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HP’s EliteBook 705 laptops pack AMD’s latest Pro chips

PC makers can't wait to test AMD's mysterious Zen chip in laptops. For now, HP and other manufacturers are making the best out of AMD's current chip offerings, the latest of which target professional users.HP has announced the EliteBook 705 family of laptops with AMD's Pro chips, which were released last month. Starting at $769, the laptops seem pricey for AMD-based systems.The EliteBook 705 family includes the 12.5-inch 725, the 14-inch 745 and the 15.6-inch 755 models. These systems can be configured with full-HD screens, up to 500GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.The laptops are targeted at business users, which may explain the price. Most high-priced laptops have Intel chips, but AMD wants a share of that market as it tries to squeak more profit out of chip sales.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Amazon slashes cloud prices ahead of re:Invent

The week before Amazon Web Services kicks off its annual re:Invent user conference the company has cut prices of its two biggest products: virtual machines and object storage.The moves come as some analysts have noted that cloud price cuts have slowed in recent years. Price cuts are not dying though, as AWS’s moves from the past few weeks show.On Nov. 14 AWS announced between 5% and 10% reductions in the cost of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), it’s core virtual machine IaaS product, effective Dec. 1.This week, the company announced between 20% and 28% reductions in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), also effective Dec. 1. Before the EC2 price reduction this month, that service’s price had not been reduced since January 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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What’s New in Docker Datacenter with Engine 1.12 – Demo Q&A

Last week we announced the latest release of Docker Datacenter (DDC) with Engine 1.12 integration, which includes Universal Control Plane (UCP) 2.0 and Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) 2.1. Now, IT operations teams can manage and secure their environment more effectively and developers can self-service select from an even more secure image base. Docker Datacenter with Engine 1.12 boasts improvements in orchestration and operations, end to end security (image signing, policy enforcement, mutual TLS encryption for clusters), enables Docker service deployments and includes an enhanced UI. Customers also have backwards compatibility for Swarm 1.x and Compose.

 

To showcase some of these new features we hosted a webinar where we provided an overview of Docker Datacenter, talked through some of the new features and showed a live demo of solution. Watch the recording of the webinar below:

 

 

We hosted a Q&A session at the end of the webinar and have included some of the most common audience questions  received.

Audience Q&A

Can I still deploy run and deploy my applications built with a previous Docker Engine version?

Yes. UCP 2.0 automatically sets up and manages a Swarm cluster alongside the native built-in swarm-mode Continue reading

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Apple teases 1-day Black Friday 2016 shopping event

In a novel approach these days, Apple is actually waiting until Black Friday, Nov. 25, until it reveals its Black Friday 2016 shopping deals. A slew of techie Black Friday deals have been touted by others, most of whom aren't waiting for the day after Thanksgiving.Apple merely teases that "Black Friday can't come soon enough" and invites consumers to visit its shopping site on Friday. The promo page, which features an Apple Watch, does mention that there is free two-day delivery on in-stock items ordered by 5pm on Black Friday and that by downloading the Apple Store app you might be privy to early access on items. Note that at least some Apple stores will have extended shopping hours too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IT Hare: Ultimate DB Heresy: Single Modifying DB Connection. Part I. Performanc

Sergey Ignatchenko continues his excellent book series with a new chapter on databases. This is a guest repost. 

The idea of single-write-connection is used extensively in the post, as it's defined elsewhere I asked Sergey for a definition so the article would make a little more sense...

As for single-write-connection - I mean that there is just one app (named "DB Server" in the article) having a single DB connection to the database which is allowed to issue modifying statements (UPDATEs/INSERTs/DELETEs). This allows to achieve several important simplifications - first of all, all fundamentally non-testable concurrency issues (such as missing SELECT FOR UPDATE and deadlocks) are eliminated entirely, second - the whole thing becomes deterministic (which is a significant help to figure out bugs - even simple text logging has been seen to make the system quite debuggable, including post-mortem), and last but not least - this monopoly on updates can be used in quite creative ways to improve performance (in particular, to keep always-coherent app-level cache which can be like 100x-1000x more efficient than going to DB).

After we finished with all the preliminaries, we can now get to the interesting part – implementing our transactional DB and Continue reading

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• A note for .NET developers: You know the pain of troubleshooting errors with limited time, limited information, and limited tools. Log management, exception tracking, Continue reading

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IBM will open the first of four new UK data centers next month

IBM is opening four new data centers in the U.K., despite some of the gloomy forecasts for the country's economy following its vote to leave the European Union.It's five years since the company began offering cloud services in the U.K., and two years since it opened its second cloud data center there.The new data centers will raise the U.K.'s share of IBM's cloud capacity in Europe from one-sixth to more than one-third. That's an interesting bet on the U.K.'s future outside the E.U.Following June's "Brexit" vote, the U.K. is set to withdraw from the 28-country bloc in a little more than two years, once the U.K. government makes up its mind when and how to leave. After that, it's anybody's guess what role data centers in the U.K. will play in the broader European economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IBM will open the first of four new UK data centers next month

IBM is opening four new data centers in the U.K., despite some of the gloomy forecasts for the country's economy following its vote to leave the European Union.It's five years since the company began offering cloud services in the U.K., and two years since it opened its second cloud data center there.The new data centers will raise the U.K.'s share of IBM's cloud capacity in Europe from one-sixth to more than one-third. That's an interesting bet on the U.K.'s future outside the E.U.Following June's "Brexit" vote, the U.K. is set to withdraw from the 28-country bloc in a little more than two years, once the U.K. government makes up its mind when and how to leave. After that, it's anybody's guess what role data centers in the U.K. will play in the broader European economy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Worth Reading: The long decline of online freedom

“Freedom on the Net,” Freedom House’s annual study on internet freedom around the world, sheds light on the fact that in many parts of the world, access to the free and open internet is simply not a reality. While this is due to a number of factors, for many people government-mobilized access restrictions and shutdowns present a significant barrier to the tremendous benefits of the internet. —The Internet Society

The post Worth Reading: The long decline of online freedom appeared first on 'net work.

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What The Evolution of APs and Cloud Means For The Next Generation of Enterprises

By: Phal Nanda, Director Product Line Management When it comes to cloud managed WLAN, it’s intriguing how the various vendors have architected their solutions. Years ago, in the controller-less days, the WLAN market consisted of fat APS that did everything...

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Nate Silver shares the secrets of accurate predictions

Statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver won fame for correctly predicting the outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election in 49 out of 50 states. And he followed that up in 2012 by nailing the winner in all 50 states.How did he do in 2016? Well, let’s just say he wasn’t as wrong as most statisticians, as he gave Clinton a little more than a 70 percent chance of winning (not far from the Trump campaign’s own predictions), while others gave her odds of up to 99 percent.So, in the wake of a continually surprising election season, what did the founder and editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight.com have to say to an audience of software and analytics professionals at New Relic’s FutureStack16 conference in San Francisco last week? Plenty, as it turns out. (Disclosure: My day job is editor-in-chief for New Relic, where I also wrote about Silver’s presentation.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Review: Netgear Orbi straddles line between traditional, mesh Wi-Fi

There continues to be lots of new products in the home Wi-Fi space. Vendors like eero, Ubiquiti Labs, Luma and Securifi have jumped into the wireless mesh space, taking on the notion of a traditional router and instead using smaller devices that can go into each room to provide better coverage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: Companies use IoT tech to personalize products, enhance consumer appeal

Personalized vitamins? Sneakers that tell you how to run better? T-shirts that request help if you collapse while running?Welcome to the future where products both help and watch out for you.How are such products designed? How can thousands of products be personalized?How do such hybrid products impact the bottom line and improve customer retention?Designing the next big hit Consumer goods have changed. The old approach of mass production is changing to mass personalization. Discrete products are provided in the form of services instead. When you do that, customer loyalty and retention improves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Cutting the cable TV cord: Roku private channels and fully loaded Kodi box

It’s been a year since I joined the ranks of cord cutters, so I thought I’d share a few tidbits learned along the way and opinions on streaming devices.ChromecastI first dipped my toe into the water by starting out with Chromecast; it was a first-generation clearance item, making it an inexpensive experiment. While it was easy to use, the device would overheat and lock up within 25 to 45 minutes of using it. Since it was plugged into a TV which was mounted against the wall, I moved Chromecast to another TV with better airflow around it. The device would still get hot, but it took longer to do so. Newer Chromecast models are supposed to be decent devices, but I can’t say that firsthand, since I switched brands.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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How career mobility programs improve retention

New research from HR executive network and research firm Future Workplace reveals that companies are increasingly investing in career mobility programs to improve employee engagement, productivity and teamwork.The Future Workplace Forecast: Navigating the Future of Work surveyed 2,147 global HR leaders and hiring managers and highlighted an emerging trend: Employers are offering internal career mobility opportunities to allow employees to "test drive" new roles and prepare them for the future workplace, according to the research.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Why a cross-platform Microsoft is good for your business

Microsoft has joined the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member. Google is joining not just the .NET foundation but the steering committee, alongside RedHat and Samsung, which is supporting .NET code on all of its Tizen devices, from smart TVs to wearables and IoT devices, running on ARM. The preview of SQL Server on Linux is ready for IT teams to try out and it has key security and data warehouse features, not just the basics. A version of Microsoft’s premier development tool, Visual Studio, has even come to Mac OS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

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Generating Documentation for TypeScript Projects

Documentation for JavaScript projects has traditionally been generated via annotations inserted as code comments. While this gets the job done, it seems far from ideal. In this post, I’ll explore how to use TypeScript to generate documentation from source code alone.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by David Joyner

TypeScript is JavaScript with optional types. Here’s a simple example:

// Sends some data to some analytics endpoint
function sendAnalyticsJS(data) {  
  if (typeof data.type !== 'string') {
    throw new Error('The `type` property is required')
  }

  navigator.sendBeacon('/beacon', JSON.stringify(data))
}


// Results in run-time error
//    The `type` property is required
sendAnalyticsJS({ foo: 'bar' })  

The JavaScript code will result in a run-time error. This is fine if the developer catches it early, but it would be better if the developer were warned as the bug was introduced. Here’s the same code written using TypeScript:

// Describe the shape of the data parameter
interface IAnalyticsData {  
  // Type is required
  type: string
  // All other fields are fair game
  [propName: string]: string
}


// We don’t particularly need the data.type check here since
// the compiler will stamp out the majority of those cases.
function sendAnalytics(data: IAnalyticsData) {  
  if  Continue reading

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Trump to attack visas that ‘undercut the American worker’

President-elect Donald Trump on Monday sent out the strongest signal yet that the H-1B visa program is going get real scrutiny once he takes office.Trump listed five executive actions he plans to take on his first day in office. They  include asking the Department of Labor to investigate "all abuses of the visa programs that undercut the American worker."Trump did not get into details and didn't specifically mention the H-1B visa, but his intent is clear. During the campaign, he was critical of the H-1B visa program and invited displaced IT workers from Disney to speak at his rallies. He said the visa is being used to undercut workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Assessing Managed SD-WAN Services

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Trump appoints critics of net neutrality rules to FCC transition team

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has appointed two opponents of current net neutrality rules to his team charged with overseeing the transition in the Federal Communications Commission.The FCC voted in February last year by 3-2 to reclassify broadband as a regulated, common-carrier service, thus prohibiting providers from selectively blocking or throttling or offering paid prioritization of traffic. The new president, who will be sworn in January, will likely undo some of the policies in the 2015 Open Internet Order, as both his nominees to the transition team - Jeff Eisenach and Mark Jamison – have previously opposed the new FCC rules.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here