The future of Office may lie in ‘decomposable’ documents

Microsoft wants you to spend less time thinking about Office and more time getting things done.An executive who helped design one of Office's most iconic features outlined a plan for its future on Tuesday, one that calls for smarter software assisted by AI and "decomposable" documents that are easier to find."No one wants to necessarily learn about the ins and outs of the tool; they have something that they're trying to get done," said Julie Larson-Green, chief experience officer for Microsoft Office, when asked about the future of the software at a Bloomberg conference.Microsoft has already added AI-powered features to the latest versions of Office that help people find functions they're looking for, and more AI is coming. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi maker gets bought for $867 million

A key manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi is being acquired for US$867 million, but the foundation that develops the ultra-cheap computers says it hopes that business will continue as usual.Premier Farnell of the U.K. has manufactured the Raspberry Pi under contract to the Raspberry Pi Foundation since the product first shipped about four years ago. The boards start for as low as $5, and more than 8 million have been sold. They're particularly popular among hobbyists, who use them to build cheap gaming consoles, laptops and smart glasses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi maker gets bought for $867 million

A key manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi is being acquired for $867 million, but the foundation that develops the ultra-cheap computers says it hopes that business will continue as usual.Premier Farnell of the U.K. has manufactured the Raspberry Pi under contract to the Raspberry Pi Foundation since the product first shipped about four years ago. The boards start for as low as $5, and more than 8 million have been sold. They're particularly popular among hobbyists, who use them to build cheap gaming consoles, laptops and smart glasses.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware Acquires Virtual Network Manager Arkin Net

Gartner: Colin Powell says he used insecure email during State Department tenure; Oh and we should vote out Congress

National Harbor, Md. -- Former Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged using insecure email during his tenure at the State Department – but as a way to create more immediate communication among those within and outside the department.During his keynote address at Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit he told the 3,400 in attendance that he had two computers on his desk, one the official secure computer – “clunky and difficult to use” – and the other a laptop with a phone line and modem that he used exclusively for his AOL account.+More on Network World: Gartner: ‘Insider threat is alive and well on the dark Web’+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

47 must-see PC gaming gems revealed at E3 2016: Watch every trailer

PCs everywhere, out of sightE3 is a console show. It’s common knowledge. The big-name publishers trip over themselves to announce PlayStation and Xbox exclusivity deals during blockbuster “Day Zero” conferences, and Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft’s booths eat up mammoth chunks of the conference floor.But here’s the thing: While consoles get all the E3 hype, the vast majority of the games revealed at the show actually wind up on PCs as well, thanks to the inclusion of AMD hardware in every major next-gen console. Every time you hear the term “console exclusive” at E3—rather than PlayStation or Xbox exclusive, specifically—that means the game’s destined for computers, too. And this year there were a whole lot of “console exclusives,” not to mention a whole show devoted solely to PC gaming.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson will lay off 3,000 this summer, says Swedish newspaper

Ericsson is preparing to lay off between 3,000 and 4,000 staff this summer, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Thousands more may have to go at the network equipment manufacturer as management look for additional cost savings of 10 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources. Ericsson had around 115,000 staff in April, 17,000 of them in Sweden A spokeswoman declined to discuss Tuesday's news report, saying the company does not comment on rumors and speculation. Ericsson is facing increasing competition from a more focused Nokia, which swallowed its Franco-American rival, Alcatel-Lucent, earlier this year, and especially from Chinese vendors such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE. It's a critical time for wireless infrastructure vendors and their carrier customers, as they taper off investment in fourth-generation networks in preparation for the next, still largely undefined, generation of technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ericsson will lay off 3,000 this summer, says Swedish newspaper

Ericsson is preparing to lay off between 3,000 and 4,000 staff this summer, according to Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Thousands more may have to go at the network equipment manufacturer as management look for additional cost savings of 10 billion Swedish kronor (US$1.2 billion), the newspaper said, citing anonymous sources. Ericsson had around 115,000 staff in April, 17,000 of them in Sweden A spokeswoman declined to discuss Tuesday's news report, saying the company does not comment on rumors and speculation. Ericsson is facing increasing competition from a more focused Nokia, which swallowed its Franco-American rival, Alcatel-Lucent, earlier this year, and especially from Chinese vendors such as Huawei Technologies or ZTE. It's a critical time for wireless infrastructure vendors and their carrier customers, as they taper off investment in fourth-generation networks in preparation for the next, still largely undefined, generation of technology.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft covets LinkedIn’s algorithms

Microsoft yesterday announced it would buy the business social network LinkedIn for a company acquisition record of $26.2 billion, a purchase triggered by Microsoft's appetite for algorithms, an analyst argued. "There are two components to LinkedIn that Microsoft wanted," said Jenny Sussin, a Gartner research director, in an interview. "One is the data component, the other is the algorithm component." An algorithm is a set of operations that tells a computer what calculations to run on what data, then how to process that data to generate a result. Algorithms are the "secret sauce" of many technology firms, the fiercely-guarded crown jewels on which a company's fortunes rest. Google's page-ranking algorithms, for example, are as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola, and just as critical to Google's ability to generate relevant search results as the sugar water formula is to Coke's bottom line.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

38% off REC TEC Wood Pellet Grill and Smoker – Deal Alert

The computer-controlled REC TEC wood pellet grill averages 5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from nearly 250 customers (93% rate it 5 stars - read reviews) and promises to change the way you eat. The grill starts with the push of a button and accurately maintains temperatures between 180 and 500-degrees, in 5-degree increments, by self-feeding from a hopper of real hardwood pellets available in apple, oak, pecan and more. This precision instrument is built with high temp durable powder coat finish, stainless steel handles, and features a 40-pound capacity hopper for long lasting grill or smoking sessions, and a large 19.5x36" grilling area. To help win your confidence they offer an "unmatched" 6-year limited warranty. With a regular list price of $1,598, it's currently discounted by a whopping 38% to $998 making it an attractive option, if you're in the market. Learn more about the discounted REC TEC grill at Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A Universal Snap Works Across All Linux Distributions

Canonical contributed the initial code for the snap.

Is It Real, or Is It Cumulus VX?

Phew! Cumulus Linux 3.0 has just been released! A big shout out to all of my engineering colleagues who worked so hard to make this happen. JR Rivers gave an overview of all the goodies included in 3.0 in his recent blog post. Stay tuned for more blog posts from other engineers for details on all of those new features.

But Cumulus Linux isn’t the only beneficiary of all the 3.0 work. Cumulus VX, our free virtual machine-based version of Cumulus Linux, also has some pretty cool new tricks. When we launched Cumulus VX last August we thought it would be a way for people to get hands on with a Linux-based switch operating system, in their own environment and without any commitment. Boy, Were we surprised at how it quickly became so much more. With over 3,800 unique users, Cumulus VX is being deployed in all sorts of ways we never dreamed of. As just one example, existing customers are using it to validate their configurations before upgrading their physical switches from one release to another.

What’s New?

And that brings me to the first change we’ve made: concurrent releases. Our plan from now on Continue reading

A closer look at Apple’s biggest announcements from WWDC 2016

Analysis of Apple’s biggest announcements from WWDCImage by ReutersApple's WWDC keynote, which included demos and presentations from Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, (pictured above) was jam-packed with a number of intriguing announcements and software updates spanning the entirety of the company's product lineup. From watchOS and iOS to tvOS and macOS, Apple gave us a whole lot to digest. To help you make sense of it all, we've compiled a list highlighting the top announcements to come out of WWDC 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russian hackers breach DNC computers, steal data on Trump

Russian hackers managed to breach the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and stole opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.The hackers had access to email and chat traffic as far back as last summer, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. No financial data was stolen, however, suggesting that espionage was the motive.The hackers belong to two separate groups that have been linked to the Russian government, according to security firm Crowdstrike, which was hired to mitigate the data breach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Russian hackers breach DNC computers, steal data on Trump

Russian hackers managed to breach the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and stole opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.The hackers had access to email and chat traffic as far back as last summer, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday. No financial data was stolen, however, suggesting that espionage was the motive.The hackers belong to two separate groups that have been linked to the Russian government, according to security firm Crowdstrike, which was hired to mitigate the data breach.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary

Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively.

Servers have been smashed wide open in large enterprises, HPC centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders (excepting Microsoft Azure, of course) by the double whammy of the ubiquity of the X86 server and the open source Linux operating system, and storage has followed suit …

The Walls Come Down On The Last Bastion Of Proprietary was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Worth Reading: The end of the hypervisor

The death knell of the hypervisor was sounded when Intel provided much of the unique capabilities of the hypervisor directly in the chip via the Intel-VTx instruction set. Prior to this, VMware and Xen had two unique approaches to providing hypervisor capabilities: binary translation and paravirtualization respectively. Arguments raged about which was faster, but once Intel-VTx came along, by virtue of being on the chip die, it was the de facto speed winner. -Cloud Scaling

The post Worth Reading: The end of the hypervisor appeared first on 'net work.

Framing Questions for Optimized I/O Subsystems

Building high performance systems at the bleeding edge hardware-wise without considering the way data actually moves through such a system is too common—and woefully so, given the fact that understanding and articulating an application’s requirements can lead to dramatic I/O improvements.

A range of “Frequently Unanswered Questions” are at the root of inefficient storage design due to a lack of specified workflows, and this problem is widespread, especially in verticals where data isn’t the sole business driver.

One could make the argument that data is at the heart of any large-scale computing endeavor, but as workflows change, the habit of …

Framing Questions for Optimized I/O Subsystems was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

What is flow-based load balancing ?

Flow-based load balancing is used mostly in layer 2 networks, although in Layer 3 routing, packets can be load balanced per packets or per flow, flow-based load balancing is commonly used with the Local area network, datacenter and datacenter interconnect technologies. There are two important load balancing mechanisms in layer 2. Vlan-based load balancing and […]

The post What is flow-based load balancing ? appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Microsoft released 16 security bulletins for June, 5 rated critical

Microsoft released 16 security bulletins for June, five of which are rated critical for remote code execution vulnerabilities. Even the MSRC team doesn’t seem too excited over this month’s patches as the entire Patch Tuesday announcement is a mere three sentences.FYI: You should be keeping an eye out for the Adobe Flash Player patch as Adobe issued a security advisory, warning of a Flash exploit being used in the wild for targeted attacks. The fix for Flash is expected to be released on Thursday, June 16.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here