IT Executive news

• Verizon's breach experts missed one right under their noses

  24-03-2016 23:46
  
  Verizon Enterprise, a bulwark against cyberattacks at many large organizations, has suffered a security breach itself.A flaw in the company's systems allowed an attacker to steal contact information on Verizon Enterprise customers, the company acknowledged Thursday. Verizon said it has fixed the flaw and is notifying those users, but it hasn't disclosed how many were affected. The intruder couldn't get to any customer proprietary network information, Verizon said, referring to data such as
  
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• France fines Google for not being forgetful enough

  24-03-2016 22:10
  
  The French data protection authority has fined Google for failing to implement the so-called right to be forgotten as ordered.
  Last year, the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) decided that requests to have personal information delisted from search results should apply to all Google properties, not just those in European domains.
  Google had been removing results from searches performed on domains including google.co.uk and google.fr, but not from its main site, google.co
  
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• SDNs come to the branch office, with risks

  24-03-2016 21:36
  
  Companies have been implementing software-defined networking (SDN) in an effort to make their networks more responsive to cloud services that require flexibility to accommodate scaling traffic loads. Now CIOs hoping to shave dollars off of their costly networking bills are looking to extend SDN capabilities to their wide area networks (WANs).
  WANs are telecommunications or computer networks that allow to relay data across remote offices. SDNs allow network administrators to use software to prog
  
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• Microsoft says it's making 'adjustments' to Tay chatbot after Internet 'abuse'

  24-03-2016 21:26
  
  It sounds like Microsoft’s Tay chatbot is getting a time-out, as Microsoft instructs her on how to talk with strangers on the Internet. Because, as the company quickly learned, the citizens of the Internet can’t be trusted with that task.
  In a statement released Thursday, Microsoft said that a “coordinated effort” by Internet users had turned the Tay chatbot into a tool of “abuse.” It was a clear reference to a series of racist and otherwise abusive twee
  
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• CIOs need to avoid a mistaken path to DevOps

  24-03-2016 20:49
  
  DevOps is the completion of the Agile methodology and creates an engineering environment in which developers can achieve speed. How fast is the difference? Agile is like a person running fast – about 20 miles per hour tops. DevOps is like a person driving a Ferrari who can exceed 200 miles per hour. Often as I talk with CIOs, I learn they focus on automated provisioning as an important aspect of DevOps. And it is. But it’s only a small component. Achieving the engineering environment
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Is Amazon Echo the next enterprise IoT platform?

  24-03-2016 19:50
  
  Amazon Echo is rapidly capturing the hearts and minds of users around the world. The rise of Echo has been so impressive that Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak recently called it the next big platform. As conversational interfaces become one of the most important trends in the next generation of computer technologies, Amazon Echo has the opportunity to lead the charge.Even though the emergence of Amazon Echo in the consumer market has been nothing short of remarkable, we believe the platfor
  
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• The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is now available for preorders

  24-03-2016 19:45
  
  Apple’s latest iPad may be a familiar, tried-and-true size, but it’s anything but standard—this 9.7-inch iPad is actually an iPad Pro, and it’s available for pre-order starting Thursday. The compact iPad Pro has everything its big brother, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, has, including a 64-bit A9X processor with an M9 motion coprocessor, Touch ID, and Apple Pencil compatibility. It also boasts a 12-megapixel front-facing camera, a wider color gamut, and True Tone technology
  
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• FAQ: 802.11ax Wi-Fi

  24-03-2016 19:02
  
  The next big new thing in Wi-Fi networks will boast groundbreaking technology, but it might not arrive for a couple years yet. Here’s the lowdown on 802.11ax, for now:
  Q: 802.11ax – what is it?
  Well, you’ve heard of 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac wave 1, and 802.11ac wave 2…
  Q: OK, OK, I get it!
  Fine. In any case, 802.11ax is the next wireless communications standard in the IEEE’s long-standing series of 802.11 standards, which form the basis for the
  
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• US accuses 7 Iranians of hacking US banks, New York dam

  24-03-2016 18:49
  
  The U.S. government says seven Iranians working for the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are responsible for 187 denial of service attacks aimed at banks across the U.S. between 2011 and 2013.It also says one of the individuals gained access to the control system for the Bowman Avenue Dam, a small dam north of New York City, and would have been able to control flow of water through the system had it not been disconnected for repairs.The accused worked for two Iranian computer com
  
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• Energy Star 3.0 server spec to look at coprocessors for more accurate power-efficiency ratings

  24-03-2016 18:45
  
  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is revising the Energy Star specification for servers to take into account significant system design changes and help buyers make effective purchasing decisions.Over the last few years, server makers have increasingly used coprocessors to boost computing power and given memory a bigger role in processing data. While memory has gotten more power-efficient, coprocessors can suck up a lot of energy.The upcoming, version 3.0 of the Energy Star spec for server
  
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• Justice Department indicts Iran hackers in massive financial cyberattack

  24-03-2016 18:13
  
  The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted seven Iranian hackers in connection with cyberattacks on U.S. banks, the New York Stock Exchange, AT&T and a water facility in New York.
  The seven live outside the U.S. and it’s questionable whether they will ever be apprehended and tried, according to reports by Reuters, the New York Times and the Washington Post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Apple Pencil: 3 sites that will teach you how to draw

  24-03-2016 17:47
  
  When Apple released the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, there was a great deal of appreciation expressed by artists around the world. The combination of the Apple Pencil and the iPad Pro gave artists a unique and powerful combination of tools for their creative work.But not all of us are artists already, some of us don’t even know how to draw yet. If you’re one of those folks, and you’re dying to learn how to draw so you can use the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, don’t worry. In t
  
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• Emergency Java update fixes two-year-old flaw after researchers bypass old patch

  24-03-2016 17:28
  
  Oracle has released an emergency Java security update to fix a critical vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise computers when they visit specially crafted websites.
  The company has assigned CVE-2016-0636 as the identifier for the vulnerability, which suggests that it is a new flaw discovered this year, but that's not really the case.
  Polish security firm Security Explorations confirmed via email that the new Java update actually fixes a broken patch for a vulnerability that was
  
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• 7 ways small businesses can leverage customer data

  24-03-2016 17:20
  
  While big companies have been using big data to identify trends and track customer behavior for a while now, smaller businesses, with smaller budgets and fewer resources, are often unable to. However, by simply analyzing the data they’ve collected from email lists, customer purchases, social media and other sources, SMBs can gain a variety of insights into their customers – and use this knowledge to improve processes and discover new business opportunities.[Related: 8 ways to make th
  
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• Privacy.com's virtual Visas are burner debit cards that keep online shoppers safe

  24-03-2016 17:00
  Slinging your credit card information all over the web may be the norm when you’re online shopping, but playing fast and loose with those precious numbers is just begging for identity theft to happen. A new company dubbed Privacy.com thinks it has a solution to the problem. Instead of handing out your actual debit and credit card numbers, Privacy.com lets you create “virtual” debit cards that are locked for use with a single vendor, or “burner” cards that
  
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• Apple Pay could help you buy stuff on the Web this year

  24-03-2016 16:48
  Apple Pay may soon make web-based commerce less of a hassle with the ability to pay by fingerprint.
  Unnamed sources told Recode that Apple Pay is headed to Safari for iOS in time for the holiday shopping season. Instead of making people fill out credit card forms, websites that support Apple Pay will let shoppers scan their fingerprints using TouchID on an iPhone or iPad. An announcement could come during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which usually takes place in June.
  Apple al
  
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• Google's Project Ara smartphone project shows signs of life

  24-03-2016 16:42
  
  Google's Project Ara modular smartphone project is showing signs of life after a long lull, though it's not certain when the customizable smartphones will be available.The Project Ara Web site sports a new look, with the redesigned front page carrying the project's new logo. There's also a new e-mail address, with which Project Ara developers can communicate with Google.There's no other page on the site now. Gone are the pages where developers could download software development kits and request
  
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• IDC: SD-WAN market to hit $6B by 2020

  24-03-2016 16:07
  
  The confluence of applications being hosted in the cloud and end users accessing them via mobile devices is accelerating advancements in wide area networking technologies.
  A new report issued today by research firm IDC predicts those factors will drive what was a relatively nascent software defined WAN (SD-WAN) industry, worth a mere $225 million last year, to grow at a more than 90% compound annual growth rate for the next five years to become a $6 billion industry by 2020.
  +MORE AT NETWORK WO
  
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• The Internet turns Tay, Microsoft's millennial AI chatbot, into a racist bigot

  24-03-2016 15:56
  Many years ago, I discovered the Mac’s built-in computer voice that would say anything you wanted with a few keystrokes on the command line. Of course, I immediately tested the feature by making my computer swear. Getting a computer to say things it shouldn't is practically a tradition. That’s why it came as no surprise when Tay, the millennial chatbot created by Microsoft, started spewing bigoted and white supremacist comments within hours of its release.
  Tay began as an experiment
  
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• Nederlandse aanbieder datacenter- en cloud-diensten gaat oostgrens over

  24-03-2016 15:48
  Aanbieder van datacenter- en cloud-diensten Previder gaat dit jaar intensiever de Duitse markt bewerken, met name op het gebied van co-locatie en cloudservices voor Duitse dienstverleners. Hiervoor is de Hengelose datacenterspecialist samenwerking aangegaan met de Duitse distributeur Team-IT Distribution.De... lees meer
  
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• Trio of Apple execs pull in $55.6 million each

  24-03-2016 15:39
  
  Three Apple executives each received $55.6 million worth of company stock, the second half of an award granted in 2011 after the death of co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs.
  The top-tier executives -- head of marketing Philip Schiller, general counsel Bruce Sewell and chief operations officer Jeff Williams -- each gained control of 525,000 shares on Monday.
  At Monday's closing price, the shares were worth $55.6 million.
  The shares were the second half of an award given in early November 2011, when A
  
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• Multitasking millennial binge-watchers lead digital media revolution

  24-03-2016 14:58
  
  More people "binge-watch" online video, stream digital music and "cut the cord" today than ever before, as technology continues to reshape the consumption of digital media. Perhaps unsurprisingly, millennials, or adults born between 1981 and 1996, are driving this shift. Recent research from Deloitte indicates that nearly half of the U.S. population subscribes to at least one streaming service, and both teenagers and the youngest millennials now spend more time watching stre
  
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• Sendergram aims to reinvent file sending

  24-03-2016 14:56
  
  It's been a little while since a new player in the files sharing and synchronization space reached out to me. There are two possible explanations for that. The optimist in me would suggest it is down to people realizing that the space is crowded beyond measure and that there is little point of ponying up and doing essentially the same thing under a different logo. The skeptic in me would suggest that it's only because I've become increasingly curmudgeonly about the vendors in the space, and PR
  
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• Stealthy USB Trojan hides in portable applications, targets air-gapped systems

  24-03-2016 14:35
  
  A Trojan program is being distributed through USB drives and seems to be designed for stealing information from so-called air-gapped computers that are not connected to the Internet.The new Trojan has been dubbed USB Thief by security researchers from antivirus firm ESET and has several characteristics that set it apart from the traditional malware programs that spread using USB storage devices and the Windows Autorun feature.First of all, USB Thief infects USB drives that contain portable
  
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• Google goes 'all-in' on enterprise cloud

  24-03-2016 14:35
  
  SAN FRANCISCO — Google wants enterprises to know it's in the cloud business for the long haul, 
  The company yesterday demonstrated its commitment to cloud at the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) user conference with detailed technology demonstrations; ringing endorsements from technology leaders at Coca-Cola, Disney Interactive and Spotify; and an array of new cloud products for IT professionals and developers. Google's top brass, including CEO Sundar Pichai, Chairman Eric Schmidt, and se
  
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• Innovatie jaagt sourcing aan

  24-03-2016 14:32
  Tijdens elke overgang van tijdperk bestaan de oude en de nieuwe situatie enige tijd naast elkaar. In een dergelijke situatie verkeert onze samenleving nu. Er is een doorgang gemaakt naar een parallel universum, een digitale wereld. Daar bevinden veel klanten zich al en bedrijven en instellingen staan voor de uitdaging... lees meer
  
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• Public concerned about security flaws in government open source code

  24-03-2016 14:16
  
  Earlier this month, the White House released a draft of an open source code policy for public review which would require agencies to share code with each other and with the public, but some experts are concerned about possible security implications.
  Under the proposed new policy, new software developed specifically for or by the federal government must be made available to other federal agencies. In addition, under a pilot program, a portion of the federally-funded code must be released to the
  
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• Report: Federal agencies still fighting the last war

  24-03-2016 14:06
  
  Federal government agencies are still fighting the last cybersecurity war, the one where computer networks had a strong, defensible perimeter, according to a new report by 451 Research.
  The battlefronts have moved, but federal security professionals are sticking with tactics and defenses that have worked in the past, according to report author and 451 Research analyst Garrett Bekker. That includes an over-reliance on network and endpoint security technologies that fail in the face of multi-stag
  
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• Oracle wants to put its public cloud behind your firewall

  24-03-2016 13:00
  
  Public clouds may promise a world of potential benefits, but for companies grappling with data sovereignty and other issues, the risks can loom large. Hoping to ease such concerns, Oracle launched a product on Thursday that effectively puts its public cloud behind the enterprise firewall.
  Called Oracle Cloud at Customer, the new suite lets companies tap the Oracle Cloud as a fully managed service within their data center, giving them full control.
  "We bring in a cloud machine, which is basicall
  
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• 2016 Chevy Volt review: The cult hero of plug-in hybrids reaches for mainstream fame

  24-03-2016 13:00
  
  The 2016 Chevy Volt wants to be the Johnny Depp of hybrid vehicles: the quirky character who becomes the star of the show, like Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.
  Long before Depp became a famous pirate, though, he was already a cult favorite for his unique performances in movies like Edward Scissorhands and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. In the same way, the Volt is already a star among green-car nerds who love how this plug-in hybrid electric vehicle combi
  
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• Trump gives displaced IT workers attention, and he's not alone

  24-03-2016 12:57
  
  HARTFORD, Conn. -- U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), flanked by laid off IT workers on Tuesday, spoke about the abuse of the H-1B visa system.
  There are 5,669 workers in Connecticut employed under the H-1B program, Blumenthal said at a press conference. "How many of them have displaced American workers? We don't know," he said. "How many of them have been hired instead of American workers? We don't know.
  "But we know that increasingly," the senator said, foreign workers are being used to
  
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• How Home Depot is building customer experience from the outside in

  24-03-2016 12:38
  
  At the CIO Perspectives event in Atlanta (March 2016), Home Depot CIO Matt Carey sat down for a fireside chat with Maryfran Johnson, editor-in-chief of CIO Events.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Microsoft and HPE throw their weight behind Mesosphere

  24-03-2016 12:30
  
  Cloud computing startup Mesosphere made its mark early with large companies like Twitter and Netflix, and on Thursday the company got a fresh boost from two more tech giants: Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.Built on the open-source Apache Mesos project credited with helping Twitter kill its "Fail Whale," the company has closed US$73.5 million in a Series C funding round led by HPE, with participation from Microsoft as a new strategic investor.Designed to help enterprises build microserv
  
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• Why you need a CSO/CISO

  24-03-2016 12:28
  
  Your CIO has enough on her/his plate without taking on responsibility for security, too. While there's plenty a CIO (or a CTO) can tackle when it comes to security, these roles are "generalists." What you really need is a chief security officer or a chief information security officer (CSO/CISO) -- a security specialist.The Cyber Security Job Trends survey from free online security MOOC provider Cybrary, which polled 435 senior-level technology professionals from October to December 2015, found t
  
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• Is the hybrid cloud's biggest challenge a lack of expertise?

  24-03-2016 12:11
  
  The cloud is the new IT economy these days, and for all intents and purposes, the public cloud marketplace has become a vendor landscape essentially monopolized by the big four providers: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the IBM Cloud. If you throw in hybrid and private clouds, then VMware’s vSphere is also making a major impact in the space.One would think that three industry giants competing against each other in a veritable death match might be nothing but good for customers, an
  
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• This data will kill you

  24-03-2016 11:54
  
  Let’s face it, nobody wants to hear about risk and problems.  But it’s only when they are ignored that they get really dangerous.  So let’s take a little tour through your CRM’s data to understand the risks that live in the dark corners of the system. The good news is that most of the system’s data is not dangerous, and the better news is that if you manage the system well you can be vaccinated against the most important problems.  The data
  
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• Chip-and-PIN adoption still slow

  24-03-2016 11:33
  
  Supposedly, credit card transactions in the U.S. were going to become considerably more secure by last Oct. 1 – the deadline for merchants and card-issuing banks to be ready to process so-called “chip-and-PIN” cards instead of the legacy “swipe-and-signature” kind.
  Some of them are – estimates of the percentage of merchants now equipped with the new terminals range from 17 percent to 37 percent. But even the high estimate isn’t what most people wou
  
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• iPhone buying guide: Should you buy an iPhone SE, a 6s Plus, or wait for the next one?

  24-03-2016 11:30
  
  Once upon a time, choosing the best iPhone was easy: Apple made sure that the iPhone got slightly better with each upgrade cycle, so you couldn’t really go wrong with simply choosing the latest model.
  With Apple’s announcement of the new 4-inch iPhone SE this week, however, the iPhone is no longer one-size-fits-all—we have five (five!) models to choose from, and three of them pack Apple’s latest and greatest features. But more options could potentially bring about more c
  
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• The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  The spectacular and the burn-outThe tech industry mirrors what goes on in regular society – people and companies rise in power one year only to fade away the next. That kind of change is the one constant in the high-tech industry. We have seen some spectacular successes and some incredible flame-outs. In 30 years the tech industry has seen many such transformations from companies such as IBM and Cisco to Nortel (remember them?) to technologies like SNA and Token Ring to Ethernet. Here we t
  
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• Networking then and now: 1986 vs 2016

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  As Network World celebrates its 30th anniversary, we took a look back at the scene in 1986 ... and had a chuckle.NETWORK WORLD/STEPHEN SAUERNETWORK WORLD TURNS 30:The networked world |9 ways technology will change within the next 10 years | The most momentous tech events of the past 30 years | 30 years of gadgets, computers and video games from my fabulous life | Network World celebrates 30 years| Thumbing through issue No.1 of Network World To read this article in full or to leave a comment, p
  
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• Macs dent the enterprise, but not by much

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  Thanks in part to the corporate BYOD movement, Apple's AppleCare service and support plan, and just plain old demand, enterprises are more steadily adopting Macs in their organizations. Those factors, coupled with Apple's partnership with IBM last year to develop a set of business apps for the iPhone and iPad, are leading Apple to make strides in the enterprise. That said, industry observers don't believe Macs will be overtaking PCs anytime soon.
  "Really, they're making strides because users ar
  
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• Jenkins 2.0 eases automation for dev teams

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  Jenkins 2.0, an upgrade to the popular continuous integration and continuous delivery platform for software development, is due in April with improvements to the delivery pipeline and user interface.
  In version 2.0, the Pipeline subsystem will enable users to automate processes and describe functions, such as for running tests and builds, said Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Jenkins founder and CTO at CloudBees. Users “can describe this choreography of automation,” he said. The capability can, f
  
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• How to make Android a real part of your business

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  Over the past five years, iPhones and iPads have become the corporate mobile standards, thanks to their wealth of business apps, Exchange compatibility, corporate manageability, and strong security. Android devices, on the other hand, have largely been relegated to "OK for email" status.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Dell XPS 15 Review: A great laptop gets bigger and a little better

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  It doesn’t take a genius to realize that when you hit pay dirt, you might do so again if you keep digging in the same area. That’s the tack Dell takes with its redesigned XPS 15 laptop: It’s easily summed up as a bigger, more powerful version of the super-popular XPS 13.
  Bigger isn't always better, of course, but in the case of the XPS 15, it worked out pretty well. Its body has the same aluminum top and bottom. The familiar carbon-fiber keyboard deck is there, too. Also like
  
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• 9 ways technology will change within the next 10 years

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  Ten years ago, there were no smartphones. It was the coffeeshop era of Wi-Fi, which meant that the Internet was just beginning to follow us out the door and into the world. Amazon first released EC2, to some confusion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• 15 years of OS X: How Apple's big gamble paid off

  24-03-2016 11:00
  
  Although OS X is now an integral part of the Mac experience, it represented a big gamble for Apple when the first general release version -- code-named Cheetah -- arrived on March 24, 2001. It was also a gamble that Apple had little choice in making -- and one that has paid off in the 15 years since, becoming, directly and indirectly, one of the critical factors in Apple's success.
  Still, there were many points at which things could have gone awry and decimated the company.
  [For a more visual t
  
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• 25 real-life ways people have been hurt using their phones

  24-03-2016 01:53
  
  Phones & the ERMore than 500 phone-related injuries were reported to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 2014 via about 100 hospitals sharing data on emergency room visits for the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. NEISS is used to help spot possible issues with categories of products that are causing harm, though as you’ll see here, phone users aren’t blameless. (With apologies to those who truly were injured…)To read this article in full or to lea
  
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• Blame the cellphone: Injuries pile up, from cat bites to shocks to broken bones

  24-03-2016 01:50
  
  We’ve all become aware of the dangers that drivers preoccupied with their cellphones cause on the roads and most have also probably seen plenty of “pedtextrians” endangering themselves by paying way more attention to their phones than their surroundings. But phone-related injuries go way beyond these two scenarios – we’re talking everything from ringing phones that supposedly scare dogs and cats into biting people to people being really dumb (and gross) a
  
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• New solar towers, cubes offer 20X more power, researchers say

  24-03-2016 01:14
  
  Researchers at MIT have discovered a method of optimizing solar energy collection by arranging photovoltaic (PV) panels on a tower or in a cube shape.
  The new forms of solar energy collection offer anywhere from double to 20 times as much output compared with today's common flat-panels using the same area.
  The technology would be most advantageous in northern climates -- further away from the equator -- where the less intensive solar exposure can be optimized.
  MIT's research, the findings for w
  
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