IBM’s Watson cognitive computing platform is almost a victim of its own fame. Watson famously beat all-comers to win the Jeopardy game show a few years ago. At the time, the general public (helped, it has to be said, by IBM’s marketers) assumed the win was an indication that, in short order, smart computers would be everywhere and intuitively making the right decisions in every situation.+ Also on Network World: IBM's Watson wants to do your tax returns +
Since the Jeopardy win, however, IBM seems to have had a hard time finding good market fits for Watson. This isn’t a criticism of IBM in any way. The reality is that while many consumer brands apply artificial intelligence (AI) to their products (think Amazon book recommendations, Google maps smart routing or Apple's Siri) most existing examples have been from those companies building AI tools themselves. There are far fewer examples of enterprises leveraging a third-party cognitive platform to build into their own applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This extremely soft, high-quality 6x7 microfiber cloth from MagicFiber absorbs and safely removes dust, oil smudges, fingerprints, and dirt from eyeglasses, camera lenses, computer screens, televisions, and other delicate surfaces without any harsh chemicals. It's machine or hand washable, and is built to last. The cloths are highly rated on Amazon, where it currently averages 4.8 out of 5 stars from over 9,100 people (90% rate 5 stars: read recent reviews). Its typical list price of $29.99 has been reduced 33% to $20 for a pack of 30 individually wrapped, so you may decide to toss one in everybody's stocking this holiday season. See the discounted 30-pack of microfiber cleaning cloths now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With Intel’s forecasts projecting the PC could be the smallest moneymaker five years from now, the company has gone “data center first”—giving Intel’s server business first crack at new manufacturing technologies.It’s another sign of massive change within Intel, as the traditional PC business is shoved to the side. In a slide presented during Intel’s investor day on Thursday, the company showed off how the total available market (TAM) for its PC CPU business was just $30 billion or so, less than half that of the data center.The TAM, as its known, projects the maximum available revenue Intel could pull in if it owned the entire market—which won’t happen. It’s an excellent guide to which segments Intel is prioritizing, however: the data center, non-volatile memory like flash and its new Optane, plus mobile communications and various embedded segments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The outcome of the annual H-1B visa lottery is immigration's Groundhog Day. It's the same result year after year, as the large outsourcing firms continue to lead all others in getting H-1B visas.But this year may be different, because of President Donald Trump.[ Join the discussion at Computerworld's H-1B & IT Outsourcing group on Facebook. ]
The H-1B lottery favors large firms. In the 2015 fiscal year, for instance, the top 10 firms received 38% of all the H-1B visas in computer occupations alone. All these firms, except for Amazon and to a partial extent IBM, are outsourcers. These large companies have the resources to submit enough visa applications to help ensure they receive a bare minimum of approvals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We continue to hear dire warnings about the inherent security risks of the Internet of Things (IoT), and indeed IoT-related incidents are happening. With many companies beginning to capture IoT data from connected devices, a key question is are they doing enough to ensure that data and networks are secure?If security executives thought they had a lot to handle with the growth of mobile devices and the expanding digital enterprise, the emergence of connected products, corporate assets, vehicles and other “things” is taking security coverage to a whole new level.A December 2016 study by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) — a cyber security think tank that acts as a conduit between private sector companies and U.S. federal agencies, points out how vulnerable enterprises are to attacks such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) via IoT.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No Intel chip is as expensive as the new Xeon E7-8894 v4 server processor.The US$8,898 Xeon chip has massive horsepower with 24 cores, 60MB of cache and a maximum clock frequency of 3.4GHz. Intel said this is the company's fastest server chip, breaking enterprise application speed records.The company's next expensive chip after the E7-8894 v4 is its other 24-core processor, the Xeon E7-8890 v4, which is priced at $7,174. The chips have similar features except for the base clock speed. The new chip starts at 2.4GHz compared to 2.2GHz for the less expensive chip.The $8,898 chip even outprices Intel's fastest supercomputing chip, the Xeon Phi 7290F, which is priced at $6,401. It is also over four times more expensive than the costliest PC chip, the $1,723 Core i7-6950X for gaming desktops.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The iPhone could really go back to becoming a status symbol if the latest iPhone 8 rumors prove true.
Grabbing attention this week is a Fast Company article, headlined "Here's why Apple's 10th anniversary iPhone will likely cost more than $1,000," in which a source says the 5.8-inch iPhone 8 is going to be packed with new features. Those include a wraparound OLED display, more memory and possibly 3D sensing technology for security.
(This concern about pricing has been a hot topic of late: See iPhone 8 Rumor Rollup -- Paying the Price for Cool.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A patient lies in a hospital bed waiting for a medical professional to conduct a blood gas analysis. Little does the patient know that his personal information is also undergoing a procedure.The database that stores patient data was found unencrypted, default passwords were used, and the nature of the exploit was basic, according to TrapX Security, which was called in later to recreate and diagnose the issues at the unnamed hospital. The technology research company recently released its findings in a report called "Anatomy of an Attack – Medical Device Hijack (MEDJACK)". The security company declined to name the three hospitals it examined, except to say they were located in the Western and Northeastern U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Fileless malware attacks, which were recently discovered in the networks of at least 140 banks, telecoms and governments, account for about 15% of known attacks today and have been around for years in different forms."Fileless malware attacks are becoming much more common and circumvent most of the endpoint protection and detection tools deployed today," Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan said.A recent discovery of fileless malware was reported on Wednesday by researchers at Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs. The attackers have not been identified and "attribution [is] almost impossible," according to Kaspersky.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has been stuck on the 400 million mark for Windows 10 for more than four months, as the head of the company's operating systems group yesterday repeated the milestone when he spoke to developers."We now have over 400 million users all around the world. This is consumers, people in schools, people in the enterprise," Terry Meyerson, who leads all Windows efforts, said at a developer's day Wednesday that was also webcast by the company.[ Related: Windows 10 Redstone: A guide to the builds ]
Yesterday's number was first announced by Microsoft in September 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This article was inspired by a post on Facebook by Ben Parr, former co-editor of Mashable. What he wrote hit a nerve with me—a nerve as raw as any of Lewis Black’s—evoking my tirade. Parr posted:
“Favorite CRM software and why?”
I replied, “They all pretty much suck and have since Siebel Systems invented it.”Let’s start with platform companies like Google and Square Payments that do not generally use CRM systems and rarely use call centers. These companies understand that any CRM system will collapse at scale, so they build well-designed web-facing responsive self-service systems as part of the product design. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
DARPA is going to have to contend with an Earth-bound problem if it is to get its plan to service satellites in geosynchronous orbit into space.The agency this week said it had picked Space Systems Loral (SSL) as its commercial partner to develop technologies under its Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites (RSGS) program that would enable cooperative inspection and servicing of satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), more than 20,000 miles above the Earth, and demonstrate those technologies on orbit.+More on Network World: How to catch a 400lb drone traveling at full speed+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft announced today it is celebrating 20 years of Visual Studio with the introduction of Visual Studio 2017, the latest iteration of its developer tool suite, on March 7.A lot has changed in those 20 years, as illustrated by a picture Microsoft posted of the contents of Visual Studio 97 (below), the first iteration of the IDE. Back then it was pretty much just a bunch of languages in one box with no real integration. Microsoft
And most of the languages supported back then are gone—such as Visual J++, a Java compiler that caused all kinds of legal problems with Sun Microsystems, and Visual C++, which has been ditched in favor of C#. Also, Visual FoxPro is pretty much dead, and the support apps, including SourceSafe and InterDev, have been replaced with newer apps or functions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Not sure what your phone is collecting about you? A free Android app is promising to simplify the privacy settings on your smartphone, and stop any unwanted data collection.The English language app, called Privacy Assistant, comes from a team at Carnegie Mellon University, who’ve built it after six years of research studying digital privacy. “It’s very clear that a large percentage of people are not willing to give their data to any random app,” said CMU professor Norman Sadeh. “They want to be more selective with their data, so this assistant will help them do that.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
5G wireless is already being hyped by AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon as their next-gen tech trials get underway, even though the term is often taken more lightly by industry observers (including us), who tone it down as just a marketing term. The 3GPP (3rd generation partnership project), which oversees cellular communications standards, has now taken a step to further rein in 5G marketing before it really gets out of hand by establishing an official logo for it that comes with some rules.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A Microsoft lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice over indefinite gag orders attached to search warrants can proceed, following a federal judge’s ruling on Thursday.The tech titan sued last year to end the government’s practice of indefinitely blocking it from informing customers of search warrants for their information. Microsoft alleged that such orders violate its First Amendment frees speech rights and the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of its users.The Justice Department argued that Microsoft couldn’t bring either of the claims in a motion argued in front of the judge two weeks ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"Every gamer is going to want to have 3D Xpoint. Every single gamer."Those were words from Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich when updating investors on the company's Optane technology, which the chipmaker believes could ultimately replace SSDs and DRAM in PCs and servers.Intel is now shipping the first-generation Optane but is also working on next-generation technologies as looks to increase density in this new class of storage and memory.Intel says Optane is significantly denser and faster than SSDs and DRAM. It is based on a technology called 3D Xpoint, co-developed with Micron.The chipmaker looks at Optane as the Moore's Law of storage. With future generations, Intel wants to make the memory smaller, denser and cheaper, and that's driving the development of Optane.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloning a drive comes in handy for a variety of reasons, but primarily when you want to replace one drive on a PC with another that is either bigger or faster than the original drive, if not both.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
IT managers disagree with chief executives over who is responsible for a cyber security breach, according to a survey released Thursday.The survey -- of a group of 221 chief executive officers and other C-level executives and another group of 984 IT decision makers -- found that each group largely believes the other group is responsible in the event of a breach.In the survey, 35% of C-level respondents said IT teams would be responsible in a breach, while 50% of IT leaders think that responsibility rests with their senior managers.Also, IT managers estimate a single cyber attack will cost their business nearly twice what top-level executives estimate. The IT managers put the cost of a single attack at $19 million, compared to the C-suite estimate of about $11 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If Jennifer Manry has her way bots will automate much of the repetitive and onerous workplace activities that consume her Capital One colleagues' time and effort. But until then the bank's vice president of workforce technology is busy helping 40,000 employees get more comfortable with new software from Slack, which allows corporate workers to instant message each other and share documents, files and other content.Capital One deployed Slack in mid-2016 and it quickly become the preferred tool for the IT department, which is embracing agile software development and DevOps principles that require close collaboration between software developers and product managers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here