What is the best mobile network in the UK?

Mobile customers across the UK may find themselves struggling for a consistently reliable connection, according to new figures that show performance is split depending on which country you are in.

The latest research from Rootmetrics found that no one operator was able to provide a continually strong performance across the four nations, with EE, Vodafone and Three all claiming the top spot in different countries.

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Dealing with password overload

In the United States, the average email address is associated with no fewer than 130 different accounts on the Internet. How many accounts do you use on a daily basis? Chances are there are accounts out there you haven’t seen or thought about in decades. Many people report having more password protected accounts than they can recall, and while you might not be using all of the accounts currently they may be giving hackers access to those accounts you do use regularly because of one common habit: password reuse.

Millennials, though they are digital natives and have grown up being told the proper password safety procedures, are shockingly the most likely group to reuse passwords. Instead of leading by example as the technologically advanced digital natives they are, millennials are making things less secure for everyone.

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What your startup needs to grow fast

If you want to succeed as a start-up, you need to excel in three key categories: design thinking, open thinking and platform thinking. This is according to a new report released by Alfresco Software, which analyzed what separates winners from losers in the digital world.

Based on a poll of 328 senior-level IT executives, the report says that 64 percent of those companies that excel in the three categories above usually "report significant annual growth." On the other hand, 43 percent of companies that are still developing their capabilities in one or two of the key areas are reporting different.

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How to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum

Bitcoin Ethereum BTC ETH

The insane rise of Bitcoin and Ethereum makes investments in the two main cryptocurrencies very attractive. You can turn a nice profit in trading but, to play in this market, you first need to get your hands on some coins. So, how do you buy Bitcoin or Ethereum?

Like all the cryptocurrencies that matter, Bitcoin and Ethereum are mainly available through dedicated exchanges. There are also other ways to get Bitcoin and Ethereum, like mining and private trading but, for most people, an exchange is the safest and easiest way to buy into this market, so this is what we will look at here.

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Is your business GDPR-compliant? This free tool will let you know

Time is running out to ensure that your organization is prepared for the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and with less than a year to go now is the time to take action.

In order to help organizations prepare for GDPR, the data governance firm DQM GRC has released a free online GDPR Self-Assessment Tool that provides insight into a company's compliance levels compared to the new regulation and offers practical advice on how they can overcome their biggest challenges.

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Biggest Hadoop mistakes and how to avoid them

Hadoop, for all its strengths, is not without its difficulties. Business needs specialized skills, data integration, and budget all need to factor into planning and implementation. Even when this happens, a large percentage of Hadoop implementations fail.

To help others avoid common mistakes with Hadoop, I asked our consulting services and enterprise support teams to share their experiences working with organizations to develop, design and implement complex big data, business analytics or embedded analytics initiatives. These are their top seven mistakes, and some advice on how to avoid them.

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How Zombies, Run! got nearly 4 million downloads

If you’ve developed an app then the last thing you want to see is it languishing in the app stores, attracting just one or two downloads a week. The dream is to see it "fly off the virtual shelf," attracting hordes of fans who willingly pay to use your app.

So, what is the secret? Unfortunately, just having a great idea isn’t enough. For every app success, there are 10 great ideas that just never get that much interest. But why?

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How to find the right data center partner

Cloud server

With most businesses today choosing to migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud, understanding the business benefits and selecting the right data center provider is fundamental to the decision-making process. The UK is leading the way in the adoption of data centers and is the largest thirty-party data center country market within the EU.

Data centers provide the perfect environment to host company data, applications and servers in a secure location, allowing businesses to operate more efficiently, reduce costs, increase resilience and become more agile. Strategically migrating to the cloud will further contribute to long-term growth revenue, due to the continued adoption of cloud based collaboration technologies that eliminate physical and geographical barriers.

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How to migrate your passwords from LastPass to 1Password

EasyBCD developer NeoSmart Technologies has released LastPass to 1Password, a simple automated tool for converting exported LastPass CSV files to the 1PIF format used by 1Password.

If you’re wondering why, check out the official method for transferring data from LastPass: export from Firefox (other browser export options don’t work properly), install Strawberry Perl, run custom Perl commands to export individual data types, manually import each exported file later...

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Split and join MP4 videos with MP4Tools

MP4Tools is a cross-platform collection of tools for the lossless splitting and joining of MP4 files. The package is the project of Alex Thuering, the developer behind DVD authoring application DVDStyler.

Installing MP4Tools gets you two applications, MP4Splitter and MP4Joiner. Despite the single "MP4Tools" brand, they’re separate programs with no integration.

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OpenStack services monitoring: Challenges and solutions

If you have previously worked with cloud platforms, you will be familiar with the distributed and decoupled nature of these systems. A decoupled distributed system relies on microservices to carry out specific tasks, each one exposing its own REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs. These microservices talk to each other through a lightweight messaging layer usually in the form of a message broker such as RabbitMQ or QPID.

This is precisely how OpenStack works. Each major OpenStack component (Keystone, Glance, Cinder, Neutron, Nova, etc.) exposes a REST endpoint and the components and sub-components communicate via a message broker layer, such as RabbitMQ. The benefits of this approach are first that it allows failures to be allocated to specific components, and second that cloud infrastructure operators can scale all services in a horizontal fashion and intelligently distribute the load.

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There are four types of AI: Here's how you can recognize them

Artificial intelligence

AI, or artificial intelligence, is becoming increasingly prevalent in today’s society, but many people don’t realize there are actually four distinctive types of artificial intelligence.

Keep reading to discover the types of AI and the differences among them and examples of how you might see each one play out in real-life scenarios.

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How to optimize your app for the App Store and Google Play

The app-economy competition is fierce. Facebook owns four out of the five most downloaded apps worldwide, but startups are still leaping into the fight to claim new and old markets. For these startups, Facebook is often the least of their worries as, according to research from Gartner, we only actually use between six and ten apps on average and end up neglecting or deleting the rest. It’s tough for app developers to break through the noise, let alone get into that top ten.

So what does this mean for startups trying to break into the space? You have to put your best foot forward to make sure users will not only find your app, but keep it.

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How to get the classic Windows Defender back on Windows 10 Creators Update

Change can be good, but not always. While Windows 10 is a great operating system, many people would prefer to stay with Windows 7. Stick with what they know and like.

Microsoft now views Windows as a service, which means Windows 10 gets updated and changed a couple of times a year. In the latest iteration of the new operating system, Microsoft replaced the old Windows Defender with a new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app version. But if you don’t like this change, the good news is it’s easy to restore the classic version of Windows Defender.

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How to download Windows 10 Creators Update ISO files direct from Microsoft

Microsoft has released Windows 10 Creators Update and if you want to get your hands on the latest version of the operating system you can now download the ISO files straight from the software giant's website.

Microsoft has a dedicated landing page for Windows 10 ISO files, which lets you download both the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 10 Creators Update, Windows 10 Creators Update N and Windows 10 Creators Update Single Language ISO files without messing around with the Media Creation Tool. However, if you click that link from a Windows device you will be redirected to the Media Creation Tool page. That's a bummer, but you can easily avoid that. Here's how.

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