PCs everywhere, out of sightE3 is a console show. It’s common knowledge. The big-name publishers trip over themselves to announce PlayStation and Xbox exclusivity deals during blockbuster “Day Zero” conferences, and Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft’s booths eat up mammoth chunks of the conference floor.But here’s the thing: While consoles get all the E3 hype, the vast majority of the games revealed at the show actually wind up on PCs as well, thanks to the inclusion of AMD hardware in every major next-gen console. Every time you hear the term “console exclusive” at E3—rather than PlayStation or Xbox exclusive, specifically—that means the game’s destined for computers, too. And this year there were a whole lot of “console exclusives,” not to mention a whole show devoted solely to PC gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ericsson is preparing to lay off between 3,000 and 4,000 staff this summer, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
Thousands more may have to go at the network equipment manufacturer as management look for additional cost savings of 10 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources.
Ericsson had around 115,000 staff in April, 17,000 of them in Sweden
A spokeswoman declined to discuss Tuesday's news report, saying the company does not comment on rumors and speculation.
Ericsson is facing increasing competition from a more focused Nokia, which swallowed its Franco-American rival, Alcatel-Lucent, earlier this year, and especially from Chinese vendors such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE. It's a critical time for wireless infrastructure vendors and their carrier customers, as they taper off investment in fourth-generation networks in preparation for the next, still largely undefined, generation of technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft yesterday announced it would buy the business social network LinkedIn for a company acquisition record of $26.2 billion, a purchase triggered by Microsoft's appetite for algorithms, an analyst argued.
"There are two components to LinkedIn that Microsoft wanted," said Jenny Sussin, a Gartner research director, in an interview. "One is the data component, the other is the algorithm component."
An algorithm is a set of operations that tells a computer what calculations to run on what data, then how to process that data to generate a result. Algorithms are the "secret sauce" of many technology firms, the fiercely-guarded crown jewels on which a company's fortunes rest. Google's page-ranking algorithms, for example, are as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola, and just as critical to Google's ability to generate relevant search results as the sugar water formula is to Coke's bottom line.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The computer-controlled REC TEC wood pellet grill averages 5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from nearly 250 customers (93% rate it 5 stars - read reviews) and promises to change the way you eat. The grill starts with the push of a button and accurately maintains temperatures between 180 and 500-degrees, in 5-degree increments, by self-feeding from a hopper of real hardwood pellets available in apple, oak, pecan and more. This precision instrument is built with high temp durable powder coat finish, stainless steel handles, and features a 40-pound capacity hopper for long lasting grill or smoking sessions, and a large 19.5x36" grilling area. To help win your confidence they offer an "unmatched" 6-year limited warranty. With a regular list price of $1,598, it's currently discounted by a whopping 38% to $998 making it an attractive option, if you're in the market. Learn more about the discounted REC TEC grill at Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Analysis of Apple’s biggest announcements from WWDCImage by ReutersApple's WWDC keynote, which included demos and presentations from Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, (pictured above) was jam-packed with a number of intriguing announcements and software updates spanning the entirety of the company's product lineup. From watchOS and iOS to tvOS and macOS, Apple gave us a whole lot to digest. To help you make sense of it all, we've compiled a list highlighting the top announcements to come out of WWDC 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Russian hackers managed to breach the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and stole opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.The hackers had access to email and chat traffic as far back as last summer, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. No financial data was stolen, however, suggesting that espionage was the motive.The hackers belong to two separate groups that have been linked to the Russian government, according to security firm Crowdstrike, which was hired to mitigate the data breach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft released 16 security bulletins for June, five of which are rated critical for remote code execution vulnerabilities. Even the MSRC team doesn’t seem too excited over this month’s patches as the entire Patch Tuesday announcement is a mere three sentences.FYI: You should be keeping an eye out for the Adobe Flash Player patch as Adobe issued a security advisory, warning of a Flash exploit being used in the wild for targeted attacks. The fix for Flash is expected to be released on Thursday, June 16.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Normally, I’m a huge skeptic of big-bucks tech mergers. But I’m 100 percent on board with Microsoft’s $26.2 billion surprise acquisition of LinkedIn, announced earlier this week.+ Also on Network World: Microsoft scoops up LinkedIn for $26.2B in cash +Why? Because as I see it, merger success isn’t usually based on technology fit or market positioning or trivia like that. Instead, most of the time it all hinges on the compatibility of corporate culture and values, and Microsoft and LinkedIn are eerily similar those regards—like twin sons from different mothers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Before Raspberry Pi rocked the world of makers, boards from BeagleBoard.org were the computers of choice among developers who were looking to create cool gadgets.One of its boards, BeagleBone, isn't as popular as it used to be, but it still has a loyal following. Seeed Studios has taken a version of the open-source board and given it a much-needed wireless upgrade, adding Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support.The BeagleBone Green Wireless is a significant improvement over predecessors: among other things it now allows makers to add wireless capabilities to smart home devices, wearables, health monitors and other gadgets. The upgrade also brings BeagleBone into the Internet of Things era, in which wirelessly interconnected devices are constantly exchanging data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Rejecting challenges by ISPs and broadband trade groups, an appeals court has upheld the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's controversial net neutrality rules, passed in 2015.
The legal wrangling will likely continue for years, however, and may go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in an opinion issued Tuesday, ruled that the FCC had the authority to reclassify broadband as a common-carrier telecom service to provide a foundation for net neutrality rules that prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet traffic.
Past court rulings have given agencies the authority to change their minds, like the FCC did when it re-regulated broadband, Judges David Tatel and Sri Srinivasan wrote in an 184-page opinion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
News this morning from storage vendor Scality that the company is announcing the general availability of its S3 Server Software. The offering is an open source version of Scality's S3 API and allows developers to code to Amazon Web Services' S3 storage API on a local machine.Packaged as a Docker container (what else!) the idea is that developers can local build applications that thereafter can be deployed on premises, on AWS or some combination of the above.RING storage capabilities
Scality has grown to scale (pun intended) by offering storage solutions that now store some 800 billion objects. Scality's RING storage supports any file and object application, sited on any hardware and with no capacity constraints. Given its standard API approaches, RING enables storage to be completed across public or private services and can be deployed on any standard x86 hardware, without the need to re-architect as infrastructure changes occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In an effort to solidifying its footing in the still-shifting public IaaS cloud computing market, CenturyLink today announced plans to buy ElasticBox, a company that specializes in hybrid cloud management software.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: VMware buys Arkin to increase virtual networking adoption +During a week filled with mega M&A news, this deal cloud deal could fly under the radar, but it's worth noticing because it highlights important trends in the cloud industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The financial industry has been one of the most reticent to adopt IaaS public cloud computing services, but researchers at Deutsche Bank predict that big banks’ use of cloud will ramp up “materially” in 2017.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are using containers and cloud | What happened at Apple’s WWDC +Regulatory barriers, questions about security and legacy IT installations are the leading reasons financial services companies have not used public cloud compute and storage services thusfar, DB researchers say. Increasingly however, banks are facing pressure to cut costs and increase flexibility of IT environments. Meanwhile, public cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have become more compliance centric in order to cater to the financial services industry.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
National Harbor, Md. -- Corporate employees who help carry out cyberattacks are increasingly being sought and are seeking criminals to hire them, a Gartner analyst told a group at the consulting firm’s Security and Risk Management Summit.A group of 60 CIOs and CISOs she worked with say this recruitment is more active and becoming a larger concern because of their use of the Dark Web to sell their services, says Gartner analyst Avivah Litan.+More on Network World: National Intelligence office wants to perfect the art of security deception+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nokia hopes it will have a hit on its hands with Impact, an all-encompassing new Internet-of-Things management platform that brings together several existing products.The Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things builds on the company's established CPE (customer premises equipment) management tool for network operators, Motive Connected Device Platform, so broadband and home routers will be among the first devices to feel its impact. It already supports 80,000 different device types, Nokia said Tuesday.No doubt its new Smart Home Gateway, also unveiled Tuesday, will soon be among them. It combines a fiber "modem" with a router, dual-band gigabit Wi-Fi -- and Zigbee and Z-Wave radios for home automation. It's intended to be distributed by network operators. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Attackers are infecting computers with a new ransomware program called RAA that's written entirely in JavaScript and locks users' files by using strong encryption.Most malware programs for Windows are written in compiled programming languages like C or C++ and take the form of portable executable files such as .exe or .dll. Others use command-line scripting such as Windows batch or PowerShell.It's rare to see client-side malware written in Web-based languages such as JavaScript, which are primarily intended to be interpreted by browsers. Yet the Windows Script Host, a service built into Windows, can natively execute .js and other scripting files out of the box.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s not enough for security pros to figure out how to protect digital enterprises from risks that can ruin the business, they must effectively sell it to corporate boards whose blessing is needed to authorize the plan, Gartner analysts told attendees at their Security and Risk Management Summit.With that in mind, three Gartner security specialists walked the roughly 3,400-person audience through how to create a plan to manage risk and minimize damage when – not if – an attack succeeds, and the strategy for buy-in from the board of directors.“One hundred percent protection should not be the goal,” Gartner analyst Peter Firstbrook told the gathering. “The goal should be resilience.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple’s highly anticipated World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) always delivers a strong shot of adrenaline to the company’s software and products. And those upgrades were present in abundance at the 2016 conference.In the past, though, Apple has sometimes used WWDC to introduce dramatic new products and services and address the biggest problems on users’ minds. I didn’t see much of that this time around.Don’t get me wrong. Apple did what it had to do at WWDC. The company addressed many of its competitive shortcomings and product lapses, upgrading key components across virtually its entire product line.+ More on Network World: FIRST LOOK: What happened at Apple’s WWDC +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
“The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.”—FedRamp websiteThat sounds positive, but getting approved for the FedRAMP certification is far tougher than most cloud providers anticipated. In fact, few organizations are truly capable of making it through the process. As shared by an article in GCN:“Of more than 80 cloud providers who have applied to go through the FedRAMP certification, more than half are not yet ready to go through the process, according to Kathy Conrad, principal deputy associate administrator with the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple and Cisco Systems have fleshed out their plans to make iOS devices work better in enterprises and said the new capabilities will arrive in the fall.Voice calls on Cisco’s Spark collaboration app will act like regular phone calls, IT departments will be able to give Cisco apps priority on iOS devices, and iPhone calls will run over corporate networks. These are some of the ways the two companies’ technologies will mesh in enterprises.Cisco announced the coming features on Monday after Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote. They’ll ship in a version of Cisco Spark updated for iOS 10. Apple also touched on the news at WWDC as one of very few enterprise announcements at the show.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here