IDC predicts the collapse of the Windows Phone by 2020

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

29% off NETGEAR AC750 WiFi Range Extender – Deal Alert

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 $50. See it now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

47% off NETGEAR AC750 WiFi Range Extender – Deal Alert

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

47% off NETGEAR AC750 WiFi Range Extender – Deal Alert

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 accelerates and simplifies its cloud infrastructure offering

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

Python Basics – Part 2 cont…

4.Tuples

A tuple is similar to a list. The difference between the two is that we cannot change the elements of a tuple once it is assigned whereas in a list, elements can be changed. A tuple is created by placing all the items (elements) inside a parentheses ()

• We generally use tuple for different datatypes and list for homogeneous similar datatypes.
• Since tuple are immutable, means value can not be changed.
• Tuples that contain immutable elements can be used as key for a dictionary. With list, this is not possible.
• If you have data that doesn’t change, implementing it as tuple will guarantee that it remains write-protected.

Empty tuples are constructed by an empty pair of parentheses; a tuple with one item is constructed by following a value with a comma (it is not sufficient to enclose a single value in parentheses)

CODE:

OUTPUT:

5 .Dictionary

Python dictionary is an unordered set of key:value pairs , with the requirement that the keys are unique (within one dictionary). A pair of braces creates an empty dictionary: {}.Dictionary have no concept of order among elements.

Keys are unique within a dictionary while values may not be.The values Continue reading

Android malware steals access to more than 1 million Google accounts

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

Android malware steals access to more than 1 million Google accounts

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’s cloud will be half way to 100% renewable power by end of next year

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

Senators fail to stop new rules allowing US law-enforcement hacking

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

Senators fail to stop new rules allowing US law-enforcement hacking

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

What’s in store for tech in 2017

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

What’s in store for tech in 2017

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

AWS launches FPGA-based cloud instances to accelerate complex applications

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

Lenovo Drives HPC From The Middle Ground

While we all spend a lot of time talking about the massive supercomputers that cultivate new architectures, and precisely for that reason, it is the more modest cluster that makes use of these technologies many years hence that actually cultivates a healthy and vibrant HPC market.

Lenovo picked up a substantial HPC business when it acquired IBM’s System x server division two years ago and also licensed key software, such as the Platform Computing stack and the GPFS file system, to drive its own HPC agenda. The Sino-American system maker has been buoyed by higher volume manufacturing thanks to the …

Lenovo Drives HPC From The Middle Ground was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Security products among the most vulnerable software

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

Security products among the most vulnerable software

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

Liveblog: Introduction to Managed Database Services on AWS

This is a liveblog of the AWS re:Invent session titled “Introduction to Managed Database Services on AWS” (DAT307). The speakers for the session are Steve Hunt, Alan Murray, and Robin Spira, all of FanDuel; and Darin Briskman, from AWS Database Services.

Briskman kicks off the session with a quick review of AWS’ managed database offerings. These fall into four categories, which Briskman reviewed so quickly I couldn’t capture. I think they were SQL, NoSQL, data warehousing, and something else. Why use managed databases? Because this allows AWS to take over the responsibility for OS maintenance, DB maintenance, high availability, scalability, etc. All you have to worry about it is the application that runs on the database.

What are the managed relational database services that AWS offers?

• Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service): The oldest service, now supporting MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle
• Amazon Aurora: MySQL-compatible (and now PostgreSQL-compatible per the announcement today) with greater scalability, better performance, transparent encryption, high availability, and integration with AWS Lambda

Relational databases are really helpful in many cases, but sometimes NoSQL databases would be more helpful. AWS also offers DynamoDB, which is a managed NoSQL database service. DynamoDB is always clustered, and Continue reading

Why Networking Doesn’t Get Respect Anymore

Worth Reading: Social Media for Social Influence

A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces. The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion. —Motherboard

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