IT Executive news

• Stratasys unveils 3D printer line for office workgroups

  06-02-2017 23:35
  
  3D printer maker Stratasys Ltd. today unveiled a new line of professional 3D printers   for use by design workgroups that do rapid prototyping.The fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers, which are about the size of a stacked washer and dryer, are designed to be simple to use while also offering fast, precise model creation.StratasysThe new F123 series office 3D printer from Stratasys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• Trump's ban becomes an H-1B fight

  06-02-2017 23:32
  
  The U.S. technology industry warned President Donald Trump that his immigration order will hurt the U.S. economy by making it more difficult for businesses to attract overseas workers. The administration's seven-country ban is, for the tech industry, a blinking caution sign to the world's highly skilled population delivering this message: Come here at your own risk.
  Tech firms see the market for highly skilled workers as being "globally competitive," and any changes to immigration rules may inh
  
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• Tech stance against immigration ban aims to protect employees

  06-02-2017 23:15
  
  The 97 tech firms who have joined forces to oppose President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration say they are looking to protect their employees as well as their business interests.
  "The order makes it more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to recruit, hire, and retain some of the world's best employees," the court brief reads. "It disrupts ongoing business operations. And it threatens companies' ability to attract talent, business, and investment to the United States."
  The l
  
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• How livestreaming video threatens the enterprise

  06-02-2017 23:10
  
  When Pittsburgh Steelers’ wide receiver Antonio Brown broadcast his coach’s postgame locker room speech on Facebook Live last month it created a distraction and senseless controversy that followed the team the week leading to its loss to the New England Patriots. Brown apologized after he was admonished by his coach, but the damage caused by his negligent use of a livestreaming service was already done.The episode was a well-publicized reminder that seemingly innocent activities on s
  
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• 17% off MAXSA Innovations Park-Right Laser Garage Parking Device - Deal Alert

  06-02-2017 23:05
  
  An innovative and unique device to help you park your cars, Park-Right automatically shines a laser on your car to guide you to the perfect parking spot every time. Simply drive into your garage and follow the laser. Once the laser is shining on the designated spot on your car, you are parked perfectly. The lasers are adjustable, allowing you to pick the ideal location on your car, so parking is consistent and accurate. Right now this parking gadget averages 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon from ove
  
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• Lenovo's ThinkPad P71 will work with HTC, Oculus VR headsets

  06-02-2017 22:52
  
  Lenovo's ThinkPad P71 is one superfast laptop that can work with HTC's Vive and the Oculus Rift VR headsets.It's technically a workstation and is targeted at professionals creating VR content, editing movies, or running engineering applications. Headsets are needed to create VR content.The laptop, which weighs 3.4 kilograms, has a 17-inch screen and is equipped with Intel's latest Xeon E3-v6 mobile chips, based on the Kaby Lake architecture. It can be configured with an Nvidia mobile Quadro
  
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• Quicken shifts to software subscription model

  06-02-2017 22:15
  
  Quicken last month moved to a software-by-subscription model for Canadian customers, and may do the same for those in the U.S. who rely on the personal finance program.
  Unlike a pilot program that launched in April 2016, the Quicken subscription is not a pure cloud-based service, but relies on software installed locally on a Windows personal computer.
  The two subscriptions available to Canadian users cost $40 a year (Quicken Cash Manager) and $90 annually (Quicken Home & Business). The core
  
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• Samsung scraps a Raspberry Pi 3 competitor, shrinks Artik line

  06-02-2017 22:14
  
  Samsung has scrapped its Raspberry Pi 3 competitor called Artik 10 as it moves to smaller and more powerful boards to create gadgets, robots, drones, and IoT devices.A last remaining stock of the US$149 boards is still available through online retailers Digi-Key and Arrow.Samsung has stopped making Artik 10 and is asking users to buy its Artik 7 boards instead."New development for high-performance IoT products should be based on the Samsung Artik 710, as the Artik 1020 is no longer in produ
  
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• Tech resume resources: Before and after examples, expert advice and more

  06-02-2017 22:08
  
  Whether you're just starting out in IT, are taking on a new technical, management or IT leadership role, or have your sights set on the C-Suite, the expert advice you'll find here will help you take your IT resume to the next level.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Trump’s Muslim ban is a war on tech

  06-02-2017 20:46
  
  President Trump’s ban on people from certain Muslim countries entering the U.S. is not just a war on the Constitution and on core American values; it’s also a war on technology. And the technology industry is fighting back.
  It’s a well-worn cliché to say that we’re a nation of immigrants, but one look at the tech industry shows how true that is. At every level, from top executives on down, immigrants have helped build the tech economy. Google co-founder Sergey Bri
  
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• You can now make smart gadgets and IoT devices that use Bluetooth 5

  06-02-2017 20:40
  
  In a few months, Bluetooth 5 will finally arrive in smartphones and tablets. But you can already test the technology on developer boards being shipped by hardware makers.Bluetooth 5 is a major step ahead for the venerable technology, which was introduced in 1999 to hook up devices wirelessly. It is two times faster than predecessor Bluetooth 4.2, has four times longer range, and boasts cool new connectivity features.It can transfer data at speeds of up to 2Mbps (bits per second) and ha
  
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• January 2017: The month in hacks and breaches

  06-02-2017 20:38
  
  On January 4, the hacker CyberZeist “claimed to have hacked the FBI's website (fbi.gov) and leaked personal account information of several FBI agents publically” by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the open source Plone content management system, according to a report on Hacker News. (For its part, the Plone security team denied that there was a zero-day vulnerability, but released “a security update on 17th January to its customers to ‘patch various vulnerabilitie
  
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• Western Digital begins production of the world's tallest 3D NAND 'skyscraper'

  06-02-2017 20:30
  
  Western Digital today announced that it has kicked off production of the industry's densest 3D NAND flash chips, which stack 64 layers atop another and enable three bits of data to be stored in each cell.
  The 3D NAND flash chips are based on a vertical stacking or 3D technology that Western Digital and partner Toshiba call BiCS (Bit Cost Scaling). WD has launched its pilot production of its first 512 gigabit (Gb) 3D NAND chip based on the 64-layer NAND flash technology. ToshibaThe industry's de
  
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• Mozilla to nail Firefox's NPAPI coffin in four weeks

  06-02-2017 20:03
  
  Mozilla in four weeks will bar plug-ins built using a decades-old technology from Firefox, ending a years-long process designed to make the browser more secure.
  The single exception to the ban: Adobe's Flash Player, which will continue to run, with limitations, in Firefox.
  Mozilla's plug-in prohibition will apply to NPAPI plug-ins, (Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface) a standard that harks back to Netscape, the 1990s browser that Microsoft buried in its antitrust-triggering batt
  
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• Hacker takes out dark web hosting service using well-known exploit

  06-02-2017 19:41
  
  A hacker is proving that sites on the dark web, shrouded in anonymity, can easily be compromised.   
  On Friday, the unnamed hacker began dumping a sizable database stolen from Freedom Hosting II onto the internet, potentially exposing its users.
  The hosting service, Freedom Hosting II, was known for operating thousands of sites that were accessible through the Tor browser; the "dark web" is essentially the encrypted network comprising Tor servers and browsers. But on Friday, the servi
  
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• What's keeping enterprises from using G Suite?

  06-02-2017 19:35
  
  While Google has spent the past year trying to woo enterprises to its G Suite productivity apps, it’s still the underdog compared to Microsoft Office, at least among large businesses. So what’s keeping it from broader appeal?One of the biggest hurdles for Google achieving broader enterprise adoption is just the fact that the company’s products aren't identical to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other Microsoft Office apps, Gartner Senior Research Analyst Joe Mariano said.
  
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• TV maker Vizio pays $2.2M to settle complaint that it spied on users

  06-02-2017 18:38
  
  Popular smart TV maker Vizio will pay US $2.2 million to settle complaints that it violated customers' privacy by continuously monitoring their viewing habits without their knowledge.
  Beginning in February 2014, the California TV maker tracked what TV shows customers were watching on 11 million TV sets sold in the U.S., the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Office of the New Jersey Attorney General said in a complaint, released Monday.
  Vizio smart TVs captured "second-by-seco
  
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• Malware distributors are switching to less suspicious file types

  06-02-2017 18:26
  
  After aggressively using JavaScript email attachments to distribute malware for the past year, attackers are now switching to less suspicious file types to trick users.Last week, researchers from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center warned about a new wave of spam emails that carried malicious .LNK files inside ZIP archives. Those files had malicious PowerShell scripts attached to them.PowerShell is a scripting language for automating Windows system administration tasks. It has been abused to
  
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• 15 data and analytics trends that will dominate 2017

  06-02-2017 18:24
  
  Along with social, mobile and cloud, analytics and associated data technologies have earned a place as one of the core disruptors of the digital age. 2016 saw big data technologies increasingly leveraged to power business intelligence. Here's what 2017 holds in store for the data and analytics space.John Schroeder, executive chairman and founder of MapR Technologies, predicts the following six trends will dominate data and analytics in 2017:Artificial intelligence (AI) is back in vogue.
  In the 1
  
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• Intel brought 300 drones to the Super Bowl

  06-02-2017 17:50
  It wasn’t live, but Intel’s 300 drones in the sky behind Lady Gaga at the start of the Super Bowl Halftime Show were impressive nonetheless. What started out as a sea of floating lights came together by the end of the bit to form an American flag. It was impressive, cool, and it was all thanks to the ever-growing interest in drones.
  The Super Bowl was the third public outing in the U.S. for Intel’s Shooting Star quadcopter drones following several weeks of aerial shows at Disn
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: Should Apple try to compete with Netflix and Amazon?

  06-02-2017 17:46
  
  Netflix and Amazon have both done an amazing job creating original TV shows and movies that have attracted millions of subscribers. Apple, on the other hand, has lagged far behind and still has no offering available to compete with either company.But Tim Cook recently hinted that Apple is getting ready to enter the original video market:
  "In terms of original content, we have put our toe in the water doing some original content for Apple Music, and that will be rolling out through the year. We a
  
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• Prime Members get 35% off Samsung Gear 360, 360-degree High-Res VR Camera - Deal Alert

  06-02-2017 17:44
  
  The Gear 360 is smaller than a baseball, so you can just hold it and shoot. Or set it down on the included tripod and live in the moment. Look all around you -- that’s what you capture with the Gear 360. Every angle, all at once, every time. Play videos back, trim and instantly share your creation on YouTube, Facebook or Samsung VR. Right now, if you're an Amazon Prime member (or have a free trial, located right here) the Gear 360 is significantly discounted from its typical list price of
  
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• A Windows Cloud build just leaked, and this is what we learned

  06-02-2017 17:37
  
  Microsoft's mysterious Windows Cloud is supposedly a stripped-down version of Microsoft’s operating system that runs only Windows Store apps. Microsoft's not commenting, but an early build that leaked over the weekend appears to be authentic and gives further tantalizing hints of what the company may have in mind. 
  Windows Cloud intrigues Microsoft watchers because of its uncanny resemblance to Windows RT, Microsoft’s failed ARM-based platform. It, too, coul
  
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• 7 leadership traits of successful CIOs

  06-02-2017 17:23
  
  Leadership traits of successful CIOsImage by ThinkstockThe California Psychology Inventory (CPI), developed by CPP -- the exclusive publisher of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment -- is an assessment tool that help leaders gain more insight into and improve their performance. Ultimately, the CPI helps identify your leadership strengths and weaknesses, what motivates you and can help you understand your personal "thinking style."This year, the CPP released the seven key traits CIOs need i
  
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• NLP elimineert verschil tussen computerstem en menselijke stem

  06-02-2017 17:06
  Door Timo Fine – Geen mechanisch klinkend robotstemmetje meer, maar een natuurlijke stem die gewoon op een menselijke en soepele wijze communiceert met de gebruiker. Een persoonlijke digitale butler die eerder wordt gezien als een ‘maatje’ van vlees en bloed dan als een computer. Intelligente chatbots... lees meer
  
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• Why Intel's Unite software survived last year's brutal product purge

  06-02-2017 17:00
  
  At first glance, Intel's Unite software comes across as an anomaly. What future does the collaboration software have in the chipmaker's future?For now, the software is linked to Intel's PC chips, which is a core business. But it's emerging as a component of the company's virtual reality, internet of things, and server businesses, which are all central to Intel's future growth strategy after a massive restructuring last year.Unite, which was released in 2015, allows remote and on-site users to lo
  
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• RSA Conference: Carbon Black to introduce Streaming Prevention

  06-02-2017 16:38
  
  Carbon Black is introducing at RSA Conference 2017 next week a new way for its gear to detect attacks that don’t make their way into networks via viruses or malicious files that other endpoint security software can detect.
  Called Streaming Prevention, the technology can find both malware and non-malware attacks by analyzing endpoint activities in the context of the sequences in which they unfold.
  It does this by having endpoint agents tag events as they occur and streaming them to Carbon
  
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• Hacker hijacks thousands of publicly exposed printers to warn owners

  06-02-2017 16:26
  
  Following recent research that showed many printer models are vulnerable to attacks, a hacker decided to prove the point and forced thousands of publicly exposed printers to spew out rogue messages.
  The messages included ASCII art depicting robots and warned that the printers had been compromised and they were part of a botnet. The hacker, who uses the online alias Stackoverflowin, later said that the botnet claim was not true and that his efforts served only to raise awareness about the risks
  
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• Anatomy of a cloud project cost overrun

  06-02-2017 16:13
  
  I recently conducted an informal survey of some cloud integration companies and found something deeply troubling.  Aside from “cookie-cutter” or formulaic quick-start projects, more than 70 percent of cloud consulting engagements involving new customers resulted in either a 10 percent cost overrun or a change-order.  The bigger the project, the more likely the overrun.You can blame it on stupid consultants or bad estimation or nutty customers or sunspot activity, but blame
  
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• Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

  06-02-2017 15:29
  
  Cloud service provider Stratoscale has snapped up database-as-a-service vendor Tesora to beef up its hybrid cloud offering.Stratoscale's key product, Symphony, is built on OpenStack and allows businesses to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) "region" in their own data center, so they can easily move workloads between private and public cloud servers or scale up capacity without having to migrate to a different service.Tesora's database as a service, also built on OpenStack, runs in public, priv
  
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• How to track employee well-being as a KPI

  06-02-2017 15:04
  
  The health and well-being of any organization starts with its employees. Companies that understand this and devote time, energy and money toward programs and initiatives that support employee well-being will have a competitive advantage over those that don't, says Karen Williams, chief product officer at workforce management software company Halogen Software.However,you can't gauge what you can't measure -- so how can you measure something as nebulous as well-being? And do you even have to?
  "The
  
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• Thumbs up for T-Mobile; thumbs down for Verizon and AT&T

  06-02-2017 13:09
  
  I don’t always pay a lot of attention to surveys, but T-Mobile has gotten a thumbs up from the respected Nielsen organization, so this seems noteworthy. The self-styled uncarrier scored notably higher than the other major players in overall satisfaction, service satisfaction and likelihood to recommend. (Nielsen would not allow other sites to link to its report.)As usual, woebegone Sprint was at the bottom of the pile in all three categories.It’s notable that Verizon and T-Mobile wer
  
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• What those IP ratings like IP68 or IP53 really mean

  06-02-2017 13:00
  
  Waterproof phones are exciting. Instead of dropping your phone in a bowl of rice when you accidentally knock it off the counter and into the sink, you can just dry it off and keep on truckin’. And many of today’s waterproof phones are as waterproof as they can possibly get—they’ve got an IPX8 rating, where 8 is the highest (barring extreme products that aren’t made for consumers) “waterproofness” a consumer device can possibly qualify for.Right?Well&hell
  
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• Intel packs a tablet chip from yesteryear inside New Balance's new RunIQ smartwatch

  06-02-2017 13:00
  
  You’re probably aware that the chip inside your smartphone contains more computing horsepower than the systems that helped launch a man to the Moon. Intel’s taken that in a slightly different direction: An Atom chip formerly used in smartphones and tablets now drives New Balance’s latest RunIQ smartwatch.
  Jerry Bautista, vice president and general manager of the New Business Group within Intel, said that the New Balance RunIQ fitness watch, which began shipping last week,
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: The not-so-secret strategy behind Walgreens’ ecosystem advantage

  06-02-2017 13:00
  Disclosure: Walgreens is a customer of my employer, Apigee.Sometimes, strategic advantage relies on concealment. The formula for Coca-Cola, for example, is a famously well-kept secret.In other cases, a company's secret advantage is as plain as day, and their success is premised on focused execution (as well as, perhaps, competitors hesitating to pick up the gauntlet and raise their game to the same level).Consider Amazon’s emphasis on its third-party retail marketplace — a not-s
  
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• IDG Contributor Network: All the king's horses

  06-02-2017 13:00
  
  After being thankful and finding your inner kid, it is time to get back to the realities of running an IT organization. The reality is that your IT team cannot protect your organization from bad actors (not these bad actors, but people/organizations who want to do harm to you or your company). You need the help and active cooperation of your users to protect your company.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
  
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• Friends or enemies? Security vendors tiptoe towards collaboration

  06-02-2017 12:50
  
  There are hundreds of security vendors across the security stack. You have providers for cloud, email, network and endpoint security, as well as threat, malware and DDoS protection, among phishing and whaling protection, insider threat detection and a whole lot more.
  The trouble is, a huge number of these solutions don’t ‘play’ well with one another, with this often making life difficult for security teams adopting these technologies. At the same time, these same teams are exp
  
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• How to prevent a bad case of cloud buyer’s remorse

  06-02-2017 12:47
  
  The trend is clear: The percentage of IT infrastructure and application workloads residing in enterprise data centers is expected to shrink from 59% today to 47% in two years, primarily the result of companies shifting resources to the public cloud, according to a survey recently released by data center provider Datalink.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• The security theory and troubling practice behind the TSA's PreCheck security lines

  06-02-2017 12:32
  
  So long, TSA fairy godmotherImage by AshleyIf you're a relatively frequent traveler, there's an occasional pleasant experience you've probably had over the past few years: as you approach the seemingly interminable security scrum, a TSA agent gently and subtly directs you in another direction. Suddenly, you're in a line that's shorter and faster than the others, and when you reach the screening area, you get to leave your shoes on and your laptop snug in your bag. What magic is this?To read this
  
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• RSA Innovation Sandbox winners: One year later

  06-02-2017 12:32
  
  With the annual RSA security conference just around the corner, we decided to touch base with the 10 companies selected as finalists in last year’s Innovation Sandbox competition and see how they’re making out.5. PREVOTYTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
  
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• Montreal sees its future in smart sensors, artificial intelligence (with video)

  06-02-2017 12:30
  
  The Quebecois city of Montreal has long been known as a hotbed of creativity -- home of Cirque du Soleil and a hub for companies in the online gaming and special effects industries, not to mention its place as a financial and trade capital.
  Creativity played a key role when the city of 2 million (with 4 million regionally) competed against other municipalities globally to win the 2016 title of Intelligent Community of the Year.
  And now that commitment to creativity is spurring the city to explo
  
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• French to fight fake news with backing from Google, Facebook

  06-02-2017 12:08
  
  News organizations operating in France will open up a new fact-checking service, CrossCheck, at the end of this month. Their initial focus will be on covering the forthcoming French elections, but with a number of international organizations participating, the project's reach could grow.CrossCheck's focus will be on identifying and debunking misleading news sites, photographs, videos, memes or comment threads.The service is backed by First Draft News, an organization that offers guidance on how
  
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• Google ordered by US court to produce emails stored abroad

  06-02-2017 12:07
  
  Google has been ordered by a federal court in Pennsylvania to comply with search warrants and produce customer emails stored abroad, in a decision that is in sharp contrast to that of an appeals court in a similar case involving Microsoft.Magistrate Judge Thomas J. Rueter of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled Friday that the two warrants under the Stored Communications Act (SCA) for emails required by the government in two criminal investigations constituted n
  
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• What deep learning really means

  06-02-2017 12:00
  
  Perhaps the most positive technical theme of 2016 was the long-delayed triumph of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and in particular deep learning. In this article we'll discuss what that means and how you might make use of deep learning yourself.
  Perhaps you noticed in the fall of 2016 that Google Translate suddenly went from producing, on the average, word salad with a vague connection to the original language to emitting polished, coherent sentences more often than not -- at least
  
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• Upstart JavaScript framework dreams of challenging Angular, React

  06-02-2017 12:00
  
  Mithril, an open source JavaScript framework for single-page applications, is looking to best Facebook's React, Google's Angular, and Vue JavaScript tools in performance and ease of use. It reached the 1.0.0 release stage last week.
  The framework is small and fast, and it provides routing and XHR (XMLHttpRequest) out of the box. Mithril also offers benefits in relative density, lead developer Leo Horie said. "It's possible to develop entire applications without resorting to other libr
  
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• Data realities of 2017 and beyond

  06-02-2017 12:00
  
  Data matters. You don’t need to be a professionally trained futurist to see that a critical driving force in the global economy for the next 10 years will be data exploitation (creation of value with data), data sharing and data protection. (Let that data Exploitation, Sharing and Protection be your ESP.) Executives need to examine what they know and how they think about data. 
  That’s because data matters, now more than ever. The recent CES in Las Vegas drove thi
  
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• Key tech companies oppose Trump immigration order in court

  06-02-2017 08:43
  
  Google, Facebook, Intel, Netflix, Microsoft, Apple and Twitter are among a large group of companies that have filed a brief in opposition to an immigration order by U.S. President Donald Trump, citing the benefits to industry from liberal immigration rules and the disruption to business as a result of the regulation.A total of 97 companies from the technology and other sectors asked permission late Sunday from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to file an amici curiae, also known as
  
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• S. Korea plans to tighten battery regulations post Note7 crisis

  06-02-2017 06:52
  
  In the wake of the Note7 debacle, South Korea is introducing new tests and regulations to ensure battery and smartphone safety, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said.The new measures will include requiring manufacturers to certify the safety of lithium-ion batteries based on new technologies in the process of production.The announcement Monday by MOTIE also agrees with the analysis by Samsung Electronics and some experts on the cause of the overheating and even explosions of some Galax
  
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• Lenovo's Yoga A12 Android 2-in-1 has futuristic touch panel keyboard

  06-02-2017 06:05
  
  Lenovo is ditching the hard keyboard for a cool new touch one on its new Yoga A12 2-in-1, which can be an Android tablet or a laptop.
  But for those seeking the latest and greatest hardware, there's a disappointment. It runs on an old chip from Intel, which has rolled back its development of Android, raising questions on the frequency of OS updates.
  The highlight of Yoga A12 is the versatile touch panel that can be a smartphone-like virtual keyboard. It's a feature adapted from the Yoga Book, wh
  
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• Nvidia's new Quadro GP100 GPU brings NVLink to Windows computers

  06-02-2017 00:00
  
  Nvidia's Quadro GP100 shares many features with the company's most advanced Tesla P100 GPU, but it also brings the superfast NVLink to Windows PCs and workstations.The Quadro GP100 isn't targeted at gaming -- it's aimed more at virtual reality content creation, simulation, and engineering applications. The GPU is based on the Pascal architecture and is capable of supporting up to 5K displays at 60Hz.The new GPU is the fastest Quadro yet, with 32-bit floating point performance of about 12 te
  
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