Microsoft delays Sunrise calendar’s death to bring more features to Outlook

At the 11th hour, the popular Sunrise calendar app’s execution has been stayed—though not permanently.Microsoft purchased Sunrise’s parent company in February 2015 to bolster Outlook’s capabilities. And in a post last October, Microsoft confirmed plans to kill Sunrise, though it promised that “We will leave Sunrise in market until its features are fully integrated into Outlook, the exact timing of which we will communicate in advance.” This past March, the Sunrise blog confirmed that the app would be shut down completely on August 31.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CPU, GPU Put to Deep Learning Framework Test

In the last couple of years, we have examined how deep learning shops are thinking about hardware. From GPU acceleration, to CPU-only approaches, and of course, FPGAs, custom ASICs, and other devices, there are a range of options—but these are still early days. The algorithmic platforms for deep learning are still evolving and it is incumbent on hardware to keep up. Accordingly, we have been seeing more benchmarking efforts of various approaches from the research community.

This week yielded a new benchmark effort comparing various deep learning frameworks on a short list of CPU and …

CPU, GPU Put to Deep Learning Framework Test was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Toshiba hopes cloudless smartphone backup will have a bright future

What will back up all the data on your smartphone, but doesn't physically exist? No, it's not another cloud backup service, it's the centerpiece of Toshiba Storage Peripherals' booth at IFA.The as-yet-unnamed (and unfinished) product will be about the size of a small plate, to judge by the prototype in a glass case on the booth. It will have a USB connection to charge your smartphone and back up its contents to an included 500 GB hard disk. There will be no cloud servers involved, and no internet connection needed: Everything will stay inside the device, said Toshiba's product manager for hard disks, Eun-Kyung Hong."This is for home backup where you know all your data is in your home, not in the cloud where you don't know whether it's secure or not," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Toshiba hopes cloudless smartphone backup will have a bright future

What will back up all the data on your smartphone, but doesn't physically exist? No, it's not another cloud backup service, it's the centerpiece of Toshiba Storage Peripherals' booth at IFA.The as-yet-unnamed (and unfinished) product will be about the size of a small plate, to judge by the prototype in a glass case on the booth. It will have a USB connection to charge your smartphone and back up its contents to an included 500 GB hard disk. There will be no cloud servers involved, and no internet connection needed: Everything will stay inside the device, said Toshiba's product manager for hard disks, Eun-Kyung Hong."This is for home backup where you know all your data is in your home, not in the cloud where you don't know whether it's secure or not," she said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why your smartphone is sicker than a room full of snotty toddlers

If you thought your smartphone was safe(r) from the wild west of malware, spyware and other viruses compared with the PC space, think again. A new report from Nokia proclaims a “sharp rise in the occurrence of smartphone malware infections” in the first half of 2016. Taking the big hit are smartphone infections, which now account for 78% of all infections across the mobile network, says Nokia in its latest Nokia Threat Intelligence Report. The report is compiled by the company’s Threat Intelligence Lab, which aggregates anonymous data across global mobile networks using its Nokia NetGuard Endpoint Security product. Along with traffic monitor that detects malware command-and-control traffic and exploit attempts (among other attacks), the lab also keeps a database of the latest malware to analyze how attacks occur.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Using guestfish to modify VM disk image

EarIier I wrote about some ways to modify VM disk images used by Unetlab. Basically it boils down to running a VM, console to it and change things through its shell. Obviously, this approach is no way near a handy way to do small changes like: loading basic config adding license files In this post I will talk

IDG Contributor Network: The 8 fallacies of distributed computing are becoming irrelevant

In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense created ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. Around the same time, the SWIFT protocol used for money transfers was also established. These are both early examples of distributed systems: a collection of independent computers that appear to users as a single coherent system.Many come to know they have a distributed system when the crash of a computer they’ve never heard of affects the whole system. This is often the result of assumptions architects and designers of distribution systems are likely to make.In 1994, Peter Deutsch, who worked at Sun Microsystems, wrote about these assumptions to explore what can go wrong in distributed systems. In 1997, James Gosling added to this list to create what is commonly known as the eight fallacies of distributed computing. Traditional approaches, which use time-based replication to architect and build distributed systems, suffer from many of these fallacies and result in systems that are inefficient, insecure and costly to maintain. Modern approaches, using complex mathematics such as the Paxos algorithm, overcome many of these significant hurdles.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: The 8 fallacies of distributed computing are becoming irrelevant

In 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense created ARPANET, the precursor to today’s internet. Around the same time, the SWIFT protocol used for money transfers was also established. These are both early examples of distributed systems: a collection of independent computers that appear to users as a single coherent system.Many come to know they have a distributed system when the crash of a computer they’ve never heard of affects the whole system. This is often the result of assumptions architects and designers of distribution systems are likely to make.In 1994, Peter Deutsch, who worked at Sun Microsystems, wrote about these assumptions to explore what can go wrong in distributed systems. In 1997, James Gosling added to this list to create what is commonly known as the eight fallacies of distributed computing. Traditional approaches, which use time-based replication to architect and build distributed systems, suffer from many of these fallacies and result in systems that are inefficient, insecure and costly to maintain. Modern approaches, using complex mathematics such as the Paxos algorithm, overcome many of these significant hurdles.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Dropbox data breach is a warning to update passwords

Recent data breaches underline the need for Internet users to regularly update the passwords for all their Internet accounts.On Wednesday, Spotify reset the passwords of an unspecified number of users, just a day after data on 68 million accounts from Dropbox began reaching the Internet.In a notice to users, Spotify said their credentials may have been compromised in a leak involving another service, if they used the same password for both.“Spotify has not experienced a security breach and our user records are secure,” the company said in an email. The password reset is merely a precaution, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Dropbox data breach is a warning to update passwords

Recent data breaches underline the need for Internet users to regularly update the passwords for all their Internet accounts.On Wednesday, Spotify reset the passwords of an unspecified number of users, just a day after data on 68 million accounts from Dropbox began reaching the Internet.In a notice to users, Spotify said their credentials may have been compromised in a leak involving another service, if they used the same password for both.“Spotify has not experienced a security breach and our user records are secure,” the company said in an email. The password reset is merely a precaution, it said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDC predicts a rebound in tablet sales

Tablet sales have been in a serious downward spiral, but market research firm IDC has reason for optimism and believes they are due for a comeback.There is a caveat to that prediction, and that's because of a qualifier category: detachables. Tablet sales are already down 11.5 percent worldwide, while convertible and detachable devices are enjoying an uptick in sales, which is expected to continue through 2020, with shipments reaching 194.2 million as detachable tablets continue to take share from traditional PCs. + Also on Network World: Enterprise use of hybrid tablets growing fast +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Which countries have open-source laws on the books?

As the institutional use of open-source software continues to expand like an octopus, the public sector remains a key target market.Government users like Linux and other open-source software for several reasons, but the most important ones are probably that total cost of ownership is often lower than it is for proprietary products and that open-source projects don’t vanish if the company providing them goes under.Government IT folks are likely quite familiar with the perils of proprietary legacy systems - a recent Congressional hearing revealed that there are computers that date back to 1976 still in use at the federal level, and that critical taxpayer data is stored on a system written more than 50 years ago, in assembly language.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Huawei picks new name, but no new technology, for ‘Nova’ phones

Practical and reliable is the image Huawei Technologies is trying to project with two new smartphones unveiled at the IFA tradeshow on Thursday. The two phones are aimed squarely at the mid-market, and feature tried and trusted technologies, according to Kevin Ho, president of Huawei's handsets product line. So it's strange that, for phones with so little novelty, Huawei has decided on the name Nova. The Nova and Nova Plus are solid phones with rigid, confidence-inspiring aluminum cases. They run Android Marshmallow on eight-core Qualcomm processors with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of flash storage, expandable via a microSD slot. There's a fingerprint sensor on the back of the case.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Baidu open sources its deep learning platform PaddlePaddle

Taking a cue from some of its U.S. peers like Google, Chinese Internet search giant Baidu has decided to open source its deep learning platform.The company claims that the platform, code-named PaddlePaddle after PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning, will let developers focus on the high-level structure of their models without having to worry about the low-level details. A machine translation program written with PaddlePaddle, for example, requires significantly less code than on other popular deep learning platforms, said Baidu spokeswoman Calisa Cole.The PaddlePaddle platform has been used in-house by Baidu to develop products and technologies for search ranking, large-scale image classification, optical character recognition, machine translation and advertising, Baidu said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Last ditch iPhone 7 rumor rollup: EarPod, 256GB storage speculation gains steam

Apple's confirmation that it will be making news on Sept. 7 means that our regular iPhone 7 rumor roundups are winding down, but you didn't expect the rumors to dry up before the big day, did you?Just this week, the following fresh scuttlebutt has surfaced, more or less confirming a couple of the most persistent rumors about the next big iOS devices:*Mashable cites a Dutch site that posted a technical document for the iPhone 7 Plus describing "EarPods with Lightning connector," adding support to the strong rumor that Apple is ditching the traditional 3.5mm headphone jack.  A Lightning-to-headphone jack adapter and Lightning-to-USB cable connector are also mentioned.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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