The boss’s boss looks out across the server farm and sees data—petabytes and petabytes of data. That leads to one conclusion: There must be a signal in that noise. There must be intelligent life in that numerical world—a strategy to monetize all those hard disks filling up with numbers.That job falls on your desk, and you must now find a way to poke around the digital rat’s nest and find a gem to hand the boss.[ Download the InfoWorld megaguide: The best Python frameworks and IDEs. | Learn to crunch big data with R. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]
How? If you’re a developer, there are two major contenders: R and Python. There are plenty of other solutions that help crunch data, and they live under rubrics like business intelligence or data visualization, but they are often full-service solutions. If they do what you want, you should choose them. But if you want something different, well, writing your own code is the only solution. Full-service tools do a good job when the data is cleaned, buffed, and ready, but they tend to hiccup and even throw up when Continue reading
Few things have as much hold on our attention as our smartphones. Recent research found that an average user touches their mobile phone 2,617 times a day and a heavy user swipes, taps, and clicks more than 5,000 times per day! That’s nearly three to four hours a day of lost productivity.Luckily, there are a few tools that can help save you from yourself. Treat your smartphone addiction with these three apps.OffTime
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OffTime lets you tailor your smartphone use—and its distractions—for work, home, or alone time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The problem: spearphishingImage by John Singleton Copley/National Gallery of ArtSpearphishing is a top attack vector used by cyber adversaries today. Consists of fraudulent emails that appear to be legitimate which target specific organizations, groups, or individuals to gain access to information systems. Targeted spear phishing also leverages social engineering which includes research about specific targets of interest. Organizations rely on email connectivity with the outside to function and thus is an entry into a potential target’s environment that bypasses many of the legacy security stack.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft on Wednesday began letting antsy customers download Creators Update, the latest Windows 10 feature upgrade.Last week, the company had said it would make Creators Update available for manual download on April 5, about a week before it will pull the Windows Update trigger and start pushing the upgrade to most users.[ See Computerworld’s Review of Windows 10 Creators Update. ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. might add other airports to its ban restricting passengers from bringing laptops and other electronics into the cabin for certain flights from the Middle East.“We may take measures in the not too distant future to expand the number of airports,” said Homeland Security secretary John Kelly on Wednesday during a congressional hearing.Last month, the U.S. announced the ban, which affects ten airports, all of which are in Muslim-majority countries. Passengers flying to the U.S. are barred from bringing any electronic devices larger than a smartphone into a plane’s cabin, and must instead check them in as baggage. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google is investing in another massive undersea fiber-optic cable as a part of its plans to build out network connectivity around the world. The company announced Wednesday that it is helping to fund a project called Indigo, which will connect Jakarta, Singapore, Perth and Sydney to one another.The cable will run for approximately 9,000 kilometers (almost 5,600 miles) and provide a capacity of roughly 18Tbps (bits per second). It's being built to bring users more connectivity in a region that has growing internet needs.Google has now invested in five submarine cables in the Asia-Pacific region and seven overall. By investing in these cables, the company hopes to better compete with other cloud providers and consumer internet companies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We may have some bad news for anyone out there eagerly counting down the days until Apple releases its highly anticipated iPhone 8. According to a fresh report from the Chinese-language Economic Daily News (via Digitimes), the iPhone 8 release date may be pushed back by one or two months due to technical challenges Apple is encountering in the manufacturing process.According to the report, Apple is having some technical problems with the lamination process involved with the iPhone 8's OLED panels. Additionally, the company is seeing some issues with incorporating the device's advanced 3D camera sensors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You’d think ponying up for a technology leader to be your school’s commencement day speaker would be so much less of a hassle than going with a high profile politician such as President Donald Trump or his rival Hillary Clinton, yet 2017 appears to be a lean year for top techies on the college/university commencement circuit.This seems especially true for tech leaders in enterprise networking and IT, whereas in the past the heads of companies such as Cisco, IBM and Salesforce.com have commanded the commencement day stage at top schools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco warned of a variety of vulnerabilities – from letting attackers issue DDOS attack to making devices unexpectedly reload -- in some of its wireless access point and LAN gear.The only critical alert came for vulnerability in Cisco Wave 2 Aironet 1830 Series and Cisco Aironet 1850 Series Access Points.In those devices, running Cisco Mobility Express Software, a vulnerability could let an unauthenticated, remote attacker take complete control of an affected device, the company stated.+More on Network World: Cisco expands wireless reach with access points, management software+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Getting 8K displays to work with Windows 10 PCs can be difficult, as Dell is finding out.But playing with 8K on PCs is a discovery process for Dell, which shipped the first-ever 8K display -- the Dell 32 UltraSharp 8K Monitor -- last week. The small initial stock of the US$5,000 display sold out in a few days.The display won't work on all PCs and needs specific hardware and display ports. But Dell is finding out that more hardware than it originally thought can handle 8K graphics, including AMD's Radeon Pro WX 7100 workstation GPU.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking to drive the use of Network Functions Virtualization, the OPNFV project this week released the fourth version of its open source platform, known as Danube, that promises to help large organizations and service providers get a better handle on virtualization, SDN and cloud services.+More on Network World: Open source routing project gets a vital technology infusion+Heather Kirksey, director, OPNFV said Danube melds a ton of work that has been done around NFV and brings DevOps methodologies to NFV. “It brings together full next-gen networking stacks in an open, collaborative environment. By harnessing work with upstream communities into an open, iterative testing and deployment domain, we’re delivering the capabilities that truly enable NFV,” Kirksey said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Peter Corcoran, Ph.D., who describes himself as long-term IoT skeptic, published a research paper recently on arXiv.org—Third time is the charm – Why the World just might be ready for the Internet of Things this time around (pdf)—in which he speculates that this incarnation of the Internet of Things (IoT) may succeed.Technologies often fail on introduction, later to reemerge and become widely adopted. The PC, smartphone and tablet all went through at least one of these cycles.RELATED: IoT catches on in New England fishing town
In the early 1990s, the Consumer Electronics Association first tried to promote CEBus, a specification for interconnecting devices in the home that supported multiple physical layers, including twisted pair, coaxial cable, powerline, wireless and even RF. CEBus was too early.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Scimitar RGB gaming mouse revolutionizes game play with its Key Slider control system, 12 mechanical side buttons, and pro-proven 12,000 DPI optical sensor. It’s purpose built to deliver the ultimate MOBA and MMO gaming experience. Brilliant customizable multicolor backlighting immerses you in the game and provides nearly unlimited lighting adjustability. The gaming mouse averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 380 people on Amazon (read reviews), where its typical list price of $79.99 has been reduced 38% to $49.99. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A critical vulnerability in the widely used Xen hypervisor allows attackers to break out of a guest operating system running inside a virtual machine and access the host system's entire memory.This is a serious violation of the security barrier enforced by the hypervisor and poses a particular threat to multi-tenant data centers where the customers' virtualized servers share the same underlying hardware.The open-source Xen hypervisor is used by cloud computing providers and virtual private server hosting companies, as well as by security-oriented operating systems like Qubes OS.The new vulnerability affects Xen 4.8.x, 4.7.x, 4.6.x, 4.5.x, and 4.4.x and has existed in the Xen code base for over four years. It was unintentionally introduced in December 2012 as part of a fix for a different issue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Four years ago, Google was faced with a conundrum: if all its users hit its voice recognition services for three minutes a day, the company would need to double the number of data centers just to handle all of the requests to the machine learning system powering those services.Rather than buy a bunch of new real estate and servers just for that purpose, the company embarked on a journey to create dedicated hardware for running machine- learning applications like voice recognition.The result was the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip that is designed to accelerate the inference stage of deep neural networks. Google published a paper on Wednesday laying out the performance gains the company saw over comparable CPUs and GPUs, both in terms of raw power and the performance per watt of power consumed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s AppDynamics this week rolled out a developer toolkit that will let corporate development teams quickly build and measure the business impact of Web and mobile applications.The AppDynamics Developer Toolkit will feature a variety of languages and diagnostic tools that let application teams measure the business impact of new programs.+More on Network World: Cisco closes AppDynamics deal, increases software weight+“We expect that the developers toolkit will help customers take real-time application performance data and tie it to business outcomes,” said Matt Chotin, product marketing chief at AppDynamics “It will help enterprises break down silos, become more collaborative and get DevOps more involved in making the business innovative.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I admit it: Like most people, I’m terrible at passwords. Too often I use too-simple passwords, and I don’t always come up with a new one for every site and service I log into. Then, when I do come up with a strong, unique password, I often forget it entirely and have to request an email to reset it—typically to something either too easy to guess or something I’ll instantly forget again.+ Also on Network World: Stop using password manager browser extensions +
That’s why password managers exist. They’re designed to let you enter a single, secure password in one place and then generate new, strong passwords for every application where you need one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When you take a chance and buy internet of insecure things devices, you already have to accept apps that have crazy overreaching permissions if you want your smart devices to work—and hope any vulnerabilities discovered will be patched. But should you have to worry about ticking off the device maker and having your device remotely disabled?There are all kinds of services and products that do not offer customer support on a Saturday night, which is frustrating when something goes wrong over the weekend and you need help. In the case of IoT garage door opener Garadget, unhappy customer Robert Martin wrote on a Garadget support thread:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Speculation is heating up again this week regarding the possibility that Apple might delay the arrival of its iPhone 8 (or iPhone X) smartphone until October or November due to technical issues related to the lamination of its new curved OLED displays as well as with its 3D sensing system.Apple historically has released its new flagship iPhones in September, but scuttlebutt in the supply chain says things could be otherwise in 2017. Speculation is that Apple could roll out its 7s and 7s Plus phones in September, with the high-end iPhone 8 becoming available shortly afterwards.MORE: Apple's Mobility Partner Program comes out of hidingTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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