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Microsoft's attempt to break into the virtual reality market has thus far consisted of their Windows 'mixed reality' headsets, a series of wearable VR devices that are being developed in partnership with companies like Dell, Asus, Lenovo and HP. These headsets were initially available to pre-order back in May, but more recently HP and Acer versions of the headsets were available for developers to purchase (though, strangely, anybody could buy them). However, Microsoft hasn't offered much information on what niche they're hoping to fill with these devices until now.

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Earlier today, Microsoft published a 'holiday update' blog post that clears up a few of the questions surrounding the Mixed Reality project. For starters, we now have a release window. Lenovo, HP, Dell and Acer versions of Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality headsets are shipping out in time for the holidays with headset / controller bundles starting at $399 and 'new PC models' (whatever that means) starting at $499. Microsoft's main goal with their Mixed Reality devices is to make the platform affordable to all. Then again, $399 for a headset and its matching controllers really isn't all that affordable when compared to the competition. Oculus already offers their controller / headset bundle for the same price and the HTC Vive saw a recent price cut down to $599.

Regardless, Microsoft seems confident that they can make these devices work - even in the face of such stiff competition. To stand out further, Microsoft has mentioned that they're teaming up with an 'incredible set of partners' to bring immersive VR experiences to their users. One such partner is 343 Industries, who Microsoft claims will help them bring future Halo titles into the realm of mixed reality. Although Microsoft aims to create completely new VR content down the line, the company certainly isn't ignoring the many excellent VR titles that already exist. As such, all Windows Mixed Reality headsets will be capable of running existing Steam VR content. If you want to grab a Windows Mixed Reality headset for yourself, check out the Microsoft Store or your local Best Buy later this year.

2017-08-28 19:30 0.9 (4.09/5). Fitbit, which has dominated the fitness band market for the past decade, is finally entering the smartwatch market with a $299/£299 Fitbit Ionic. Features include built-in GPS and NFC, improved heart-rate tracking, water resistance (up to 50 meters), and a music player, so you don't have to carry a smartphone to make your smartwatch useful. However, the Ionic's unique selling point is its superior heart rate reader, which includes a 'relative SpO2 sensor' that can estimate and track the amount of oxygen in your blood. The Ionic is also part of a system that includes Bluetooth-connected Fitbit Flyer earbuds, the Fitbit Coach personal trainer app, Fitbit Pay, Wi-Fi-connected Aria 2 Smart Scales, and Fitbit Studio. This web-based SDK (software development kit) enables anyone to create apps - or at least create their own watch faces - using JavaScript, CSS and SVG. Apps can be shared privately, or submitted to Fitbit for addition to its App Gallery.

Fitbit says it expects apps such as Flipboard, Game Golf, Nest and Surfline to appear this autumn. The App Gallery includes Strava guided training, AccuWeather's weather app, Starbucks and Pandora. The operating system appears to be Fitbit's, but Fitbit claims 'cross-platform compatibility'. Its press release says: 'Develop one app and reach Fitbit's large, global community of users across Android, iOS and Windows platforms.'

Fitbit Coach is an enhanced version of FitStar, which provided guided workouts and health routines to people using the earlier not-quite-a-smartwatch Fitbit Blaze. It requires a £7.99 a month subscription. As Larry Dignan points out, 'Fitbit Coach is a first step toward becoming more data, services and enterprise based.' (Fitbit tips data, services strategy with coaching, health program app) Fitbit estimates the battery life as '4+ days'.

I'm currently getting '5+ days' from my Fitbit Charge 2. The Fitbit Ionic may be a smartwatch but it's clearly designed as a fitness device, which should make it an attractive upgrade to millions of Fitbit fitness band wearers. And while it may currently be weaker than Apple and Google in terms of smartwatch apps, the fact is that smartwatch apps are not particularly useful at the moment. Nobody wants or needs hundreds of smartphone-style apps on their smartwatch, so their absence is irrelevant. Fitbit just needs to cover the basics, and they're built in with the Fitbit Pay wallet, notifications, automatic sleep-tracking, automatic swim-tracking, and automatic GPS-based run-tracking.

The Fitbit Ionic (£299.99; $299), Fitbit Flyer earbuds (£109.99; $129), Aria 2 smart scales ($129.95) and various accessory bands are now available for pre-order in Fitbit's online stores. Ionic smartwatches will reach 55,000 retail stores in 65 countries in October. Fitbit Studio, the web-based developer environment, will be available in September. An Adidas 'special edition' version of the Fitbit Ionic and Adidas training programs will be launched next year. 2017-08-28 16:19 1.7 (2.26/5).

Today, Microsoft released a cumulative update for PC users that are on the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, build (KB4039396). Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of the month, is typically when the company offers these updates, but lately it's been happening twice a month. But the kicker here is that Anniversary Update users already got a second cumulative update almost two weeks ago, so this is the third. The changelog isn't nearly as long as build, and it mostly fixes issues that were present in the last update. You might recall that the last couple of cumulative updates for the Anniversary Update had known issues where 'Update History' doesn't list previously installed updated, and where hidden updates might be installed. Those were fixed, along with the WSUS known issue.

Interestingly, we still haven't seen second updates this month for any other versions of Windows 10, and since tomorrow is Tuesday, it seems likely that we may see them then. You can grab today's update through Windows Update, or you can manually download it here. 2017-08-28 20:40 1.6 (2.07/5).

One of the first announcements out of the gate for IFA 2017, Dell has announced a range of new Windows 10 PCs that include Intel's eight-generation processors. That's right; quad-core ultrabooks are here. Dell is promising 44% more power in its new XPS 13 laptop, which the company says is the 'smallest 13.3 inch laptop on the planet'. As usual, it offers an optional QUD+ InfinityEdge display, and it's available now with a 7th-gen Core i3 starting at $799. The model with an 8th-gen Core i7 won't be out until September 12, and it will start at $1,399.99. And then there's a new series of Inspiron 7000 laptops and convertibles.

There's four of them, with the 2-in-1 and standard laptop models coming in 13- and 15-inch sizes, and with a range of configuration options, they all have 8th-generation chips. The 15-inch variant, however, is the only one that offers the option of a 4K display and Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU though, as the 13-inch model will only have integrated graphics. All of the Inspiron 7000 devices will be available on October 3; the laptops will start at $799.99, the 13-inch 2-in-1 will start at $879.99, and the 15-inch 2-in-1 will start at $849.99.

Finally, Dell is refreshing its Inspiron 5000 2-in-1s with eighth-generation processors from Intel. Also available on October 3, these will start at $749.99 for a model without pen support, and $799.99 with pen support.

2017-08-28 16:20 0.2 (2.06/5). Amazon closed on Whole Foods today in a $13.7 billion deal and began slashing the chain’s grocery prices this morning as a result.

While the deal has much larger implications for Amazon, the goal with the price cuts – including those on many of its organic items – is to bring Whole Foods more in line with rival stores. But even with Amazon willing to slim its margins on Whole Foods’ groceries, can it really expect compete with its top competitor Walmart when it comes to affordable groceries? Today, Walmart’s brand is associated with a focus on low prices, while people tend to joke that Whole Foods should be called “whole paycheck, ” because that’s what it takes to shop there. Amazon had announced Whole Foods price cuts on things like bananas, organic avocados, organic large brown eggs, organic responsibly-farmed salmon and tilapia, organic baby kale and baby lettuce, animal-welfare-rated 85% lean ground beef, creamy and crunchy almond butter, organic Gala and Fuji apples, organic rotisserie chicken, 365 Everyday Value organic butter, and other items. As it turned out, it had already begun discounting other grocery staples today, including milk and cheese.

See our gallery of price comparisons below: To find out how the newly-discounted Whole Foods groceries compared to Walmart, we shopped the same selection at two stores in the same region on the East Coast around the same time. This is by no means a definitive answer to the question at hand, of course – it’s too early for that – but rather more of a snapshot of how prices compare on day one. It wouldn’ t be surprising to see Walmart very quickly respond with price cuts of its own.

To be clear, we only looked at the same products that just received price cuts at Whole Foods today. Walmart, overall, may continue be more affordable – especially as you fill your cart with generics that aren’ t organic, responsibly-farmed, gluten-free, and so on. According to the comparison shopping results, Walmart was often cheaper. But that was not always the case. As of today’s price cuts, Whole Foods is beating Walmart on price for things like organic milk, almond butter, organic pasta sauce and organic bananas, for example.

At times, those “beats” were just pennies, other times they were a lot more. That said, where Walmart beat, it sometimes did so by a wide margin, too.

It had the cheaper organic eggs, ribeye steaks, 12-packs of water, and salmon. But it also didn’ t have as full a selection of organic items to choose from, which limited the possible comparisons. (Of course, inventory will vary by store, so your mileage may vary.) This Walmart didn’ t have organic avocados, organic apples, organic baby kale salad mix, organic almond milk, or organic store-brand butter or cheese. Whole Foods did, and it made those items cheaper today.

In other words, if buying organic is important to you, Whole Foods may be the better choice, even if prices are higher – that’s why people starting shopping there to begin with, after all. 2017-08-28 22:25 0.8 (2.04/5). Microsoft’s bid to bring Windows mixed reality to the masses is taking shape with a raft of affordable PCs. On Monday the company announced that its hardware partners will launch two types of mixed-reality PCs this holiday season, showing them off first at the IFA show this week in Berlin. The company also said its mixed-reality content would include Steam’s VR games and even some sort of Halo experience.

Microsoft has spent much of this year building up its mixed-reality ecosystem. The company has promised that mixed reality will be a key part of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Working in concert, its hardware partners—HP, Lenovo, Dell, and Acer—plan to launch mixed-reality devices in time for the holidays. Pricing is important: Acer’s headset, for instance, will be available for $299 without the controllers, undercutting the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. At its Build conference in May, Acer announced a $399 bundle of headset plus a set of motion controllers.

Dell, announced that its own mixed-reality head-mounted display, the Dell Visor, will ship for $350 for just the headset, $100 for the controllers, and $450 for a bundle of all of them. Dell’s headset boasts a flip-up visor, and the controllers feature a thumb stick and buttons, according to Dell. Though all of Microsoft’s headsets are tethered to a PC via an HDMI cord, they can track movements in space without the need for external sensors. Meanwhile, prices of mixed-reality-capable PCs begin at $499. Microsoft’s partners have yet to announce further specifics on those PCs, but we do knows they’ ll be classified into two tiers.

Windows Mixed Reality PCs with integrated graphics will run at up to 60 frames per second, while Windows Mixed Reality Ultra PCs with discrete graphics will provide up to 90 frames per second. Microsoft also published a graphic of some of the developers who will be publishing apps to mixed reality. Note that they include a number of developers who already have published virtual-reality apps, or just apps for Windows. 2017-08-28 18:55 1.8 (2.03/5). You are about to activate our Facebook Messenger news bot. Once subscribed, the bot will send you a digest of trending stories once a day. You can also customize the types of stories it sends you.

Click on the button below to subscribe and wait for a new Facebook message from the TC Messenger news bot. Thanks, TC Team SpaceX Founded 2002 Overview Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is a space-transportation startup company founded by Elon Musk. It is developing the partially reusable launch vehicles Falcon 1 and Falcon 9.

Originally based in El Segundo, SpaceX now operates out of Hawthorne, California, USA. SpaceX was founded in June 2002 by Musk who had invested $100 million of his own money in the company as of March 2006. Location Hawthorne, CA Categories Aerospace, Transportation, Space Travel Founders Elon Musk Website http: //www.spacex.com Full profile for SpaceX SpaceX Founded 2002 Overview Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) is a space-transportation startup company founded by Elon Musk. It is developing the partially reusable launch vehicles Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. Originally based in El Segundo, SpaceX now operates out of Hawthorne, California, USA. SpaceX was founded in June 2002 by Musk who had invested $100 million of his own money in the company as of March 2006. Location Hawthorne, CA Hawthorne, CA Categories Aerospace, Transportation, Space Travel Aerospace Transportation Space Travel Founders Elon Musk Elon Musk Website http: //www.spacex.com http: //www.spacex.com Full profile for SpaceX Full profile for SpaceX Hyperloop One Founded 2014 Overview Hyperloop builds incredible pieces of advanced machinery.

They are inventing the technology of the future of transportation and to make sure we get it right we have developed unique testing capabilities. Whether it is state of the art wind tunnels, levitation rigs or electromagnetic test stands our world-class engineering team has built them in record time. We’ re building the 5th mode of transportation Location Los Angeles, CA Categories Travel, Transportation, Manufacturing Founders Josh Giegel, Shervin Pishevar Website https: //hyperloop-one.com/ Full profile for Hyperloop One Hyperloop One Founded 2014 Overview Hyperloop builds incredible pieces of advanced machinery.

They are inventing the technology of the future of transportation and to make sure we get it right we have developed unique testing capabilities. Whether it is state of the art wind tunnels, levitation rigs or electromagnetic test stands our world-class engineering team has built them in record time.

Fitbit on Monday introduced the world to its first bona fide smartwatch, the Fitbit Ionic. The fitness-minded consumer electronics company dipped its toes in the smartwatch waters with the Fitbit Blaze in early 2016 but that wasn’ t really a “true” smartwatch. The Ionic, which Fitbit describes as the ultimate health and fitness smartwatch, is constructed of lightweight aluminum with a nano-molding technology that allows the watch body to double as a Bluetooth and GPS antenna. It features a color, spherical glass touchscreen display with a brightness of up to 1,000 nits and is offered in a range of styles and colors (such is also the case with the bands). The wearable affords a variety of features including contactless payments, the ability to store music locally, water resistance up to 50 meters, sleep tracking, improved heart rate tracking, smart notifications and 4+ day battery life (this drops down to just 10 hours if you use the GPS or play music).

Users will have access to a variety of apps and clock faces via the Fitbit App Gallery as well as dynamic, on-demand workouts courtesy of Fitbit Coach. Audio coaching sessions designed to increase endurance, speed and form are coming in 2018, we’ re told. There’s even a relative SpO2 sensor for estimating blood oxygen levels which Fitbit says may one day be able to provide deeper health insights.

Fitbit earlier this year relinquished its position as the world’s top wearables vendor. According to a report from Strategy Analytics, Apple is now the global wearable leader as far as shipments are concerned.

Fitbit on Monday also announced a set of wireless headphones they’ re calling Fitbit Flyer. Essentially earbuds connected by a tether, the Flyer features a hydrophobic nano-coating that is rain, splash and sweatproof. The headphones provide up to six hours of playtime per charge and deliver two sound profiles for a more personal listening experience. The quick charge feature grants an additional hour of playtime with just a 15-minute charge. Included with each purchase is a collection of interchangeable ear tips, wings and fins to help users get the best possible fit.

Yahoo Finance earlier this year leaked renderings of the smartwatch and earbuds which, in hindsight, appear to be spot-on. The Fitbit Ionic will be available to pre-order starting tomorrow at select retailers (and from Fitbit’s website) priced at $299.95. Traditional and sport bands will command $29.95 each while a hand-crafted Horween leather strap will set you back $59.95. The Flyer headphones also go up for pre-order on Tuesday and will ding your wallet for $129.95. Both will arrive sometime in October, the company says.

2017-08-28 20:45 0.8 (2.00/5). Fitbit's new smartwatch, Ionic, up close: Is it an Apple Watch killer? Fitbit rolled out a series of products including a smartwatch called Ionic that'll compete with Apple Watch, but the future of the company may ride with a guidance and coaching service. The company is widely known for its hardware and fitness trackers. The Ionic features a bevy of improvements and CNET's Scott Stein noted that the smartwatch is 'a giant fitness-watch moonshot to compete with the bleeding-edge watches on the market.' For good measure, Fitbit also launched Aria 2, a Wi-Fi smart scale and Fitbit Flyer, wireless fitness headphones.

But those products--and Fitbit's overall lineup--collect the personalized data that'll lead to a new business model. Fitbit's long-term strategy is going to have to revolve around services. If all goes well, Fitbit could become a key health care player in the enterprise and push patients toward better outcomes. Enter the Fitbit Coach app, which rebrands the Fitstar Personal Trainer app and adds video workouts, audio coaching and guided health programs. In other words, Fitbit Coach will take the data customers produce and provide insights and tools. Fitbit will charge $7.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Audio coaching will be available on the Ionic in 2018.

Guided health programs will be available in the Winter on the Fitbit app. The idea that an app or wearable company can replace a fitness trainer is not new. There are many companies (Peloton, Under Armour) looking to even replace gyms with workout apps.

The interesting wrinkle for Fitbit is that its app could easily be tailored for health insurers and companies trying to boost the well being of their workouts. Fitbit to restructure, lay off 110 as Q4 unravels: Can it make business model shift? Fitbit will offer bodyweight workouts, on-demand exercises, recommended workouts and roadmaps to start running or cut added sugars. Those latter items could be used to offer discounts on health premiums for companies. The bottom line is that the hardware industry is a rough business. Fitbit sold 3.4 million devices in the second quarter, down 40 percent from a year ago. Fitbit is also burning off excess inventory.

The company lost $58.2 million on revenue of $353.3 million in the second quarter. But Fitbit's early move into the healthcare and wearable markets have given the company its real asset--data. Fitbit Coach is a first step toward becoming more data, services and enterprise based. 2017-08-28 14:00 1.1 (1.03/5). Get this deal On the inside, the Inspiron 3650 features a sixth-generation quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, a discrete AMD Radeon HD R9 360 graphics card, 16GB of RAM, a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive, a DVD burner, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi support.

And since Dell throws in a wired mouse and keyboard combo at no additional cost, you'll just need a PC monitor or HDTV to get up and going. Connectivity-wise, this model sports two USB 3.0 ports in the front, four USB 2.0 ports in the rear, an audio combo jack, an Ethernet port, a five-in-one card reader, a VGA port, and an HDMI port. And with plenty of room for internal expansion, you can easily add an SSD or a beefier graphics card down the road. Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) comes installed automatically, and that's a good fit if you depend on legacy software with limited support for newer operating systems. But since a license for Windows 10 Pro (64-bit) is included for free, you can make the jump to Microsoft's latest OS whenever you're ready. With Xbox One local game streaming, the Cortana personal assistant, and access to countless games and apps in the Windows Store, the Windows 10 upgrade is absolutely worth considering. 2017-08-28 18:48 1.0 (1.03/5).

When VMware announced it was partnering with AWS last fall, it turned more than a few enterprise heads. After all, we’ re talking about one company that dominates virtual machines on-prem, and the other in the public cloud. Together, the two companies make a powerful combination — and VMware made the whole shebang official today at VMworld when it announced that VMware Cloud was live on AWS. While AWS runs its own VMs, it’s not the same as those that VMware runs in a data center, and that creates a management headache for companies trying to run both.

By letting companies move to AWS and continue to run the VMware VMs in the public cloud, they get the best of both worlds without the management problems. It should be a boon to both companies, a fact that wasn’ t lost on VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger or AWS CEO Andy Jassy. “VMware Cloud on AWS gives customers a seamlessly integrated hybrid cloud that delivers the same architecture, capabilities and operational experience across both their vSphere-based on-premises environment and AWS, ” Gelsinger said in a statement. Jassy added, “The majority of the world’s enterprises have virtualized their data centers with VMware, and now these customers can easily move applications between their on-premises environments and AWS without having to purchase any new hardware, rewrite their applications, or modify their operations.” All of this is good news for IT pros, who have struggled to make the two systems work together.

That generally meant they would could put new applications in the cloud, but struggled to move legacy applications from VMware to the AWS VMs. That obstacle is removed with this alliance. This partnership is a huge lift for VMware as a company. While they boast almost 100 percent penetration in on-prem data centers, the company has struggled over the last five years to find its place as customers began to shift workloads to the cloud. This gives them a way to i ntegrate with AWS, the giant in the public cloud, and work smoothly across both environments. As for AWS, it’s a case of the rich getting richer.

It gets all of the public cloud business it was getting anyway, while also getting the VMware business as it moves to the cloud. Any way you slice it, this is a win-win-win.

Both companies get a big boost, and so do the customers who get a product that makes it easier to integrate VMware VMs in the AWS cloud. Everybody gets a trophy. 2017-08-28 14:49 1.3 (1.03/5). VMware, the company that gave rise to the virtual machine concept in the enterprise data center, announced a series of products and services today at VMworld in Las Vegas that show a company clearly shifting to managing hybrid environments. The hybrid strategy really began to gain momentum last year when the company forged agreements with the top public cloud vendors including Microsoft, Google and IBM, and most importantly, market leader AWS.

This showed that VMware finally understood that the best way forward wasn’ t to try and forge its own public cloud product, which it tried and failed, or to fight the public cloud. It was a recognition that most established enterprise companies were probably not going to be all on-prem or all in the public cloud, but a mix of the two for some time into the future. Today’s announcements at VMworld are about extending that strategy and offering customers a stack of tools to help manage their hybrid cloud world.

The partnerships with the public vendors last year were a big part of laying the groundwork for what they presenting today. The approach could work, at least for the foreseeable future as the industry shift to cloud computing has happened much more slowly than many (including me) would have anticipated. Companies working in a hybrid world face a myriad of challenges around areas like networking, security and policy management across environments, says Chris Wolf, CTO at VMware, and his company is lining up to help with a set of products designed to manage the complexity of a hybrid approach. This includes the new VMware Discover product, which is designed to give IT insight into all of the applications and services being used across the company with the idea of providing some control over what’s happening across its networks and in the public cloud (with or without its knowledge). This could be used in conjunction with VMware Cost Insight to more closely monitor the costs of these services. In addition, there is a new security product called VMware AppDefense, which is designed to help understand the normal state of the network, then report on anomalous behavior. There is a cloud-based network monitoring tool called VMware Network Insight that helps set consistent network and security policies across applications in the public cloud and on-prem, while VMware NSX Cloud is a cloud service for managing traffic across the public clouds and a software defined data center.

Finally, the company has an analytics service to supply detailed insight into performance across environments. While none of these tools are ground-breaking by any means, they give VMware a comprehensive set of solutions for customers to manage their hybrid environments, and continue the shift from their core virtual machine roots. Keep in mind, they are hardly alone in coming up with this approach. This is a similar strategy being employed by other legacy vendors including IBM, HPE, Red Hat and corporate parent Dell/EMC — VMware is an independent, publicly-traded entity that is part of the Dell/EMC federation.

2017-08-28 12:00 1.7 (1.02/5). Western Digital on Monday announced it's acquired the cloud services company Upthere, which provides users with a single cloud-based storage space for photos, videos, documents and music. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition should help Western Digital offer more innovative ways for consumers and enterprises to create, store and manage critical data. Last year, the Redwood City, California-based company -- founded by people from Apple, MongoDB and Oracle -- launched its cloud storage solution out of beta testing. It aims to replace consumers' hard drive or local mobile storage. The Upthere app is platform agnostic and available for iOS and Android devices, as well as macOS and Windows.

The company also announced last year that it received $77 million in funding from the likes of Western Digital and KPCB. 'Upthere is delivering on its mission to transform the personal storage market and we share their focus on providing consumers more rich and meaningful experiences with their data, ' Jim Welsh, Western Digital's SVP and GM of client solutions, said in a statement Monday. Upthere CEO Chris Bourdon is joining Western Digital as a 'strategic leader, ' Welsh said, adding, 'His extensive software expertise will help accelerate our user experience and cloud services imperatives across all aspects of the Client Solutions business.' 2017-08-28 22:18 1.0 (1.02/5). There have been several attempts at a Game of Thrones video game.

Cyanide Studios and Focus Home Interactive released a Game of Thrones RPG in 2012. Telltale Games has a version of Game of Thrones that utilizes its signature choose-your-own-adventure style gameplay and who could forget the excellent mod for Crusader Kings II? It now appears that Bethesda, the famed developer behind the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series, could be working on its own adaptation of the popular HBO title. First spotted by NeoGAF, there appears to be a landing page on Target's website that shows a primarily blank page, save for the words 'Bethesda: Game of Thrones'. The page is still there as of this publication. It almost seems fitting for Bethesda to make a Game of Thrones video game. The studio is well known for fantasy role playing with its Elder Scrolls series.

Dragons, feuds and medieval settings are the norm in the fantasy world of Tamriel. The irony is that Bethesda almost made a game set in Westeros, the fictional continent that most of Game of Thrones takes place on. According to a 2011 interview with Electronic Gaming Monthly, Todd Howard, executive director of Skyrim, said, “people in our studio liked [A Game of Thrones], and it seeped in a bit to what we were doing.

We were actually asked a while ago to turn those books into games.” It seems that George R. Martin's novels may have had a big influence on the development of Skyrim.

If anything, Bethesda making a Game of Thrones adaptation brings everything full circle. While it is certainly possible that the listing on Target is a mistake (or we're being trolled), giving Bethesda the reins to the beloved series seems within the realm of possibility.

2017-08-28 22:00 0.9 (1.02/5). Apple will unveil its next flagship smartphone at a press event on September 12 according to sources familiar with the company’s plans as reported on Monday by The Wall Street Journal. The rumored date is in line with iPhone reveals in previous years. Apple the past couple of years has unveiled its new iPhones at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. This year, however, the company is reportedly aiming to host the event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its new campus that is, if construction of the facility is complete in time.

While the iPhone will be the star of the show, it likely won’ t be the only new product we see that day. Apple is also expected to showcase its third generation Apple Watch at the event. Rumors suggest the wearable will feature the same design as its predecessors albeit with upgraded internals and an optional LTE radio. A new Apple TV with support for 4K video is also on the docket, we’ re told. Most believe Apple will announce as many as three variants of the iPhone for 2017 including a high-end model with an OLED display to mark its 10 th anniversary. The first iPhone was unveiled to the public on January 9,2007, and launched on June 29.

Samsung last week officially introduced its second-half flagship, the Galaxy Note 8, and opened pre-orders the following day. That phablet launches on September 15. Apple typically releases its iPhones 10 days after announcing them. If that holds true this time around, we’ d be looking at a launch date of September 22. 2017-08-28 17:30 1.8 (1.02/5).

Although Apache Kafka is widely adopted, there are still operational challenges that teams run into when they try to run Kafka at scale. In order to restore balance to Kafka clusters, LinkedIn open sourced and developed Cruise Control, its general-purpose system that continuously monitors clusters and automatically adjusts the resources needed to meet pre-defined performance goals. According to LinkedIn staff software engineer Jiangjie Qin in a LinkedIn engineering post, Cruise Control started off as an intern project by Efe Gencer, who is currently a research assistant at Cornell University. Several members of the Kafka development team helped to brainstorm and design Cruise Control, and the project received several other contributions from the Kafka SRE team at LinkedIn. Cruise Control for Kafka is currently deployed at LinkedIn, where it monitors user-specified goals, makes sure there are no violations of these goals, analyzes the existing workload on the cluster, and then automatically executes administrative operations to satisfy those goals, according to Qin. Cruise Control was also designed with a few requirements in mind, which meant it needed to be reliable, resource-efficient, extensible, and serve as a general framework “that could only understand the application and migrate only a partial state and be used in any stateful distributed system, ” writes Qin.

Cruise Control follows a monitor-analysis-action working cycle, providing a REST API for users to interact with. This REST API supports “querying the workload and optimization proposals of the Kafka cluster, as well as triggering admin operations, ” according to Qin. Cruise Control is also made up of a Load Monitor, which collects standard Kafka metrics from the cluster and derives per partition resource metrics that are not available. For instance, it estimates CPU utilization on a per-partition basis, writes Qin. The Analyzer is the actual “brain” of the open source project, using a heuristic method to generate optimization proposals based on the goals and the cluster workload model from the Load Monitor. According to Qin: “Cruise Control also allows for specifying hard goals and soft goals. A hard goal is one that must be satisfied (e.g., replica placement must be rack-aware).

Soft goals, on the other hand, may be left unmet if doing so makes it possible to satisfy all the hard goals. The optimization would fail if the optimized results violate a hard goal. Usually, the hard goals will have a higher priority than the soft goals.” Now that Cruise Control is open sourced, Kafka users can check out its architecture and what challenges it aims to solve. LinkedIn recommends users check this reference for a guide. 2017-08-28 17:26 0.9 (1.02/5).

A New York Post report that one of Microsoft's more celebrated U. Business customers for Windows Phones is dumping the platform raises some interesting questions about Redmond's future mobility plans. The Post reported on August 28 that the New York Police Department (NYPD) is going to scrap the 36,000 Nokia phones running the Windows Phone OS that it has been rolling out for the past two years. Microsoft dropped support for Windows Mobile 8.1 in July 2017. But the two handset models the NYPD purchased, the Lumia 640XL and Lumia 830, both were among the Windows Phones that were upgradable to Windows 10 Mobile. (Of these two, only the newer 640XL will also be eligible for the coming Fall Windows 10 Mobile update, however.) As of October 2016, the NYPD was planning ot migrate to Windows Phones running Windows 10 Mobile. But the New York Post is reporting that the NYPD, instead, is likely to move to iPhones by the end of this calendar year.

Microsoft has been working to get out of the phone business for the past couple of years. The company is not currently manufacturing any new Windows Phones.

And Windows Phones that are still being used won't get the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update coming out later this year. Instead, some subset of existing models will only get something internally known as 'Feature 2, ' which is believed to be a dead-end branch of Windows 10 Mobile. I asked Microsoft officials for comment on the NYPD's plans.

No word back so far. NYPD's seeming defection from Windows Phone is interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, Microsoft officials have held up NYPD as an example of the kind of customer that Microsoft's top brass seem to believe they could win over with some type of new business-focused Windows 10 handset at some point in the future. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and others at the company have said publicly that certain business verticals could be a good target for Windows-based mobile phones tailored to run a set of customized applications. The NYPD -- the largest police force in the U.

-- is an example of this type of customer, with a number of the apps running on Windows Phones, like specific forms, case management and the like, being specific to the agency and its work. In 2015, Nadella said Microsoft was not going to try to make another me-too consumer phone or phone OS. Instead, 'for business customers, i t's about custom apps they want to deploy onto those endpoints with management and security, ' he said. Microsoft is believed to be working on s ome kind of new mobile device, codenamed 'Andromeda.' We've heard it will likely offer telephony capabilities. We've expected Microsoft to target the device specifically at the business audience -- users like the NYPD.

But if businesses don't find Microsoft's mobile productivity, security and management capabilities interesting enough, is there any point in the company trying yet again to infiltrate the mobile-phone market? It was already increasingly hard to make a case that Microsoft would be able to find the exact moment to try to make a comeback in mobile, beyond trying to strengthen its slowly dwindling PC/tablet stronghold. It's growing increasingly tougher to see what Microsoft could bring to the party to entice businesses to give up their iPhones and Android phones. 2017-08-28 17:08 1.4 (1.02/5). In the present, just as in 1724, the human race found itself in an adventurous spirit, a spirit that asked big questions, a spirit that demanded to know what the boundaries were and to push the envelope.

Beaston02 wanted to know if the unlimited cloud storage offered by Amazon was really unlimited, so he recorded live webcam porn to see if he could break the boundaries of 'unlimited' cloud storage. And if you started watching his recorded porn back in 1724 you would only just have finished it. Amazon suspended its unlimited storage option in June - many speculate that it was due to beaton02's giant porn stash - but he himself claims that decision has nothing to do with him.

The Redditor claims that he has more of a problem with hoarding data than he does with porn, as the whole thing started out as a part of a bigger project to learn new code and to test himself to see how much data he could capture. So he set off and after 5 to 6 months he had captured nearly 2 petabytes (1.8) of pornography by setting up a number of programs to record a number of free Livestream webcam shows. Which if you break it down equates to the following: 23.4 years worth of HD porn, 102 years worth of porn at 720p, or a whopping 3 centuries worth (293 years) at 480p. Beaston02 has stopped his recording adventures but has released how he did it, and the torch has been passed on to another group of diligent porn archivists - if we are going to let that become a title - who have collectively embarked on the Petabyte Porn Project, which has the similar goal of recording and storing recorded porn on Amazon and Google Drive. The Petabyte Porn Project allegedly stockpiles 12 terabytes a day.

Earlier this month the plans for the largest data storage centre that will be built in the Arctic Circle in Norway was reported on, back then some naysayers questioned what could possibly demand such a huge secure facility, it seems that question has been answered. 2017-08-28 17:00 0.4 (1.02/5). We've become so comfortable with the idea of our data traveling over Wi-Fi that most of us have stopped worrying about the safety of that data—and just who else might be seeing it.

Public Wi-Fi networks, which are commonplace and convenient, are also unfortunately also excellent avenues for attackers looking to seize your personal information. When even your ISP is allowed to sell your browsing history it's time to be concerned about who's looking at your data. Enter virtual private networks (VPNs). These online services use simple software to secure your internet connection, and they give you greater control over how you appear online, too. While you might never have heard of VPN services, they are valuable tools that you should understand and use. So who needs a VPN? The short answer is that everyone does.

Even Mac users can benefit from a VPN. In the simplest terms, a VPN is used to create a secure, encrypted connection—which can be thought of as a tunnel—between your computer and a server operated by the VPN service. In a professional setting, this tunnel makes you part of the company's network, as if you were physically sitting in the office—hence the name. While you're connected to a VPN, all your network traffic passes through this protected tunnel, and no one—not even your ISP—can see your traffic until it exits the tunnel from the VPN server and enters the public internet. If you make sure to only connect to websites secured with HTTPS, your data will continue to be encrypted even after it leaves the VPN. Think about it this way: If your car pulls out of your driveway, someone can follow you and see where you are going, how long you are at your destination, and when you are coming back.

They might even be able to peek inside your car and learn more about you. With a VPN service, you are essentially driving into a closed parking garage, switching to a different car, and driving out, so that no one who was originally following you knows where you went. The protection provided by a VPN offers users many advantages. First and foremost, it prevents anyone on the same network access point (or anywhere else) from intercepting your web traffic in a man-in-the-middle attack. This is especially handy for travelers and for those using public Wi-Fi networks, such as web surfers at hotels, airports, and coffee shops. VPNs also cloak your computer's actual IP address, making it harder for advertisers (or spies, or hackers) to track you online.

Many VPN services also provide their own DNS resolution system. Think of DNS as a phone book that turns a text-based URL like 'pcmag.com' into an IP address that computers can understand. Savvy snoops can monitor DNS requests and track your movements online. Greedy attackers can also use DNS poisoning to direct you to bogus phishing pages designed to steal your data. When you use a VPN's DNS system, it's another layer of protection.

This is just common-sense security, but there are also people for whom a VPN is essential for personal and professional safety. Journalists and activists rely on VPN services to circumvent government censorship so they can safely communicate with the outside world. Of course, doing so may be against the law, depending on the country in which they're located. What about using a VPN for BitTorrent? Some services, such as TorGuard and NordVPN, allow peer-to-peer file sharing and the use of BitTorrent sharing. Others cancel your subscription if you use their servers for file sharing.

Be smart: Learn the company's terms of service—and the local laws on the subject. That way you can't complain if you get caught. The VPN services market has exploded in the past few years, and a small competition has turned into an all-out melee. Many providers are capitalizing on the general population's growing concerns about surveillance and cybercrime, which means it's getting hard to tell when a company is actually providing a secure service and when it's throwing out a lot of fancy words while selling snake oil. In fact, since VPN services have become so popular in the wake of Congress killing ISP privacy rules, there have even been fake VPNs popping up, so be careful. It's important to keep a few things in mind when evaluating which VPN service is right for you: reputation, performance, type of encryption used, transparency, ease of use, support, and extra features. Don't just focus on price, though that is an important factor.

That said, not all VPN services require that you pay. Several services we've listed here also have free VPN offerings. You tend to get what you pay for, as far as features and server locations go, but if your needs are basic, a free service can still keep you safe. TunnelBear, for example, offers a limited but serviceable free VPN. Some VPN services provide a free trial, so take advantage of it. Make sure you are happy with what you signed up for, and take advantage of money-back guarantees if you're not.

This is actually why I also recommend starting out with a short-term subscription—a week or a month—to really make sure you are happy. KeepSolid VPN Unlimited offers a one-week Vacation subscription, for example. Yes, you may get a discount by signing up for a year, but that's more money at stake should you realize the service doesn't meet your performance needs. If you're using a service to route all your internet traffic through its servers, you have to be able to trust the provider.

Established security companies, such as F-Secure, may have only recently come to the VPN market. It's easier to trust companies that have been around a little longer, simply because their reputation is likely to be known. But companies and products can change quickly. Today's slow VPN service that won't let you cancel your subscription could be tomorrow's poster child for excellence. I'm not a cryptography expert, so I can't verify all of the encryption claims providers make. I focus, instead, on the features provided. Bonus features like ad-blocking, firewalls, and kill switches that disconnect you from the web if your VPN connection drops, go a long way toward keeping you safe.

I also prefer providers that use OpenVPN, since it's a standard that's superior to the older PPTP. It's also, as the name implies, open source, meaning it benefits from many eyes looking for potential problems. Be sure to consider transparency and the privacy policy of a VPN service before you buy a subscription. See if the policy spells out what the service does, what information it collects, and what its responsibilities are. Some companies explain that they collect some information, but don't inform you about how they intend to use that information.

Others are more transparent. TorGuard, for example, has a clear explanation of how it keeps track of payment card information without maintaining any logging information. As part of your research, you should also be sure to find out where the company is based.

Some countries don't have data-retention laws, making it easier to keep a promise of 'We don't keep any logs.' Most users want a full graphic user interface for managing their VPN connection and settings, though a few would rather download a configuration file and import it into the OpenVPN client. Most VPN companies I've reviewed support all levels of technological savvy, and the best have robust customer support for when things go sideways. While a VPN can protect your privacy online, you might still want to take the additional step of avoiding paying for one using a credit card, for moral or security reasons. Several VPN services now accept PayPal, Bitcoin, and other alternate payment methods.

In a few cases, VPN services may even accept retailer gift cards. That Starbucks gift card may be better spent on secure web browsing than a mediocre-at-best latte. It's also important to remember what a VPN can and cannot do. While it hides your IP address, it's not a true anonymization service.

For that, you'll want to access the Tor network, which will almost certainly slow down your connection. That said, some services, such as NordVPN, offer Tor access on specific servers. IVPN offers a similar feature called multi-hop VPN, which lets you route your web traffic in tricky ways. Some important things to look for when shopping for a VPN are the number of licenses for simultaneous connections that come with your fee, the number of servers available, and the number of locations in which the company has servers. It all comes down to numbers.

Most VPN services allow you to connect up to five devices with a single account. Any service that offers fewer connections is outside the mainstream. Keep in mind that you'll need to connect every device in your home individually to the VPN service, so just two or three licenses won't be enough for the average cohabitating pair. Note that many VPN services offer native apps for both Android and iOS, but that such devices count toward your total number of connections. Of course, there are more than just phones and computers in a home.

Game systems, tablets, and smart home devices such as light bulbs and fridges all need to connect to the internet. Many of these things can't run VPN software on their own, nor can they be configured to connect to a VPN through their individual settings. In these cases, you may be better off configuring your router to connect with the VPN of your choice. By adding VPN protection to your router, you secure the traffic of every gadget connected to that router. And the router—and everything protected by it—uses just one of your licenses. Nearly all of the companies I've reviewed offer routers with preinstalled VPN software, making it even easier to add this level of protection. When it comes to servers, more is always better.

More servers mean that you're less likely to be shunted into a VPN server that is already filled to the brim with other users. Private Internet Access currently leads the pack with well over 3,000 servers at its disposal. But the competition is beginning to heat up. Last year, only a handful of companies offered more than 500 servers, now it's becoming unusual to find a company offering fewer than 1,000 servers. The number and distribution of those servers is also important. The more places a VPN has to offer, the more options you have to spoof your location! More importantly, having numerous servers in diverse locales means that no matter where you go on Earth you'll be able to find a nearby VPN server.

The closer the VPN server, the better the speed and reliability of the connection it can offer you. Remember, you don't need to connect to a far-flung VPN server in order to gain security benefits. For most purposes, a server down the street is as safe as one across the globe. While it's often said that having to choose between security and convenience is a false dichotomy, it is at least somewhat true in the case of VPN services. When a VPN is active, your web traffic is going through many more steps than normal and being bounced around in surprising ways.

The end result is that your internet connection will likely be more sluggish than normal. The good news is that using a VPN probably isn't going to remind you of the dial-up days of yore.

Most services provide perfectly adequate internet speed when in use, and can even handle streaming HD video. 4K video and other data-intensive tasks like gaming over a VPN are another story, however.

Some VPN services, such as NordVPN, have started to roll out specialty servers for high-bandwidth activities. And nearly every service I've tested includes a tool to connect you with the fastest available network. Of course, you can always limit your VPN use to when you're not on a trusted network. In some very rare cases, VPN services can actually improve your internet performance.

That was the case for PureVPN, IPVanish, and ExpressVPN in my testing. This is likely because these services have access to high-bandwidth infrastructure that your traffic is routed through when the service is active. When I test VPNs, I use the Ookla speed test tool. (Note that Ookla is owned by PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis.) This test provides metrics for latency, download speeds, and upload speeds. Any one of these can be an important measurement depending on your needs, but I tend to view the download speed as the most important.

After all, we live in an age of digital consumption. Using that measurement, PureVPN is the fastest VPN by far. It's followed by the aptly named ExpressVPN and IPVanish VPN. But networks can be fickle things and your mileage may vary. Borders still exist on the web. New, major-release films and television shows are often available on Netflix outside of the US yet only available for purchase via Amazon, iTunes, or on the Windows Store within the US. But if you were to select a VPN server in a country with rights to the show, your computer's IP address would appear to be in that country, allowing you to view the content.

Of course, you might find Netflix in other countries to be even more restrictive. The trouble is that Netflix and similar streaming services are getting wise to the scam. In my testing, I found that Netflix blocks streaming more often than not when I was using a VPN. There are a few exceptions, but Netflix is actively working to protect its content deals. VPNs that work with Netflix today may not work tomorrow. You'll note that I said 'scam, ' above, and that is more or less true. Just because you paid for Netflix in one place does not mean you're entitled to the content available on the same service but in a different location.

Media distribution and rights are messy and complicated. You may or may not agree with the laws and terms of service surrounding media streaming, but you should definitely be aware that they exist and understand when you're taking the risk of breaking them. I used to advise people to do banking and other important business over their cellular connection when using a mobile device, since it is generally safer than connecting with a public Wi-Fi network. But even that isn't always a safe bet. Researchers have demonstrated how a portable cell tower, such as a femtocell, can be used for malicious ends. The attack hinges on jamming the LTE and 3G bands, which are secured with strong encryption, and forcing devices to connect with a phony tower over the less-secure 2G band. Because the attacker controls the fake tower, he can carry out a man-in-the-middle attack.

Admittedly, this is an exotic attack, but it's far from impossible. And Wi-Fi attacks are probably far more common than we'd like to believe. That's why I recommend getting a VPN app for your mobile device to protect all your mobile communications.

Even if you don't have it on all the time, using a mobile VPN is a smart way to protect your personal information. Most VPN services offer apps on both Android and iOS, saving you the trouble of configuring your phone's VPN settings yourself.

VPN providers typically allow up to five devices to be connected simultaneously under a single account. Also, while there are free VPN services available, many require that mobile users sign up for a paid subscription. Not all mobile VPN apps are created equal. In fact, most VPN providers offer different services (and sometimes, different servers) for their mobile offerings than they do for their desktop counterparts. I am pleased to see that NordVPN and Private Internet Access provide the same excellent selection of servers regardless of platform.

These apps received an Editors' Choice nod both for desktop VPN apps and Android VPN apps. KeepSolid and NordVPN win when it comes to VPN apps for the iPhone. One feature of note for Android users is that some VPN services also block online ads and trackers. While iPhone owners can use apps like 1Blocker to remove ads and trackers from Safari, ad blockers aren't available on the Google Play store. But if you were to use Spotflux or Private Internet Access, ads would be a thing of the past. If you're of the iPhone persuasion, there are a few other caveats to consider for a mobile VPN.

Many iPhone VPN apps don't use OpenVPN, even if the VPN service that made the app supports the protocol. That's because Apple requires additional vetting if a company wants to include OpenVPN with its app. Thankfully, there's a workaround for this problem. Instead of using the VPN app from the company from which you've purchased a subscription, you can download the standalone OpenVPN app. Open it, and you can enter your subscription information from the VPN company you've decided to work with. The OpenVPN app will then connect to the VPN company's servers using my preferred protocol. Computer and software providers work hard to make sure that the devices you buy are safe right out of the box.

But they don't provide everything you'll need. Antivirus software, for example, consistently outperforms the built-in protections. In the same vein, VPN software lets you use the web and Wi-Fi with confidence that your information will remain secure. It's critically important and often overlooked. Even if you don't use it every moment of every day, a VPN is a fundamental tool that everyone should have at their disposal—like a password manager or an online backup service.

A VPN is also a service that will only become more important as our more of our devices become connected. So stay safe, and get a VPN. Click through the review links of the best VPN services below for detailed analysis and performance results, and feel free to chime in on the comments section below them. 2017-08-28 14:44 0.2 (1.02/5). China’s crackdown on Internet freedom is getting even more intense. Last Friday, the country’s top Internet censor announced a new set of regulations (link via Google Translate) meant to eliminate posts by anonymous users on Internet forums and other platforms.

The Cyberspace Administration of China will start enforcing those rules on Oct. According to the new regulations, Internet companies and service providers are responsible for requesting and verifying real names from users when they register and must immediately report illegal content to the authorities. Tech firms, including Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, are under more pressure to serve as the government’s gatekeepers as China prepares for the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party this fall, which is expected to place new people in several key leadership positions. Furthermore, a n ew cybersecurity law that went into effect at the beginning of June requires tech companies to store important data on servers within China. While this is supposedly meant to protect sensitive information, it can also make it easier for the government to track and persecute Internet users. The CAC also specified what content is forbidden from being published online (link and translation via Google Translate), citing a list from a 2000 bill regulating Internet information services in China. The list is so broad that it can cover almost anything: While China has issued various rules requiring online real-name registration for years, the CAC’s new regulations are another sign that the government is becoming increasingly stringent about censorship.

For example, using VPNs to access blocked sites like Facebook and Twitter was relatively easy until earlier this year when the government began a crackdown that many observers believe is much more serious than previous attempts to enforce the ban. As The Diplomat notes, China is taking a multi-pronged approach as it doubles down on censorship, placing more pressure on international publishers as well. 2017-08-28 05:07 1.6 (1.00/5). The Uber board offered Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi the new role on Sunday. And according to Bloomberg data, they would have had to pay him a lot of money to woo him.

Khosrowshahi, who has been at the helm of Expedia since 2005, had almost $185 million in unvested stock options when the offer was made Sunday. He probably wouldn’ t forgo that kind of money unless Uber could offer him more. Executives are usually given a salary, with much of the compensation tied up in stock awards. This is designed to motivate them to grow the company’s value and to stay in the job. With a $68 billion valuation, Uber can afford a significant compensation package. When Uber bought Otto, it was enough to net founder Anthony Levandowski $250 million.

Since Uber is a private company, it won’ t need to disclose Khosrowshahi’s salary and equity stake. According to the New York Times, Charter Communications CEO Thomas Rutledge was the highest paid CEO last year, with $98 million awarded for just 2016.

CBS’ Les Moonves followed with $68.6 million and Madison Square Garden CEO David O’ Connor took home $54 million. Khosrowshahi received nearly $95 million in pay in 2015, making him one of the most highly paid leaders in corporate America. The vast majority of that sum came from a package of stock options that the online travel company gave him in March of 2015 and that was expected to vest over several years. His pay wasn’ t always so rich, however. In 2014, Khosrowshahi’s compensation at Expedia totaled $9.6 million.

Last year, he took home $2.4 million in salary and bonus compensation. 2017-08-28 19:01 1.8 (1.00/5). The biggest change in recently released Go 1.9 is improved support for gradual code repair through the use of type alias declarations. Go 1.9 also improves the garbage collector and the compiler.

Gradual code repair, as explained by Google engineer Russ Cox, is a useful approach to code refactoring, mostly valuable with large codebases. In short, gradual code repair aims to carry through a large refactor in a series of steps, i.e., commits, as opposed to making all the changes atomically, i.e., in one single commit. The atomic refactor approach is usually simpler at a conceptual level, but with large codebases it can produce really big commits, which are hard to review and merge. With gradual code repair, you refactor your code in three steps: first, you introduce the new API, which should be able to coexist with the old API, so you do not need to change all uses of the old API at once; second, you convert all uses of the old API to the new API; finally, you can remove the old API.

To enable gradual code repair, it must be possible to create alternate names for constants, functions, variables, and types. Now, Go allows to define a type alias using a declaration like: This can be used to make all references to OldAPI automatically use the refactored type. For a broader discussion of gradual code repair, do not miss Russ Cox’s exposition. As explained by Google engineer Francesc Campoy, most engineering effort for Go 1.9 went into improvements of the runtime, core library, and tooling. The most significant changes are: To learn about all the changes that went into Go 1.9, make sure to read the official release notes.

2017-08-28 19:00 1.7 (1.00/5). Although Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has yet to officially accept the chief executive officer position at Uber, Expedia Chairman Barry Diller believes “it is his intention to accept, ” according to an SEC filing. Just yesterday, it came out that U ber offered the CEO job to Khosrowshahi. In an email to Expedia employees, Diller wrote: Khosrowshahi has been CEO at Expedia since 2005, when IAC spun it out as its own company. He was a vocal opponent of President Trump’s executive order banning Muslim people from traveling to the U. S., and he more recently criticized Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville. If Khosrowshahi takes the job at Uber, which it sounds like he will, he’s going to be immediately tasked with the lawsuit with Waymo over self-driving technology, hiring a chief operating officer and a chief finance officer, and helping to restore Uber’s public image in light of sexual harassment allegations.

2017-08-28 17:37 1.8 (1.00/5). Containers are exploding in popularity because they're fast and efficient.

While security is just as important as it is for virtual machines, securing containers requires a different approach. Because containers run on a shared host and typically use multiple components to deliver a complete solution, there are many considerations that are required to secure a container environment. There are three distinct layers in a container implementation that need to be secured: Securing the containers and images without securing the host is like building a strong house on quicksand. Securing the host without properly securing the containers is like building a house on rock, but leaving all the doors open with a big sign out front that says, 'Please rob me, thank you.' As part of the three distinct levels of a container security implementation, there are five security controls you should use for implementing a complete container security solution. The threat of privilege escalation through an attacker gaining access to even the least important containerized image is too great to leave to chance, so it's key to ensure each and every image is free from vulnerabilities.

It makes sense to run security assessments on images as part of your build process, along with continuous monitoring of images in your private registries. Containers should always (and only) be deployed with a hardened configuration. You will want to ensure that all components are run using best practices with no privileged mode or SSH access.

Every container must be signed and authenticated and checks need to put into place that ensure they are verified before they are used. Typically, these checks can be integrated into Docker Content Trust. All the images have their own secrets, passwords, and keys that allow them to be authenticated whenever a container is brought up or down. These secrets should never need to be part of the deployment process and not be directly embedded in the images to ensure full content trust as described above.

The host is the most obvious point that needs security since an attacker, via this point, could easily gain access to everything. As the host is a traditional OS, usually Linux, this is something we've long been able to secure. At this time, no commercially available container security product supports all three levels of container implementation or the five specific security controls mentioned above. CloudPassage's Project Azul, now in beta, is designed specifically to support this.

Containers are fast becoming a popular approach to delivering agile applications. Securing containers doesn't come without challenges. Following these best practices ensures that your container implementation is secure. 2017-08-28 17:01 0.9 (1.00/5). To get started, head to Settings >System >Notifications & actions ‌ – or, if you’ re on a Windows 10 PC, click here to open notifications & actions.

First, send notifications, reminders and alarms directly to the action center by right-clicking action center in your taskbar, then selecting Turn on quiet hours. Stop notifications from showing during a presentation by turning on Hide notifications when I’ m duplicating my screen. Or, keep them from showing on your lock screen when you’ re not logged in by turning off Show notifications on the lock screen. If you’ re tired of seeing notifications from a particular app, turn them off next to the app under Get notifications from these senders – or, click on the app for more options. You also always have the option to stop getting notifications on your PC by turning off Get notifications from apps and other senders. In case you missed it, here’s last week’s Windows 10 Tip: Have a great week!

Updated August 28,2017 9: 23 am 2017-08-28 16:18 0.3 (1.00/5). Somewhere along the lines, while it was hard at work on the Ionic, it occurred to Fitbit that it really ought to make a pair of Bluetooth headphones, too. After all, ditching the smartphone during a workout is one of the smartwatch’s selling points, thanks to mobile payment and offline caching for music services like Pandora, so wireless earbuds are a bit of a no-brainer. So the company built the Flyer.

For pretty much all intents and purposes, they’ re your basic pair of Bluetooth workout headphones — akin to the latest offering from Jaybird, et al. That’s not a bad thing, mind, but there’s not a ton they’ re bringing to the table, save for the fact that they’ re designed specifically to hold two simultaneous connections: your Ionic and your phone. Pairing to the phone is pretty standard, but they do a pretty good job auto connecting to the smartwatch. It’s not quite as seamless as what Apple has done with the W1 chip on Beats, but it does the trick.

Once connected, they’ ll do music playback and voice cues tied to a workout. Beyond all that, there doesn’ t seem to be much particular advantage in picking Fitbit’s headphones over the competition. I suspect Fitbit flirted with the possibility of building heart-rate monitoring or other fitness tracking directly into the headphones like Samsung has done in the past, but doing so would have both driven up the price and been redundant for all those who have a tracker on their wrist. Instead, the company just went the straightforward route with the Fitbit Flyer and the result is pretty underwhelming. The headset is sweat proof for workouts, features a control panel for volume and calls and has dual-microphones to help reduce wind noise. I’ ve been wearing them, and the quality is fine — pretty much on par with the competition.

The headphones also have rubber fins to keep them in place that are a bit more comfortable than other, harder plastic fins. That said, I have yet to find a pair of Bluetooth buds that fit me well.

But maybe I’ m the weird one here. As for the look — like the Ionic, I’ m not in love with it.

The big metallic bulbs bring to mind those bizarre will.i.am Button headphones. Fitbit has been making some weird design choices of late The Fitbit Flyer will run $129, putting it in the ballpark of other wireless earbuds. I asked Fitbit about the possibility of a bundle, and they refused to confirm or deny anything — but that would certainly make sense in terms of product positioning. 2017-08-28 13:00 1.3 (1.00/5). There is little debate that open source is increasingly important across all of the major infrastructure areas: compute, storage, networking, and applications.

But the role of open source, and in some cases even the purpose, is being changed as the major drivers shift from vendors whose primary objective is to carve out a business to the very users whose infrastructures leverage the open source components and tools. As open source changes, it means that the surrounding landscape will have to change with it. And as with all change, this creates threats and opportunities for those who make their living in and around IT. Open source has actually played a key role in networking for several decades. Virtually every carrier-, enterprise-, or cloud-grade system available leverages (and has for some time) key open source elements. Whether it’s the underlying operating system or the SSL libraries, it is difficult to deploy a networking device today without having some open source component in your environment.

So even if nothing were to change, I would encourage any user of networking to begin developing an open source strategy if one does not already exist. Minimally, you should at least understand what open source exists within your environment if for no other reason than to track the known issues and vulnerabilities that tend to proliferate, at times quietly, through large swaths of the IT world. More optimally, you would develop a strategy for evaluating and qualifying key open components, and potentially even contribute to projects that advance your company’s interests. It’s not just that the major networking players have adopted open source strategies to accelerate development.

The rate of open source inclusion is actually increasing. The open source acceleration is driven by three primary dynamics: more mainstream understanding of the role of open source in production environments, the maturation of major open source projects, and the use of open source as a primary strategic lever. I don’ t need to spend too much time on the first two. It is observably true that open source is mainstream. The proliferation of Linux was enough to make this happen, and then we have added broader efforts like OpenContrail, OpenDaylight, ECOMP, and the like. And as these projects get deployed in high-profile networks, a lot of the risk that used to be associated with open source is suddenly rendered less potent. But the use of open source as a major strategic lever deserves some special treatment.

If you are a major service provider, who is the competition you worry about most? AT&T certainly has to take steps to compete with Verizon. But Verizon represents a well-known foe. Like teams that face off in major rivalries in collegiate or professional sports, when you know your enemy, the battles are familiar, and the tactics are easily understood. It’s not that the competition is not fierce, but because it is familiar, the risk is not about the unknown so much as about execution. If you have wondered why AT&T has spent so much time focused on improving execution through a software focus, it’s because that’s exactly how you prepare to fight a longtime foe.

But the real risk lies not in Verizon. Or Sprint or CenturyLink or even Comcast. Those are all competition, which might be challenging at times, but the plays to run there are well understood. The risk—the unknown, if you will—comes from non-traditional warfare. As broadband access improves and as access and WAN go through a technology refresh, we will see that more and more applications will perform reasonably well using regular broadband for connectivity.

This is certainly true for consumers already, and it’s largely true for most smaller branches or for branches that primarily perform small functions. With base Internet connectivity and some fairly basic services as all that’s really required in the home or on-prem, it’s a pretty small step to go from home assistant to gateway device for the likes of Amazon and Google. If the existential threat is coming from the cloud players, then open source becomes an interesting lever to pull for AT&T. In fact, where they would normally fight for differentiation against their more traditional competition, they are now willing to open source.

AT&T has pushed into the open source space in a big way with ECOMP. It’s a massive undertaking, and they are no doubt keeping some of the jewels under lock and key, but to put that much effort into an open source project signals a change in strategic disposition. Of course, it doesn't hurt that they can swell their developer ranks without hiring more people — a nice side effect of effective communities. If they can use open source as a lever to bring down industry-wide costs, they can effectively arm the entire telco space with some of the tools required to make transport and managed services more cost effective. In doing so, they can help circle the herd while Google and Amazon attack from the outside. It is actually in AT&T’s long-term worst interests to allow these non-traditional players to gain any foothold from which they can build a better offering, even if that foothold is in someone else's backyard.

The cloud players are also contributing to the change in open source. Facebook is perhaps the best example with their efforts around the Open Compute Project, but virtually every major web scale and cloud property is engaged in this type of effort. To understand how this works, we have to understand where the intellectual property is.

For most of the web scale companies, the real jewels are less in the infrastructure and more in how it's managed. So as they innovate in the hardware or even the platform software, they can open that up for the world without really impacting their competitive moat. Essentially, they improve their negotiating position for some components while preserving the things that matter most to them. And so we end up with a dramatically different open source landscape now that these players have solidified their operations and moved beyond. But the changes to open source are just starting.

In fact, in the container space, we are seeing companies start to band together with efforts like Kubernetes and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It might seem strange to see the cloud companies starting to align around a small set of common efforts. But who is the primary enemy for the cloud properties? The obvious answer is that they are each others’ enemies. But the reality is that the biggest competition for cloud at this point is still non-consumption. That’s a fancy way of saying that people doing the same old thing is what they need to compete against. And if they collectively make it easier to move to the cloud, then they can all compete on the strength of their offerings.

In fact, as the cloud companies become more differentiated in their products, they will actually collaborate more in the open source arena. When cloud was just starting, they were all roughly after the same thing. Now that Microsoft is attacking with applications, Google with TPUs, and AWS with their sheer presence and market dominance, they will be freer to collaborate to take down traditional IT. And to do that, they will undoubtedly step up their open source game above what is already very impressive engagement. So we will continue to see—at least in the networking arena—small battles like gRPC and OpenConfig that might not have ubiquitous end-user support, primarily because it fits into some existing framework. And those efforts will also impact open source because, depending on how the architects try to flex their muscles, we might very well see fractured communities emerge as people try to garner support for their secret sauce. My major point in all of this is that open source is a major contributor to networking today, and it’s going to become more important over time.

But the role of open source is not merely because someone wants something to be open. Increasingly, open source is going to be a strategic weapon for opening up markets and fighting B2B battles. And this means that open source groups will increasingly become a battleground where proxy wars are fought between groups of people advocating for interests that are not always well-publicized. Minimally, I would think that consumers would want to at least survey the landscape to develop a point of view on how some of these battles will impact them. They could, for instance, signal the rise or fall of major efforts, which could render architectural decisions obsolete over time.

As a means of risk mitigation, open source strategies simply have to exist. The winners in all of this? The users always win when competition heats up. Minimally, it improves things like choice and flexibility. And more ideally?

Someone will end up serving the entire industry out of what might originate as pure self-interest. 2017-08-28 09:01 1.0 (0.05/5). Office 365 subscribers always have the latest version of Microsoft Office — currently Office 2016. They also get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office 2016 without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they’ re available. We’ re doing for you, so you don’ t have to. Following are key updates to Office 365 for Windows since Office 2016 was released in September 2015 — all the 2017 updates and the most important ones from 2016 and late 2015, with the latest releases shown first.

We’ ll add info about new updates as they’ re rolled out. This very minor non-security update fixes one issue in Visio and three that affect the entire Office suite. In Visio, the bug squashed occurred when COM add-ins don't receive document opened events when a Visio file is opened by a double-click on a file icon or file name. The overall Office fixes include one in which hovering over a Common Control with a tooltip on it caused the application you’ re using to crash. Get more information about Version 1707 (Build 8326.2087) by going to Office 365 client update channel release page. On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “August.” This very minor non-security update fixes two issues in Outlook and two in Word.

In Outlook, it fixes a problem that causes intermittent crashes when opening Outlook, and another that makes it impossible to configure an IMAP account in Outlook. In Word, it fixes a problem that causes Word to crash when recovering cloud-based files, and another in which Word closes unexpectedly when loading the Grammarly add-in. Get more information about Version 1707 (Build 8326.2076) by going to Office 365 client update channel release page. On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “August.” This extremely minor non-security update fixes only one Excel issue, in which a data refresh doesn't succeed or Excel crashes when using data from a SQL Server Analysis Services server and the locale of Excel and the locale of the SQL Server Analysis Services server differ.

Get more information about Version 1707 (Build 8326.2073) by going to Office 365 client update channel release page. On the left side of the screen choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “August.” This extremely minor non-security update fixes only three small issues, including one that prevents the What’s New dialog from appearing, and another with how some program files are signed, causing anti-virus programs to flag those files and have problems protecting or accessing data under Windows Information Protection (WIP). Also fixed is an Outlook issue that occurs when the scrollbar is dragged to move through a list of messages.

Get more information about Version 1705 (Build 8201.2171) by going to Office 365 client update channel release page. On the left side of the screen choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “August.” This extremely minor non-security update fixes only one problem, an issue with Skype for Business in which non-English characters in chat and chat history are garbled. Get more information about Version 1707 (Build 8326.2062) by going to the Office 365 client update channel release page. On the left side of the screen choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “July.” This extremely minor update fixes an issue with how some program files are signed, causing antivirus programs to flag those files as potentially dangerous.

It also fixes problems protecting or accessing data under Windows Information Protection (WIP). Get more information about Version 1707 (Build 8326.2059) by going to the Office 365 client update channel release page. On the left side of the screen choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “July.” The big news in this feature update is that Excel finally gets the collaborative editing features that Word and PowerPoint have had since Office 2016 was released nearly two years ago, in September 2015.

People can now simultaneously work on a workbook, seeing each other’s edits. Excel also gets an AutoSave button, which when turned on automatically saves workbooks. PowerPoint gets the same feature. Also new in PowerPoint is that slides that have been modified by others are highlighted in a color, to make it easier to see at a glance which have been changed.

Other Office applications get a variety of minor additions, such as data connectors in Access now being able to import data from or link to data stored in Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce. In Word, you can now create and edit equations using LaTeX syntax. Get more information about Version 1707 (Build 8326.2058) by going to Office 365 client update channel releases page.

On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “July.” This non-security update fixes a variety of very minor bugs, including one in Excel in which errors appear when trying to save changes to documents synced with the OneDrive client. The update also fixes a bug in Word that prevents shapes within the drawing canvas from being rotated. Get more information about Version 1706 (Build 8229.2103) by going to Office 365 client update channel releases page. On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “July.” This security update fixes two security vulnerabilities in Excel and one in the Office suite overall.

Both holes in Excel are memory corruption vulnerabilities. Attackers who exploit either could run arbitrary code as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take control of the system. The overall Office hole is a remote code execution vulnerability, which would also allow attackers to take control of the system if the current user is logged on with administrative user rights. Get more information about Version 1706 (Build 8229.2086) by going to Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select “2017” and “July.” This feature update lets you choose a personal set of pens, highlighters and pencils in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Choose them for one of the applications, and the same ones become available in the other two.

In addition, when you insert pictures from the internet in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, attribution information for the pictures is inserted along with the pictures themselves. In PowerPoint, when you create a chart, Designer will recommend designs for it based on the slide type and content in it. Excel gets a small Ribbon addition: You can now insert superscripts or subscripts by choosing Effects from the Font group on the Ribbon. You can also add subscripts and superscripts to the Quick Access toolbar. In addition, Outlook has gotten a new wizard for setting up new email accounts. Get more information about Version 1706 (Build 8229.2073) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release.

This security update closes a variety of holes in Outlook, Skype for Business, Word, and the overall Office suite, including remote code execution vulnerabilities in Outlook, Word and Office. The update also fixes a minor bug in Excel in which Excel doesn't set the sheet protection password when applied programmatically for workbooks created in Excel 2010 or earlier. Get more information about Version 1705 (Build 8201.2102) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. In this feature update, Excel gets a few small additions, including rearranged buttons on the Ribbon’s Data tab and the ability to export any query definition into an Office Database Connection (ODC) file and then share it across workbooks or with others. PowerPoint lets you add closed captions to videos, and Designer now recommends design ideas for charts added to your slides.

Get more information about Version 1705 (Build 8201.2075) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This update fixes two minor bugs in OneNote and Outlook, one where the Outlook navigation pane stops rendering when the PC is low on memory, and one in which the OneNote canvas hides content or updates when many paragraphs are in view. Get more information about Version 1705 (Build 8201.2157) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. With this feature update, Excel users can now personalize the default PivotTable layout and more easily import data from various sources. Outlook gets a new “focused inbox” feature, which divides the inbox into two tabs, Focused and Other.

The messages that Outlook determines are the most important are put into the Focused tab, based on the content of the messages and whether they’ re from someone with whom you frequently interact. Also, in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Word, you can now easily insert links to websites you’ ve visited recently into files and emails — you’ ll be able to choose them from a dropdown list. Get more info about Version 1704 (Build 8067.2115) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This security update fixes assorted holes, including remote code execution vulnerabilities throughout Office, Word and Skype for Business. Get more information about Version 1703 (Build 7967.2161) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. In this feature update, PowerPoint gets a QuickStarter feature, which creates an outline of the topic of your presentation, and offers suggestions for design and talking points.

You can also use new Data Visualizer templates in Visio to automatically create a Basic Flowchart or Cross-Functional Flowchart from Excel data. A new Activity button in the upper right corner of Excel, PowerPoint and Word lets you see when a file shared in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint was shared, edited, renamed or restored. Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Word get the new Dubai font, which supports Arabic and Western European languages. Get more information about Version 1703 (Build 7967.2139) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release.

This security update fixes two holes in Outlook, one of which allows an attacker to take control of a PC and install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. It also fixes a remote code execution vulnerability in Office and WordPad that allows attackers to do the same thing. Get more information about 1702 (Build 7870.2038) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release.

This update fixes bugs in Excel and Outlook, including one in which Excel crashes when a user tries to apply cell-level permissions, and one in Outlook in which users can’ t search through. Get more information about Version 1703 (Build 7967.2161) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This security update fixes a variety of holes in Excel, Skype for Business and Word. Get more information about Version 1703 (Build 7967.2161) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release.

With this feature update, PowerPoint gets a digital ruler that make it easier to draw straight lines or align a set of objects on touch screens. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook get a new tool that lets you remove picture backgrounds to make the main image stand out more. In Word, you can use a new Side to Side command on the View tab that lets you flip through a document two pages at a time on a touch screen.

Those with non-touch screens can use the horizontal scroll bar or mouse wheel to move through the pages. Get more information about Version 1702 (Build 7870.2020) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. With this feature and bug-killing update, you can use a digital pen in Word to select and change objects. In Outlook you can collaborate in real time on attachments uploaded to OneDrive for Business. A variety of bugs have also been fixed throughout Office, including an image-cropping bug in PowerPoint that caused the cropped portion of the image to appear dark.

Get more information about Version 1701 (Build 7766.2060) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This update fixes minor issues in OneDrive for Business and Skype for Business, including one in which Skype hangs when multiple conversation windows are open simultaneously. Get more information about Version 1701 (Build 7766.2060) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This feature update lets you see who has made changes to shared files in Word, PowerPoint and Excel and lets you restore earlier versions of the files. The update also lets you use a digital pen to select and change objects in Excel.

In addition, there are also a variety of bug fixes, including an issue with Office’s digital ink feature that causes the ink to shift slightly when the mouse button is released. Get more information about Version 1612 (Build 7766.2060) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This update fixes a variety of issues, including one in which the default template doesn't appear under File >New in PowerPoint, and another in which Excel hangs or crashes when closing. Get more information about Version 1701 (Build 7766.2060) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release.

This feature update makes it easier to find and reuse content in Word and Outlook from a business’s relevant documents. (Note: This feature is available only in Office 365 Business Premium, E3 or E5.) It also lets you create a PowerPoint presentation composed of recorded slides, screen recordings and inserted videos, and share it to be viewed remotely. Get more information about Version 1609 (Build 7369.2024) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. In this feature update, collaboration capabilities are grouped together on the Ribbon for Word and PowerPoint. In addition, in PowerPoint, multiple users can edit different elements in a SmartArt graphic simultaneously. Get more information about Version 1605 (Build 6965.2053) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This feature update makes it easy to de-clutter your inbox by quickly moving an item stored in your Inbox or any other folder to an archive folder.

It also introduces the Groups feature to Outlook, which lets you collaborate and communicate with others by storing all of your project or team information, such as emails, discussions and events, in one shared location. Get more information about Version 1602 (Build 6741.2021) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This feature update lets you use your finger or pen to write and draw, and use the tools on the new Draw tab to highlight content in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

It also adds a new black theme to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. Funnel charts, which display values as progressively decreasing proportions, have been added to Excel. In PowerPoint, when collaborating on a presentation with others, you can see which slide they are working on.

Get more information about Version 1601 (Build 6568.2025) at Microsoft’s Office 365 client update channel releases page: On the left side of the screen, choose the Current channel and select the year and month of the release. This was the Office 2016 release. Here’s a summary of what was new: For a full review of Office 2016, see “ Review: In Office 2016 for Windows, collaboration takes center stage.” For more information about changes to Office 2016 that affect IT, see “ What's new for admins in Office 2016.” 2017-08-28 20:48 1.6 (0.02/5). React has quickly become one of the most favored front-end web frameworks, and is second only to plain old HTML5, according to JAXenter. So it’s no surprise that developers are learning it, and employers are asking for it. In this tutorial, you’ ll start with a very simple React app with a couple of pages and some routing built in, and add authentication using Okta’s Sign-In Widget.

The Sign-In Widget is an embeddable JavaScript widget that allows developers to use Okta’s secure, scalable architecture with minimum of effort from within React applications. Let’s get started! Start by cloning the simple React seed project. When you open http: //localhost: 3000, you should see something like this: When you click on the navigation links, you should see page placeholders for those links. Install the Okta Sign-In Widget using npm. We’ ll be using version 1.9.0 of the Sign-In Widget, which is the most recent version at the time of this writing. Note that using Yarn won’ t work.

This will add the Okta Sign-In Widget code to your node_modules folder. Then add the styles for the widget in your index.html file from the Okta CDN: First, create a folder called auth in the./src/components folder, then create a file called LoginPage.js where the LoginPage component will go. Start with the most basic of components and then add the route inside the main route (the one with the path of “/”) So log in to your Okta account, or create one if you haven’ t yet. Navigate to Admin >Add Applications and click on the Create New App button. Select Single Page App (SPA) for Platform and OpenID Connect for the sign on method. Click the Create button and give your application a name. On the next screen, add http: //localhost: 3000 as a Redirect URI and click Finish.

You should see settings like the following. Make note of the Client ID (yours shouldn’ t be blurred out) and make note of your Dev ID (it’s the number part of your subdomain of the URL) So if you are at https: //dev-1234-admin.oktapreview.com/ your Dev ID is 1234. Now that you have that, you can set up the widget to talk to your new app! Thus far you’ ve imported the OktaSignIn function from the Okta Sign-In Widget npm module you installed earlier. Next, in the constructor of the component, you initialized an instance of OktaSignIn with the configuration for the application. This way, the application code will be able to talk to Okta and Okta will recognize that this is the app you just created. Next, you’ ll create the code to actually render the Sign-In Widget to the page!

You’ ll need to change your render method to create an HTML element you can render the widget into. Make sure to get a reference to the element that will be rendered. Then, add a componentDidMount function to make sure you don’ t try to render the widget before the HTML element is on the page. You also added state to your component. If you’ re using a flux implementation, this would naturally come from the app state. But to keep this tutorial simple, let your LoginPage keep track of its own state.

We’ re almost there, but you don’ t necessarily want to render the widget right away. You’ ll need to add a check to make sure the user isn’ t already logged in, and move your renderEl out to a function called showLogin. Let’s wrap this up. Make sure you bind the class’s this context to each of your methods.

Add a logout method, and change your render method to make a decision on what to render, based on whether there is a currently logged in user. So the final version of LoginPage.js should look like this. When you run the app now (with npm start), you should see something like this: If it works - congrats! If it doesn’ t, please post a question to Stack Overflow with an okta tag, or hit me up on Twitter @leebrandt. There is one known issue in this tutorial. The widget’s CSS takes over the whole page and will override your app’s CSS.

This is a documented issue and you can see Matt Raible’s comment on it. 2017-08-28 14:01 0.3 (0.01/5). Parallels Desktop 13 Limited resources mean it is sometimes not practical to test a product.

In these cases, we sometimes offer the manufacturer description alone. This is not a review and does not imply endorsement by the author or Incisive Media - it's just FYI. Manufacturer Description Parallels ® (www.parallels.com/about), a global leader in cross-platform solutions and creator of the No. 1-selling software for running Windows ® applications on a Mac ®, today launched Parallels Desktop ® 13 for Mac (www.parallels.com/desktop), which provides macOS High Sierra readiness and support for upcoming Windows 10 features. Bringing together the best of both worlds, Parallels Desktop 13 makes it simple for MacBook Pro users to add Windows applications to the Touch Bar, and use Touch Bar within Windows applications. It is also the first solution to bring the upcoming Windows 10 People Bar feature to the Mac - including integration with the Mac Dock and Spotlight.

The new version also features up-to 100 percent performance improvements for completing certain tasks. 'This year, for the first time ever, we are bringing the two hottest features from Mac and Windows into one place via Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac, ' said Jack Zubarev, Parallels president.' This new release delivers our best-ever Windows on Mac performance, plus innovative and useful new features and tools to help users get more done quickly and efficiently.' With a single mouse click, the Parallels Installation Assistant will automatically install Windows 10 into a virtual machine (VM), which can be purchased at a later date without losing data or installed applications, making getting started in Parallels Desktop 13 for Mac simpler than ever. It also enables users to purchase and automatically install Windows 10 from Microsoft, add an existing copy of Windows, and simply move their PC to their Mac. From the beginning, users can choose to make Windows look like a PC (Full Screen) or make Windows invisible (Coherence mode), while launching Windows apps from the Mac Dock, Launch Pad or Windows Start Menu, enabling users to tailor the experience to their liking.

Best of Both Worlds Parallels Desktop 13 provides Mac Touch Bar integration for Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as browsers including Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. Additionally, when you are using the Windows Start Menu or Desktop, Parallels Desktop 13 features Taskbar pinned elements, along with Cortana, Task View and settings in the Touch Bar. Thousands of other Windows applications that run in Parallels Desktop can quickly be customised with popular Touch Bar actions, if the default set of functional keys is not enough. Not only can Parallels Desktop enhance existing Mac features, but it also can build on Windows tools as well. Parallels Desktop 13 integrates People Bar (from Windows 10 Insider Preview build 16232), a forthcoming Windows 10 feature that lets users pin contacts to the Taskbar. Although Windows limits People Bar contacts to three, the Mac Dock doesn't limit favourite contacts and enables their photos to be larger for easy viewing.

More Productivity Tools New Parallels Desktop 13 innovations include Picture-in-Picture (PiP) View, a feature which creates windows of other active VMs, which are always visible on top, even when a Mac app is in Full Screen mode. Now, it is easy to monitor and work in multiple operating systems (OS) and their applications simultaneously on one screen, or watch a video while switching between macOS Spaces and applications. PiP View joins popular Parallels Desktop customisation settings such as Coherence (Windows is invisible while using Windows apps on a Mac), Full Screen mode, and Window mode (Windows in a window in macOS). New Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition features coming this autumn include the customer-inspired Single Application mode, which lets IT admins deliver, lock and secure an invisible Windows VM with selected applications to a user's Mac Dock - making it easy for them to discover and use the Windows apps just like Mac apps. The latest version of Parallels Desktop provides a number of visual and display improvements for improved transitions and better scaling resolution. Owners of hi-res Retina displays will enjoy greatly improved sharpness of text and graphics in scaled mode. More than 30 Single-click Utilities for Windows and Mac: New and popular utilities include: Clean Drive - easily free up disk space Presentation Mode - Prevent embarrassing notifications, desktop reveals of personal files, and screen saver lockout delays during the presentation - in just one click.

(Mac only) Download Video - In just one click, download video from YouTube, Facebook and other websites so you can enjoy watching it anytime Find Duplicates - Search any drive or folder to quickly find identical files (even with different names), and free up disc space Record Screen - Capture video of your entire screen, a window or select area - which can include audio from your computer microphone - in one click. Significant performance improvements include: Up to 100 percent performance improvement for External Thunderbolt SSD drives (near native performance) Up to 50 percent faster Snapshot creation for VMs with a large amount of memory. Once again, analysts have predicted a grim, grim future for the PC. According to the latest IDC forecasts, PC sales will fall from the 435.1 million units seen in 2016 to 398.3 million in 2021. That's a five-year compound annual growth of -1.7 percent. According to Loren Loverde, IDC's VP for Worldwide Personal Computing Device Tracker, things could turn (somewhat) around, but that depends on a couple of moving targets. 'Shipments could pick up if accelerators like economic conditions, adoption of gaming, VR, and Windows 10 speed up, ' Loverde said, before adding: 'even in the best case, overall growth would likely remain limited.'

The only machine that could actually do well in the next five years is what IDC describes as a 'detachable tablet, ' or in other words, the Surface Pro or the iPad Pro. Devices that can be used as a tablet, but do come with a first-party keyboard of their own could succeed.

However, IDC has had to contain its optimism because manufacturers aren’ t building them fast enough. The developing world isn’ t helping, either. According to the report, India bought less than two million PCs last year.

This is a result of an upcoming legislation in the country, which has seen resellers postponing purchases. IDC also believes ultraslim laptops could show growth. It expects commercial PC sales to pick up the pace again in 2019. Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Future plc Publication. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Mopic / Shutterstock 2017-08-28 22:06 1.1. Editor's Note: The following article was originally authored by Heather Meeker and originally appeared on FOSSA.io.

In recent months, there has been some controversy over the BSD+Patents License that Facebook offers for React. Reminiscent of AJAX, React is a framework (available for Javascript and natively for iOS and Android) for developing performant applications whereby independent regions of an app's user experience dynamically update themselves in response to events on the server side. React is most often compared to the Angular framework and ProgrammableWeb's interest in both frameworks has to do with how very frequently they're used to build Web and mobile apps that consume APIs. Open source licensing is far more complicated than most people realize which is why organizations like FOSSA exist to help companies stay within the open source guardrails. In this article Meeker looks to lay the controversy to rest based on some important open source precedents. Recently, Apache re-classified code under Facebook’s “BSD+ Patents” license to “Category X, ” effectively banning it from future contributions to Apache Foundation projects.

The move has re-ignited controversy over the patent grant, but like many events in the open source community, the controversy is more partisan than practical. In fact, it’s unlikely the move will affect adoption of ReactJS, and the criticisms of the BSD+patent grant mostly don’ t survive the scrutiny of reason. The Facebook patent grant, officially called the Additional Grant of Patent Rights Version 2, has been in effect for years. It applies to the wildly popular ReactJS code — a Javascript library for rendering user interfaces.

The roster of major technology companies using the code is impressive, including such consumer-facing giants as Netflix — and of course, Facebook itself. The reaction to this news is surprising, given the parallel patent licensing model is nothing new. Facebook released its “BSD+Patents” grant in 2013 (with a revision in 2015). But a similar model was used with some fanfare by Google with its WebM codec in 2010.

This licensing model involves two parallel and simultaneous grants of rights: a BSD license to the copyright in the software, and a separate grant to practice patents that read on the software. Putting the two together means there are two independent and parallel grants of rights. In this respect, it is quite similar to the Apache 2.0 license which, like BSD, is a permissive license, and which also contains a defensive termination provision that exists alongside the copyright license grant. Much of the reaction to Apache Foundation’s announcement has just created confusion, such as this article misleadingly calling it “booby-trapped.” In fact, many open source licenses have defensive termination provisions — which are mostly considered a reasonable mechanism to discourage patent lawsuits, rather than a booby trap. They are also the rule rather than the exception; all major open source licenses with patent grants also have defensive termination provisions — each with slightly different terms.

The difference between the Facebook grant, which Apache has rejected, and the Apache 2.0 license, which Apache requires for its projects, is more subtle than the controversy suggests. Defensive termination provisions vary in two main ways: the trigger for termination, and the scope of rights terminated.

As to the scope of rights terminated, there are two camps: those that terminate only the patent rights grant (including Apache 2.0, Eclipse Public License, and the Facebook grant) and those that also terminate the copyright license as well (Mozilla Public License and GPL 3). In other words, for most licenses, bringing a patent infringement suit can only cause termination of one’s patent rights; for the others, bringing a patent lawsuit can result in termination of the copyright license as well — forcing one to stop using the code. Copyright license termination is a much stronger anti-patent mechanism, and more risky for private businesses, resulting in some private companies refusing to use GPL3 or MPL code.

The Facebook grant differs from most other open source licenses in its threshold for triggering termination. In Apache 2.0, for example, the termination of the patent grant is triggered by a patent claim accusing the software provided under the license.

The idea is to create a “patent commons” for the software. Most other open source licenses follow roughly this calculus. The Facebook patent license also terminates if the licensee brings a claim against Facebook, or against any party accusing a Facebook product. In that respect, the termination trigger is similar to the one in the Common Public License 1.0, written many years ago by IBM. (“If Recipient institutes patent litigation against a Contributor with respect to a patent applicable to softwarethen any patent licenses granted by that Contributor to such Recipient under this Agreement shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed”) Defensive termination provisions of the scope in the Facebook grant are very common in patent licensing, outside of the open source landscape. Most patent licenses terminate if the licensee bring patent claims against the licensor.

The reason is that a licensor does not want to be unilaterally “disarmed” in a patent battle. Most patents are only used defensively — asserted when a competitor sues the patent owner. A sues B and then B sues A, resulting in mutually assured destruction. If B has released its software under an open source license without a broad defensive termination provision, B is potentially without recourse, and has paid a high price for its open source code release.

A gets to simultaneously free ride on B’s software development and sue B for patent infringement. Finally, the Facebook grant itself is not new. The grant was released in 2013, and ReactJS’ popularity has been growing since then. As with many open source licenses, the industry’s willingness to absorb a new license depends on the tastiness of the code released under it. In the case of ReactJS, the code was great, and the patent license terms were new, but reasonable. Some have suggested that the BSD+Patents Clause violates the Open Source Definition. The OSD does not allow licenses that discriminate against persons or groups, or fields of endeavor.

But the patent grant does not have license scope limitations; it terminates if the licensee misbehaves — that misbehavior having a lower threshold for actions against the code author than for others. So it seems likely that BSD+Patents does not violate the OSD, and moreover, CPL is already approved by the Open Source Initiative as compliant. CPL, like BSD+Patents, sets a lower threshold for termination based on patent suits against the code author.

The practical result of the Apache Foundation’s decision is unclear. Category X licensed code cannot be included in an Apache Foundation repository. (That category also includes licenses like GPL.) Apache’s re-classification doesn’ t mean anyone is restricted from using ReactJS — it just can’ t be committed in an Apache project. It’s not even clear that an Apache project cannot contain a dependency on BSD+Patents licensed code. Meanwhile, in private business, there is little controversy about using code under the BSD+patent terms. Most companies have examined the marginal legal risk of this license compared to others (like Apache 2.0) and considered it underwhelming.

Unless a company decides to sue Facebook (or accuse its products), the termination trigger has no actual effect. If you want to fling patent claims at a company that developed and released a great piece of code, removing the code from your business seems like a reasonable price to pay. Some of the controversy seems to arise from concern that Facebook is advantaged over others in the license terms. But that is not the same as harming the open source community.

The BSD+patents grant establishes the same “patent commons” as Apache 2.0, as a baseline, but provides more protection for the contributor (Facebook) against software patent claims of licensees. It’s odd that a community so opposed to software patents would find this objectionable, particularly in light of the array of defensive termination provisions that have been used in the past. 2017-08-28 21:43 1.0. Public Interest Registry’s 2017 Internet 101 Survey results are in and you may be surprised by just how many people lack basic knowledge about the Internet. Although it's easy to point fingers at older generations over their perceived lack of technical prowess, it is actually baby boomers that scored highest in a number of areas. Looking at the infographic below, we see that only 47 percent of people currently have access to the web. Of those who do have access, many rely solely on cellular networks or low-speed connections.

Try taking the quiz for yourself to see how you fit in. The survey included feedback from 506 men and 508 women, all over 18 years of age. Public Interest Registry is a non-profit group responsible for operating the.org top-level domain name.

Some of their main goals are educating the public and promoting Internet security. Found is a TechSpot feature where we share clever, funny or otherwise interesting stuff from around the web. 2017-08-28 21:30 0.8. Everyone knows the secret to success — personal and business alike — is good communication. But in what form? If you're trying to communicate with a group in real time, you're no doubt familiar with the old standby: conference calls. You know: those mind-numbing phone meetings in which talkers overlap, voice quality is terrible, half the people aren't paying attention and somebody's dog barks intermittently throughout the call.

But what's the alternative? Consider an old (very old) standby: instant messaging. Except nobody calls it that anymore; now it's group chat. These virtual meeting rooms are focused on text-based communication — and often vastly preferable to conference calls.

Why type when you can talk? A chat session makes it easier for everyone to be 'heard, ' as you can instantly see who said what. (No more having to start every sentence by identifying yourself.) If someone is momentarily distracted, they can easily jump back into the conversation by reviewing the previous comments.

And, perhaps best of all, there's no static or background noise. On a group chat, no one knows you're listening to your favorite playlist. There are other advantages, too, like the option of keeping a permanent, searchable transcript of each session. Most chat services also let you share or embed files in real time (as opposed to, 'Hang on, I'll email you the spreadsheet.

Did you get it yet? How about now?' Many will let you break off into side chats if you need a quick one-on-one discussion of what's happening in the group. ('Do you think Bob is going to need some extra help on this project?' ) And don't forget the security advantages: Voice conversations can be overheard; text-based chats cannot.

(To that end, the vast majority of chat services offer heavily encrypted sessions.) Okay, but why not just fire off a text message or loop in a few co-workers through, say, iMessage? Texting is too cumbersome for anything longer than a quick exchange, and too 'cramped' if you're trying to communicate with more than a few people. This is not to say that group chats are ideal for every scenario, merely that they're an option worth considering — especially if you're finding your current communication methods lacking.

For this story we looked at seven group-chat services — CA Flowdock, ChatWork, HipChat, Microsoft Teams, Office Chat, Slack and Telegram — that offer web- and app-based instant messaging for two or more people, but with different interfaces, features and focuses. To continue reading this article register now Learn More Existing Users Sign In 2017-08-28 21:09 2.3. There are dozens of reasons to create surveys, and nearly all of those reasons are good ones. An online survey can help customer relationship representatives gauge customer satisfaction (e.g., 'How happy were you with our spa services?' ), solicit information from existing or prospective customers (e.g., 'Which of these proposed new features would be most valuable to you?'

), or help human resources professionals learn what matters to employees (e.g, 'How can your manager give you better feedback?' Some form-based 'applications' also fit the survey model such as testing educational efforts (e.g., 'Here's the final exam!' ) or unemployment claims submissions. Even better: People love to tell you what they think.

They want to be asked. So don't be shy. Fortunately, the online survey tools for creating and administering surveys have vastly improved since I first tested PC-based tools in 1999. The 10 web-based online survey tools I evaluated in this roundup are Campaign Monitor GetFeedback, Checkbox Survey, FluidSurveys, Outside Software eSurveys Pro, SoGoSurvey, SurveyGizmo, SurveyMonkey, SurveyPlanet, WorldApp KeySurvey, and Zoho Survey. All of them guide you step by step th2ough creating a survey, sharing the survey (so people have the opportunity to answer all those questions), and evaluating the results. All of these apps are excellent; you won't be disappointed in any of the choices (even the free versions thereof). Each app follows a similar path.

They help you design the survey, launch it (exhorting respondents to 'take my survey!' Via email, social media, or embedding on a website), collect data, and report on the results.

Each step can be as simple or complex as you like (or as you require anyhow). For instance, you can control the survey appearance such as background color, typeface, and company logo, or just go with the default styling. There are several important steps to consider when planning an online survey project. First, think demographics. Simplu throwing a survey into web space isn't nearly as effective as not only pointing it at a specific audience, but tailoring your questions and collected data points at that audience, too.

Mine your CRM app for guidance on either which customers you want to target or which characteristics of your existing customers you can use to better target your survey at people with whom your company has never interacted. If you've got a business intelligence (BI) tool focused on other customer-facing databases, like invoicing or helpdesk, you can drill down to more audience-focusing data even more effectively. Once you've got a better idea of who'll be taking your survey, you better frame your questions since you'll have a more focused idea of what kind of information you want from these folks. This is the time you should also conisder what form your survey will take. Generally, for an electronic survey, you'll be choosing between an email and a web survey. The tools we've reviewed here focus primarily on the latter.

If you decide on an email survey, some of these tools support that method, but overall you'll have more flexibility with both delivery and data collection with a web-based survey. An important new deployment target is the mobile device. According to a study from Greenbook that had more than 1.5 million respondents, more than 19 percent of today's online survey's get taken on a mobile device. Makers of online survey tools are responding with companies like SurveyMonkey designing entirely new interfaces incorporating new capabilities around not just mobile but also artificial intelligence (AI). Once you've got the who and the how, it's time for the when. The problem with online surveys is that they take some time to complete, which means results can often be forgotten or go unnoticed until results are outdated.

Avoid this by building a project timeline that covers not just building and deploying your survey, but also data collection, analysis, and report creation. While several of the tools we review here support features that can help with all those steps, it's up to you to initiate those capabilities in a timely enough manner that the results remain relevant. Another part of the survey design process is controlling the order in which you ask questions, and of whom they're asked. For example, let's say you're surveying pet owners. You first have to ascertain that the respondent owns a pet and then gently end the survey if this individual isn't qualified. Then you may ask cat owners questions that aren't shown to dog owners; otherwise, dog owners will be confused, bored, or waste their time giving you irrelevant data. Generally, that means splitting up a survey into several (sometimes interlocking) webpages.

You don't show cat-litter preference questions until you know how many cats rule the household. Another reason to put questions on separate pages is to hide upcoming questions; 'Which brands come to mind' should not be asked where the respondent can see, 'Have you heard of any of these brands?' Every online survey app lets you skip questions or otherwise perform survey logic (at least, once you pay for a subscription; the free versions have feature limitations). The complexity of survey logic you can create is in the 'you get what you pay for' department.

All of the survey apps share basic features, such as requiring a question to be answered; controlling page breaks; and randomizing the order in which questions are asked or answers are presented. They also let you style the text, support languages beyond English, preview the survey before you launch it, and share the URL of the survey webpage. And, of course, each app lets you view the survey results, including options to filter the data ('show responses only from people who prefer dark chocolate' –oh wait, that's everybody!) and to compare responses based on answers to secondary questions ('show salary expectations correlated by gender').

Each app's features beyond the basic functionality is what distinguishes its strengths and weaknesses. Depending on the number of surveys you create and the nature of the information you're seeking, some of these criteria should be on your short list. In the simplest case, you don't need more than a URL to include in an email message along with hand-constructed text like, 'Help us decide which hotel to choose for our user group conference!'

Incorporating these types of emails into a marketing automation workflow is a simple process no matter which tool you choose. But to get customers' attention, that email message needs some kind of formatting. You might also need to track participation and to send reminders to those who didn't respond. On the other hand, you don't want to 'over touch' the audience by asking the same people to respond too often. That's bad manners, not to mention that you don't want to hear from the same people all of the time. SoGoSurvey gets a nod for its email-list tracking in that regard. If your chosen survey tool doesn't support these features, then look for them in your chosen email marketing package.

All these apps work perfectly in a web browser. But if your audience of 20-somethings is apt to respond to the survey on their smartphones, then it behooves you to test and deploy the survey on that platform. (SurveyGizmo gets top marks for showing a preview on multiple devices. Campaign Monitor GetFeedback shines brightly with a mobile-first design.) Need to share 'take my survey' via social media? The apps' features vary there, too. Not everyone posts survey links directly to Google+.

But don't expect much. Even when social media sharing is supported, though, it probably means nothing more than constructing a tweet on your behalf. You easily could do that with social media tracking tools without the survey tool's help. There's no point in wasting anyone's time if nobody looks at the results. All of these apps let you close a survey based on date (such as accepting responses until the end of the month). Others, such as SoGoSurvey, permit you to stop when you have 'enough' responses (surely, 1,000 people telling you which color they prefer is enough to make a decision?). This requirement doesn't apply to surveys you implement as an ongoing feedback mechanism, such as customer satisfaction research sent automatically after a hotel stay.

Sometimes you need 'open-ended' data in a particular format. All of these apps support data validation in basic forms, such as a date or email ID.

But if your needs are specific (for instance, FluidSurveys can check UK post codes and URLs), then you may need to spend more money. Every one of these apps does an admirable job at presenting the results in pretty charts and graphs. Some do impressive things with their analysis, however, such as SurveyGizmo performing text analysis on open-ended questions or Checkbox Survey automatically sending an email to a designated ID based on a survey response (such as a poor mark for customer service). Quite often, your business or community group's survey needs are met with minimal functionality, and these apps are overkill.

But if you really care about learning what customers, users, and employees feel, you'll be sure to appreciate the features in these apps. 2017-08-28 20:34 1.9. Zoho kept the mission for Zoho Survey, which starts at $19 per month unless you're using Zoho One, short and sweet. But while Zoho Survey doesn't deliver the more advanced features found in several of its online survey tool competitors, it's still a great choice for the small business owner who just wants to get started or even a more sophisticated user charged with a project that only needs to collect basic information. SurveyGizmo is our Editors' Choice in this category, but Zoho Survey is a good bet for beginners. Like the other online survey applications I reviewed, including FluidSurveys, SoGoSurvey, and SurveyMonkey, there are three steps: creating the survey, getting it in respondents' hands, and analyzing the results.

But good luck trying to figure out the options. The company has three classes of service beyond the (quite capable) free application, and provides too little guidance of the features in the standard ($19 per month), premium ($24 per month), and enterprise ($41 per month) choices. For instance, the more expensive subscriptions include piping, which let you customize follow-up questions and answer options.

However, when you're logged in as a freebie user, Zoho Survey's otherwise-useful Help screens don't show you how piping works or where it'd be appropriate, so you never get a chance to see if that feature is worth the money for the premium subscription. You do get unlimited questions and responses at the least expensive option. The premium option adds piping, Multilanguage support, and email notifications; for the top tier you also get portal creation and user management. You create a survey in Zoho Survey by choosing question-types from a drop-down menu: multiple choice, essay text box, a number field, a matrix choice, a star-rating scale (e.g., on a scale of 1-5), a date field (where you can choose from a calendar, unique among these tools), and so on. Its question types aren't as extensive as you'll find in, say, SurveyGizmo, but 90 percent of the time you'll be asking people multiple-choice and essay questions.

I liked the simplicity of the interface. While you build the survey, everything appears on one webpage. You see all the survey pages at once, so you can scroll up-and-down to see where to add a question. If (when!) you decide to move a question, you know right where it will end up. The question logic is easy to follow, too, with drop-down boxes that guide you through the path a respondent follows. For example, if question three has a drop-down for state, and the respondent is from California, you can show some California-only questions.

Zoho Survey also supports predefined choices (such as gender or days of the week) from a databank of commonly asked questions. You can add 'guest reviewers' to review and comment on the survey before it's launched. Predefined themes make it pretty, with customizable colors, fonts, etc., though nothing like the full-on themes in SurveyGizmo.

Each of these applications expects you to distribute a ready-to-go survey by email, and Zoho Survey is no exception. Unless you want to copy-and-paste the public or private survey link into an email message on your own, though, you need to use Zoho Campaigns or Mailchimp to manage and distribute the survey. That can be a plus or a minus. On one hand, you have to learn yet another application (though with the same design sensibilities as Zoho Survey; and Zoho Campaigns, too, has a free option); on the other, you get the advantages of an email campaign application that has more than 'bolt on' email functionality.

Do you have different audiences taking a survey? You can use what Zoho Survey calls 'collectors' to create a customized link for different sets of respondents, which can help you discern whether respondents came to the site from your 'Take a survey, win a cruise!' Promotion or the 'Take a survey, win an unemployed brother-in-law!' There are more options: You can print the survey or save it as PDF, for offline form-filling-in, as well as a QR-code. You can share it on Facebook with a little extra 'oomph, ' or share just-the-URL to Google+, LinkedIn, or Twitter. If you don't want to send direct respondents a Zoho-branded link, you can map the survey to a URL that belongs to your own domain.

And, of course, you can embed the survey on your website with a JavaScript link, as a pop-up, or iFrame. When it comes time to analyze the data you gathered, Zoho Survey keeps it deliciously simple. Reporting is reassuringly basic, with pie charts and text charts, and adjusting what's shown (bar, column, or line charts; or perhaps text-only) takes only a few clicks.

Filters can incorporate multiple criteria (show charts reflecting only people who work for small companies), and cross-tabulations let you compare responses based on their answers (show satisfaction rankings based on the respondent's company size). If you expect to rely on the software's reporting, without any need to change formatting or delve deep into the data relationships, Zoho Survey should serve you just fine. Zoho Survey is one of several online business applications from Zoho, and naturally they play well with one another. The survey application integrates with Zoho CRM Professional Edition, Zoho SalesIQ, and Google's spreadsheet (into which, the documentation promises, you can automatically push real-time data; I didn't test this). If you need a lot of control over surveys, and you want an extensive set of question-types or reporting features, look elsewhere. However, if your needs are unfussy, Zoho Survey should serve you quite well. 2017-08-28 20:28 0.6.

Engineer Julio Vazquez wanted to help his friend Rami Wehbe play the Nintendo Switch after he lost the use of his right hand due to a cerebrovascular accident. Wehbe couldn’ t play Breath Of The Wild with the Joy-Con controllers because he needed both hands to manage the two sticks. Vazquez built a few simple prototype solutions and settled on a modular system that lets him play the game with just his left hand. “This current design was the result of almost a week of research and lots of failed prototypes, as I had to ensure that it would be easy to print, lightweight and practical. After testing that it works properly, we decided to share it, so that it can be of help to other gamers in a similar situation, ” wrote Vazquez. You can download the model here and print it at home. These sorts of little physical hacks are some of the coolest uses of 3D printing tech I’ ve seen.

While it’s fun to print a Yoda head or a sleeping pig, fixing a problem with a simple, accessible technology is the best test of its future utility. 2017-08-28 20:26 1.4. A company called Roboteam is developing its contribution to the robot world which comes in the form of Temi, a sort of tablet on wheels. This week already we were introduced to Pepper, the Buddhist priest robot, and a few months ago to Tertill, the gardening robot. But this robot is quite different from them; Temi doesn't try to be a conventional robot with hands, facial features, or offering the ability to replace people in some sense. Instead, the product is a three-foot tall, four-wheeled device that is focused on the facilities that its tablet centerpiece can offer. The idea behind Temi is to make things like watching TV, Skyping family members, playing music or asking your Google Assistant questions, something that you can do in more places and with more freedom from holding your tablet or smartphone.

In its promotional videos, for instance, a user might call over Temi and ask for a pasta recipe, the robot would then search for one and present it on its screen and keep the recipe in sight by constantly following the user. Meaning the user can then start cooking and follow the recipe without having to get their normal device or smartphone dirty from fingers covered in sauce by constantly having to look back at the recipe. The robot uses a host of fancy tech in order to get away with this, such as facial recognition to make sure that when you are on a video call the camera stays centered on your face. Temi also uses methods developed for military drones in order to navigate around your house when you call it to come to you. Roboteam says that the robot will probably be ready by late 2018 and will cost less than $1,500.

It plans on first letting 1,000 people see how the product fares through a beta phase, then expanding over this fall in the US. Sources: Robotemi, Wired Images via Robotemi 2017-08-28 20:16 3.2. ATLANTA (AP) _ American Software Inc. (AMSWA) on Monday reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $2.7 million. The Atlanta-based company said it had net income of 9 cents per share. The enterprise software provider posted revenue of $26.9 million in the period.

American Software shares have dropped nearly 2 percent since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $10.13, a decline of slightly more than 4 percent in the last 12 months. This story was generated by Automated Insights (http: //automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on AMSWA at https: //www.zacks.com/ap/AMSWA Keywords: American Software, Earnings Report 2017-08-28 20:10 1.8.

This blog post is co-authored by Peter Darvasi, Engineer, Hortonworks. We are excited to announce the availability of Cloudbreak for Hortonworks Data Platform on Azure Marketplace. Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) is an enterprise-ready, open source Apache Hadoop distribution. With Cloudbreak, you can easily provision, configure, and scale HDP clusters in Azure. Cloudbreak is designed for the following use cases: When you deploy Cloudbreak, it installs a “controller” VM which runs the Cloudbreak application. You can use the controller to launch and manage clusters.

The following diagram illustrates the high-level architecture of Cloudbreak and HDP on Azure: Cloudbreak lets you manage all your HDP clusters from a central location. You can configure your clusters with all the controls that Azure and HDP have to offer, and you can automate and repeat your deployments with: In addition, Cloudbreak on Azure features the following unique capabilities: 2017-08-28 20:09 1.6. The UK government has confirmed that it plans to comply with existing European laws on data handling and sharing, even after Brexit. A paper published by the GOV. UK government website said that the EU needs to recognize how the UK is looking for an early agreement in finalizing its plans.

Doing so will help streamline Brexit negotiations and minimize disruption to businesses both in the UK and on the continent, the government says. 'Early certainty around how we can extend current provisions, alongside an agreed negotiating timeline for longer-term arrangements, will assuage business concerns on both sides and should be possible given the current alignment of our data protection frameworks, ' the paper said. The need for agreement and speedy negotiation is also accelerated somewhat by the looming deadline of the new GDPR legislation, which is set to come into force in May 2018. Numerous recent reports have claimed that British businesses are nowhere near as prepared for the new guidelines as should be liked. However, the UK's decision to leave the European Union had thrown confusion over whether GDPR will be implemented in the UK, and in what form, with the current status suggesting that GDPR will be rolled into a new data protection bill. The paper adds that the government is keen to remain involved in the development of new rules governing data with the EU, whatever form this may take.

'The UK would be open to exploring a model which allows the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to be fully involved in future EU regulatory dialogue. An ongoing role for the ICO would allow the ICO to continue to share its resources and expertise with the network of EU Data Protection Authorities, and provide a practical contribution at EU level which will benefit citizens and organizations in both the UK and the EU, ' the paper added. Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Future plc Publication. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Den Rise / Shutterstock 2017-08-28 20:07 2.1.

The Wi-Fi in hotels and coffee shops is convenient, but by no means secure. With a virtual private network (or VPN), such as VPN Unlimited from KeepSolid, however, you can rest assured that your browsing is encrypted and private.

This service offers inexpensive, flexible subscriptions, as well as many of the advanced security features I usually see in far more expensive products. Throw in solid speed scores and lightweight browser extensions, and VPN Unlimited looks like a very attractive deal. It's an Editors' Choice winner for VPN services. When you switch on your VPN, it creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and the VPN server, which can foil hackers or even government snoops trying to eavesdrop on your activities. From the server, your web traffic travels off into the public internet, but your actual IP address remains hidden. Data-hungry website advertisers see the IP address of the VPN server instead of yours. A VPN can even help protect against your ISP harvesting your data —something new for us all to worry about.

PCMag recommends using a VPN as often as you can, but especially when your PC is connected to a public Wi-Fi network. When you hop on an unsecured network at the airport or coffee shop, you have no way of knowing whether the network is what it claims to be. Instead of a convenience offered to thirsty customers and weary travelers, the network could have been created by a hacker looking to intercept your data. VPNs can also be used to disguise your actual location, which is why these services are used by journalists and political activists operating in countries with restrictive internet controls. This has a fringe benefit for the average user: You can use a VPN to unlock region-locked streaming media content, such as the latest TV shows from the BBC.

Note, however, that some streaming services, including Netflix and others, have gotten wise and begun blocking VPN users. VPN Unlimited offers six pricing plans, giving you lots of choice over how much you pay and how often you're billed. The cheapest plan, Vacation, is intended for those quick jaunts away from home, and costs $3.99 for seven days. The Economy plan ups this to a month-long subscription for only $8.99 per month, $16.99 for three months, and $39.99 for a whole year. A three-year plan is also available for $89.99.

Note that all prices are charged in full at time of billing, and a seven-day money back guarantee is included. Careful readers will notice that this is a slight upward shift in KeepSolid pricing. But even so, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited remains one of the most affordable VPN services. Among the top ten VPNs I've reviewed, only Private Internet Access costs less, at $6.95 per month. That said, KeepSolid is unique among VPN services with the sheer flexibility of its pricing.

The weekly plan is ideal for someone looking for a little extra security while traveling, for example. If you're really happy with VPN Unlimited and want to hedge your bets about internet access in the afterlife, you can opt for the Infinity Plan, which is a 100-year subscription for $149.99. KeepSolid, the developer behind VPN Unlimited, kindly notes that the company will 'gladly extend this period by your request.' You can buy these, or any of VPN Unlimited's other plans, with PayPal, credit cards, Amazon Pay, Bitcoin, and Payment Wall.

Note, however, that KeepSolid only lists the monthly, yearly, and Infinity plans on its website. For the other options, you'll have to download the free client or change your information from the company's web interface. It's a bit tedious, but the flexibility of these plans makes it well worth the trouble. Although VPN Unlimited is inexpensive, it has more features and options than most of its higher-priced competition.

For example, VPN Unlimited sports 1,273 servers across a very geographically diverse 80 locations. These include many often-overlooked regions, such as Africa, China, the Isle of Man, Mexico, Russia, South America, and Turkey, to name a few. Private Internet Access, which also holds an Editors' Choice award, has well over 3,000 servers. By the numbers, it's the most robust VPN service I've tested. Want to go cheaper? There are numerous free VPNs available.

Of particular note is TunnelBear, which is extremely easy to setup and use. The free version is capped at 500MB of traffic per month, however. Note that KeepSolid does not offer a free level of service. Unlike TorGuard VPN, which is designed for BitTorrent and P2P services, VPN Unlimited only allows file sharing on five servers (California, France, Luxembourg, Ontario, and Romania). That's still more than most other VPN services such as Spotflux, which simply ban the practice outright. VPN Unlimited also has a special Streaming server, available specifically for high-speed video streaming. Co-Editors' Choice NordVPN also offers a video streaming server, but goes further with a VPN server that also connects to the Tor anonymization network, as well as a double-encrypted server.

Power users looking for a personal VPN server in the country of their choice or a static IP address that is (allegedly) not associated with proxy services will be pleased to know that VPN Unlimited offers these rare options. Personal IP addresses are available in Canada, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. An IP address in any of these locations costs $14.99. A Personal Server offers users improved speeds since you won't be sharing it with other VPN users. These cost $21.99 per month, and have a bandwidth limit of 1TB per month. The advantage is that a 'clean' IP address is less likely to be blocked by other services (such as Netflix).

TorGuard also offers static IP addresses, and includes other add-ons such as access to a high-speed 10-gigabit network. So far, VPN Unlimited is the only service I've reviewed that offers server rental. Also in the category of rare features is something called KeepSolid Wise, which disguises VPN traffic as HTTPS traffic. This is designed for use in countries where access to the free internet isn't available, and where the use of VPNs is blocked. TunnelBear has a similar feature. For Android, Windows, and Linux systems, VPN Unlimited uses the OpenVPN protocol, and uses IPsec IKEv1 on macOS and iOS. I'd really like to see VPN Unlimited add OpenVPN support for Macs.

KeepSolid currently does not support the IKEv2 protocol, but says it will be adding support soon. Not long ago, some VPN companies chose to make some extra dough by injecting ads into user's web traffic. A company representative confirmed to me that KeepSolid VPN Unlimited does not do this. The company is based in New York City, meaning that it is not subject to any specific data retention laws. However, the representative pointed out that KeepSolid's zero logging policy means it would have precious little information to retain or hand over to law enforcement. Recently, KeepSolid introduced the Censorship Test feature. This scans your internet connection and looks for services and websites that may be blocked in your particular geographic region.

For example, my US-based scan looked at 45 websites and found them all available. You can opt to send KeepSolid an anonymized version of your scan, which the company says will be available in aggregate at www.censor-check.com. Sending your data will also earn you a free day of VPN access, but you can only submit one scan per week. KeepSolid also offers what it calls a DNS Firewall. This is a bundle of features, aimed at preventing websites from tracking your movements, protecting you against malware, and blocking ads. It's offered free with any subscription, but note that it is not enabled by default.

Once you switch it on, you select from various levels of protection. That's smart, since ad blocking can sometimes break the sites you visit. Letting you choose the level of protection means you can try to balance security with ease of use. KeepSolid includes a White and Black List for blocking, giving you even more customization. It's great that KeepSolid is offering these features, but it's important to understand their limitations. The ad-blocking and tracker-blocking features use global blacklists maintained by KeepSolid. Similarly, the anti-malware feature simply blocks known malicious URLs.

This is approach is partly taken to respect your privacy and offer additional protection without decrypting your web traffic, which would be required to inspect the data moving to and from your computer. These tools complement your existing antivirus solution or privacy tools, rather than replacing them. Regardless of your platform, VPN Unlimited has you covered with native clients for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

It also offers mobile VPN clients for Android and iOS, which I discuss in brief below. As with most leading VPN services, VPN Unlimited lets you connect up to five devices simultaneously. You can add an additional device for 99 cents per month, five devices for $2.99 per month, or 10 devices for $5.99 per month. If you've got a big family or a lot of devices, it's a great option. Alternatively, you could set up your router to use KeepSolid's VPN service, providing protection to every device on your network.

In my testing, I used a Lenovo ThinkPad T460s laptop running Windows 10. I had no trouble installing VPN Unlimited, which uses a typical installer and setup tool. The only wrinkle is that it needed to reboot my machine. I'm impressed with the VPN Unlimited client, which is very well designed. All of the features are easily explained with an overlay that points out each element and what it does. A toggle at the top of the screen turns the VPN connection on and off.

Buttons down the left show your account information and give you quick access to available servers. All that can be a bit overwhelming to a first-time user.

If a kinder, friendlier VPN is what you're looking for, definitely consider TunnelBear or Hide My Ass. The right panel lists all VPN Unlimited's available servers, with a handy search box at the top. Each server lists its country of origin, how crowded the server currently is, and whether or not torrenting is allowed on that server. VPN Unlimited also has a high-speed server dedicated to video streaming and an Optimal option that connects you to what it believes is the best server available. I really like that the client offers up this much information. Unfortunately, I found that Netflix blocked access while I using VPN Unlimited.

That's not unusual, however. In fact, it can be hard to find a VPN service that works with Netflix consistently. If you'd rather not deal with a stand-alone client, KeepSolid also offers browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox for the VPN Unlimited service. Just install, log in, and click to have all traffic to that browser secured. The browser extension offers all the features and servers of the desktop version, as well as the ability to turn off some WebRTC functions. Websites use WebRTC to communicate with your webcam or mic, but security-minded readers might know that WebRTC can potentially leak your IP address.

In my testing, I used the official WebRTC troubleshooting test, which reported that most of the network capabilities were disabled. Having VPN in your browser has some advantages over using a VPN machine-wide. For one thing, you get VPN protection in any computer on which you've logged into Chrome or Firefox. For another, you can minimize your impact on computer performance by only encrypting your web browser traffic. That said, the whole point of using a VPN is to secure all your web traffic and the browser extension won't do that. Regardless of the VPN service you choose, you're certain to see some kind of impact on your web browsing experience. Usually, more latency and decreased upload and download speeds.

This is especially true when connecting to a far-flung VPN server—but not always. In my testing, I found that PureVPN actually improved web performance.

To get a sense of the impact using a particular VPN will have on internet speeds, I perform a series of tests with Ookla's speed test tool. (Note that Ookla is owned by PCMag's publisher, Ziff Davis.) I average these results and then find a percent change between when the VPN is in use and when it is not. I actually perform these tests twice. The first round is done while connected to a local VPN server, which puts an emphasis on speed and reliability. It's also how most people will probably interact with their VPN service. For the second round of tests, I connect to an Ookla test server in Anchorage, Alaska and a VPN server in Australia.

The vast distances involved are a stress test on the VPN service, and show how it will function when connecting to international locales. In the domestic VPN test, I found that KeepSolid increased latency by 167 percent. Hide My Ass did far better in this test, increasing latency by 5.6 percent. I also found that KeepSolid only reduced download speeds by 1.65 percent. That becomes a bit of a mixed result, since KeepSolid slowed upload speeds by 8.5 percent. Editors' Choice winner PureVPN, on the other hand, is the fastest VPN I've yet tested.

It actually improved download speeds by 346.4 percent. When connected to a far-flung VPN server, KeepSolid increased latency by 384.7 percent.

That's on the higher end for this test. AnchorFree Hotspot Shield Elite only increased latency by 155.4 percent. In testing, I found that KeepSolid reduced download speeds by only 11.8 percent, and upload speeds by 4.2 percent. PureVPN leads in these tests as well, improving download speeds by 403.8 percent. For the upload test, Hotspot Shield Elite ekes out the lead, improving upload speeds by 1.4 percent. The Android app will look and feel familiar to anyone that has used a VPN Unlimited client on another device.

It's built around a map view, with a hidden left-side tray. Like most VPN apps, VPN Unlimited lets you access some controls from a card in the Android pull-down notification tray. This means you always have control over your VPN, even if you have a different app in focus. I'm happy to see that the Android app also has all the useful features of the desktop versions. The specialized video streaming servers are clearly marked. You can see how crowded a particular server is from the server list, and which allow torrenting. That said, I'm not sure how many people will be using BitTorrent on their Android phone.

VPN Unlimited did fairly well in my speed testing, but I am disappointed in its download speed performance. I view it as the most important benchmark for most users, and KeepSolid VPN Unlimited on Android is a distant second place. Private Internet Access, on the other hand, dominated this test.

The best way to install VPN Unlimited on your Mac is to download the client from the official Apple App Store. KeepSolid does offer a version on its website, but it requires that you install a new VPN profile every time you connect to a server. It also did very poorly in my speed tests, so stick with the App Store offering.

The macOS client for VPN Unlimited is nearly identical to the Windows version. That's fine if you're already familiar with it, but I would have liked to see more effort to make the software more Apple-like.

I really appreciate that, unlike other clients, it takes very little time and effort to get online with the VPN Unlimited client. The app does a good job relaying important information about servers, such as whether BitTorrent is allowed or whether the server is already crowded with users. VPN Unlimited also clearly marks servers optimized for video streaming, which is very handy. Annoyingly, I discovered that I couldn't click or zoom on the map view, which makes me wonder why it's included at all.

One unique feature of the VPN Unlimited macOS client is that it takes advantage of the Touch Bar on high-end MacBook Pro models. There's an on/off toggle switch, as well as a scrollable selector for different VPN servers. It's a neat flourish, but would be better if I could access the VPN options from the Touch Bar while I was in other apps. In my testing, I found that KeepSolid VPN Unlimited for Mac had middling speed test results. Its download speeds were especially disappointing.

I don't recommend using speed as a primary consideration when choosing a VPN, however. KeepSolid uses the same, familiar design for its VPN Unlimited iPhone client that it has on all other platforms. The map is still the center of attention, and you can easily tap locations to connect to the relevant servers.

VPN Unlimited also recommends a list of alternative servers, if the one it believes is best is not to your liking. The app also shows the load currently experienced on its servers, making it easier to chose a speedy one.

Note that it's rare to find an iPhone VPN client that uses OpenVPN, my preferred VPN protocol. VPN Unlimited is one such client, and will even let you choose between OpenVPN, IPSec, and its proprietary KeepSolid Wise. Surprisingly, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited for iPhone earned solid speed test scores overall, just behind NordVPN. While its download scores, which I believe to be the most important, were not stunning, it did provide a remarkably low-latency connection. When I test VPN services, I'm looking for speed, flexibility, and balance between excellent performance and advanced features. KeepSolid VPN Unlimited does well in all these categories.

Its pricing scheme is inexpensive at the usual monthly subscription cycle, and with subscription periods as short as one week, VPN Unlimited can be available whenever you need it. It also provides a consistent user experience across all its supported platforms, meaning you'll always know how the apps work.

Add to that BitTorrent support, a well-designed client, specific streaming servers, browser plug-ins, and advanced security features, and you're looking at an all-around winner. For all of this, VPN Unlimited earns our Editors' Choice award for VPN services, an honor it shares with NordVPN, PureVPN, and Private Internet Access. 2017-08-28 20:06 0.5. Tidal began life as a comically pretentious promotional video that featured Jay Z and his musician friends touting the service as the future of streaming music due to its sound quality and artist-friendly payouts. Two years later, Tidal has transformed into a pleasurable music platform that contains exclusive albums and videos, quality editorial, early access to concert and sports tickets, and excellent, lossless sound. A Tidal subscription gets you many cool benefits that you won't find elsewhere, but the service is still missing a few features that I expect in a premium streaming music service, features found in the Editors' Choice award-winning Slacker Radio. Tidal lacks a free, ad-supported option, so you have to either pay $9.99 per month for 320Kbps AAC+ music (Tidal Premium), or $19.99 per month for non-compressed 1411Kbps FLAC audio (Tidal HiFi) —a much higher fidelity than your standard MP3 or audio stream.

Tidal's top-level plan is double the cost of Slacker Radio 's corresponding Slacker Premium plan, so take that into consideration before dropping any cash. Thankfully, Tidal has a 30-day trial period, so you can give the service a test run before committing to it. However, you're still required to submit your debit card or credit card information for the trial.

For Tidal's premium cost, you get premium content. Tidal has cool original feature-length articles, such as 'Grant-Lee Phillips: 5 Albums That Changed My Life' and 'Alice Cooper: Reflections of a Hollywood Vampire, ' which have embedded music so you can learn more about artists while listening to their tunes. Unlike the Android app, the web-based and desktop-based versions of the Tidal service use an easily identifiable document icon to let you know which homepage panels link to the stories. I like Tidal's move to embrace the music's faces and histories; Slacker Radio does a similar thing with its informative DNA stations. Tidal offers exclusive albums for a short time period, such as Jay-Z's 4: 44, Kanye West's The Life of Pablo, and Rihanna's Anti, before they're widely distributed to other platforms.

It also has exclusive video content that never appears on competing services. Tidal lets you stream, on demand, many Jay Z albums, which is something that the recently revamped Pandora, for example, cannot boast. Tidal's exclusive video content consists of music videos, music video outtakes, sneak peeks, and backstage concert footage.

Video content is available to both Tidal Premium and Tidal HiFi subscribers, so it's the lossless music streams that differentiate the two subscription tiers. Tidal subscribers also get first dibs on select concert and sports tickets before the general public has an opportunity to purchase them, as well as Tidal-exclusive streaming concerts. For example, the Tidal homepage—at the time of this writing—lets subscribers purchase tickets for the Maxwell Summers' 2017 tour. Subscribers can also livestream the Lil Weezyana Fest.

Note: Tidal does not let you record audio. If you want that unique feature, check out SiriusXM Internet Radio, the Editors' Choice for streaming audio services focused on live audio. Tidal's $19.95 per month HiFi plan is expensive when compared to rival services, but you may find that it's worth the cash, if you value audio quality. Here's why: Tidal's more than 25 million music streams can sound significantly better than rival companies' streams. That non-compressed 16-bit, 44.1kHz FLAC audio is pretty damn good.

For example, Steely Dan's 'Black Cow' sounded extremely clean in my testing, making it easy for me to discern and appreciate the individual instruments at work; this was especially evident during cymbal crashes. On the other hand, I didn't notice any audio improvement in Kavinsky's 'Nightcall.' The stream quality was good, but I couldn't detect a noticeable audio boost over Slacker Radio's 'Nightcall' stream. It was D'Angelo's 'Untitled (How Does It Feel?) ' that sold me on Tidal. I'd never before heard a streaming song sound so sensational.

The song carried a fresh energy that was so addicting that I replayed the track several times. I must admit that some listeners may initially find the lossless sound a bit unusual when compared to an MP3's compressed muddiness, but once you spend time with Tidal HiFi, it's hard to return to standard streams. Even better, Tidal launched a new feature called Masters that's available exclusively to HiFi subscribers who use the Tidal desktop app. The tracks in the Masters section offer studio-quality, high-resolution audio streams to music fans courtesy of the Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) audio codec. These FLAC-based streams are of 24-bit, 96kHz quality, and sound absolutely terrific. Jon Bonham's hi-hat work in Led Zeppelin's 'The Lemon Song' is seriously delicious when played back in Masters-quality sound. Dozens of albums spanning several genres are available, including David Bowie's Young Americans, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Jay Z's American Gangster, and Stone Temple Pilots' Core.

Tidal says that more Masters content is on the way. Please note that headphones play a key role in the listening process; cans with better sound reproduction are, unsurprisingly, conducive to a superior listening experience. Tidal's interface isn't radically different from that of other music streaming services.

I scrolled through the panel-driven What's New section to see the latest releases, including Kendrick Lamar's Untitled Unmastered. This section also houses entertaining themed playlists like 'R.

Phife Dawg' and 'Streets of Fire: Lower East Side Punks.' Tidal has dozens upon dozens of themed playlists that are categorized by moods, time of day, and events, such as Coachella.

It recalls Songza, a defunct, playlist-based music service that inspired many imitators. That's not at all a bad thing. Tidal's playlists may not be as quirky as Slacker Radio's '55 Songs You Think Suck' or 'Yacht Music, ' but 'Headbangers Ball: 1987-1995' will take metal heads back to the heyday of MTV rock. Other sections highlight new albums, individual tracks, and the aforementioned video content. You can discover music by browsing the genre categories (a feature Pandora lacks) or by using the search box. Browser- and desktop-based based Tidal lacks Audio Search, a Shazam-like feature that analyzes music playing in your environment and displays song information. You can find it in the Android version, however.

Overall, the service's music catalog is stacked. Tidal has struck agreements with Sony, Universal, and Warner, as well as many indie labels. I've found popular artists like Arcade Fire, Michael Jackson, and Led Zeppelin, as well as indie faves, such as The Dirtbombs and Harlem.

You can, of course, favorite songs and create a radio station based on a particular artist. Unfortunately, Tidal lacks lyrics, which may prove disappointing to people like me who occasionally want to read along to a song.

Tidal doesn't have any of Slacker Radio's fancy features, either; there aren't The Weather Channel reports, live ESPN sports coverage, or lifestyle stations. Tidal is often perceived as an artists' ego trip, but it's so much more. The service's feature-length articles, curated playlists, exclusive albums, video content, high-quality audio (especially via the Masters feature), and early access to concert tickets add value to a service that is lacking in only a few areas. Tidal doesn't dethrone Editors' Choice Slacker Radio as our overall winner, but it's definitely a streaming music service worth checking out. 2017-08-28 19:52 1.6. In 2013, Nvidia revealed that it would be releasing a powerful gaming portable known as Project Shield.

It was later rebranded as the Shield Portable and would offer immense graphical and processing power thanks to the firm's own Tegra 4 chipset. While the Shield Portable was a great option for a gamer looking for a powerful portable Android handheld gaming device, it would eventually be discontinued, with Nvidia moving towards other platforms like a tablet and home console. While there have been little bits and pieces of information over the years that signaled the firm could be working on a sequel, nothing so far has arrived to market. Now, a Reddit user has most likely stumbled on a rare find, that could be the second iteration of the portable gaming device. Reddit user FwrigginRwootbeer acquired the model at a pawn shop after trading in an original Shield Portable, not realizing that the product was not yet available on the market or even publicly released. The exterior looks similar to the original with only minor differences, but it appears that its specifications have been enhanced.

The Shield Portable 2 prototype offers: This is quite a difference compared to the original that had 2GB RAM, 16GB of internal storage, along with a 5-inch 720p display. Although it is uncertain when and if Nvidia will ever release another portable, it is great to see a prototype of the device come to light. Don't forget to follow us @NeowinGaming on Twitter to keep up to date with our gaming coverage! Source: Reddit via Liliputing 2017-08-28 19:40 0.9. If you like to keep on top of the latest display tech, you’ re probably familiar with Ray Soneira’s exhaustive testing of the screens on the newest smartphones and other devices. His latest target is the Galaxy Note 8, and it turns out Samsung’s excellent phablet sports the best screen they’ ve ever seen on a phone.

It shouldn’ t come as that great of a surprise — OLED screens are the future, of course, and although early models were far from competitive, steady improvements have led to the tech leapfrogging traditional LCDs. But don’ t take my word for it. Look at that beautiful signature up top. And more importantly, Soneira’s article concludes: Of particular interest were the phone’s multiple calibrated display modes, all of which have as good or better color accuracy than the best screens out there — but have subtle or not-so-subtle differences in how they render an image. There’s also a user-adjustable white balance setting, which photographers and anyone sensitive to color temperature will appreciate. The full rundown of new and improved features is worth reading, so take a few minutes to check out the state of the art. An interesting thing to think about given the surpassing excellence of the Note 8 display is whether others — particularly Apple — can challenge them.

If the iPhone is indeed going to go to OLED soon, it likely wouldn’ t be able to claim anything but playing catch-up, though Apple has been spinning its catch-up moves pretty well over the last few years. But although its IPS LCDs are counted among the best in the world, it’s going to be a stretch for them to say they’ re superior to the competition. Right now, however, the main problem is there just aren’ t enough of the high-quality OLED units to supply everyone who wants them now, let alone Apple. So it’s a bit of a moot point for the present. 2018, however, may be a very interesting one for the display market. 2017-08-28 19:38 0.6.

It’s part of normal discussion in Silicon Valley to claim that Amazon makes no money, or even loses money, in the pursuit of growth. But it’s a trope Amazon bucks on a regular basis for two reasons: This makes the addition of Whole Foods to its stable of businesses all the more interesting.

Grocery stores are notoriously profit-lean. But Amazon’s profit, as has been pointed out, is perhaps even leaner on a percentage-of-revenue basis.

So what impact will the Whole Foods pickup have on Amazon’s numbers? We can figure out the sums some, but only partially. Attempting to precisely predict what Amazon will do with Whole Foods, in terms of new costs, is too speculative even after a host of initial price cuts have become known. Price cuts are the early shots in a longer war. Amazon has three core business reporting units to keep in mind when we discuss its profitability or lack thereof: its North American sales; its self-described “International” sales; and AWS, its cloud computing group. The e-commerce giant reports operating income (otherwise known as profit) for each group, which gives us a decent ruler for results, even though it would be better to have GAAP net income for each.

Caveat aside, here’s what two of Amazon’s trio managed in its most recent quarter (PDF): As you can see, the company’s North American e-commerce business, which is growing, managed to do so while generating operating income, while its international sales appear to come with negative operating margins as they scale. Amazon, famed for its claimed long-term focus, is likely content to watch its domestic (roughly) online sales help subsidize its growth abroad. AWS, the third of the triplets forming Amazon’s trivium, is even healthier than the above. It closes the operating income gap formed by its non-domestic e-commerce growth operating losses: In arithmetical nomenclature: $436 + -$724 + $916 >0.

Therefore, Amazon is above zero in operating terms before we toss in any Whole Foods results. (In more polite company, we’ d put the preceding as follows: Amazon’s domestic e-commerce business no longer fully subsidizes its international e-commerce business, as it did, for example, in the year-ago quarter; this makes AWS all the more important as it keeps the company’s aggregate business operating results in the black.) Now, let’s examine the same company, with two additions: Whole Food’s sales and operating income. Now that the Whole Foods deal is done, we should understand what happens when we stack the companies vertically. To do that, we need new numbers, and to get those numbers, we’ ll turn to Whole Foods’ most recent quarterly results: In short, Whole Foods’ operating income margin is a touch under 5 percent. But, as Gadfly points out, that’s actually better than Amazon’s own margin. From that we can understand that the addition of Whole Foods to Amazon’s stable—turning its Three’s Company into a quartet— may actually improve Amazon’s aggregate operating margin. So does the addition of Whole Foods make real change to the Amazon model?

Amazon is so much larger than Whole Foods that the addition of that $180 million in operating income is only so useful. Recall our prior formula for Amazon: $436 + -$724 + $916 >0. That equation works out to $628 million in operating income. Now, let’s run the calculations with Whole Food’s stronger operating margins, but smaller operating income: $436 + -$724 +916 +180 = $808 million. If the increase to $808 million actually changes a damn thing at Amazon isn’ t clear.

Sure, it’s a 29 percent increase in operating income off a 9 or 10 percent change in revenue. But, that the delta buys Amazon much material latitude to change how it invests in other business seems like a stretch of an idea.

This becomes doubly true now that Amazon is already cutting prices at Whole Foods. We can therefore anticipate a negative impact to Whole Foods’ operating income. This will lower the impact that Whole Foods has on Amazon’s operating income and aggregate operating margin. So, summing gently, it looks likely that whatever real profit Amazon grinds out of Whole Foods will be small, and it will perhaps spread inside of other business units (such as more Prime memberships). It’s also important to bear in mind that Amazon already generates operational income.

Whole Foods is a minnow compared to the Seattle giant, and its profit is peanuts compared to those of its new overlord. 2017-08-28 19:26 1.0. Zazzle is warning customers that hackers may have compromised their accounts. The company's chief technology officer Bobby Beaver confirmed in an email to ZDNet that 'thousands of accounts' were affected, representing what he called 'a small percentage of accounts.' The company sent an email to customers revealing that hackers in June used brute-force techniques to cycle through account usernames and passwords that were stolen from a breach of another unnamed site. The online marketplace denied that its systems had been directly breached. Zazzle said that customers will be prompted to choose a new password when they next visit the site.

Aspekte Mittelstufe Deutsch B2 Pdf Editor more. 'The reset procedure we referenced requires the user reconfirm their email address by sending a security token to that email address, ' said Beaver. 'As such, a malicious actor could not reset the password for the account -- unless they had access to the email account itself, which is not in our control.' Zazzl's login page now features a one-click CAPTCHA box, aimed at slowing down automated login attempts, and the company said it was 'currently evaluating additional safeguards' to deter similar attacks. 2017-08-28 19:21 0.9.

Fraud detection is a huge problem for retailers and the banking industry. But as companies fortify their defenses against fraudsters, the criminal element finds new weaknesses to exploit. The latest tactic has been phone spoofing, and fraud at the call center itself.

Helping to ward off the latest wave of fake accounts is Next Caller, a Y Combinator-backed startup based in New York. Next Caller, which launched at Disrupt SF in 2013, raised $5 million in a recent round of funding led by the secretive Crystal Towers fund, an investment put together by YC alumni to back promising companies coming out of the group. Tikhon Bernstam, one of the fund’s founders, discovered Next Caller during some consulting work he was doing for a well-known social network, says Ian Roncoroni, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “ Next Caller ’s unique approach to protecting highly sensitive information has made it the chosen solution for large financial institutions authenticating inbound calls, ” said Bernstam in a statement. “As a result, fraudsters that continue to move their attention to the call center after being stymied by EMV technology and other security advances are finding it harder to penetrate what’s traditionally been fertile ground for fraud.” Using the technology, companies no longer need to ask callers to verify their identity. Next Caller has already identified the caller as the legitimate account holder, allowing the customer service rep to offer assistance sooner.

Typically, fraud detection has relied heavily on biometrics and phone number “reputation scores, ” according to a statement from the company. Those methods, Next Caller says, are extremely vulnerable to spoofing. Next Caller’s technology combats the spoofing menace in part by analyzing carrier-level metadata to determine whether a call is legitimate or not. The three-year-old company actually owes much of its success to its appearance in TechCrunch’s Battlefield competition, according to Roncoroni. One of the judges for that year’s competition was Jessica Livingston, who encouraged the company to apply to Y Combinator.

Its acceptance to YC led it to be part of the internal network at the accelerator, where it was discovered by Bernstam, which led to the latest round of funding. The moral of the story? Apply to pitch in the Disrupt Battlefield.

Membership has its privileges. 2017-08-28 19:15 0.0.

A simple upgrade that Android smartphone users have enjoyed for years may finally be coming to the iPhone: wireless charging. The technology would allow iPhone owners to simply lay their devices on a charging pad – something that's also been embedded in furniture and vehicles – to recharge. Wireless charging hardware possibly related to the next iPhone has been shown in a series of photographs published by Chinese blog site Weibo. While add-on, external iPhone covers have allowed wireless charging for some time, if the photos and a leaked document are genuine, the 'iPhone 8' could contain the technology natively. Apple is planning to hold a product launch event Sept. 12 at which it's expected to unveil its next iPhone and an updated Apple Watch.

The iPhone has not yet been given a name, though most experts expect it to be called the iPhone 8. The photographs show wireless charging receivers on an assembly line and a leaked document from Apple for its HomePod Firmware for iOS mentions inductive wireless charging and electric vehicle charging. Documents showing inductive wireless charging. HomePod was announced at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and is a Siri-activated speaker system similar to Amazon Echo powered by Alexa.

The bad news? Apple is not expected to 'enable' the wireless charging capability on its new iPhone until sometime after it ships this fall, meaning there will have to be some type of software upgrade to activate the function, according to a BGR report. Additionally, if Apple chooses to go with a proprietary wireless charging technology, iPhone users will be pigeon-holed into buying a specific charging pad sometime after the iPhone 8's launch. While wireless charging has yet to become a widespread technology, it has been deployed by several restaurant chains, airports and in some other public venues.

What may be an issue, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates, is that an Apple embrace of proprietary technology would require iPhone users to remember to carry their wireless charging pads wherever they go – just as they do with a lightning connector today. 'In the past, I just went to a local store and bought a cable -- readily available, ' Gold said. 'Will chargers be that readily available? Probably not in the short term.

And if Apple goes with a proprietary charger, as they often do go proprietary so they can sell their own peripherals, how hard will it be to get one if needed? USB and USB-C is becoming ubiquitous, but not so wireless charging, which will take a few years to become really ubiquitous.' Though he has no concrete information about the wireless charging reports, Gold said he believes the iPhone 8 will offer wireless charging, as Apple has systematically been pairing down hardware on its smartphone.

'This has more to do with sleekness of design than anything else in my opinion, ' Gold said. 'But in reality, Apple has been trying to remove all vestiges of connectors from their device anyway -- no more earphone jacks -- so this is just one more way to make the device thinner, sleeker overall and have no openings around the periphery.' Over the last decade, Apple has filed several patents on wireless charging. In 2005, an Apple patent described technology for an iPod using zero-contact induction for not only charging but data transfer – most likely to manage device charging.

In a 2012 Apple patent filing, the company described a near-field magnetic resonance (NFMR) power supply 'arranged to wirelessly provide power to any of a number of suitably configured devices.' Apple's patent description indicated a charging distance of about one meter, which could be projected out from a desktop computer such as an iMac to power peripheral devices such as a wireless mouse. According to MacRumors, Apple has also been eyeing a company called WiTricity, which licenses a magnetic resonance charging technology that can be projected over several feet away. Apple did not return a request for comment about its wireless charging plans.

If the HomePod leak is any indication, however, the type of wireless charging Apple could roll out for the iPhone 8 would be more akin to the tightly-coupled technology it used on the Apple Watch versus loosely-coupled magnetic resonance charging that allows more freedom of placement on a charging surface. As Apple has been researching wireless charging, competitors have charged ahead. Samsung, Apple's chief smartphone rival, has been selling smartphones with native wireless charging for years. According to IHS, 80% of consumers want wireless charging in public places, so enabling it in mobile devices is simply good business for mobile providers. The problem is that even as the wireless charging industry has consolidated over the past several years, there are still competing standards, which means not all smartphones or tablets can use public charging stations. If Apple adds another, it will further complicate an already small market. 2017-08-28 19:03 0.5.

Stormfront, the oldest neo-Nazi forum on the web, has been shut down by its name provider, Network Solutions, and the domain officially put on hold. The news followed the shutdown of DailyStormer, another supremacist site. Stormfront began in 1990s as a dial-up BBS and then morphed into a website and forum in about 1995. It has been registered at Network Solutions since 1995. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Executive Director Kristen Clarke said that her organization took “action against Stormfront.” “Their website is a vehicle used to promote racially-motivated violence and hate, ” she wrote.

The group told Network Solutions that Stormfront was violating their terms of service. Stormfront was unique in that it was considered the “murder capital of the Internet” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and, as of 2014, over 100 murders were attributed to Stormfront users.

The SPL wrote that the site was popular with “wound collectors.” “A typical murderer drawn to the racist forum Stormfront.org is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend, ” wrote the SPL in 2014. “She is the sole provider in the household. Forensic psychologists call him a ‘wound collector.’ Instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education, he projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.” The group also has a Cloudflare account according to the DNS records. Cloudflare’s CEO has spoken out against hate groups and was instrumental in beginning the attack against DailyStormer. It’s unclear where or when StormFront will return but as of this writing the website is completely inaccessible.

2017-08-28 18:55 1.0. It would not be surprising at all if you have never heard of Acid Wizard Studio until now.

It is a small independent game developer with only one game under its belt which was released quietly only a little over a week ago. However, the studio is already making a name for itself by doing something that is unprecedented in the video game industry; it posted a torrent for its one and only game, Darkwood, on The Pirate Bay.

To say Polish developer Acid Wizard is a small indie studio might be an understatement - it is really just “three guys (and a dog) ” as the devs put it on their Imgur page. Their image gallery, which contains 17 pictures of the team, concept art and screenshots of Darkwood, tells the story of the developers and explains their reasoning behind posting the torrent for their game.

The game’s development was rocky, to say the least. The devs admit that none of them had any experience in game design when they started in 2013. Production was expected to be complete in a year although scope creep and others issues delayed progress significantly.

“It wasn’ t an easy ride, in fact, to be honest, each of us went through at least one nervous breakdown during the development process.” When it became apparent that it was not going to meet its 2014 release date, an early beta of Darkwood launched on Steam Early Access instead. It did better than the studio thought it would so production continued and the scope expanded even further. However, the slow progress led to negative reviews and rumors that the title had become vaporware. The developers pushed on despite the negativity and finally released the full version on August 17 of this year. The game immediately started getting positive reviews. So what happened that led Acid Wizard to post its masterpiece on The Pirate Bay for free?

After the release, the studio was flooded with emails. Some were praising the game, others were just questions, but many were from people claiming to be bloggers or YouTubers asking for free keys to review the game. Most of these requests were just scammers looking to sell the key for profit on “shady platforms” like G2A, which the developers at Acid Wizard consider a 'cancer' in the games industry. “To be honest, we're fed up with it, ” they said. “This practice makes it impossible for us to do any giveaways or send keys to people who actually don't have the money to play Darkwood.” Those people who don’ t have the money to play the game are the other reason Acid Wizard released the DRM and malware-free torrent. The team was checking out refunds that Steam had issued for the game and one, in particular, caught their attention.

A kid had asked for a refund because 'he didn't want his parents to be stressed out when seeing the bill at the end of the month.” The devs said they felt bad about that. Figuring that the game would be pirated eventually, they decided to offer it for free on one of the most popular websites known for pirated software. They only had two requests from those choosing to download the game.

One was that if the players liked it, they should buy it when they can afford to. The second request was that no matter what, 'don't buy it through any key reselling site.' Some reactions to the move have been along the lines of, “are these guys crazy?” However, it has garnered a lot of positive comments and the free publicity is getting the word out about the game.

This attention will ultimately equal sales. I’ ll be checking the game out for sure, but I will be purchasing it through the official Steam page rather than the torrent (and I’ m sure I am not the only one). 2017-08-28 18:45 0.8. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have welcomed their second daughter into the world, and her name is August. Before you ask, it’s unclear if she was named August because she was born in August. (But I highly doubt it.) In usual Zuck fashion, the Facebook CEO and founder posted the announcement to Facebook along with a letter from him and his wife to the new baby girl.

Here’s the letter: Zuckerberg and Chan had their first daughter, Max, in December 2015. They pledged to give away 99 percent of their shares to “advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.” At the time, Zuck’s shares were worth around $45 billion.

2017-08-28 18:40 1.6. Target is attempting to simplify its mobile app strategy by merging its more popular Cartwheel savings app into the main Target app, before eventually closing Cartwheel for good.

Today, integration side of things is complete – the main Target app can now serve as a way to both shop online and in-store, with support for lists, delivery and pickup options, and now, Target’s own digital couponing experience, known as Cartwheel. The change is notable because Cartwheel is actually Target’s more popular application. While the main shopping app is often a top 20 app in the App Store’s “Shopping” category, Cartwheel tends to sit in the top 10. The Cartwheel app itself has been downloaded around 40 million times, and users have saved a billion dollars in-store via its deals – up from the $600 million reported last year. Target will have a formidable challenge on its hands in getting that many customers to make the switch. Not only will they have to download the Target app, if not already installed, the retailer says that Cartwheel users who signed up with a social account, like Facebook or Google, will have to move to a Target.com app in order to port over their existing offers list and lifetime savings to the main app. You can also choose to just sign up for a new account directly in the Target app, if you don’ t care whether or not your list and history carries over.

The retailer had previously announced its plans to merge its apps earlier this year, saying that the change would take place this summer. It also said Cartwheel will be left alone for now, as it favors a slower transition. However, it eventually won’ t make sense for both apps to continue to be maintained – especially when the Target app will be the one getting all the new upgrades. Target had also said that other new features, including an in-store map showing your location and the location of Cartwheel deals, as well as mobile payments support will also come to the main app in time. The retailer has been working to bring mobile payments to its app some time this year. But we understand it may need to push that back to early 2018, as the exact deadline is in flux.

Cartwheel’s transition, however, is a first step towards supporting mobile payments. In the future, the plan is to allow customers to show a barcode at point-of-sale, then receive their Cartwheel savings and pay for their products with just one scan. Target isn’ t the only retailer to consolidate its apps. Ebay did the same a couple of years ago. Meanwhile, Target competitors like Walmart, Kohl’s, and CVS, all offer their payments and savings features within their main shopping app, not in a separate one. Cartwheel is now available in the Target app on both iOS and Android.

2017-08-28 18:32 0.0. Apple Music, Cupertino's streaming audio service, lets you stream most, but not all, of the iTunes library on your iOS devices, dive into numerous curated playlists, and find artists using Siri voice commands. There's even an Android version of Apple Music, which is a major departure for Apple, one that shows how seriously it takes music. Overall, Apple Music's many features make this service a strong contender in its category.

Unless you're dead set on becoming further entrenched in the almighty Apple ecosystem, however, there are even better options, such as Spotify and especially the Editors' Choice award-winning Slacker Radio. A quick refresher for those of you who are considering signing up for Apple Music: It is not the iTunes Store app from which you buy digital music files.

Instead, Apple Music is a streaming music service that brings millions of songs to your iPhone, desktop iTunes app, or Apple TV. Confusingly, however, it only gets its own dedicated app on iPhone and Android. On all other platforms, Apple Music's streaming functionality is built into iTunes. On mobile devices, you access Apple Music by tapping the same music icon iOS has displayed for years. The free account included with your Apple ID lets you access several radio stations, including Beats 1 and NPR News and Culture, and you can also follow artists on the Connect social network. But to get the most out of Apple Music, such as unlimited skipping, no ads, and offline listening, you'll want to sign up for the $9.99 Single Membership or the $14.99 Family Membership for up to six people using iCloud Family Sharing.

I like seeing Apple Music and other streaming music services adopt family plans, which is something that Slacker Radio still lacks, unfortunately. If you're a college student who's enrolled in an eligible college or university, you can subscribe to Apple Music for a wallet-friendly $4.99 a month. Students can take advantage of the discount for up to four years. Spotify and Tidal offer a similar student deal.

The white-and-red layout features large, eye-catching icons that invite you to explore the app. Honestly, that's something that you're likely to do anyway, as the interface features a menu structure that helps you find content quicker than before. Library, Playlists, Artists, Albums, and Songs are all prominent and easy to navigate. If you just want to play the music you've bought, the Purchased playlist is where you should focus your attention. It let me stream songs from my iCloud Music Library that I bought in the past, even though none of them were downloaded on the iPhone 7 I used for testing. Playlists and saved albums from the Beats Music app transfer over, too. Thankfully, Apple Music lets you download music for offline playback.

Unlike the majority of rival streaming music services, Apple Music doesn't let you access your library from a Web browser. As yet another music-related Apple app you'll frequently be using on iOS, Apple Music does a good job separating itself from the regular My Music section where purchased tracks are stored, even though they are both technically the same app. However, it would be nice to see iTunes Store merged with Apple Music to create a one-stop iOS music shop, as the divide can lead to confusion. In testing I often forgot which app was the streaming app versus purchasing app, which proved frustrating.

Apple Music is also for discovering new music, not just for listening to old favorites. So I hopped over to the revamped For You section and swiped through numerous themed playlists, such as Eric Clapton: The Early Years and Lady Gaga vs. Apple must have discovered that people really dig these prefabricated playlists, because the previous For You iteration was an entirely different beast. The older For You tasked you with manually selecting genres using brightly colored bubbles and creating stations around those picks.

So, basically, the new For You removes the extra step. Of course, you still have the option to use the search box to find new tunes. Apple Music features a vast selection of songs taken from the iTunes library, including Dr. Dre's The Chronic and other exclusive albums, as well as tracks from Taylor Swift and other pop acts. I found many Prince albums, too, including 1999, Batman, Controversy, Purple Rain, and Sign 'O' the Times. You can also listen to radio stations dedicated to certain themes, such as Hip-Hop Workout Anthems and Disney Princess Radio.

Apple Music takes a page from Slacker Radio's playbook with the addition of non-music stations, such as NPR News and ESPN Sports. Meanwhile, Apple's flagship radio station, Beats 1, features tracks curated by DJ Zane Lowe, along with artist interviews.

That said, the idea that a single radio station like Beats 1 can be all things to all listeners at all times is antiquated at best and arrogant at worst. Meanwhile, the more specialized stations aren't as well crafted as what Spotify and Slacker Radio offer. Still, one of my favorite uses for music streaming services is queuing up chill instrumental tracks to listen to while editing text like this review. Apple Music does deliver on that front.

It's easy to select a favorite song or artist and listen to a station full of similar tunes. Apple Music's audio quality is about what you'd expect from songs downloaded from iTunes, but not as high as Tidal's Hi-Fi offering. Only hardcore audiophiles will notice the difference, as the audio streams at 256 Kbps.

That's a lower bitrate than Spotify's 320 Kbps streams, but Apple's use of the AAC format enables its streams to retain more audio data. In addition, the app now supports lyrics (when they are available), so you can sing along to your favorite song, even if you don't know the words. Speaking of artists, Apple Music lets you follow your favorite bands, signed or unsigned, using its Connect social network.

Here, artists can share thoughts and material that fans can comment on and interact with. For example, Pharrell used his page to debut his single, 'Freedom.' Other social features include the ability to share playlists, albums, and Apple Music's large library of ad-free HD music videos through Facebook and Twitter.

But, again, while this is a pretty, glossy feature, it doesn't offer much that you won't find on other, more open, and more popular social networks. Connect reminded me of MySpace's major rebranding as a music-focused site a few years ago, and few things are less reassuring than MySpace comparisons. It is cool, though, that your Connect profile automatically follows artists whose songs you've purchased. I like having a big, fat Insane Clown Posse news feed waiting for me without lifting a finger. What would an Apple service be if it didn't encourage you to use other Apple services and products along with it?

You can use Siri to tell Apple Music to play specific songs or ask for recommendations, like The Top Songs of the 80s. Apple Watch owners can sync music to their device and keep listening even when not paired to an iPhone. The 90-day free trial should be plenty of time to determine whether Apple Music is a service you want to invest in. Just make sure to turn off auto-payments in case you don't dig it.

I suspect many people will keep using Apple Music, because it's more convenient to use the streaming app already included on your phone, and Apple Music is good enough that those users won't be disappointed. That said, if you want to use one of the best music streaming services currently available for iOS devices, check out my top pick, Slacker Radio. 2017-08-28 18:22 0.3. We heard from past Disrupt attendees that they are eager for more opportunities to discuss the big topics we cover on the main stage in greater depth. That insight led us to create smaller, more focused discussions we’ re calling Off the Record (OTR) sessions — which we’ re launching at Disrupt SF for the first time this Sept.

The idea behind the Off the Record sessions is simple. Take speakers from our main stage, a moderator, and a few hand-picked experts, and stage a 45-minute, roundtable discussion that includes questions from the audience. Any regular Disrupt attendee may participate.

The sessions take place on site at the venue in an area we have set aside for OTRs. The discussion is followed by a networking reception. The OTRs won’ t be recorded, and TechCrunch won’ t be covering them.

The only way to be a part of what is sure to be a series of great discussions is to register for Disrupt SF. The OTRs are meant to provide founders and investors, always the mainstay group at Disrupt, a close-quarters opportunity to engage in conversations with top figures in core categories. Right, so what categories are those? We’ re almost done programming the OTRs and here is the line-up so far.

Later this week, we will announce OTRs for security, AI, and health/biotech. Please note that most of these OTRs also correspond to highlighted sections of our Startup Alley as well. Cryptocurrencies and ICOs – Monday Sept.

18 at 12: 15-1: 30 p.m. AR/VR – Monday Sept. 18 at 4: 15-5: 45 pm China Cross Border – Monday Sept. 18 at 2: 40-4: 00pm Robotics – Tuesday Sept.

19 at 11: 15-12: 45pm 2017-08-28 18:11 0.2. Using your Android tablet or phone to access the free Wi-Fi at the local coffee shop is quite a bit more dangerous than you might imagine.

First, you can't tell if the network has been configured incorrectly, allowing others on the network to see your data. Second, it's entirely possible that nefarious parties have simply set up an innocent-looking wireless network to trick naive coffee drinkers. They can be very difficult to tell from the real thing. That's why you need a VPN. In both of the scenarios above, someone could monitor your network traffic.

Everything you send, from emails to passwords, would be open to them. That's a lot of private information you'd probably rather keep private. One example of a classic man-in-the-middle attack is to use a bogus network to intercept victims' web traffic and replace legitimate sites with fake ones. When a victim goes to enter their information (everything from passwords to credit card numbers) on the site, the attacker gets it all. VPNs are still a good investment even when you know the network is safe.

Recent legal changes allow ISPs to sell anonymized user metadata to advertisers and other third-parties. Lots of other companies, like Facebook and Google, have benefited from access to user data, and ISPs have successfully argued that they should also get a piece of the tasty data pie. But, to my mind, it's a trickier issue because you can conceivably opt out of using Facebook but accessing the internet without an ISP is all but impossible. Speaking of advertisers, they use advanced trackers that correlate your movements between websites. By placing trackers on a variety of sites and watching for requests from the same IP address, advertisers can get a sense of your habits. This is still true when you browse the web on your Android.

What's more, many mobile apps still transmit data without encryption, letting various three-letter organizations keep an eye on you. You might not think anyone would be interested in your data, but it's not always individuals that are targeted for surveillance or attack. While attending the Black Hat security conference, I saw some 35,000 devices connecting to a malicious Wi-Fi network, all without the knowledge of their owners. The malicious network was configured to mimic whatever Wi-Fi request was made of it.

You can bet that many of those devices were mobile phones merely seeking a familiar Wi-Fi network. When you connect through a VPN service, you interact differently with the internet. Your data is sent through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server, either nearby or in a far-flung location. Anyone monitoring your network connection only sees the gibberish of an encrypted connection.

Because your traffic exits onto the open web from the VPN server, advertisers and spies see the IP address of the VPN server and not your device. It's a smart and simple way to keep your information and identity secure. As important as it is to understand what a VPN is, it's also important to know what it isn't. It isn't a true anonymization service, and you can't use it to connect to hidden websites on the Dark Web.

For both of those activities, you'll want to use the Tor anonymization network. There are Tor client Android apps in Google Play, so you'll have no trouble connecting, no matter where you are. While some VPN services claim to protect you against malware and phishing sites, standalone antivirus utilities definitely do a better job. Some VPN services also block ads—an especially useful feature on Android, where ad blockers are a rarity.

When you're connected to the VPN, your data is, indeed, encrypted. But that's not the case once it leaves the VPN server.

If your browser or app doesn't secure your information, then it will be entirely readable to someone with the will and the means to try. Manually encrypting your files is one way to ensure that they aren't read. There are also apps, like Signal, that send encrypted text messages, keeping each message secure even if part of the journey to its intended recipient is unsecure. A common use of VPNs is location spoofing. By sending your web traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a remote server, you cause it to appear to originate from the VPN server and not your actual location.

Journalists and activists have used this to get around restrictive internet controls imposed by various governments. But for most people, this feature will probably be used to watch region-locked streaming content. If you live in the US and want to watch the free video streams from the BBC, you're out of luck. But with a VPN, you can fool the BBC website into believing you're a noble UK citizen. The same is true for sporting events, such as official MLB streams.

That said, companies and content providers are starting to get wise. Netflix in particular has begun blocking VPN connections. I've noticed that Hulu, too, frequently blocks access when I'm using a VPN. Note that streaming companies are well within their rights to block VPN users. Just because you're paying to watch Netflix in the US doesn't mean you are allowed to view UK Netflix. There are some VPNs that work with Netflix.

But in my experience, their effectiveness can change on a day-to-day basis as the streaming companies and VPN services play a cat-and-mouse game of spoofing and blocking. It's not surprising that rerouting your connection to other, perhaps distant, servers can have a negative impact on your web browsing speed. Usually, a VPN greatly increases your latency, and reduces the speed of download and uploads. How annoying the impact is will depend on the location of the VPN servers and the network infrastructure the VPN provider can access, among other things. Note that most VPNs can also protect you when you're connected to cellular networks as well. This might seem like overkill, but there are exotic attacks to intercept cellphone data. One such attack involves jamming the LTE and 3G bands, forcing nearby phones to attempt to connect via a 2G connection, the encryption of which has long been broken.

The attackers use a portable cell tower, similar to a Femtocell, and trick nearby phones into connecting. In my testing, I don't look at VPN performance over cellular connections. That's because I can't control how or when the phone connects with cell towers. By restricting my testing to Wi-Fi, I can control more variables and emulate the circumstances most people will probably experience. The biggest hurdle to using a VPN on a mobile device is maintaining a connection. Annecdotally, I've found that it takes longer to establish connections when a VPN is engaged, and that dropped connections are more common with VPN than without. That's just my impression, however, and I know that VPN companies are working to ensure that their products don't intrude too much on your daily usage.

I definitely recommend taking advantage of free trials with VPN services, so you can get a sense of how the product will work in your life firsthand. Although Android phones and tablets are radically different in form factor than desktops and laptops, what I look for in a VPN remains the same. The question I am asked the most is 'which is the fastest VPN?' But I've found that speed is far from the most important metric when measuring value in a VPN plan.

The number and distribution of available VPN servers provided by the company is far more important than speed. Lots of servers in lots of places means that you'll have an easier time finding a nearby server while traveling. When you're in a foreign country and you're desperate to get information (directions or translation, perhaps), you probably won't be worried about whether or not the Wi-Fi connection you've found is secure. VPNs give you some assurance in these situations. The location of the VPN company is also important. Depending on where the company has its corporate headquarters, local laws may require the company to retain user data.

That's not a good thing, especially if maintaining your privacy is your primary concern. Reading the company's terms of service is a great way to figure out the logging and data retention policies. Nearby servers are good, since they generally provide better speed and performance. A surfeit of servers also means that you'll have many options when spoofing your location, should you desire it.

You're also likely to find the VPN service's statement about P2P file sharing and BitTorrent in its terms of service. Most VPN services don't allow BitTorrent, since it's a drain on resources and opens a legal can of worms. A few services allow file sharing on specific servers, and even fewer will allow them on any server. While I seriously doubt many people will be using their Android phones for Torrenting, be sure to respect the rules for your chosen VPN service. Breaking them can sometimes mean being banned without a refund.

Finally, price and licenses are a very important factor to consider. VPN services range from free to incredibly expensive, and you'll want to make sure you can connect all your devices to the VPN service. In my experience, the average price of a VPN is a little under $11 per month. If you're looking at a service that falls outside this range, be sure that it's offering something unique to make up for it. Most companies allow five or six devices to connect at a time. You'll want to make sure you have enough licenses to cover all your mobile devices and computers, too.

Most VPN services have a pretty consistent design across platforms, but it's an unfortunately rare thing for developers to create a VPN for macOS that actually blends in. I highly recommend trying several VPN services on all your machines and finding the ones that work best for your particular mix of devices.

Whether you're a globe-trotting business magnate, or a humble homebody, a VPN service is a worthy investment. Your data will be more secure, and you'll have much more flexibility in how your mobile traffic moves across the web, even when you're using your smartphone or tablet. It won't protect you from every threat, of course, but it's a simple way to be much more secure.

2017-08-28 18:10 1.4. Self-service business intelligence (SSBI) is a technique for data analytics that allows business teams to access and utilize company data regardless of their background in data analysis or knowledge of data mining. It allows end users to employ statistical analysis to pose questions and solve their own problems. When users across the enterprise can analyze data to make informed decisions, it eases the demands on BI or IT personnel to provide data meeting a sometimes endless stream of ad hoc requests. Self-service BI users can devise their own queries and obtain information for reports or other purposes, allowing technical teams to focus on bigger issues. In order for self-service BI tools to be productive and reliable for employees without BI training, it's essential that the interface used to access data tools be relatively straightforward and intuitive. Visual control elements such as dashboard graphics make navigation easier.

However, some training is usually required so that a variety of end users can navigate the interface to explore data and compose their own specific data queries. Before users can start to utilize data in their own decision making, the IT team normally has to first set up the data warehouse, specialized data marts, and the necessary self-service BI tools. Once levels of access are granted, and minimal training provided, end users should be able to generate information and satisfy their own data requirements quickly and easily. SSBI helps to create a mindset where employees are more likely to seek out data when making decisions, rather than judgments based on intuition or assumptions. However, there needs to be a degree of data governance in place to avoid repetition and confusion.

This involves strictly defining permissions for who has access to what data or data objects, including editing, copying, and sharing reports or queries. There should also be policies regarding security, confidentiality, and preserving data integrity among the self-service BI users.

As a component in business intelligence, statistical analysis requires consideration of every data point in a sampling. In statistics, this is a representative collection of a larger population. For example, the Pareto Rule states that 80 percent of events likely come from 20 percent of the possible causes. The other 20 percent of events and 80 percent of causes are likely to be statistically insignificant.

Techniques for statistical analysis can normally be divided into the following five distinct steps: Define the data required for analysis. Determine the relationship of the sample to the population. Construct a model that summarizes this relationship. Verify or disprove the conclusions of the model. If proven, use predictive analysis on applicable scenarios to suggest future actions or outcomes.

The purpose of statistical analysis is finding trends. For instance, a large service company may employ statistical analysis of unstructured customer feedback to identify prevalent consumer expectations. Understanding the customer and using personalized information can increase revenue by providing improved customer experiences. Self-service BI tools can provide data warehousing benefits and analysis to most aspects of a business, without specialized training in business intelligence or statistical mathematics. This may not be false if you've gathered exhaustive records on every aspect of your business and loaded them correctly into your data warehouse.

This provides incredible transparency and accuracy. However, the key to successfully utilizing statistical analysis is that you must ask the right questions. If you're hoping to just spit out some numbers and discover mind-blowing revelations, you're going to be disappointed. Instead, analysis can suggest and clarify business theories and rules. A large company with millions of contact points could quickly amass a huge amount of information. This can actually obscure the facts if you aren't careful about the data used in your sampling. Success requires that you have a very clear idea of what you want before you start exploring the data.

If you don't know the objective or understand the information, you won't recognize the answer. This is vital in using statistical analysis. Self-service BI platforms don't necessarily eliminate the occasional need for specialists, especially in the early phases of adoption or particularly complex or important analysis projects.

But self-service BI tools are becoming both more flexible and more instructive. Many products will include and even explain packaged statistical formulas. But training programs on BI, statistics, and selected vendor products can certainly speed up the learning curve. 2017-08-28 18:01 1.7. BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) is a way of developing code based on the expected behavior of the code as experienced by the users. When testing APIs for BDD tests, it’s important to configure BDD correctly and to keep the count of BDDs to a minimum.

This blog post will show best practices to configuring the execution of BDD tests through open-source Cucumber, to execute Spring Boot APIs. To run the tests yourselves, you can find the source code here - blazedemo. BDD is a type of software development process where the specification and design of an application are determined according to what its behavior should look like to users. BDD is also known as acceptance tests. There are two sides of the coin when it comes to BDD: on the one hand, it enables non-techie people in the company to contribute directly to test automation. This can be done even in the project’s source code, by giving them a place where they can directly write their criteria. On the other hand, it is very difficult to maintain and support.

Create a new empty Java project on IntelliJ IDEA. For more details on how to do that, take a look here (step 1). Now that we have a project, we need to setup the dependencies. You can use these dependencies, since they are public. To do that, double click on your build.gradle file and add the following Gradle configuration file: In this script, there are only two dependencies for Cucumber itself: All the rest are libs/dependencies for the API project itself (including unit and REST assure testing).

The Cucumber plugin will create/generate/auto-create the JAVA CODE. This plugin gives us two main benefits: code completion in a feature file as well as implementing methods of the feature steps directly from the feature file. The features file is the place for non-techies to write criteria/tests. Keep is as small as possible, with meaningful input only, and include all the steps in it.

This is important for making technical maintenance and support as efficient as possible. Here is an example of a short features file: 4. By clicking Alt + Enter on the line of feature step, we will get the following popup window: In the popup you can select “Create step definition” that will create a step definition only for the selected row from the feature file, or “Create all steps definition” that will generate methods for all the steps in the Java classes.

For example, if we select “Create step definition”, we will see the step definition class creation popup, which will create the Java class as an output with a defined name and a defined path. As usual, you can store your test files anywhere in the src/test/java, according to your personal preferences. I will group them according to test types: unit, rest, bdd, etc.

Don’ t forget to name the class for step definitions. Obviously you can do this manually without any Intellij IDEA generation. To ensure smooth running and code readability, it’s important to put all your step definition files in one place. This will enable Cucumber to find the steps and feature files easily.

As you can see from the screenshot below, we create a folder named “bdd” and a subfolder named “steps” and put all the testing steps in it. Then, we added a file holder for BDD Cucumber (named “BddCoverage” in this example). The BddCoverage.java class is important because it groups the steps, so Cucumber knows the name of our test suite and where to collect steps and feature files from.

This is part of the @CucumberOptions annotation, and done via Glue: 5. You will receive an auto-generated file from the plugin, which shows the class code with all the steps. Add your code to it, instead of the sample code that will appear in it. Below you can see the part that shows the ArrivalsSteps class. You can also create your own file. This is the CommonSteps file, which I manually created: To ensure your application runs properly, create an Abstract Class.

The Abstract Class ensures the API runs automatically before the tests, and not separately. In this example, we named the class “BlazeMeterFeatureTest.” The Abstract class that will help us run SpringContext and a random port. As result, all our step classes will extend this one. 6, Now let’s run the tests! Right click on “bdd” and select Run’ Tests in ‘bdd’ ’ as shown in the picture below: Here are the results of the execution.

On the left pane you can see the scenario execution results, and on the right pane you can see the log output and the amount of tests that were run and that passed: That’s it! You now know how to run Unit Tests with JUnit for REST APIs. 2017-08-28 18:01 2.5. I look terrible in a bikini (take my word for it), but I'd love me a Lamborghini. However, in order to afford nice things, we need to do as the song says and get to work. And we need to manage and prioritize that work somehow. Today, I'm going to show you how to build part of a work order management system with Neo4j.

I'm going to build an evented work order model. Let's say our order gets created, then based on what it is, pieces of work need to happen.

This work is performed by some provider (whether internal or external) and that work can be broken down into tasks that have dependencies on events that have occurred. How would this look in the graph? Glad you asked: If this sounds familiar to you it's because I just blogged about a boolean logic rules engine in a recent blog post.

We can take the same ideas, turn them sideways, and find out for any given order what tasks are completed, what tasks remain to be done, and what events are tasks waiting on. Let's create some sample data and see how this works. First, we'll create some nodes: Then, we will connect them together with some relationships: This will create a graph with one work order, two providers, two work items, three tasks, and two events — which looks like this: Tasks 2 and 3 do not have any event dependencies, they can happen at any time, but Task 1 requires some events to have occurred. Events 1 and 4 have occurred, can we proceed with completing this task? Let's build a stored procedure to answer this question. We can start by finding the Order in question in the Graph: Once we have the order, we want to find all the events that are associated with this order and get their IDs: You'll notice I look for negative events. That is events that have an id that starts with a minus sign, for example, '-ex2'.

If I encounter these I remove the pre-existing event ID from the set of events. In a real event-based workflow system, your event stream should be immutable, so instead of simply deleting events, you would generate events that would undo existing events (using '-ex'). Now that we have the events, let's get the work that needs to be done, the providers who need to do it and the tasks they need to perform: For each task, we want to find out if it can be performed independently or if it has some requirements. We will create a boolean expression and get all minimum sum-of-products solutions. Instead of creating Path nodes like in the previous blog post, we will simply save them as a string array property on the node itself, so we only ever have to calculate this once: Just like before we check each path against the events that have occurred, except this time we will also capture the events that have not happened or the ones that need to be removed for this task to continue. Finally, we add these to our properties and then to our task list to be returned from our method.

Now we can call our stored procedure: And see in our answer that Tasks 2 and 3 done by Provider 2 are ready to be performed, but Task 1 done by Provider One requires either Event 2 to occur or Event 3 to occur along with the removal of Event 4. To add Event 2 to our Order, we can run this Cypher query: And if we run our stored procedure again, we can see that Task 1 can now be performed. So, there you have it. The source code, as always, is on GitHub. Now get to work, sashay, shante!

2017-08-28 18:01 1.6. Keeping your hardware drivers up to date is essential to ensure your Windows PC keeps running smoothly, but it’s all too easy to miss updates that would improve its performance. That’s where Driver Booster comes in. The latest version of this handy software, released last week, can automatically scan your PC and over 400,000 devices and PC driver provided by more than 5,000 companies, including Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft. Driver Booster is particularly useful for gamers, updating not only your graphics card drivers, but also other components like DirectX, VC Runtime and PhysX.

It’s a great timesaver, and once you’ ve given it a try we think you’ ll be impressed. Bear in mind that you might experience a brief interruption to your internet connection if Driver Booster needs to update your network adapter drivers. Download of the Day is our pick of the best free software around – whether it's useful, fun, or just plain silly.

If you have any recommendations, please send them to downloads@techradar.com. 2017-08-28 18:00 0.2. Starting next month, Australia will deploy drones powered by artificial intelligence to patrol Australian beaches for sharks. As reported by Reuters, publicly available videos are used to train the system’s algorithms and differentiate sharks from other marine creatures, surfers, swimmers and boats. 'Studies have shown that people have a 20-30 percent accuracy rate when interpreting data from aerial images to detect shark activity.

Detection software can boost that rate to 90 percent, ' said Dr. Nabin Sharma, a research associate at the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Software. 'It’s not about replacing human beings all together, it’s about assisting human beings to get the work done in a better way with more accuracy. That’s what the application is meant for.' In 2016, the University began working with Little Ripper Group, the company that developed the drones, on the shark detection project. According to co-founder Dr. Paul Scully-Power, a life raft and emergency beacon could be dropped from the drone if a shark is detected.

Little Ripper Group is also working on developing an electronic shark repellent. 'I guess the world has learned many years ago - defense in depth is the way to go. So this is one of the layers of the depth, ' said Scully-Power. According to the International Shark Attack File of the University of Florida, Australia trails only the United States in the number of unprovoked shark encounters with humans last year. Following a string of attacks, Australia began installing protective underwater nets in an attempt to protect swimmers from the sharks, however, there are some researchers who have questioned the reliability of the underwater nets while environmentalists cite potential harm to marine wildlife. 2017-08-28 18:00 0.5. IT teams track thousands of metrics to make informed decisions for their organizations.

Metrics are used to share information, understand the current state, judge successes or failures, identify anomalies, or predict the future. This all sounds great, but there is a dangerous side to metrics. When metrics aren’ t focused on the right thing, aligned across teams, or are gamed, their value decreases. Here are some well-worn patterns to help you determine if you’ re entering a danger zone with your metrics: Proxy metrics What you want to measure and should measure -- compared to what you can measure -- isn’ t always the same thing. Teams often fall back to using proxy metrics since there is no apparent way to measure what they truly want to track. Vanity metrics Proxy metrics can lead to vanity metrics. Vanity metrics feed into our desire to demonstrate value.

They are often large numbers that always seem to increase, and sound impressive. One of the most famous vanity metrics is McDonald’s quoting “billions served.” Vanity metrics tend to be cumulative and don’ t help us understand usage patterns. When you pay attention to vanity metrics, you lose sight of what really matters. For example some companies track daily active users (DAUs) to measure growth. DAUs don’ t reveal much about what the user is doing, how much time they are spending on a site, if they are satisfied, or how many users are lost. If the goal of having more users is to have them download or purchase a subscription, DAUs won’ t tell you whether this goal is being met.

More users may not necessarily equate to more downloads or subscriptions purchased. Summary data Means and medians are easy to understand but they often don’ t tell the whole story. They hide the presence of anomalies and outliers. Often we can learn more from the anomalies and outliers than we can from the average events. A common metric used to track performance of incident resolution is mean time to resolve (MTTR).

This doesn’ t show whether all incidents are resolved within the same timeframe, or if some incidents take a few minutes while others take much longer. To improve this metric there needs to be an understanding of the distribution of measurements. Two great visualizations of this are available from AutoDesk and FlowingData.

Selecting the metrics that truly reflect what matters to your business is critical to IT and business success. Some tips to help you choose the right metric include: Align your metric with larger organizational goal. If you want other people to take notice of your metric, portray it in a way that matters to them.

The three things that matter to an organization are revenue, risk, and costs. How does your metric align with one of these three objectives?

Ask yourself “so-what?” to elevate why a metric matters. Individual and team goals may focus on culture, collaboration and sharing. These can be used to measure efficiency, effectiveness, quality and velocity. These in turn bubble up to measure customer and business value. The Ideal IT Metrics Funnel So, align these metrics to the bottom-line concerns of the organization. Ask: Why should others care? Examples: If mean time to repair (MTTR) decreases, customers are more satisfied and will spend more money.

If MTTR increases, customer and employee satisfaction decreases. Employee burnout leads to higher recruitment and training costs. Track actionable metrics. What action can be taken to make a metric move?

A metric should show you what is going right or wrong and how to improve. If nobody knows what can be done to change the trajectory of a metric, it is not useful. Look at the big picture.

While simplicity in metrics is important, don’ t focus on a single metric. Even if you’ re not using a vanity metric, hyper-focusing on a single metric or viewing it out of context can still lead to negative consequences. For example, reporting on the number of software deployments can show growth and productivity, but if number of incidents increases at the same time are things really improving? Lead to growth. Healthy competition is good, but metrics should not be used to pit teams against one another or shame individuals. If you are trying to create a culture of sharing, mentoring, or constructive peer reviews, using metrics that deem people as winners and losers are counterintuitive.

We need to be able to compare metrics across times, across teams, or across systems to identify what’s working and what needs to change. Look for the similarities and differences without assigning blame. We operate in a world of ever-increasing data, so it’s important to remember that metrics aren’ t set and forget. They should constantly be evolving and changing as your team and organization changes. The metrics that matter today may not matter 6 or 12 months from now. Metrics should guide us on a path towards continuous improvement. That path will likely be a windy road with ups, downs, and potential detours.

When a metric becomes a target we see through rose-colored glasses it ceases to be a good measure. Metrics can open lines of communication and lead to alignment across teams when they are actionable, comprehensive, and comparative. Finding the metrics that exhibit these qualities may not be easy, but it is worth it. Dawn Parzych is a director at Catchpoint, a digital experience intelligence company.

She has deep expertise in topics relating to the psychology of IT and frequently researches, writes, and speaks about trends related to application performance, user perception, and how they impact the digital experience. In 15+ year career, Dawn has held a wide variety of roles in the application performance space at Instart Logic, F5 Networks, and Gomez. 2017-08-28 18:00 1.5.

Today, Apple released the eighth developer betas of the next major updates to its operating systems, including iOS 11, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, watchOS 4, and tvOS 11. The company has been seeding new builds weekly since beta 5 was released, and this is likely to be the last one before the GM seed is offered following the iPhone 8 launch on September 12. Because of this, there obviously aren't a lot of changes in this build; instead, it focuses on fixes. IOS 11 still has some problems with third-party apps like Audiobus 3, MobileIron Mobile@Work, Tweetbot, and Square Cash, but at this point, it's likely the developers' responsibility to get them working.

MacOS 10.13 High Sierra has fixed most issues that have to do with the new Apple File System (APFS), but it still isn't supported by HDD-only Macs or iMacs with 3TB Fusion drives with BootCamp. Also, some third-party apps might not recognize an APFS volume, and again, it's unclear if Apple plans to fix any of this in time for the GM. WatchOS 4 beta 8 contains a known issue where workout sessions may be slow to start, and they may not update with calorie and distance measurements. TvOS 11 still has some issues with Sling TV and FoxNow, but that's about it, since there aren't many new features coming to tvOS at all. To be clear, these are near-final builds, and beta testers will see the finalized versions in a couple of weeks. 2017-08-28 17:52 1.3.

Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has operated stormfront.org since 1995, said he didn't receive any warning before Network Solutions blocked the use of the stormfront.org name on Friday. Stormfront.org had more than 300,000 registered users, Black said, with traffic increasing since a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Popular with the KKK and neo-Nazi groups, the site included forums where users sometimes promoted white power events. 'I'm talking to my lawyers, and that's about all I can do right now, ' Black, of West Palm Beach, Florida, said in a telephone interview. 'I can switch to another domain, but it might wind up the same way.'

Another major white supremacist website, The Daily Stormer, was previously shut down by the web-hosting company Go Daddy and then Google after the violence in Charlottesville. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said the stormfront.org shutdown followed complaints it filed with Network Solutions alleging the site promotes not only hate speech, but deadly violence. A spokesman for Network Solutions didn't immediately return an email seeking comment. Users of Black's website have been implicated in more than 100 killings, according to the complaint, including 77 people slain by neo-Nazi Anders Breivik at a camp in Norway in 2011. 'Especially in the wake of tragic events in Charlottesville and the spike in hate crimes across the country, Stormfront crossed the line of permissible speech and incited and promoted violence, ' said a statement by Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Black, speaking about the shutdown during an online radio show Monday, said his site had rules against promoting violence or any crime.

Black was a state KKK leader under former Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, who appeared on the radio show following Black and expressed his 'full support' for Black and the website. 'He was the first major site defending the rights of white people, ' said Duke. Black has been involved in the white supremacy movement since the 1970s and was convicted in 1981 for his role in a right-wing plot to overthrow the government of Caribbean island nation of Dominica. Explore further: Free speech concerns as extreme-right evicted from web 2017-08-28 17:34 1.4. When LG announced the V20 last year, it included a 32-bit Hi-Fi Quad DAC to provide excellent sound recording and playback. The feature was lost on the G6, in most markets at least, but with the V30 unveiling around the corner, LG has announced that the DAC is back, and it's better than ever.

The V30 will include what the company is calling the 32-bit Advanced Hi-Fi Quad DAC, which is 'typically only available in expensive digital audio players'. You'll have more options to customize the experience, and LG says that its engineers 'studied the characteristics of popular tones' to create four pre-programmed settings: enhanced, detailed, live, and bass. Powered by ESS Technology's SABRE ES9218P, the V30 will also support high-resolution audio streaming with MQA technology. This is a 'streaming-focused file format' that will offer better sound from a smaller file size, so it won't be as hard on your data plan. According to LG, users will see an improvement in audio quality even if they're using ordinary headphones; indeed, we already found this to be the case when we reviewed the V20 last year. While LG won't be fully revealing the V30 until Thursday at IFA, the company has been making a series of announcements regarding the handset's features. It's been confirmed that the second display is gone in favor of the new Floating Bar, there are a bunch of new camera features, and it will include an OLED FullVision display.

2017-08-28 17:20 1.2. Travis Kalanick, former CEO of Uber, filed a document today arguing the case involving Benchmark Capital should move to arbitration. This filing reiterates Kalanick’s earlier argument that Benchmark’s claims are subject to mandatory arbitration and that the Delaware Chancery Court doesn’ t have the jurisdiction to settle them. In the filing, Kalanick’s lawyer argues that, “to allow Benchmark to proceed in this forum on its claims would contravene the express terms of Section 5.18 of the Voting Agreement and Delaware law, would turn the presumption in favor of arbitration on its head, and would expose the company to significant and unnecessary harm for no reason other than Benchmark’s desire to use this forum to publicly slander Mr. Kalanick with its fabricated allegations.” Kalanick filed the claim with the American Arbitration Association.

In the event that Judge Sam Glasscock rules in favor of arbitration, the case will move to behind closed doors. Otherwise, it’s deposition time. Benchmark Capital sued Kalanick earlier this month, alleging the former Uber CEO had committed fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty while trying to maintain control over the company. Benchmark’s lawsuit ultimately seeks to remove Kalanick from the board and make it so that Kalanick can never regain power at Uber. Kalanick’s filing comes a day after Uber offered the chief executive position to Dara Khosrowshahi, the current CEO of Expedia.

Judge Glasscock is expected to make his decision regarding arbitration as early as Wednesday. 2017-08-28 17:19 1.8. I’ ve been using a MacBook Pro with touch bar for a few months – you can read about it here and pick up a few usage hints here. I’ ve also been working with some of the software and accessories you can pick up for these systems. Here are five items I think you’ ll find useful. I love the convenience of portability when I’ m using my MacBook Pro on the road, but when I’ m back at base I like to hook it up to a decent monitor and my existing accessories. Apple took a certain amount of criticism when it decided to move to USB-C (which it calls 'Thunderbolt 3') on its new Macs, but this clever docking station lets you add a whole bunch of older accessories to your system using just one cable.

In my case I have Ethernet, a display, and an older high-capacity USB 3 storage drive permanently hooked up to my Elgato Thunderbolt 3 Dock. I just connect my MacBook Pro to my office arsenal using a single cable when I’ m around, and use it independently when I’ m not. I do like that this system will power up my Mac (over the same cable as everything else), and will continue to power-up any connected devices when the Mac is no longer present. It costs around $300. Flash drives are one of the easiest ways to securely share data with people in the same room: plug them in and take the data off. The problem when using the MacBook Pro uses USB-C, while most everyone else is still on USB 3. That’s no problem at all with SanDisk’s handy little flash drive, which hosts both a USB-C and USB-3 connection which you set with a slider on the device.

This dual connectivity makes it really easy to swap files with others as and when you want to do so. It costs around $20 on Amazon. If you do lots of work on your notebook you may want to invest in a stand to hold the system up at a more appropriate working angle. That’s what this stand does, angling your computer to around 18-degrees. This angle makes it a little easier for you to reach the right keys and also makes it a little easier to see the display without tilting your neck quite so much. The other advantage of stands like these is that they increase airflow around the base of your Mac. If you use a digital camera then you’ ll want a portable SD/microSD card reader.

Satechi’s Aluminum Type-C Micro/SD Card Reader costs just $25 and accepts both SD and microSD cards. Plug it into your Mac and you can easily grab your images to edit immediately on your computer.

Finally, a couple of software recommendations. While there are many alternatives, including Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote, for most knowledge workers the productivity market continues to be defined by Microsoft’s Office products.

The latest (from $99.95/year) Office 365 version of Microsoft’s productivity suite integrates a range of touch bar-friendly features, which should help you get things done faster. The second recommendation is a little controversial, but I do feel that any Mac user working in a cross-platform environment may be able to make a little use of Parallels Desktop 13, which I looked at last week. Equipped with these two items (Office and – effectively – Windows) any Mac user can operate on an equal footing in even the most dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft-dominated environments. Parallels Desktop 13 costs $79.99 plus the cost of the operating system (s) you wish to use on your machine. I’ ve chosen to avoid discussing cables, dongles, keyboards and displays in this short report – partly because the Elgato dock means you should be able to use anything you like with your Mac, and partly because you probably already have a display and older Apple Bluetooth keyboard around which will work just fine with your Mac. 2017-08-28 17:07 1.9.

When you’ re getting an enterprise to function in a more lean and efficient way, there are several frameworks that you can use to get there. But, initially, it may be unclear as to whether some frameworks work together synergistically and complement each other or whether some compete with each other. You may have questions like: In Techtown’s webinar “Do Frameworks Like SAFe, DevOps, ITIL and OMMI Compete or Complement?” two of our subject matter experts Chris Knotts and Alan Koch have a quick review of each framework and discuss the relationships. We have 5 takeaways from their discussion that, hopefully, will clear up your questions.

First, let’s revisit each framework. SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) allows you to apply the same Agile structure as you use with software development teams to an enterprise by scaling Agile on a larger basis for the enterprise level. If you have many Agile teams, SAFe gives a single view of the entire process, in that it provides a structure around them by which the teams can coordinate with each other. Ultimately, by using SAFe, the organization becomes more nimble. SAFe requires program and portfolio levels of management to be a part of the process. These layers of management must be aligned with the goals and processes across the enterprise in order to achieve optimal results. DevOps isn’ t a framework really; instead, it is a change of culture that focuses on empowering the frontline workers.

The DevOps solution establishes cross-functional teams made up of all stakeholders and encourages communication throughout the cycle. A primary goal of DevOps is the quick deployment of applications that add value to the customer. Using DevOps, the way to shorten development and release cycles is through automation, in particular in testing.

The deployment pipeline stays full due to automating the testing of smaller pieces. DevOps is about changing how people work and relate to each other through the process. DevOps requires management to enable the workers to learn from failures and experimentation. There is no “one size fits all” with DevOps because the framework brings together a looser set of principles and, therefore, is integrated depending on the organization’s needs. Each organization decides what is appropriate based on its needs. ITIL has been around since the 1980s and there have been several iterations through the years, with the latest coming about in 2006. The focus of ITIL is on the operational side of organizations rather than application development.

ITIL is a framework of best practices instead of being a prescriptive solution. The 5 categories that are addressed by ITIL are all service-related: CMMI, Capability Maturity Model Integrated, an older model, addresses engineering work of all kinds.

It defines the structure of a maturity model. In other words, there are certain things in place at your organization that have been there for a while. As you put more systems in place, you gain higher levels of maturity. CMMI allows your organization to highlight specific processes that represent higher levels of approaches.

And here are our 5 important takeaways from the discussion between our two subject matter experts: Using Jez Humble’s description, “continuous delivery” means that the software is always in a deployable state; whereas, “continuous deployment” defines the timing of “deployment” as strictly a business management decision. If your organization is in the initial stages of getting lean, use one of the newer frameworks such as SAFe or DevOps. However, if your organization has been using an older framework like ITIL or CMMI, don’ t throw away what you have been using. You can look at SAFe or DevOps in light of what you want or need in efficiencies with the newer models. Find out which frameworks provide the efficiencies you need. Adapt and be sure to look beyond what the model says.

With CMMI and ITIL, the business requirement is the goal. Practices are not required; they are expected.

So, practices are flexible to meet the goal through newer frameworks. The frameworks above are providing the concepts and logical frames for guidance and should not be prescriptive. Typically, management has a proclivity toward being prescriptive. However, implementing a framework needs creativity and problem-solving. It is crucial to get the people doing the work involved since these workers have the best understanding of the work. Usually, predictions that are made up front are not correct. False assumptions are made regarding what the customer wants.

Sometimes the customer doesn’ t even know what he/she wants. So, throw out predictions; get the products to the customers in order to find out what they need or want. This is best accomplished using a framework like DevOps that allows for experimentation, finding the least costly way to develop products, and working more efficiently.

Note: Most functionality, especially from predictions, is never used. Final takeaway: these frameworks compete when people take them literally and use prescriptive solutions.

However, they are complementary when used as guidelines for setting goals and creating best practices. 2017-08-28 17:01 1.1.

Well, you use d3.zoom. That gives you zoom events for pinch-to-zoom and the mouse wheel. Detects panning too. Just like your users expect from everything else that zooms. Then you have a choice to make.

Do you want to zoom your whole component like it was an image, or do you want to zoom the space between your data points? The first looks pretty, the second gives users a chance to see more detail. In a side-by-side comparison, the two zoom effects look like this. Both scatter plots use the same random data. Left side zooms like an image, right side zooms the space between data points. It even works on a phone.

So how do you make that? You’ ll need: – 2 React components – 2 D3 scales – 1 D3 zoom – 1 D3 random number generator – 1 line of HTML – 5 lines of CSS – some event hooks – a sprinkle of state – a few props Here we go! Our component renders two scatter plots and talks to d3.zoom to zoom them. This way we can use a single zoom behavior for the entire SVG, which makes the scatter plots zoom in unison. I also found it more reliable than attaching d3.zoom to individual elements, but couldn’ t figure out why.

I think it assumes internally that it’s working on a whole SVG element. Our chart component breaks down into 4 parts: The component follows the full integration approach I outline in React+D3v4. We have D3 stuff in an updateD3 function and we call it when props change to update the internal states of D3 objects. One complication we run into is that we use the same scatter plot component for two different types of zoom. That means some bloat, but it’s manageable. Much like the component, you can think of as having 4 parts: Inside updateD3 we zoom the space between data points by changing our scale’s domains.

ZoomTransform.rescaleX takes a scale and returns a changed scale. We take its domain and update xScale. Same for yScale. This updates both the scatter plot's positioning and spacing between data points. This will never make intuitive sense to me, but it works. Get transform also handles zooming. It creates an SVG transform attribute which we use to position and scale a scatterplot.

We use translate () to move a chart into position and scale () to make it bigger or smaller depending on the factor zoomTransform gives us. Even if we’ re not zooming, we still translate () the chart so that we can move it around the page and show two scatter plots side by side. You can check out the full project on CodePen. 2017-08-28 17:01 1.1. Leela Kids is a very straightforward app that nonetheless might prevent some parents from going insane. It curates podcasts by subject matter for age ranges from three to 15 years old and packages them in a kid-friendly interface.

Leela Kids gives caretakers peace of mind that whatever their charges are listening to is age-appropriate and reasonably edifying. In fact, it recently hit the top spot in the Taiwanese App Store’s kids category after parents started downloading it as an English-learning tool. Now also available for Android, Leela Kids was developed by Santa Clara, California-based Leela Labs, which launched last year to find better ways to find and listen to podcasts. Its main app, Leela, now hosts about four million episodes from across 30,000 podcasts, while Leela Kids currently hosts about 5,000 episodes from roughly 80 podcasts. Leela Labs founder and CEO Sandeep Jain said he became interested in podcasts after someone suggested an episode of A16Z while he was researching online marketplaces. “What struck me most was that despite living in the technology hub of the world, my information consumption resources had been limited to Google Search and certain print publications only, ” Jain said in an email. “I had no idea that podcasts offered such amazing and relevant content and that I could consume this content while driving, at home, etc.” Jain surveyed a group of tech-savvy friends and found that only two people out of 20 listened to podcasts.

“I quickly found out why—technology to access them is horribly broken, ” he said. Discovering podcasts is a cumbersome process that involves figuring out the right keywords to search, subscribing to shows and then scrolling through a menu to find individual episodes to download. While Apple is trying to make podcast discovery easier, the current method is annoying enough to put off casual listeners and nearly impossible for younger kids to navigate. After realizing that even the grown-up version of Leela’s podcast player was hard for his four-year-old son to use, Jain decided to create a kids version. Leela Kids uses both tech and human curation to figure out which shows are best suited to specific ages, since that information usually isn’ t included in a podcast’s RSS feed.

Parents might be incredulous that listening to audio content is enough to keep their kids engrossed when the wonders of Netflix, YouTube and Snapchat are just a click away on the same device. Jain says toddlers love listening to stories on the app, however, and that he has even managed to reduce his son’s screen time by playing podcasts during car trips and dinner. The startup plans to make Leela Kids compatible with smart speakers so older toddlers can operate the app themselves. Parents of older kids, meanwhile, have told Jain that their offspring enjoy Leela Kids because it gives them a new way to discover content besides what they already read or watch. “Parents and even kids are liking the ‘visual detox’ effect of Leela Kids, ” he said. The Leela team did not anticipate that Leela Kids app would be used as a language learning tool until a Taiwanese news site recommended it. After it took off in Taiwan, parents and teachers in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan and China also began downloading Leela Kids to help kids practice English.

As a result, Leela’s editorial team plans to add English teaching content in the future, including podcast episodes about grammar basics and more conversational content. Other plans include adding episodes about parenting topics, working with parenting publications to integrate their calendars into Leela Kids so parents can get notifications about nearby events and making curated playlists with educators. “Our vision is to make Leela Kids the defacto knowledge and entertainment resource for kids and even for parents, ” said Jain. 2017-08-28 17:00 1.5. Hyper-convergence in the data center is at the center of a series of announcements out of the VMworld conference kicking off in Las Vegas this week.

Dell EMC, Lenovo and Hewlett Packard Enterprise unveiled systems designed to boost their portfolios aimed at the lucrative converged systems market. Dell EMC, parent company to VMware, has a span of product rollouts that the company says will reduce infrastructure complexity for enterprises. Products include new VMware Ready Systems, expanded features on the Dell EMC's turnkey hybrid cloud platforms, and advancements to VxRail Appliances and VxRack SDDC Systems.

Each update is designed to help modernize IT for VMware environments and data centers at any scale, according to Dell EMC. As for HPE, the company has announced what it describes as a composable platform for VMware Cloud Foundation based on HPE Synergy. HPE says the platform will help IT organizations deploy infrastructure as a service and private clouds in minutes and lower virtual machine costs compared to public clouds and traditional server racks. 'HPE Synergy powered by Cloud Foundation will provide a powerful solution to consolidate traditional, private and cloud native workloads onto a single integrated infrastructure platform that is simple to deploy and operate, ' said John Gilmartin, VP and GM of Vmware's Integrated Systems business. The VMware Cloud Foundation on HPE Synergy should be certified and available from HPE and channel and distribution partners in late 2017, while vSphere and vSAN are certified and available with HPE Synergy today.

Lenovo's announcements revolve around its ThinkAgile brand, which focuses on software-defined data centers and integrated and converged systems. More specifically, Lenovo is rolling out the ThinkAgile VX Series, powered by VMware vSAN software. The VX Series is a pre-integrated, pre-configured platform that aggregates servers, storage and virtualization resources into a common resource pool within a standardized platform. Availability is slated for November 17. RELATED COVERAGE VMWare releases AppDefense to protect enterprise virtual environments The new security solution is designed to protect virtual and cloud systems from cyberattacks. VMware expands multi-cloud offerings, adds new intent-based security product At the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, VMware is demonstrating how its strategy to help hybrid cloud deployments extends to multiple public clouds. VMware launches new version of vSphere for big data and HPC workloads (TechRepublic) VMware launched a new version of its vSphere platform tailored to big data and high performance computing, along with additional efforts in HCI.

2017-08-28 17:00 2.5. Acronis True Image 2018 www.acronis.com Our Thoughts Even after all these years, Acronis continue to make strides in back-up.

This version marks a multi-million dollar commitment to AI to make that service even better. Watch this space. Manufacturer's Description Acronis, a global leader in hybrid cloud data protection for business and consumers, today introduced Acronis True Image 2018. The new release includes major updates to the program's backup and recovery capabilities, and is the first personal backup software to incorporate artificial intelligence-based technology designed to actively protect data against ransomware.

'As the first company to offer full image backup for consumers, Acronis pioneered intelligent backup for home use, ' said Serguei Beloussov, co-founder and CEO of Acronis. 'Acronis True Image 2018 continues that tradition as the first and only personal backup software that uses artificial intelligence to defend consumers against one of the fastest growing threats to their data.' By combining the company's artificial intelligence (AI) based ransomware defense, called Acronis Active Protection™, with a new generation of enhanced backup and recovery capabilities such as active disk cloning and automated WinPE boot media creation, Acronis True Image 2018 represents a new standard of 'intelligent backup' for individuals, families and small businesses. Reliable backup and recovery In a survey of Acronis customers during July 2017,95 percent of respondents said they choose and recommend Acronis True Image because the backups are so reliable.

The 2018 release improves on those core backup and recovery capabilities even more, with enhancements such as: Active disk cloning: Users can create an exact replica of an active Windows system without stopping and restarting using bootable media, making migration to a faster or larger disk even easier. An updated media builder: Automatically creates boot media for a WinPE environment, so users can quickly resolve driver configuration issues and recover their systems to the same or new hardware. Continuous backup to the cloud: Users can update their backups as they work on files while securely storing an off-site version in the cloud. Virtual drive conversion: Users can test the recoverability of the full image backups, or run their system in a Hyper-V virtual environment to test various applications without risking the primary system, and move complete system image as a virtual drive to another computer. Faster incremental backups: Up to three-times faster with new Changed-Block Tracker technology that tracks image changes in real time. Automatic mobile backup to NAS devices: More than a quarter of Acronis users have network-attached storage (NAS) at home.

Now they don't have to think about backing up a mobile device, since the process starts as soon as the mobile device connects to the same Wi-Fi as the NAS. Acronis True Image 2018 also addresses the needs of the next generation of users by expanding its support for social media with automatic backups of Instagram accounts, including photos, comments and statistics, such as the number of likes, tags or comments a post gets. Easy control A new visual interface addresses the preferences of 83 percent of Acronis customers who reported that they want more information and insights into their backups. Graphically displaying backup activity and statistics, it allows users to manage their backups at a glance - including how much data they have stored, the types of files in storage, and the status of backups. Secure data protection The ability to restore a system or individual files is critical following a ransomware attack. Acronis True Image 2018 not only makes recovery automatic, it takes the initial protection a step further by preventing ransomware from corrupting a user's data in the first place.

Using machine learning models, Acronis Active Protection recognises unusual patterns of file access. These models are generated in Acronis' dedicated Cloud AI infrastructure, which processes data from hundreds of thousands of malicious and legitimate processes to build those models. Those models are incorporated directly into Acronis Active Protection, allowing Acronis True Image 2018 to protect a system's data independently, without the need for an internet connection.

When Active Protection detects unusual activity, it checks the process using both heuristics analysis as well as those models of expected and unexpected behaviour. If the process is identified as potentially malicious, Acronis True Image 2018 alerts the user of the suspicious activity.

With real-time monitoring, Acronis Active Protection verifies all processes so approved activities are allowed to run, while potentially dangerous behaviour is detected and stopped. Then, if any files are encrypted during a ransomware attack, Acronis True Image 2018 automatically restores those files from backup.

While cybercriminals increasingly target backup files to keep users from restoring their system without paying the ransom, Acronis' technology specifically defends backup files as well as the original data. Ransomware damages are expected to top $5.

I apologize if this gets long, but it's kind of convoluted. I am using Acronis True Image Home 2009 with Chain2Gen to make backups of two partitions(C: and D:) on my primary drive on alternating days. Everything has worked well for months but last month, I began to have failures on both backups. I didn't notice it for a while, so the last backup that I have confidence in is May 13.

Since this is my C: Drive, I don't think it will be a large problem if I go back to this date for a restore. The problems are that Acronis is reporting bad sectors when it does the backups. This shows up on both partitions, but the sector numbers are not consistent from backup to backup, even on the same partition. I ran Chkdsk/f on both drives and it said it found and fixed bad sectors, but the problem persists.

I booted into Recovery Console and was unable to run Chkdsk/r or /f on C:, but was able to run on D. It showed repairs, but still Acronis reports the problem. I then ran Western Digital's recovery scan which found bad sectors and when I chose to repair, wiped out my sound drivers. (Which I haven't been able to get reinstalled, but that's another problem) Still Acronis will not run without reporting bad sectors. I did a backup last night, telling it to ignore all errors, but I wonder how trustworthy that is. Here are my questions: Should I do a reformat of the disk and then restore my May 13 backup? Is this just like restoring to a disk that has already been running?

In case of a problem, is there any way to be sure that my June 26 backup will restore? Thanks for your help. Robert, Either your drive is failing or it has a major corruption that with Windows running cannot be resolved. One fo the two things I would do, would be to check by either exploring or by mounting the image to check they seem to be OK, you could also run a validation task on your images.

This will work because the validation checksum is embedded in the image, so all TIH does is to recalculate the checksums and check them against what it finds. Once you are confident that your images are OK, then reformat and restore. Make sure you've checked that your recovery CD works satisfactorily before starting as if this doesn't work other methods might need to be used. Don't worry about bad sectors in your images as they will either have been ignored or Windows will mark them as bad automatically and they will no longer be used. I would also consider getting a replacement disk and restore your image to the new disk. Afterwards, you could reformat the old drive and run CHKDSK X: /R (where x is the drive letter being checked). The fact that you could not resolve the errors make me not want to trust the old disk.

Sometimes it takes multiple passes of chkdsk to get it all clear but the disk still could b suspect. Nice to see you using C2G. Should you do a restore of an old backup, I would immediately do another CHKDSK on the drive being restored--even if the drive is a new disk. You could have residue from the old errors carried onto the new disk--not as actual errors but as sectors marked as bad when the space is really not bad.