May 08, 2015

EMC-owned Spanning sounds alarm over enterprise attitude to SaaS backups
“People think that when they go to the cloud and SaaS the provider is going to take care of all their backup and recovery needs, but what the provider does is protect itself from its own errors,” said Erramouspe. “I’m never going to lose data in Google because a server goes down. That’s never going to happen. However, if I accidentally delete that data myself then it’s gone,” he said, describing how the thought process might take place. The situation becomes even more complex when users rely on SaaS services that plug-in to other cloud offerings and the effects of user error can spread even further. “A typical Salesforce customer integrates Salesforce at a data level with at least 10 different apps.


Frank Wang On DJI's Milestones, Miscarried GoPro Partnership & Corporate Espionage
Unlike other Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba and Xiaomi, which grew big mainly by tapping into the enormous consumer market in their home country, DJI derives about 70% of its sales from outside of Asia. It is the first Chinese company to lead a global tech revolution. In three sit-down interviews with FORBES, Wang shared stories of DJI’s early days, his drive as a “perfectionist” and challenges that the company faces ahead. His focus has allowed him to accomplish a childhood dream of creating a flying robot, and he now heads up the largest consumer drone maker in the world.


Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency
One twist, though, is that bitcoins themselves are still inherent to the process: they provide the incentive for people to help make all this happen. Verifying transactions and storing their data in the blockchain earns “miners” newly minted bitcoins. In other words, any service that aims to use the blockchain as a general-purpose database will have to pass a bitcoin (or a fraction of one) around in the process. Or it will have to find some other way to motivate miners to put the information into the ledger. The concept of a blockchain is not limited to Bitcoin, and several other networks have recently emerged as potential alternatives. Indeed, Bitcoin’s blockchain isn’t even necessarily the one that is best equipped to have applications built on top of it. But Bitcoin has gained by far the most traction and has the biggest network, which makes it more resilient than the others, says Monegro.


Google Brings Exascale Bigtable NoSQL To The Masses
As the name suggests, BigTable takes the unstructured data housed in a file system like GFS and makes it look like a giant database table or spreadsheet from the point of view of programmers and applications. BigTable’s successor – and that is not precisely the right word, just like Omega is not precisely the successor to Google’s Borg job scheduling program but is much more of an augmentation of it – is a geographically distributed database called Spanner, and it runs atop of BigTable and a follow-on to GFS called Colossus, which is a geographically distributed file system. BigTable is a key element of Google’s Mesa data warehouse, which is used to ingest and store the telemetry from its AdSense, AdWords, and DoubleClick advertising systems, which have an immense amount of data that they have to ingest.


All hail the next big job, the Chief IoT Officer
One person who sees a potential need for a Chief IoT officer to coordinate connected-product development is Philippe Ameryckx, general manager of remote diagnostics at Abbott Labs, a multi-billion dollar pharmaceuticals and health care products company. IT departments and CIOs "are focusing on the internal informatics, and not what is going on with the customer," said Ameryckx, who was at the ThingWorx conference. The person who acts as the Chief IoT officer "should be in charge of informatics projects that go to the customer," said Ameryckx. The idea of creating a Chief IoT officer is beginning to get attention, but it's unclear whether anyone today holds that title exclusively. More likely, IoT is getting attached to the list of CTO and CIO requirements. But the pressure for a better development model is there.


Behavioral analytics vs. the rogue insider
“It identifies and scores anomalous activity across users, accounts, applications and devices to predict risks associated with insider threats.” This should not be a surprise. Data analytics are being applied to just about every challenge in the workplace, from marketing to efficiency. So it is inevitable that it would be used to counter what has always been the weakest link in the security chain – the human. Americans have also been told for years that personal privacy is essentially dead. Still, some of them may not appreciate just how dead it is, or soon will be, in the workplace. But Nayyar and others note that there should be no expectation of privacy in the workplace when it comes to corporate data. “This technology is simply monitoring activity within a company’s IT systems,” she said. “It does not read emails or personal communications.”


IT Staff Fearful Of Cloud? Try Cloud Whispering
Business leaders see the cloud in very different ways from IT workers. Business leaders see improved speed to market; the ability to rent instead of own, especially as things relate to new ventures that might not be permanent; and the ability to rent infrequently used assets (like those for disaster recovery). And, of course, business leaders read those annoying tech-light biz strategy magazines like all executives do, and they may have an overly inflated sense of what cloud computing can do for their organizations. ... IT pros tend to fall into two different camps. There are those that see the value of public cloud -- think of developers who don't have to wait for weeks to create a new app, or those that don't have to wait for weeks to scale their apps. And then there are those who fear that Death has arrived, and that he rides a pale and cloudy horse.


​Linksys brings fastest Wi-Fi router ever to market
Linksys does claim that the EA8500 with its Qualcomm MU | EFX MU-MIMO technology+ chipset can hit a combined 2.53 Gbps Wi-Fi speeds. That breaks down as 1,733 Megabits per second (Mbps) with 5 GHz and 800 Mbps with 2.4 GHz. I've benchmarked more Wi-Fi devices than I can recall, and I think what you'll see in your office will be more like 600 Mbps and 200 Mbps. That's still almost certainly a lot faster than what your current equipment is giving you. The really interesting practical news isn't so much its raw speed. What sets Wave 2 equipment apart is that MU-MIMO can transfer data clients simultaneously. Older Wi-Fi and 802.11n and 802.11ac standard gear can only serve one client at a time.


NSA phone metadata tracking ruled illegal
However, the court did not call for an immediate halt to the collection of US phone metadata, but urged Congress to make a decision on Section 215 that is set to expire on 1 June. The programme has to be re-authorised every three months by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The circuit court said the outcome of debate in Congress over the re-authorisation of the controversial section 215 of the Patriot Act “may (or may not) profoundly alter the legal landscape". Members of Congress are set to vote next week on a bill, the USA Freedom Act, that would end the NSA's collection of bulk data, reports the BBC. “We hold that the text of section 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorise the telephone metadata programme,” the judgement said.


Your Home Will Be Connected. Here Are Three Options.
Innovation in the connected home environment is flourishing, leading to more intelligent and integrated connected home platforms. Based on the 2014 Gartner consumer survey, 16% of U.S. online households (equivalent to 20 million households) own a connected home device. An additional 4% of survey participants reported owning at least two or more devices. Our three Cool Vendors in the Connected Home illustrate a cross section of innovation in the area of the connected home platforms. Their offerings include devices, apps and services as well as infrastructure components. ... The Wink Hub communicates with devices that do not to speak the same wireless language by translating the different communication protocols — including Bluetooth, Z-Wave and ZigBee.



Quote for the day:

“You have a choice: pursue your dreams, or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams.” -- Jay Samit

No comments:

Post a Comment