IT Executive news

• Microsoft issues Windows 10's lucky 7 preview

  05-03-2016 15:01
  
  Microsoft today issued another Windows 10 preview to its Insider testing group, the seventh so far this year.
  Gabriel Aul, engineering general manager for Microsoft's operating systems group, touted build 14279's improvements to Cortana, the operating system's digital assistant, in a post to a company blog Friday.
  The refresh also consolidated the two different backgrounds for Windows 10's lock and logon screens -- where users enter their authentication password -- by dropping the separate imag
  
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• Soft, illuminating skin could stretch boundaries of robotics

  05-03-2016 15:00
  
  Researchers have developed a robotic skin that can stretch to six times its original size, light up and even change color.
  Scientists at Cornell University, where the work on the soft skin is being done, said the technology could lead to significant advances in health care, transportation and communications.
  "This material can stretch with the body of a soft robot, and that's what our group does," Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell, said in a st
  
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• Industrial IoT still needs humans -- and user interfaces

  05-03-2016 14:59
  
  IoT is getting more automated, but not everything can be done by machines. An engineer who's been working with a system for decades has insights that machines can't grasp, so sometimes it's a human making the tough calls.
  General Electric now offers a way to design that engineer's virtual dashboard. The system, called Predix UI, is for enterprises developing applications on GE's Predix cloud platform.
  Predix is a development and hosting platform for industrial IoT applications that started ship
  
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• Privacy: Is it dead or just being renegotiated?

  05-03-2016 14:58
  
  It would have been hard to find anybody at this past week’s RSA conference who doesn’t think privacy is a problem. The topic even had its own track, with more than six dozen sessions.
  There is a bit less agreement, however, on how big a problem. It is not a large divide, but two presentations illustrated it well.
  The first view is that the loss of privacy is reaching a catastrophic level. According to Theodore F. Claypoole, a partner at Wombie Carlyle, modern technology is not only
  
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• Space X fails again at a sea landing

  05-03-2016 02:45
  
  It was close, but close doesn't cut it when you're dealing with a space rocket. For the fourth time, Space X has failed at the difficult task of landing a rocket on a platform bobbing up and down in the middle of the ocean.Live video pictures from the barge, anchored in the middle of the Atlantic, showed the glow of the rocket exhaust as it approached, and then the picture froze. It resumed for a second before a testcard appeared, cutting the feed.Space X CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter later
  
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• Microsoft reportedly scrubbed an $8B bid for Slack

  05-03-2016 02:03
  
  Slack is the darling of the enterprise software world, and Microsoft reportedly considered buying it for a huge sum of money.The tech giant was supposedly mulling a bid as large as US$8 billion before ultimately deciding against a purchase, according to a report in TechCrunch. An acquisition could have made sense for Microsoft, which has been picking up companies left and right over the past few years.Slack is right in its wheelhouse, considering that Microsoft has purchased several other p
  
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