IT Executive news

• This bird could be a drone's worst enemy

  01-02-2016 23:35
  
  When it comes to the problem of stopping errant drones, there's been a number of high-tech solutions -- from radio jamming to laser beams to nets launched by other drones  --  but a group in The Netherlands is proposing a low-tech solution that's much more elegant.
  Guard From Above says it is training birds of prey to attack drones, taking advantage of their natural predatory instincts and precision in the sky.
  A video posted by the company on YouTube shows a bird attacking a DJI Phan
  
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• 'Big bets' cost Google parent Alphabet $3.6 billion in losses last year

  01-02-2016 22:59
  
  Alphabet, the parent company of Google, racked up $3.6 billion in losses last year through investments in "big bets" such as self-driving cars and Internet balloons.The company was known to be spending heavily on these items but revealed actual figures for the first time Monday when it broke out results separately for its core Google business and for big-bet investments, which it also calls moonshots.The losses for those items were much higher in 2014 than in 2013, when they totaled $1.9 billion
  
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• Turn a barebones PC into a graphics powerhouse with AMD's new FirePro server GPUs

  01-02-2016 22:18
  
  If you have an under-powered PC but need the horsepower to see high-definition video or edit intense graphics, AMD has your back.AMD's new FirePro S7150 and S7150 x2 GPUs, which sit in servers, can deliver "virtualized GPUs" to client devices and remote desktops. A virtual GPU mimics the functionality of a GPU on local hardware, and users can run graphics, engineering or even VR applications on virtual desktops.The virtual GPUs on remote desktops can do everything regular GPUs can do on a comput
  
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• Bluetooth wireless range, speed to continue improving

  01-02-2016 22:03
  Soon, turning off the heat and lights before leaving your house could be as simple as turning a key in a Bluetooth-equipped lock.This scenario may be possible with the latest Bluetooth wireless technology, which could start appearing in products next year. With the improvements, devices will be able to communicate directly over a longer range and at faster speeds than with current technology.The range and speed of Bluetooth will continue to increase in coming years as the markets for home automa
  
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• Quick start to meetings saves money, improves efficiency for Intel

  01-02-2016 21:24
  
  Getting meetings under way faster and more efficiently can contribute to cost savings and productivity gains, as Intel highlighted in its annual IT performance report on Monday.Intel has established over 500 "wireless" conference rooms where meetings start within seconds of everyone gathering. The collaboration and sharing tools are instantly deployed wirelessly and that has helped save time and money, said Steve Sciarappo, vice president at Intel's information technology group.That wireless con
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: How to get your organization to recognize the need for change

  01-02-2016 21:12
  
  It was the amazing and talented project manager entertainer Michael Jackson that once wisely said, “Make that change!” He also accompanied it with some dancing and singing, but the point of the song “Man in the Mirror” was that change starts with you. As a CIO, project leader, or IT manager, you might find it difficult to get your organization or project team to recognize the need for change, and the even greater need to control change. As my mentor used to say, “Co
  
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• 8 hot technologies the CIA wants

  01-02-2016 21:00
  
  Of interest to the CIAThe CIA has been investing in startups since 1999 through its not-for-profit arm called In-Q-Tel, hoping to accelerate development of technologies the agency might find useful. It currently lists about 100 firms in its portfolio. The agency doesn’t say why it might be interested in the technologies these companies represent, but with a little imagination it’s not that hard to figure out possibilities. Here is a sample of what they’ve been interested in lat
  
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• IE takes another beating, keeps on retreating

  01-02-2016 20:40
  
  Microsoft's browsers, Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge, continued to bleed users last month, according to the latest data from metrics company Net Applications.
  The multiple editions of IE and the two versions of Edge now available lost a combined 1.7 percentage points of user share in January, the largest one-month decline since October 2011.
  IE and Edge -- Net Applications folds the latter's user share into an aggregate labeled "IE" -- accounted for 46.9% of all browsers used to reach the Web
  
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• Law professor: T-Mobile’s Binge On program violates Net neutrality

  01-02-2016 19:59
  
  A T-Mobile service called Binge On that allows subscribers to consume as much data as they want while streaming video from selected providers violates Net neutrality rules, according to a published analysis from Stanford University legal scholar Barbara van Schewick.
  Net neutrality’s core tenet is that service providers shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate between different types of traffic they’re asked to carry. By offering some video services – including Netflix, Hulu
  
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• Citrine borrows from Ruby, JavaScript, C for object-oriented programming

  01-02-2016 19:54
  
  Combining ideas from Ruby, Smalltalk, JavaScript, and C, the Citrine language aims to simplify object-oriented programming.
  Positioned as an easy-to-learn general-purpose programming language, Citrine can be used with Unix-like OSes, including Linux, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X.[ Find out how to handle the real-world problems faced by developers, with InfoWorld's professional programmer's business survival guide. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's Application Development newsle
  
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• BrandPost: Transitioning Data from Byproduct to Business Asset

  01-02-2016 19:49
  
  Just watch: Someday a brilliant person will invent a way to capture exhaust from tailpipes and smokestacks and convert it into energy. It will be a virtuous circle that solves a host of problems and changes our point of view from exhaust as a byproduct to exhaust as an asset. That change is likely a few years away.Luckily, in the technology ecosystem such a virtuous circle has already taken hold. It’s been common for businesses to view data as exhaust; it’s the byproduct that gets ch
  
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• Digitus

  01-02-2016 19:30
  Ze komen tevoorschijn als een verkoudheid dezer dagen. Ik doel op de chief digital officers. Is u toch ook opgevallen? En denkt u dan niet: "Het wordt tijd dat ik er ook een aanstel”? Natuurlijk stelt u trots: "Wij worden digitaal!" En dus komt er een nieuwe loot aan de CxO-stam.De vraag die u zich dan wel moet... lees meer
  
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• Tired of telemarketers? Now you can turn the tables on them with this clever bot

  01-02-2016 18:59
  
  You're on every do-not-call list and you've tried opting out, but still the telemarketers keep pestering you. What's a consumer to do? Just ask the Jolly Roger Telephone Company.That's what Roger Anderson did, though in his case it was a matter of creating the company first. Reportedly a frustrated telecom professional himself, Anderson did just that, and now it's on hand to help phone owners at their wit's end.In a nutshell, Jolly Roger Telephone offers a bot that's designed to waste as much of
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: AI Inside: How machine intelligence might save lives

  01-02-2016 18:59
  
  Much as Intel processors are the power inside PCs, AI algorithms may emerge as the power behind some advanced medical applications.Virtual Radiologic, a U.S. company that provides diagnostic services to thousands of hospitals and medical facilities around the world, is developing a deep learning algorithm to review CT images taken in the emergency room. The company, also known as vRAD, is grooming the algorithm to find signs of intracranial hemorrhage.  The algorithm is designed not to diag
  
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• Microsoft woos small businesses to Office 365 with new offer

  01-02-2016 18:38
  
  Microsoft really wants small businesses to pick up its Office 365 productivity suite, and the company unveiled a new offer Monday aimed at drawing them into its cloud.
  Businesses with more than 50 employees can now get access to Microsoft’s FastTrack service, which helps companies move over to Office 365. Businesses can get resources from Microsoft’s online FastTrack Center, and work with an engineer on the FastTrack team whose job it is to help businesses move over to their new pro
  
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• Tablet shipments down, but detachables catch on

  01-02-2016 18:34
  
  The saving grace for the declining tablet market is detachable devices, also called 2-in-1s, that can serve as both a laptop and a separate slate-style tablet.
  But the initial successes of detachables by all vendors were not enough to make up for the precipitous decline in tablets. All types of tablets declined 10% in 2015, with pure slate standalone tablets declining by 21%, according to market research firm IDC.
  IDC reported Monday that Apple's iPad Pro was the top-selling detachable for the
  
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• Trojanized Android games hide malicious code inside images

  01-02-2016 17:56
  Over 60 Android games hosted on Google Play had Trojan-like functionality that allowed them to download and execute malicious code hidden inside images.The rogue apps were discovered by researchers from Russian antivirus vendor Doctor Web and were reported to Google last week. The researchers dubbed the new threat Android.Xiny.19.origin.Malicious Android apps were a common occurrence on Google Play until a few years ago when Google implemented more rigorous checks. This included an automated sca
  
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• Irate Comcast subscriber turns Raspberry Pi into a watchdog for slow Internet speeds

  01-02-2016 17:34
  There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with slow Internet at home, especially when you’re paying a steep premium for a fast connection speed. Washington, DC-based Reddit user and Comcast customer AlekseyP came up with an interesting solution for this problem. Instead of wasting time calling up Comcast over the issue, he is using the power of Raspberry Pi to complain to the Internet Service Provider over Twitter under the name @A_Comcast_User.To read this article in full or to
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Kolab and Collabora team up to take on Google Apps and Office 365

  01-02-2016 17:29
  
  Collabora Productivity, a UK-based consulting firm that offers LibreOffice for enterprises, and Kolab Systems, a Switzerland-based provider of open source groupware solutions, have partnered to offer Collabora’s CloudSuite as an integrated component of Kolab.
  This is a significant collaboration because it will allow users to work on documents simultaneously, similar to Google Docs and Office 365, using a full-featured online office suite from within the Kolab collaboration suite. In addit
  
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• Sales of tablets are still shrinking -- except the ones that are most like PCs, says IDC

  01-02-2016 16:47
  
  Tablets may have ushered in the post-PC age, but the only ones posting a growth in sales are detachables --  the ones that are most like PCs.At 206.8 million, tablet shipments last year were 10.1 percent down on 2014. The decline in the fourth quarter -- which, with the holiday season, accounted for almost a third of the year's sales -- was even more marked, down 13.7 percent on a year earlier, according to market researcher IDC.It was, though, a record quarter for detachable tablets, a cat
  
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• Microsoft's audacious Project Natick wants to submerge your data in the oceans

  01-02-2016 16:29
  
  Microsoft Research has a new concept that could bring data centers powering cloud services closer to roughly half of the world’s population. All it requires is a custom submarine capsule designed to go five years at a time without a visit from a technician.
  The company’s R&D department recently went public with Project Natick, a data center enclosed in a steel capsule that sits on the ocean floor. These underwater data centers are more easily deployed, reduce emissions, and save
  
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• AdWords for iOS gives marketers easy access to campaign stats

  01-02-2016 16:28
  
  About a year after announcing an AdWords app for Android, Google just released an iOS version for iPhone and iPad. However, if you want to create an ad using an app, you need the separate AdWords Express app for Android or iOS, which isn't new and doesn't work with AdWords accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• You can run Windows 95 inside your browser now

  01-02-2016 16:22
  
  We’ve seen Windows 95 running on smartwatches and handheld game consoles, but now you can run the 20-year-old operating system directly through any web browser.
  The browser-based version of Windows 95 was created by programmer Andrea Faulds, and was recently discovered by The Next Web. Essentially, Faulds used the popular DOS emulator DOSBox to boot up a copy of Windows 95, then compiled the DOSBox code into Javascript using a program called Emscripten.To read this article in full or to l
  
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• Windows Server 2016 could cost you more than you think

  01-02-2016 16:22
  
  A few years ago, Microsoft switched from per-processor to per-core licensing in SQL Server, and it's about to do the same with Windows Server 2016. You may not be thrilled with the results."Microsoft’s auditors likely will have a field day with these new requirements for Windows Server, in the same way that they have used the ever-more-complex licensing rules for SQL Server to increase the company’s audit-based revenue in recent years," warned Christopher Barnett, an associate attorn
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: The Dell XPS 15 is a beast

  01-02-2016 16:15
  
  I recently got my hands on a demo system from Dell, an XPS 15, and the thing is a killer. First of all, no one has carried around a 15-inch notebook since 1997, and second of all, it's a beast. Now, I mean that in the nicest way possible. But its specs are really off the chart.So, a 15-inch portable. Isn't that an oxymoron? 15.6", actually. I mean, by definition, isn't something like that more of a boat anchor than a "high-mobility device?" Well, yes and no.You see, the XPS 15 has one of Dell's
  
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• How messaging bots will change workplace productivity

  01-02-2016 16:00
  
  It’s a familiar story to perhaps every knowledge worker suffering software fatigue and frustrated by the inefficient task of switching between different applications to manage information and collaborate with colleagues. Work is perhaps the one place where “there’s an app for that” is viewed as burden rather than a bastion of efficiency.Now imagine a single messaging interface where software automates many of these capabilities on your behalf, serving as virtual concierge
  
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• Study: Untamed analytics will take your business on a wild ride

  01-02-2016 15:48
  
  Predictive analytics can speed up business decisions and create a competitive advantage, but the models need better governance to avoid having some predictions turn into business fiascos, according to research supported by the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Should Apple buy Netflix?

  01-02-2016 14:49
  Apple has done well in jumping into music streaming by releasing Apple Music. But the company is way, way behind its competitors when it comes to video streaming. For some reason Apple has been hung up on a cable TV kind of service focused on channels instead of a Netflix-like video streaming service with original content.And while Apple has been dragging its feet, bogged down in negotiations over broadcast and cable TV channels, its competitors like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon have been forging ah
  
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• Windows 10 posts impressive user share gains

  01-02-2016 14:09
  
  Windows 10's user share jumped in January by its second-largest one-month increase since its launch, data from analytics vendor Net Applications showed today.
  At the mid-point of its first year, Windows 10 powered approximately 196 million systems, according to Computerworld's calculations using Net Applications' numbers, close to Microsoft's current claim of 200 million machines, made in early January.
  The jump in user share -- an estimate of the portion of all personal computers worldwide tha
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Why your MSP shouldn’t be your CIO

  01-02-2016 14:09
  
  First, let me be clear, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) deliver valuable and essential services to SMEs. Many of these companies offer a wide array of service and expertise that provide business with invaluable, scalable and cost-effective solutions. In order to have an effective technology platform for your business, MSPs offer the SME access to support that, in most cases, are necessary, even essential, for sustainable day-to-day operations.Take a look at how any large enterprise organizes th
  
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• How technology is transforming the retail sales associate role

  01-02-2016 14:07
  
  Online shoppers may have broken records over the holidays, spending over $4.5 billion over Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day, but it turns out that consumers still love their brick-and-mortar: According to Gartner analyst Kelsie Marian, the physical store still brings in the largest portion or retail revenue — around 72 percent. And, even though most customers have had an experience where a store’s sales associates seem to mysteriously go missing just when they are most needed,
  
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• Why your ATS may be killing your recruiting efforts

  01-02-2016 13:45
  
  Applicant tracking systems (ATS) get a bad rap for a good reason. From a candidate's perspective, they're often difficult to use, clunky and there's no way to tell if your qualifications are ever actually reviewed by a human being. For companies, however, the ATS can be a lifesaver; streamlining the application process and making screening candidates much more efficient. And therein lies the rub, as the saying goes: how to walk the line between delivering what candidates need in the sourcing and
  
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• 5 reasons you need to hire a Chief Privacy Officer

  01-02-2016 13:22
  
  As data becomes a fundamental part of operations in nearly every industry, businesses are finding that privacy measures are becoming equally as important. Unfortunately, research suggests that businesses don't understand how vital privacy practices are and treat it an afterthought.
  A study by cloud-based data protection provider Druva on the "State of Data Privacy in 2015" asked 214 people worldwide at companies with 100 to 5,000 employees how they are tackling data privacy. Of those surveyed, 8
  
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• Why a small iPhone could be a big moment for Apple

  01-02-2016 13:03
  
  The iPhone 5c might be the most confusing product Apple has ever made. Released alongside the iPhone 5s in 2013, the “unapologetically plastic” handset was seen by many as a cheap alternative to the high-priced flagship, a way for Apple to attack the midrange market, much like it did with iPod nano.
  Except that wasn’t the case. The iPhone 5c was basically an iPhone 5 in colorful clothing. The changes inside were minimal–slightly larger battery, minor camera improvements&
  
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• Why your network admins are nervous

  01-02-2016 12:30
  
  This past summer, the White Rose Academies Trust in Leeds, England, kicked off a project that represented the first step on a journey to a software-defined networking platform -- and the move precipitated some career changes, both positive and negative, for the IT staff.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Automakers go west in search of tech and talent

  01-02-2016 12:30
  
  Here's how you can tell there's a seismic shift underway in the auto industry: A slew of automakers have set up R&D centers in Silicon Valley, hoping to be closer to the developers and the technologies they need to remain competitive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Virtual assistants: They're made out of people!

  01-02-2016 12:15
  
  When users first try virtual assistants (like Siri, Google Now, Cortana, M or Alexa), they're struck by the idea that they're talking to a computer, rather than a person.
  That much sounds obvious. In reality, however, the responses from virtual assistants are far more human than most people assume. In fact, every response is carefully crafted by a person or a team of people.
  What you get as a response to your question or request to a virtual assistant isn't what a real-live person said. It's wh
  
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• We've officially reached peak smartphone, but real innovation is still within reach

  01-02-2016 12:00
  
  Samsung’s smartphone problem can be summed up by a single phrase slipped into last year’s fourth quarter earnings statement: “softening demand.” People just aren’t buying as many smartphones as they used to, and in 2016 they’ll be less inclined to immediately upgrade once a new model is announced.
  This isn’t just a Samsung problem. Apple is also feeling the pressure—in his earnings call last week, Tim Cook downplayed the fact that i
  
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• Down and dirty Wi-Fi stumblers and analyzers for Android users

  01-02-2016 12:00
  
  Inexpensive appsIn this review, we look at eight Android-based Wi-Fi stumbler and analyzer apps sold for under $10 on the official Google Play store. We compared the products based on their GUI, features and functionality. All the Wi-Fi apps will show you a list of nearby service set identifiers (SSIDs) or access points (AP) along with basic details like the channel and signal strength. Some offer further details, such as the AP vendor, MAC and IP addresses. Due to limitations of the Android OS,
  
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• 10 of today's really cool network & IT research projects

  01-02-2016 11:57
  
  New enterprise and consumer network technologies are coming fast and furious these days via well-heeled startups, and yes, even more established tech players. But further back in the pipeline, in the research labs of universities and colleges around the world, that's where the really cool stuff is happening.
  Take a peek at some of the more intriguing projects in areas ranging from wireless to security to open source to robotics and cloud computing.UNDERWATER WIRELESSUniversity at Buffalo and No
  
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• Microsoft tests underwater data center

  01-02-2016 07:56
  
  Companies are finding some of the oddest locations for data centers these days.
  Facebook, for example, built a data center in Lulea in Sweden because the icy cold temperatures there would help cut the energy required for cooling. A proposed Facebook data center in Clonee, Ireland, will rely heavily on wind energy locally available. Google's data center in Hamina in Finland uses sea water from the Bay of Finland for cooling.
  Now, Microsoft is looking at locating data centers under the sea.To rea
  
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• Harvard study refutes 'going dark' argument against encryption

  01-02-2016 03:42
  
  A study from Harvard released Monday largely refutes claims that wider use of encryption in software products will hamper investigations into terrorism and crime.It predicts that the continued expansion of Internet-connected devices -- such as smart TVs and vehicles, IP video cameras and more -- will offer fresh opportunities for tracking targets. "Law enforcement or intelligence agencies may start to seek orders compelling Samsung, Google, Mattel, Nest or vendors of other networked devices
  
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