For once, there will be a ceasefire in the war between major chip architectures x86, ARM and Power9, which will all be used in a supercomputer being built in Barcelona.The MareNostrum 4 is being built by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and will have three clusters, each of which will house Intel x86, ARM and Power9 chips. Those clusters will be linked to form a supercomputer that will deliver up to 13.7 petaflops of performance.All three architectures have never been implemented together in a supercomputer, let alone PCs or servers. It raises questions on how the architectures will interoperate.The three chip architectures are fundamentally different. An application written to take advantage of a specific architecture won't work on another, but server architectures are changing so different types of systems can coexist. Linux supports x86, ARM and Power, so it's possible to write applications to work across architectures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today promoted its Windows 10 August upgrade to the Current Branch for Business release track, putting the "Anniversary Update" in the queue for automatic download and installation on enterprise PCs.The move will also set in motion a two-month countdown clock on support for the original mid-2015 version of Windows 10."Windows 10 1607, also known as the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, has been declared as Current Branch for Business (CBB) and is ready for deployment," Michael Niehaus, a director of product marketing, said in a post to a company blog that used similar wording to the first upgrade to the CBB. In April, Microsoft moved the November 2015 upgrade to the corporate delivery track.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple this week signed on another large business customer through its partnership with IBM. The deal that will see Finland's largest airline use iOS apps for technical operations and customer experience. Finnair says it carries more than 10 million customers each year between 70 cities in Europe, 17 in Asia and three cities in North America. Finnair has a team in place at IBM's "MobileFirst for iOS Garage," which operates as a collaborative development hub for iOS enterprise apps. IBM says its MobileFirst for iOS customers have direct access to the world's largest concentration of developers that use Swift (Apple's programming language for iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS), designers, integration experts and enterprise iOS consultants. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Look after your home 24/7 in crisp 1080p HD. With Nest Cam Indoor, you can check in, even when you’re out, and even at night with its built-in high-quality night vision. Nest Cam features a versatile magnetic stand that lets you put it anywhere. See who’s there, listen in and speak up to get their attention. With Nest Aware, you can get a special alert if Nest Cam sees a person, and save 10 or 30 days of continuous video history in the cloud. Then speed through it in seconds and quickly find the moment you’re looking for in Sightline. Nest's indoor camera is a best-seller on Amazon with 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,300 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $199 has been reduced 12% to $174.60 on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Corporate digital strategy—whether it involves the cloud, the Internet of Things or other technologies—has presented new opportunities for infrastructure engineering. The infrastructure engineer, traditionally relegated to hardware provisioning and maintenance, is now an integral part of solution design and delivery. But this shift entails new expectations along with new demand.The shift towards cloud-based, software-defined infrastructure requires today’s infrastructure engineer to marry traditional, specialized depth in a technology tower (e.g., network) with architectural breadth across towers. That doesn’t mean a network engineer needs equivalent expertise in storage and hosting technologies, but it does mean engineers have to understand how network, storage and hosting technologies (as well as software) interact and integrate to deliver a business outcome. As more core engineering activities in each tower become automated, engineers will become more focused on the configuration and orchestration of technologies to deliver seamless service performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft’s mobile OS is tracking to eventually drop to 0.1 percent market share, and the proposed Surface Phone line expected next year won't do anything to stop that decline. That's the conclusion from IDC, which just released its latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. It puts global smartphone year-over-year growth in 2016 at a paltry 0.6 percent That's a major drop from the 10.4 percent year-over-year growth in 2015. + Also on Network World: When it comes to security, Android is the new Windows +
However, that's the total market. For just 4G smartphones, IDC predicts a 21.3 percent year-over-year growth globally for 2016, reaching 1.17 billion units. Much of this growth is coming from emerging markets, such as Asia/Pacific—excluding Japan—Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. Mature markets such as the U.S., Canada, Japan and Western Europe are further along the 4G adoption curve, so the growth is slower.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Boost the range of your existing WiFi and create a stronger signal in hard-to-reach areas with a WiFi range extender like this one from Netgear, which is highly rated and currently discounted 43% on Amazon. . This compact AC750 wall-plug WiFi booster delivers AC dual band WiFi up to 750 Mbps, and is small and discreet, easily blending into your home decor. Well over 13,000 people have reviewed the AC750 on Amazon (read reviews) and have given it an average of 4 out of 5 stars. Right now its list price of $70 has been reduced to $36.93. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services continued to push its infrastructure offering forward on Wednesday with the launch of upgrades to its existing instance types and new tools for simplifying and accelerating computation tasks in its public cloud.AWS CEO Andy Jassy unveiled a new Elastic GPUs feature for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that will let developers add flexible acceleration using parallel processing for their applications.On top of that, Amazon launched a new Lightsail service that’s aimed at giving customers an easy way to spin up a straightforward virtual private server without having to orchestrate a fleet of different AWS services. Finally, the company also unveiled upgrades to its burstable, memory intensive, high I/O, and compute intensive instances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new Android malware has managed to steal access to more than 1 million Google accounts, and it continues to infect new devices, according to security firm Checkpoint.“We believe that it is the largest Google account breach to date,” the security firm said in Wednesday blog post.The malware, called Gooligan, has been preying on devices running older versions of Android, from 4.1 to 5.1, which are still used widely, especially in Asia.Gooligan masquerades as legitimate-looking Android apps. Checkpoint has found 86 titles, many of which are offered on third-party app stores, that contain the malicious coding.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services is marching toward powering its global cloud footprint completely with renewable energy, with plans to be half way to the goal by the end of next year.As of April 2015, the company was a quarter of the way to its goal of using 100% renewable energy. One of its 14 regions – in Oregon – already runs completely on green power. At the AWS re:Invent conference this week, VP and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton said the company is now 40% of the way to its goal and hopes to be 45% by the end of this year. By the end of next year it hopes to be half way there.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Cool products at AWS re:Invent | A peek inside Amazon’s massive cloud, from global footprint to custom built silicon +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three senators' efforts to stop a major expansion of U.S. law enforcement agencies' hacking powers has failed for now.Proposed changes to Rule 41, the search-and-seizure provision in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, will go into effect Thursday barring any last-minute action in Congress. The rules change will give U.S. law enforcement agencies the authority to cross jurisdictional lines and hack computers anywhere in the world during criminal investigations. Until now, the rules, in most cases, prohibited federal judges from issuing a search warrant outside their jurisdictions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Top tech predictions for 2017It's the time of year for tech predictions. We've rounded up a slew of ideas from industry watchers who track IT budgets, cybersecurity, hiring, infrastructure management, IoT, virtual reality and more. Here are their predictions, projections and prognostications.IT spending set to rise 2.9%Growth in software and IT services revenue will drive an increase in worldwide IT spending, which Gartner forecasts will climb 2.9% to $3.5 trillion in 2017. Software spending is projected to grow 6% in 2016, and it will grow another 7.2% in 2017 to total $357 billion, according to Gartner. IT services spending, which is on pace to grow 3.9% in 2016, will increase 4.8% in 2017 to reach $943 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Amazon Web Services gave its cloud customers a set of new infrastructure capabilities aimed at making its compute offering faster for complex applications that benefit from hardware acceleration.The F1 instance type, which entered beta on Wednesday, lets companies deploy applications that are accelerated by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs allow users to program hardware to perform a particular task quicker than a general-purpose processor would be able to.AWS CEO Andy Jassy positioned the new instances as a way to democratize access to the hardware needed to optimize speed for particular applications. Several other public cloud providers have turned to specialized hardware like FPGAs to try and accelerate the speed of their offerings. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Why do you spend the big bucks for security products? For protection, right? But many of the top security vendors utilize open-source or third-party components and libraries that are seemingly packed with vulnerabilities.While this is something you already know, a new report found that security products are some of the most vulnerable software. Flexera Software, which acquired Secunia in 2015, noted that between August and October of 2016, 46 products made it to the top 20 most vulnerable products. Eleven of those software products overflowing with vulnerabilities were security-related products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Seagate expansion desktop drive provides extra storage for your ever-growing collection of files. Instantly add space for more files, consolidate all of your files to a single location, or free up space on your computer's internal drive to help improve performance. Setup is straightforward; simply plug in the included power supply and USB cable, and you are ready to go. It is automatically recognized by the Windows operating system, so there is no software to install and nothing to configure. Saving files is easy too-just drag-and-drop. Take advantage of the fast data transfer speeds with the USB 3.0 interface by connecting to a SuperSpeed USB 3.0 port. This drive receives 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon, where its typical list price of $199.99 has been reduced 33% to $99.99. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Former presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce legislation to discourage companies from relocating jobs offshore. The legislation would punish offshore decisions with loss of tax breaks and government contracts and impose an "outsourcing tax" on firms that proceed nonetheless.The proposal, announced this weekend, singles out United Technologies for its decision to close its Carrier Corp. manufacturing plant in Indianapolis and relocate operations to Mexico.[To comment on this story, go to Computerworld's Facebook page.]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you’ve spent any time evaluating software version-control systems, you have undoubtedly looked at GitHub Enterprise and Bitbucket Server, two big names that offer both on-premises installs and a SaaS option. You also should have run into GitLab, an open source project backed by the company of the same name. GitLab is available in a free community edition, paid enterprise and hosted editions, and a free SaaS offering that includes the enterprise features. Though less of a household name, GitLab is a compelling alternative to its more popular rivals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Oracle is making good on plans to cut management and messaging improvements from the next version of enterprise Java.The company is axing Management 2.0 and Java Message Service (JMS) 2.1 from the Java EE 8 road map. Also, Oracle is investigating a possible transfer of the MVC functionality planned EE 8 to another community member or organization.[ The big 4 Java IDEs reviewed: See how Eclipse, NetBeans, JDeveloper, and IntelliJ IDEA stack up. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsletter. ]
"These changes are consistent with the revised Java EE road map presented at the JavaOne 2016 conference in September, in which Oracle proposed to remove these JSRs from Java EE 8," Oracle's David Delabassee noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Tech executives are optimistic as they head into 2017. One of the biggest reasons for the hopeful outlook is the fact that business and IT are finally on the same page, with planned technology projects and overall strategic business goals closely aligned for the upcoming year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Getting the gang togetherImage by ThinkstockLast month, I presented you a chamber of horrors—the worst people you meet doing IT security, many of them your friends and, sadly, co-workers. But I don't like to dwell on the negative! So I asked a slew of IT pros about the best people, the ones they want on their side when facing down the toughest security challenges. There are a number of important roles to fill, and I'm not just talking about job titles: I mean attitudes, and abilities that verge on superpowers. IT security is a team sport, so who do you want on your team?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here