“Congratulations”Let’s say you’re a scientist, and you’ve worked your entire adult life at your discipline. You do a sort of offbeat study, for valid scientific reasons, and figure, hey, this’ll get a laugh in whatever journal is relevant to your field, and then somebody calls you from Cambridge, Mass., and tells you you’ve won science’s equivalent of a Razzie. These are this year’s Ig Nobel Prize winners. Enjoy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Citigroup is using software-defined storage to build an infrastructure that could last 25 years – while generations of hardware come and go.The financial services company needs to transform its storage architecture to deal with growing and changing demands, says Dan Maslowski, global head of storage and engineered systems. By simplifying its architecture, Citigroup expects to slash its operational expenses, which make up most of its storage costs.Citigroup’s need for storage is growing so fast that if costs don’t go down, the company’s spending on storage might eat up its entire IT budget in a few years, Maslowski told an audience at the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The OontZ Angle 3XL was designed and engineered by Cambridge SoundWorks to be their most powerful, best sounding speaker yet. Features a powerful 40 Watt AMP, delivering 20 Watts RMS loud enough to fill even large rooms with high quality sound. Perfect for parties, playing outdoors, at the pool and at the beach. Distortion-free even at maximum volume. IPX5 water resistance means it'll be OK with accidental splashes or rain. A built-in USB power bank can charge your iPhone or Smartphone while you're enjoying music. Other features include: Up to 8 hours of battery play time; Built in mic for speakerphone capability; Play from laptops, PCs and non-Bluetooth devices using the included 3.5mm audio cable connected to the aux-in jack. The Angle 3XL is highly rated on Amazon with 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 750 customers (read reviews). Right now its list price has been reduced a generous 56% to just $110. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I’ve been a fan of software-defined networking (SDN) since my first conversation about software-based firewalls for an application deployment in 2004. Our goal was to leverage the concepts of grid computing to grow and shrink the web and application server environments in response to load, and we got the idea to throw the firewall into the mix. What made our approach possible was the ocean’s depth of software development knowledge on our team tempered by a puddle’s depth knowledge of networking.+ Also on Network World: Survey shows growing interest in SDN, where and how companies might deploy the tech +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're looking for cables that can keep up with the high demands of today's video tech, you may want to consider this cable from SecurOMax, currently discounted 60%. This heavy duty, high quality 6ft HDMI 2.0 cable will drive full 4K 60hz 2160P. Something that older HDMI cables just can't pull off. It features more expensive, thicker 28 AWG wiring which enables 18 GBPS speed required for all HDMI 2.0 features. Its connectors are 24K gold-plated, with soldering points covered by a thick aluminum shell to achieve better shielding and lower SNR. Ethernet & audio return channels eliminate extra network and audio cables. All of this while also being backwards compatible. The cable by SecurOMax averages an impressive 4.7 out of 5 stars from over 1,000 customers (91% rate a full 5 stars: read reviews), and right now its price has been reduced significantly to just $11.99. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal fresh on your mind, it’s hard to feel sorry for banks these days. But the pressure on big banks to innovate has never been higher.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Following reports that Yahoo will confirm a data breach that affects hundreds of millions of accounts, some users reported Thursday on Twitter and elsewhere that they were prompted to change their email password when trying to log in.Yahoo launched an investigation into a possible breach in early August after someone offered to sell a data dump of over 200 million Yahoo accounts on an underground market, including usernames, easy-to-crack password hashes, dates of birth and backup email addresses.The company has since determined that the breach is real and that it's even worse than initially believed, news website Recode reported Thursday, citing unnamed sources familiar with the investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A fire department in a large city certainly has a difficult job, but its mission is fairly straightforward. When a fire is detected, the fire department dispatches an appropriately sized staff to assess, contain and put out the fire, clean up, investigate what happened, and prepare themselves for the next blaze.Yup, it's a pretty simple process when a manageable number of fires are burning. But what would happen if there were hundreds or thousands of simultaneous infernos?My guess is that a senior fire chief (and perhaps other participants from local government and law enforcement) would have to make decisions on which blazes to resource and which to ignore. These decisions would certainly be based upon information analysis and best practices, but there is still some risk that the disregarded fires would end up being far worse than expected, turn into disasters, and call into question the judgement of all involved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
High-speed wireless internet could soon be delivered over power lines, according to a major mobile network operator that announced positive test results of a proposed system.AT&T says its project, called AirGig, will deliver multiple gigabit-speed wireless internet by creating broadband signals that will emanate from the power lines crossing the country and beyond.The company says it won’t actually connect its equipment directly to the powerline cables but will simply use the wires as way to send modulated radio signals to individuals’ homes, smartphones, tablets and so on. The equipment sits atop the utility poles and uses the existing wires for transmitting and receiving.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Allo is a child that Google just sent to school to become your personal assistant. The first release looks like a messenger app because it is a common user interface (UI) that almost all smartphone users know, and it is conversational. Like a child learns to speak through conversation with adults, Allo will learn to be a personal assistant through quadrillions of messaging conversations if it succeeds as the next big platform.Google Now and Apple’s Siri are rudimentary compared to the personal assistant that Google Allo could become. Google Now’s and Siri’s voice to text is pretty accurate, but the user is limited to a fixed set of commands, navigate, play music, search, etc.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The cost of complying with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation might seem like something best deferred until it enters force in 2018 -- but working on compliance just might boost profit, not reduce it.The GDPR, the EU's latest rewrite of its data privacy laws, doesn't enter effect until May 25, 2018, but already IT companies are talking up their software and services for complying with the new rules.It's not just an issue for EU enterprises: Any company processing the personal information of EU citizens is affected.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I was notified that a software update was available for a few of my systems. An update to macOS Sierra was available for my main production system, a MacBook Pro, and my travel system, a MacBook Air. My personal work environment also includes a cloud-based storage service, several Linux servers for local file and print services as well as a lonely, old Windows-based laptop to execute a single application to support a long-term consulting contract.Living with an electronic tower of potential trouble
Since my production environment is made up of systems from different vendors, purchased at different times, and software from different vendors, the prospect of updating anything, much less the operating system on one of my production machines, is scary.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You may have heard that Microsoft has made Windows 10 more secure than any of its predecessors, packing it with security goodies. What you might not know is that some of these vaunted security features aren’t available out of the box or they require additional hardware -- you may not be getting the level of security you bargained for.Features such as Credential Guard are available for only certain editions of Windows 10, while the advanced biometrics promised by Windows Hello require a hefty investment in third-party hardware. Windows 10 may be the most secure Windows operating system to date, but the security-savvy organization -- and individual user -- needs to keep the following hardware and Windows 10 edition requirements in mind in order to unlock the necessary features to achieve optimum security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the biggest mistakes companies make when responding to a cybersecurity incident is taking well-meaning steps to “clean up the mess” that actually ruin the digital evidence needed to investigate and prosecute the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Apple hasn't embraced social media the way its tech rivals have, but the company appears to have warmed to the medium. Today Apple uses its @AppleSupport account on Twitter as a customer service and outreach tool, and the company also maintains Twitter accounts for some of its most popular services, including Apple Music, the App Store, iTunes and Beats1. Apple also finally started to use its main @Apple Twitter account in the days leading up to the iPhone 7 launch earlier this month. But things got off to a bit of a rocky start. During the company's presentation, the company published and then immediately deleted at least three tweets to the @Apple account that revealed details and key features of the iPhone 7 — before it was officially announced.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technology has drastically changed the role of management in the enterprise, as teams, and even entire companies, grow more disperse. In fact, it's not out of the realm of possibility that you could eventually work for a company with an entirely remote workforce.While technology has brought plenty of positives to the corporate world, it's also made managers' jobs more difficult. How do you effectively measure engagement and performance if you have a team of workers sprinkled across the country or even the globe?Phil Shawe, Co-CEO of TransPerfect manages over 4,000 employees across 100 countries -- and he's learned a lot from the experience. He's had to get creative to make it work, but based on lessons learned growing his company from an NYU dorm room in 1992 to a global operation, he has six tips to offer for effectively managing remote teams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Larry Ellison has voiced fighting words at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference this week, announcing that Amazon Web Services’ lead in the IaaS market is over and that AWS will have “serious competition going forward.”But does Oracle actually have a shot versus AWS and the company many see as the second place vendor, Microsoft?“It depends,” says Gartner distinguished analyst Lydia Leong, author of the annual Magic Quadrant benchmark report for the public Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud market.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Oracle CEO Mark Hurd says he has the whole cloud stack +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The hardest thing about adopting an enterprise collaboration platform can be adoption itself – getting employees to actually start up the new software and then turn to it whenever they need to communicate.Putting the software inside something that workers already use is one way to drive adoption and also make the communication tools more valuable. Cisco Systems knows this, and on Thursday the company announced a strategic alliance with Salesforce, its second big partnership in that direction after its headline-grabbing Apple iOS integration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Start making the list and checking it twiceThe calendar may say it’s the beginning of fall, but that won’t prevent us from giving you a sneak peek at some of the hottest devices and gadgets that will top your holiday wish list. Here’s a bunch of cool stuff that we’re hoping to get our hands on to present in our 17th annual Cool Yule Tools holiday gift guide (coming Nov. 14). Keep in mind that these devices are not yet reviewed, so we’re not giving these our official seal of approval for cool yule goodness, but rather an indication of some things that could be in the final guide.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday we reported on the reaction to a Cisco bug report that speculated “partial data traffic loss” on the company’s ASR 9000 Series routers was possibly triggered by “cosmic radiation causing SEU soft errors.”Reaction to that contention on a Reddit forum ranged from the obvious -- acknowledgment that cosmic radiation is an issue -- to sharp-tongued skepticism and tales of the cosmic radiation villain being used as a tongue-in-cheek place-holder meaning “we really don’t know what caused the problem yet.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here