and IT groups. To use another analogy, cybersecurity is a team sport. If the cybersecurity team doesn’t communicate and collaborate well with other groups within an organization, it will be difficult if not impossible to stay current with what’s needed for security incident prevention, detection, and response.Unfortunately, this is the situation too often today. According to a new research report from ESG and the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), 20% of cybersecurity professionals claim that the relationship between cybersecurity and IT teams is “fair or poor” today, while 27% rate the relationship between cybersecurity and business team as “fair or poor” (Note: I am an ESG employee).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The French Constitutional Council has taken another look at a new security law it waved through in July 2015, and found it wanting.A key clause of last year's Surveillance Law essentially allowed security agencies to monitor and control wireless communications without the usual oversight applied to wiretapping operations.This is unconstitutional as the lack of oversight is likely to result in a disproportionate invasion of privacy, the council ruled Friday. It was responding to a complaint filed by La Quadrature du Net (LQDN), an association campaigning for online rights, the ISP French Data Network (FDN) and the Federation of Non-Profit ISPs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
26 cool iOS 10 featuresIt’s now been more than a month since Apple released iOS 10, and adoption of Apple’s latest and greatest mobile OS has already set new records. As it stands now, more than 54 percent of all iOS users already use iOS 10, an impressive feat for any new operating system. All the more so when one looks at how slow adoption of any new Android OS usually is.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Quick question, MPLS or SD-WANs, which would you say offers better performance? For the same bandwidth, we’d assume MPLS. After all, MPLS services are managed for a reason, right? However, as we learned on one recent project, internet performance has improved so much over the years that its performance can rival, even exceed, private WAN services.The situation
The project was with a manufacturing company that wanted to see if modernizing its MPLS WAN made sense. The alternative would be an SD-WAN or hybrid WAN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple has been selling Macintosh branded computers for 31 years, but with its emphasis shifting to smartphones, watches, music and who knows what else, the company has neglected its Mac line, leaving the Apple faithful wondering if the company is still committed to it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Are you tired of your operating system dictating what you can and can’t do with your PC or laptop? Need more control over your computing environment? Dual boot might be the answer. I have a dual boot dream machine running both Windows 10 and Linux Mint 18. What I can’t do with one OS, I can do with the other.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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.The Back-UPS battery backupKey features: APC by Schneider Electric’s new Back-UPS battery backup solutions are designed to deliver reliable/secure power protection for wireless networks, computers and other home/business electronics to help users stay connected. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
WikiLeaks claims to have many thousands of sources but does not collaborate with states in the publication of documents, its editorial board said late Sunday.The statement by the board of the whistleblowing site assumes significance after the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama charged that it and other sites had released allegedly hacked emails under the direction of Russia. WikiLeaks has leaked mails from the Democratic National Committee that showed that the Democratic Party’s national strategy and fund-raising committee had favored Hillary Clinton over her rival Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination. The website has also published mails from the account of John Podesta, chairman of Clinton's campaign for the presidential election, which could prove to be embarrassing to the candidate.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T said it will acquire Time Warner for US$85.4 billion, reflecting a continuing trend for the consolidation of communications and media companies.
The deal aims to combine content from Time Warner, which has a film studio and a vast library of entertainment, with AT&T’s distribution network of mobile services, broadband and TV in the U.S., Mexico and Latin America, AT&T said late Saturday.
Under the part cash, part stock deal, Time Warner shareholders will receive $107.50 per share under the terms of the merger, consisting of $53.75 per share in cash and $53.75 per share in AT&T stock.
The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2017, and is subject to approval by Time Warner shareholders and review by the U.S. Department of Justice, AT&T said. Review from the Federal Communications Commission may also be required to the extent that FCC licenses may have to be transferred to AT&T under the deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. Logs are one of those things that a lot of people take for granted. Every software, device and application generates its own logs, and they are often overlooked until something happens and someone needs to dig into the logs to try to discover a root cause of the issue. Companies that treat logs in this way are missing out on an opportunity to improve their business.Logs have an interesting property that makes them quite valuable: they are the only common thread across a company's entire technology stack. It doesn't matter if it's network devices, security devices, operating systems or applications—all generate logs. Because of that, and with the proper tools, it's possible to look end-to-end in the infrastructure and the application stack using logs. The result is the ability to see what is happening from node to node, and from process to process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Attacks against DNS service provider Dyn resumed today after a two and a half hour lull, and could indicate a new application of an old criminal technology, experts say.Dyn hasn’t shared details on the type of DDoS attacks used nor the size of those attacks that have affected access to sites including Amazon, Etsy, GitHub, Shopify, Twitter and the New York Times.+More on Network World: Gartner Top 10 strategic technology trends you should know for 2017To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No one looks forward to a hospital stay, but the tech amenities at Jacobs Medical Center could make visits more comfortable for patients.With an iPad and Apple TV in every room, patients will be able to control room settings such as temperature, lighting and window shades. They can access games, log into their own social and entertainment apps, and control the TV. The iPad also provides access to a patient’s electronic medical records, including information such as medications, caregivers' names, diagnostic data, and upcoming lab work or medical procedures.
RELATED: 14 go-to tools for Mac sysadmins | 25 CIO pay packages revealed | Tech jobs set for biggest raisesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Although they both offer core IaaS features like virtual machines, storage and databases the leading public cloud providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, take very different approaches in offering cloud services, including at the most basic level of how their data centers are constructed and positioned around the world.+MORE FROM NETWORK WORLD: What’s behind the Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s aggressive cloud expansions? (With an interactive map!) +Both companies’ clouds are made up of regions: AWS has 14 and Microsoft has 30. But those numbers aren’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Here's an adapter you might want to have on hand. This highly rated all-in-one style adapter from HooToo charges and powers your laptop, while allowing you to connect multiple peripherals, transfer data, and even extend/mirror your screen to an external display in 4k. Ports include USB Type-C, HDMI, 3 x USB 3.0 Ports, and an SD Memory Card slot. Its display port is capable of outputting 4K UHD or Full HD 1080p video to HDTV, monitor or projector. Its Mac-inspired design features a unibody aluminum alloy exterior, ionized finish, reinforced TPE cable coating, and Mac-style LED activity indicator. EMI protection prevents interference with wireless devices. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 180 people on Amazon (read reviews). Its list price of $79.99 has been reduced 19% to $64.99. See the discounted HooToo Shuttle now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Indian banks have asked customers to change the PINs, and in some cases blocked access, to 3.2 million debit cards after concerns about a security breach.The issue surfaced in September when some banks complained that their customers' cards were used fraudulently mainly in China and the U.S. while the account holders were in India, the National Payments Corporation of India said late Thursday.India's top government-controlled bank, the State Bank of India, said earlier this week that after card network companies like Visa and MasterCard had informed various banks of a potential risk to some cards because of a data breach, it had taken the precautionary measure of blocking the cards identified by the networks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Save for the frequently used business critical data and the all-time low prices of disk storage, any CFO talking to an open-minded systems administrator will come to the conclusion that tape wins all the time for data archiving.When you take several regulations—such as The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which requires data to be retained for six years from the date of its creation or the date when it was last in effect, whichever is later—and other regulators like Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and Security Exchange Commission (SEC), you realize that extended retention of up to seven years is mandated by the aforementioned acts and regulatory bodies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here