Latest Technology News

Public clouds not for core apps? Businesses challenging this preconception

Cloud server

With its greater performance, reliability, and scalability, it is little surprise that we’re seeing a boom in  the deployment of public cloud services. According to a recent survey by Gartner, companies consider public cloud to be both the most disruptive and most impactful issue facing them in 2017. In fact, IDC predicts that the worldwide public cloud services spending forecast will double to more than $141 billion by 2019.

For most organizations, this first venture into public cloud has been in deploying new applications to engage with their customers (systems of engagement). Now, having successfully used public cloud platforms for these new applications, a growing number of application development and delivery leaders want to bring the same benefits of fast delivery, high security, and cost flexibility to core business applications.

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Delivery firm Hermes trials self-driving robots in London

Amazon has been talking about using drones as a way to deliver parcels to customers for some time, but Hermes has a more down to earth solution it’s about to start trialing in London -- self driving robots.

In partnership with Starship Technologies, the courier firm will soon trial a number of parcel collections in the London borough of Southwark. This follows on from a successful pilot project which saw Hermes Germany test parcel delivery by robot in the Ottensen, Volksdorf and Grindel suburbs of Hamburg.

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How to convince IT decision makers to embrace DevOps

DevOps

Years ago, comedian Steve Martin joked about the best trick to play on a three year-old kid: "Whenever you’re around him," he said, "talk wrong." On his first day at school, the kid will raise his hand and say, "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?"

Pitching a project for implementing DevOps at your company can make you feel a lot like that kid. To you, the ask is crystal clear. To your executives, it’s mumbo jumbo. Why? Because if you’re like lots of technical folks, you’re using technical terms to make your case. However, "technical" is not the language that your management team speaks when discussing new processes and tools. When you’re asking to "mambo dogface," they’re thinking about things like, "How many people do I need to implement this?" or "How many people will need to be trained?" and "How long will it take them to become proficient?"

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Reducing downtime is a huge financial opportunity

In creating a world that doesn’t break down, a huge $20B opportunity is on the table for the process industry to address. Astute manufacturers should focus on reducing unplanned downtime and increasing asset utilization, as both processes represent the biggest opportunities for financial improvement in production operations.

Albert Einstein could well be alluding to smart manufacturing when he said: "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes."

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Microsoft shows off Edge's battery usage improvements in Windows 10 Creators Update

The war over which web browser offers the best battery life to laptop users has been waging for some time. Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge have all been battling it out, and with the release of Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft thinks it's time to show off the improvements that have been made to its browser.

In Microsoft's own tests -- involving streaming video on a Surface Book -- Edge lasted for over three hours longer than Chrome, and nearly five hours longer than Firefox. These are figures that will almost certainly be disputed in further tests by Mozilla and Google, but for now, Microsoft is giving Edge its moment in the spotlight at the top of the performance pile: 77 percent longer battery life than Mozilla Firefox, and 35 percent longer than Google Chrome.

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GetDiz: a Notepad replacement with a difference

Notepad replacements are usually aimed at the most technical users, and like to boast about their syntax highlighting for 500 languages, customizable Git integration and support for more code pages than you ever knew existed.

GetDiz isn’t interested in any of that, it doesn’t even have tabs, but if you just want something that’s like Notepad, but better, it might appeal.

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Employees in the dark about data retention policy

data retention

Enterprises are increasingly bound by legal and compliance requirements to retain information and communications.

Yet a new study reveals that over half of office-based employees say their companies don't have written policies on data retention or personal use of work devices, or if they do, they aren’t aware of them.

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Amazon launches Parent Dashboard and Discussion Cards to allow greater parental control

The problem with unleashing any child onto the internet is keeping track of what they are up to, and trying to ensure they're not accessing content you'd rather they didn't. With this in mind, Amazon has launched two new services for its Fire for Kids tablet.

Parent Dashboard and Discussion Cards not only give parents the chance to keep an eye on what their kids are doing, but also to encourage dialog about apps and content. Amazon says the aim is to connect parents and children, but it's also about managing time limits and setting educational goals.

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New cloud platform enables cost-effective data engineering

data engineering

Businesses encounter a variety of challenges in building systems on and around Spark to meet the needs of data engineering.

Often engineers need to perform mission-critical data cleansing, transformations, and manipulations, to make business activities real-time dashboards or fraud detection possible. Mastering data engineering is therefore an essential step to automating systems and making data-driven decisions.

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TP-Link launches Deco M5 Whole-Home Wi-Fi System

Mesh Wi-Fi home networks are all the rage nowadays. If you aren't familiar, it is the use of several access points as opposed to a single router. For larger homes in particular, a mesh option can provide greater coverage -- potentially minimizing dead zones.

Today, TP-Link launches Deco M5 Whole-Home Wi-Fi System. Not only does the 802.11ac offering offer respectable specifications, but they look very attractive too -- yes, that matters. The access points (you get three of them) look like white small hockey pucks, allowing them to be placed in any room in your home without being too conspicuous. It even comes with a three-year subscription to Trend Micro HomeCare for free.

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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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O&O ShutUp10 1.5 protects your PC’s privacy against new Creator’s Update changes

It can sometimes feel like Microsoft is playing a game with us over privacy. It promises to respect people’s rights in one sentence, then unleashes a new version of Windows 10 that finds new ways in which to spy on people.

Mindful of this endless dance, O&O Software has released O&O ShutUp 10 1.5, the latest version of its free, portable tool that locks down privacy settings in Windows 10. Version 1.5 focusses on improving privacy in the brand new Creator’s Update release.

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Google AutoDraw is like autocomplete for your doodles

Machine learning has been put to lots of powerful uses, but Google has a new way to make use of the technology. AutoDraw is the company's "fast drawing" tool for everyone, and it works much like autocomplete on your phone.

AutoDraw is a web-based drawing tool that uses the same technology as Google's Quick, Draw! AI experiment and it helps you to quickly create an image by "guessing" what it is you’re trying to draw. If this all sounds a bit mad, that's because, well, it is really. But it's also unique enough to make it well worth checking out.

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Preventing cyber attacks -- this time it's personal

Security professionals are putting pressure on themselves to secure their organization's systems according to the findings of a new report.

The 2017 Security Pressures Report from managed security specialist Trustwave surveyed over 1,600 security decision makers around the world and finds that while 53 percent of respondents report increased pressure in trying to secure their organization, that pressure is becoming more personal as 24 percent say they put the most pressure on themselves, up from 13 percent last year.

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Brexit voter registration website may have suffered DDoS attack at the hands of Russia or China

The Brexit process is now officially underway, but there is still a good deal of talk about the validity of the outcome. A number of members of parliament have expressed concerns that a foreign government may have interfered with the referendum, making it difficult or impossible for people to register to vote.

The Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee (PACAC) has published a report which looks at the possible causes for the crash of the "register to vote" site last year. It suggests that the crash bears the hallmarks of a DDoS attack, and notes that this is a tactic employed by both Russia and China in the past.

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