Microsoft Research comes up with a workable low-end VR system

There is one inevitable real-world reality when it comes to virtual reality: you need high-end gear. It’s no accident that VR headsets like Oculus Rift and Vive are taking off this year because both Nvidia and AMD are launching very powerful video cards that can generate the realistic graphics needed to make VR work. There are more low-cost VR alternatives, such as Google Cardboard and Samsung’s Gear VR, but they don’t give the same experience as Oculus and Vive. However, Microsoft Research may have come up with a workaround that can lower the barrier to entry for VR systems and make underpowered devices viable VR platforms.FlashBack is a new system from Microsoft Research that eliminates real-time frame rendering and instead relies on cached, pre-rendered frames that are displayed based on the user’s actions. According to a research paper just published (PDF), the system provides eight times improved frame rate, 97 times less energy consumption and a 15-fold latency reduction in mobile devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hyperscalers, Enterprises Pull Back On Server Spending

The server cycle has some long waves that are not always in phase with each other, and that is generally a good thing. But every now and then, the waves synchronize, and it is either really exciting as the market rises or something of a bummer as it falls. In the first quarter of this year, there was a bit of a dip but still an order of magnitude less dramatic than the collapse in shipments and sales during the Great Recession.

It is important to keep perspective, and it is actually quite remarkable that the server market is as …

Hyperscalers, Enterprises Pull Back On Server Spending was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Open source networking: The time is now

Vendor lock-in is dead. Proprietary specifications are dead. Closed vendor ecosystems are dead. Today’s networks are increasingly defined on de facto and de jour open standards—call it open source, call it open APIs, call it whatever you want. It’s all about openness and collaboration. Vendor consortia are open, as are the many partnerships and pairings between standards-defining organizations.It’s about time, and it’s all good.The power of open source and open standards In May, I attended TM Forum Live, the big telecommunications management conference in Nice, France, produced by the TM Forum. Once a bastion of operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) for carriers, TM Forum is all about digital transformation and open standards. More than two dozen multivendor interoperability and proof-of-concept demonstrations—which the conference calls “Catalysts”—showed off the power of open source and open standards. But that was only the start.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft takes a swing at Trello and Asana with new Planner app

Microsoft has taken a big step toward helping employees stay on track with the launch of a new app called Planner.It's a Web-based tool for Office 365 subscribers designed to let them easily lay out plans for projects and business objectives and then share them with other people. After creating a plan, users can create and assign tasks, share files and update their colleagues on the status of key to-dos.Planner appears to be a response to the likes of Trello and Asana -- startups that have built their businesses on making it easier for other companies to improve their employees' productivity. Microsoft has positioned Office 365 as a key part of a users'  productivity workflow, and this app is supposed to make it easier for them to stay on track and effectively collaborate with colleagues. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Review: LiveCode 8 is freaking incredible

For those unfamiliar with LiveCode, it is a visual software development environment (and corresponding language). Think Hypercard—the the Hypermedia authoring tool/development environment that shipped with every old Macintosh. Then make the language more powerful. Make the interface usable for experienced developers. And allow it to build Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS and HTML5 applications—while running on Linux, Windows or MacOS.That is, in a nutshell, LiveCode. Oh, and it's open source under the GPLv3 and available right up on GitHub—a fact I rather like.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Troubleshooting Cisco Remote Access

The Cisco Mobile and Remote Access (MRA) feature is a “client edge” solution that allows external software and hardware clients to register to enterprise Cisco Unified Communication (UC) solutions without requiring a VPN. Like most things, there are a lot of moving parts working together to create a relatively seamless user experience. And, like most things, the first time you deploy MRA there are a few “gotchas” that can eat up a significant amount of troubleshooting time. Netcraftsmen

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IDG Contributor Network: Ping Identity invests in blockchain vendor to create new identity standard

Now, this is interesting.Ping Identity is a well-known identity vendor. Basically, Ping handles authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and other identity-related functions that large organizations have. The company competes with vendors such as OneLogin and Okta. So, what is it doing investing in a formerly stealthy blockchain vendor?It seems Ping sees blockchain as a potential disruptor for identity session management. It's so excited about it that it is spending some of its hard-earned cash to invest in Swirlds, a new platform that is creating the "hashgraph," a distributed consensus platform. Swirlds sees itself as solving some of the limitations that are inherent in blockchain. Swirlds contends that it delivers the three legs of the consensus stool: fairness, distributed trust and resilience to Denial of Service attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Ping Identity invests in blockchain vendor to create new identity standard

Now, this is interesting.Ping Identity is a well-known identity vendor. Basically, Ping handles authentication, single sign-on (SSO) and other identity-related functions that large organizations have. The company competes with vendors such as OneLogin and Okta. So, what is it doing investing in a formerly stealthy blockchain vendor?It seems Ping sees blockchain as a potential disruptor for identity session management. It's so excited about it that it is spending some of its hard-earned cash to invest in Swrlds, a new platform that is creating the "hashgraph," a distributed consensus platform. Swrlds sees itself as solving some of the limitations that are inherent in blockchain. Swrlds contends that it delivers the three legs of the consensus stool: fairness, distributed trust and resilience to Denial of Service attacks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to prepare to interview for a temporary position

Temporary jobs are on the rise. According to research from CareerBuilder and Economic Modeling Specialist Intl., nearly three million people are employed in a temporary job with a projected 173,478 additional temp jobs expected to open up from 2016 to 2018. The study found that 47 percent of companies plan to hire temporary or contract workers in 2016, and just under 60 percent of that group also plan to consider transitioning temporary workers to permanent employees at some point. Tech jobs are at the forefront of temporary work, with computer service representatives, computer user support specialists, software developers and application developers expected to see the most growth in contract jobs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Petition condemns Windows 10 upgrade practices, asks EFF to investigate

A petition launched Friday asks the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to investigate Microsoft's aggressive moves to convince and cajole users into upgrading to Windows 10.The request was launched on Change.org, a popular online petition website, and by early Monday had garnered more than 470 signatures.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD Microsoft blows trust and credibility with forced upgrade +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers wirelessly hack Mitsubishi Outlander Hybrid SUV, turn off anti-theft alarm

Security researcher Ken Munro of Pen Test Partners hacked the Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). He discovered several vulnerabilities, including being able to disable the anti-theft alarm from a laptop.U.S. drivers may be unfamiliar with the vehicle. Had Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In Hybrid sales started in 2013 as originally proposed, it would have been the first plug-in hybrid SUV available in the U.S. But it didn't. The 2017 model is expected to hit showrooms late this fall, with an estimated $42,000 as a base price. In the U.K., it is the “bestselling hybrid.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Trouble down under: Amazon cloud goes down in Australia

Amazon Web Services reported a multi-hour service disruption to core features of its IaaS public cloud in Sydney, Australia over the weekend.It’s one of the highest-profile hiccups the cloud provider has had in recent months.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Father’s Day 2016 gift ideas for the techie Dad +According to the Amazon Web Services’ Service Health Dashboard, the company’s virtual machine service named Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) began experiencing connectivity issues at 10:47 PM PDT Saturday, which was 3:47 PM on Sunday in Sydney. The issue was finally resolved more than 12 hours later by 4:50 AM local Sydney time. AWS said a single Availability Zone within the region lost power (AWS regions are each made up of at least two or more Availability Zones). AWS said by 1 AM local Sydney time about 80% of the EC2 and Elastic Block Storage (EBS) instances that had been impacted were resolved. A handful of other ancillary services were almost impacted in the region.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers wirelessly hack Mitsubishi Outlander Hybrid SUV, turn off anti-theft alarm

Security researcher Ken Munro of Pen Test Partners hacked the Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). He discovered several vulnerabilities, including being able to disable the anti-theft alarm from a laptop.U.S. drivers may be unfamiliar with the vehicle. Had Mitsubishi Outlander Plug-In Hybrid sales started in 2013 as originally proposed, it would have been the first plug-in hybrid SUV available in the U.S. But it didn't. The 2017 model is expected to hit showrooms late this fall, with an estimated $42,000 as a base price. In the UK, it is the “bestselling hybrid.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Widespread exploits evade protections enforced by Microsoft EMET

It's bad news for businesses. Hackers have launched large-scale attacks that are capable of bypassing the security protections added by Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a tool whose goal is to stop software exploits.Security researchers from FireEye have observed Silverlight and Flash Player exploits designed to evade EMET mitigations such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Export Address Table Access Filtering (EAF) and Export Address Table Access Filtering Plus (EAF+). The exploits have been recently added to the Angler exploit kit.Angler is one of the most widely used attack tools used by cybercriminals to launch Web-based, "drive-by" download attacks. It is capable of installing malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in users' browsers or browser plug-ins when they visit compromised websites or view maliciously crafted ads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Widespread exploits evade protections enforced by Microsoft EMET

It's bad news for businesses. Hackers have launched large-scale attacks that are capable of bypassing the security protections added by Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a tool whose goal is to stop software exploits.Security researchers from FireEye have observed Silverlight and Flash Player exploits designed to evade EMET mitigations such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Export Address Table Access Filtering (EAF) and Export Address Table Access Filtering Plus (EAF+). The exploits have been recently added to the Angler exploit kit.Angler is one of the most widely used attack tools used by cybercriminals to launch Web-based, "drive-by" download attacks. It is capable of installing malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in users' browsers or browser plug-ins when they visit compromised websites or view maliciously crafted ads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Health insurer dedicates IT group to work with Digital Experience team

Sean Radlich is Manager of Digital Experience at HealthNow New York, one of the leading health insurance companies in upstate New York servicing about a million members.  Headquartered in Buffalo, NY, the company operates BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York (Buffalo), BlueShield of Northeastern New York (Albany), Health Now Brokerage Concepts (Blue Bell, PA) and Health Now Administrative Services (across the Northeast US and California).  Network World Editor in Chief John Dix recently spoke with Radlich about the organization’s digital initiatives and how his team works with IT.  Sean Radlich, Manager of Digital Experience, HealthNow New YorkTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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