Customers can purchase a minimum of 18 panels for about $9,000. And you thought jamming that Ikea sofa box into the car was a pain.
Now that many organizations in big data, BMC Software has provided a way to incorporate jobs from the Hadoop data processing platform into larger enterprise workflows. “We provide a finer level of granularity for Hadoop workflows, and not just within Hadoop, but across the enterprise,” said Shamoun Murtza, BMC director in the company’s office of the chief technology officer. BMC has released a new module for its Control-M job scheduling software that’s designed to allow its users—typically large organizations—to manage Hadoop jobs as well, alongside the traditional IT jobs that they already manage using Control-M. Murtza explained that even as enterprises start to use Hadoop, they don’t have a lot of utilities to fit it into their existing IT operations.
that it is equipping its 11,000 pilots with Surface 2 tablets to replace the traditional paper document flight bags. A pilot’s flight bag contains flight charts, navigation tools, and other documents and information. That luggage weighs nearly 40 pounds on average. That may not sound like much, but multiplied by thousands of pilots flying thousands of flights that added weight costs the airline millions of dollars per year in increased fuel costs. , and others have adopted the iPad as a flight bag replacement. Delta does stand out as unique, though, for choosing the Microsoft Surface. The Surface 2 tablets will run Jeppesen’s FliteDeck Pro app, which was built for Windows 8.1. The app provides pilots with all of the research and reference materials normally found in the flight bag, with the added benefit of real-time access to relevant information as conditions change.
CIOs will have a harder time evaluating how well key Microsoft products are selling now that the company has restructured the way it breaks down its revenue streams, according to analysts. The new reporting format, , will make its debut next month when Microsoft issues its financial report for its first fiscal quarter, which ends today. The company said that it will be easier for outsiders, in particular investors and Wall Street analysts, to grasp Microsoft’s financial performance, especially after its corporate reorganization and new focus on hardware devices and cloud services. But some see the changes as negative for enterprise IT decision makers, saying CIOs and IT managers will likely struggle making sense of the numbers.
Need some time away from Facebook? Sick of its privacy issues? You can deactivate—or outright delete—your account if you know where to look.
Intel says that it has made a “significant investment” in Recon Instruments, a company that has quietly emerged on the cutting edge of wearable computing. Intel did not disclose the size of the investment. For Intel, the stake means closer ties with a company who has a proven track record in wearable computing. Intel said Friday that it will also contribute expertise in manufacturing, operations, and technology, arguably one of Intel’s competitive advantages over its rivals in the semiconductor industry. , Recon has largely flown under the radar. Its first products combined a heads-up display (HUD) interface projected onto the inside of ski goggles for skiers and snowboarders.
Storage limitations could be an issue for early adopters, just as it was for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
A piece of malware designed to launch brute-force password guessing attacks against websites built with popular content management systems like WordPress and Joomla has started being used to also attack email and FTP servers. The malware is known as Fort Disco and was by researchers from DDoS mitigation vendor Arbor Networks who estimated that it had infected over 25,000 Windows computers and had been used to guess administrator account passwords on over 6,000 WordPress, Joomla and Datalife Engine websites. Once it infects a computer, the malware periodically connects to a command and control (C&C) server to retrieve instructions, which usually include a list of thousands of websites to target and a password that should be tried to access their administrator accounts. The Fort Disco malware seems to be evolving, according to a Swiss security researcher who maintains the Abuse.ch botnet tracking service. “Going down the rabbit hole, I found a sample of this particular malware that was brute-forcing POP3 instead of WordPress credentials,” he said Monday in a .
Security-savvy mobile-device users are increasingly casting a skeptical eye on public Wi-Fi, and now the vendor consortium behind the wireless standard wants to make logging in via that coffee shop network a bit safer. The Wi-Fi Alliance's Passpoint program, based on the Hotspot 2.0 specification, will make public hotspots both safer and easier to use, according to CEO Edgar Figueroa. "Today, for the most part, when we go on a public hotspot we are sending data without protection. With Passpoint the connections are secure and the communication is encrypted," Figueroa said. Also, users should no longer have to search for and choose a network, request the connection to the access point each time and then in many cases re-enter their password. All that can be handled by Passpoint-compatible devices, according to Figueroa.
, a free visual task management Web app that launched in February, offers a more intuitive way to monitor and manage workloads. With its circular-themed dashboard DropTask gives you a birds-eye view of who’s been assigned what tasks; due dates; and the status of a task through play, pause and check symbols that indicate whether something is not started, in progress, on hold, or completed. The tasks that involve the most work are represented as larger circles within a group, with less-complicated tasks represented as smaller circles. While this circles-within-circles theme takes some getting used to, it works well if you’re a global or strategic thinker who wants to quickly grasp work distribution. For example, let’s say your company is launching a new product. Each large circle, or group, could represent a function such as marketing, IT, or human resources with the smaller circles symbolizing various tasks each has been assigned. Or groups could represent clients with inner circles expressing what needs to be done for each of them. To assign tasks to others you can drag team member photos on the left onto a task or choose team members through a pane that pops up on the right of the screen when you click on a particular task. Within it you can also add a due date, tags, or files.
. . If you haven’t heard of the latter, a Pirate Box is a mobile device capable of creating a local wireless network that nearby users connect to via Wi-Fi. The beauty of the Pirate Box is that it doesn’t connect directly to the Internet. Instead, a Pirate Box is only accessible to computers within range of the signal. Users can then use a Pirate Box network for secure online messaging and file sharing. The Pirate Box was originally designed by David Darts, Associate Professor and Chair of the New York University Art Department. McAfee’s product wants to take the best aspects of both the hotspot and the Pirate Box to let you share files publicly and anonymously with users nearby, as well as chat privately with people you know.
Microsoft has added the ability to automatically scan uploaded photos to SkyDrive via optical character recognition, in an attempt to catch up to Google. Microsoft also touted the success it has had with "smart files," a technology that only syncs a small percentage of SkyDrive's files and folders on a local machine, allowing users to minimize the number of files stored locally. from either uploaded PDF files or images. —as a competitive advantage over its rivals.
, a bad RAM chip could be the cause of your travails. If these annoyances tend to happen when you're using a memory-intensive application or game, bad RAM is a very likely culprit. But that doesn't mean it's a sure one. You still need to make sure that the problem is with your RAM, and if it is, you need to identify the bad module.
It's hard to believe that not a single Windows 8 tablet has matched the screen resolution of Apple's iPad, but Sharp plans to change that with its Mebius Pad. . That makes it a little sharper than the 9.7-inch iPad (264 ppi), and it's the first 10-inch Windows 8 tablet to come with greater than a 1080p resolution screen. , use a 16:9 aspect ratio, making them somewhat narrower in portrait mode and shorter in landscape mode. The added roominess of the 16:10 display is a welcome change. plays a big role, as the new low-power chip can support much higher resolutions than last year's Clover Trail chips. The Mebius Pad will ship with quad-core Z3370 Bay Trail chip, but other specs are unknown at this time.
. However, there appears to be a bug in the way OL 2013 syncs with Gmail, and if you've run into the same problem, it can be a huge pain. I use Outlook to manage three Gmail accounts, all of them configured for IMAP. Translation: Anything I do in Outlook should be instantly reflected elsewhere (like on my phone or the Web), because IMAP affords real-time syncing. So, for example, if I delete a message in Outlook, I shouldn't see that message when I check email on my iPhone.
EMC came early to enterprise flash storage, shipping its first product in 2008, and it's still increasing its investment in the hot technology. More than half its new R&D expenditures are going into flash, and just nine months ago the company formed a division dedicated to it. EMC sees a long-term move toward all-flash data centers and wants to make sure its efforts have enough "oxygen" within the company, says Zahid Hussain, SVP and general manager of EMC's Flash Products Division. Last year, EMC went beyond hybrid flash-and-disk arrays by acquiring XtremIO, a startup developing all-flash systems. The resulting products are set to ship later this year. The company has also started to pursue server-based flash, which gives applications the closest and fastest access to data. With its ScaleIO acquisition earlier this year, EMC plans to let enterprises pool flash assets from many servers into a primary storage tier. EMC probably has the broadest flash lineup of the established storage vendors, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, NetApp and Dell, says Taneja Group analyst Arun Taneja. But data storage is starting to merge with computing and other areas where EMC hasn't been a major player. When flash resides in servers and caches in various parts of the data center, coordinating all the pieces requires computer expertise, he says. "Storage guys have to understand applications all the way up, and storage guys have to understand what's happening in VMware or Hyper-V, because if they don't, then the applications just suffer," Taneja says. "All the boundaries are gone."
A thorough examination of a leaked version of the next Gmail Android app suggests ads are finally hitting your mobile inbox.
Sharp on Monday showed off its latest prototypes of a new type of display screen that it says brings several advantages over today's LCD (liquid crystal display) screens. The screens, called MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) displays for the tiny moving parts they contain, are being developed by the Japanese company in partnership with Qualcomm and were on show at the Ceatec electronics show just outside of Tokyo. Behind each pixel in a MEMS display is a backlight that flashes red, green and blue in fast succession, and in front of it is a tiny shutter can be opened to let light through.
IBM will pay a $44,000 fine to settle a case alleging it violated anti-discrimination law by placing online job listings seeking software developers with specific visas, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday. . The Immigration and Nationality Act does not allow employers to express a preference for visa holders over U.S. citizens and permanent residents unless required to comply with another law, an executive order or a government contract, the agency said. F-1 visas are issued to foreign students who are studying in the U.S., while H1-B visas are six-year visas for people with technical expertise.
Apple has emerged as the most valuable brand in the world, passing Coca-Cola which held the top position for 13 years, according to a report released by brand consultancy Interbrand.
Intel has partnered with startup TSO Logic in a move that should give more companies tools to track how much power their server applications consume. The energy consumed by data centers has become a big concern for a lot of businesses, which face rising operating costs and pressure to cut carbon emissions. That's fuelled a growing market for software that can improve data center efficiency. TSO's software lets companies monitor how much energy individual applications are consuming, a key first step in managing costs. They can then use it to cap energy use by particular applications or to power servers down when they're not doing useful work. That requires access to instrumentation data inside servers, however, and that's where the partnership with Intel comes in. Intel has an SDK (software development kit), developed with all the big server vendors, for accessing data about power usage, thermals and other variables.
With the launch of the , Microsoft is joining the promotional cloud-storage craze, giving buyers 200GB of free storage for two years. Like other tech companies that have offered similar promotions, Microsoft hopes you’ll use cloud storage to ease the burden your device’s somewhat skimpy flash storage drive. In a blog post, the company boasts that 200GB is “enough space to take a photo, every hour, from the moment someone is born, to the day they graduate from college.” Microsoft and other companies (like Google and Dropbox) don’t like to talk about what you’ll do after the promotion runs out. If you switch to a paid storage plan at that point, they’ll rejoice—but the recurring cost of such plans can be high, and if you’re not prepared to pay, you and your uploaded content could be in an awkward situation when the free ride is over. So before you start uploading your entire digital life into sky storage, let’s take a closer look at how SkyDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox deal with your files after their promotional plans expire. The cloud can turn mighty dark indeed when your time is up.
It might seem as though every new Windows laptop has a bright, glossy touchscreen. After all, Windows 8 is a touch-centric operating system, and Intel requires any notebook powered by a fourth-generation Core processor to have a touchscreen. The hulking desktop-replacement models that gamers gravitate to, on the other hand, rarely have this feature. That omission has two reasons: First, gamers prefer to use wired mice or gamepads. Second, large touchscreens are expensive. Acer’s Aspire V3 (model V3-772G-9402) isn’t necessarily a gaming machine, but it does have a 17.3-inch display (with resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels) and a powerful discrete graphics processor. Acer describes it as a “versatile entertainment powerhouse,” and its $1100 price tag puts it in budget territory for people who don’t mind lugging an 8-pound machine. It’s powered by one of Intel’s fastest fourth-generation Core (aka Haswell) processors, the Core i7-4702MQ; 12GB of DDR3/1600 RAM; and Nvidia’s third-fastest discrete mobile GPU, the GeForce GTX 760M. But Acer skimps on storage by equipping the machine with just a 500GB, 5400-rpm hard drive. That component choice explains the Aspire V3’s somewhat unimpressive Notebook Worldbench 8.1 score of 177. While that score marks the Aspire V3 as 77 percent faster than our reference machine, the , pricier gaming notebooks have delivered scores well north of 400. But when you look at some of the gaming benchmark results that go into that composite score, the Aspire V3 looks a little better. With Dirt Showdown and BioShock Infinite at resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels and visual quality set to low, it delivered very playable frame rates of 65.6 and 69.7 frames per second respectively.
: It’s slightly thinner and a little lighter, but it’s powered by one of Intel’s new Haswell-class processors. That update helps the new XPS 12 deliver better performance and much better battery life than its predecessor offered. This machine’s key feature is a 12.5-inch touchscreen with a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels that pivots inside its aluminum frame—just as on the original. Open the lid, and you can use the computer as you would any other notebook. You simply push the top front or bottom back of the display to pop it out of its frame, and then flip it over and close it to convert the machine into a tablet. The configuration we tested consisted of an Intel Core i5-4200U processor, 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory, and a 128GB mSATA solid-state drive. It posted an excellent Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 296, and the Windows log-in screen appeared in just 9.2 seconds. Tested battery life was a cool 6 hours, 49 minutes: That’s enough for a coast-to-coast plane ride with time to spare, and it’s 2 hours longer than the battery life of the first XPS 12 we reviewed, which used an Intel Core i5-3317U CPU. The XPS 12 still relies on integrated graphics, so don’t expect to play hard-core games on it. Dirt Showdown played at 44 frames per second at 1024-by-768-pixel resolution and low visual quality, but you’ll need to drop most games down another notch for smooth play. Video looks superb, and the system easily handled high-bit-rate high-definition video. If you want to use an external display, you’ll need a Mini DisplayPort cable (the beauty of DisplayPort is that you can buy adapters for any other type of display, including analog VGA for when you need to use an old-school video projector).
You’re full of good ideas, but putting them in writing is easier said than done. Maybe you like to start from the end. Maybe you work from jumbled notes, gradually polishing them into a cohesive piece. No matter what your workflow, a good outliner can help. Much like mind maps, outliners are thinking aids. But while mind maps appeal to visual thinkers, outliners are great for working directly with text. Both are hierarchical: In a mind map, a main idea branches out into sub-ideas, which then branch out even further. In an outline, a master topic has sub-topics, each with its own sub-sub-topics. And, just as it is with a mind map, what you do with an outline is up to you: You can use it for drafting text, but it also works well as a to-do list for a project.
Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the embattled National Security Agency (NSA), says he is willing to share cyberattack information with the private sector—an offer seen as a Trojan horse by at least one expert. Last week, told attendees of his keynote at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit that the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the CIA are ready to pass information back and forth with a select group of private organizations, provided they get the authorization from Congress. "We need the authority for us to share with them and them to share with us," Alexander said, Kaspersky Labs' ThreatPost security website. Alexander's comments came a day after U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that she planned to move forward with a draft of the Senate's version of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). The House version passed in April.
Struggling smartphone maker BlackBerry is being taken private by one of its largest shareholders. Here's a quick primer to get you up to date on the news and what it means for customers and the industry.
While the energy industry may fear the appearance of another on the systems they use to keep oil and gas flowing and the electric grid powered, an equally devastating attack could come from a much more mundane source: phishing. Rather than worry about exotic cyber weapons , companies that have Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems—computer systems that monitor and control industrial processes—should make sure that their anti-phishing programs are in order, say security experts. "The way malware is getting into these internal networks is by social engineering people via email," Rohyt Belani, CEO and co-founder of the anti-phishing training firm PhishMe, said in an interview. "You send them something that's targeted, that contains a believable story, not high-volume spam, and people will act on it by clicking a link or opening a file attached to it," he said. "Then, boom, the attackers get that initial foothold they're looking for."