67057387
submission
itwbennett writes:
For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can't really spin the drives faster than 7,200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We'll have to wait and see on that.
67056225
submission
itwbennett writes:
In a post last week, Quartz ranked the most valuable programming skills, based on job listing data from Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution. Ruby on Rails came out on top, with an average salary of $109,460. And that may have been true in the first quarter of 2013 when the data was collected, but 'before you run out and buy Ruby on Rails for Dummies, you might want to consider some other data which indicate that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards,' writes ITworld's Phil Johnson. Johnson looked at recent trends in the usage of Ruby (as a proxy for Rails usage) across MS Gooroo, the TIOBE index, the PYPL index, Redmonk's language rankings, and GitHut and found that 'demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills has been on the decline, at least for the last year.'
67024565
submission
itwbennett writes:
Chat app maker Slack is hoping to make inroads in the enterprise with a new paid plan that will include an optional feature called Compliance Exports that will let administrators access their team's communications, encompassing public and private messages. The tool is far-reaching, potentially including the edit history for workers' messages as well as messages workers have marked for deletion, if the supervisor so desires.
67013573
submission
itwbennett writes:
A draft version of a European Parliament resolution, reported by news outlets over the weekend, calls on the Commission to break up Google as one way to solve competition issues with the search engine provider, which is the biggest in Europe. But there are other options as well. "We want fair and neutral search in the interest of consumers. Unbundling is one of the ideas but we proposed several ideas of solutions that are on the table," said German Parliament member Andreas Schwab and Ramon Tremosa of Spain, who drafted the resolution. One of the other solutions is a rotation mechanism, which would display commercial services from Google and its competitors in the same location and with the same prominence on the search results page. And another option for resolving Google's antitrust issues is to adopt legal measures that would specifically prevent anticompetitive behavior in search, Tremosa and Schwab said.
66895521
submission
itwbennett writes:
The WordPress development team on Thursday released critical security updates that address an XSS vulnerability in the comment boxes of WordPress posts and pages. An attacker could exploit this flaw to create comments with malicious JavaScript code embedded in them that would get executed by the browsers of users seeing those comments. 'In the most obvious scenario the attacker leaves a comment containing the JavaScript and some links in order to put the comment in the moderation queue,' said Jouko Pynnonen, the security researcher who found the flaw.
66887511
submission
jfruh writes:
Computing devices have been gobbling up more and more memory, but storage tech has been hitting its limits, creating a bottleneck. Now researchers in Spain and Scotland have reported a breakthrough in working with metal-oxide clusters that can retain their charge. These molecules could serve as the basis for RAM and flash memory that will be leagues smaller than existing components.
66887331
submission
jfruh writes:
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, people wondered how the tech heavyweight would approach the business of running a traditional print outlet, and how Amazon would fit into the picture. Well, here's a first tiny step: Kindle Fire owners will now be getting a free six month subscription to the Post's slick new Web app, whether they ask for it or not.
66802567
submission
itwbennett writes:
Microsoft released an out-of-band patch on Tuesday, addressing a vulnerability in Kerberos KBC, a component that handles authentication on local networks. The patch was supposed to have been released earlier this month, but Microsoft withheld it due to QA concerns. However, Redmond says the flaw is being used in attacks online, so organizations are urged to update immediately.
66756669
submission
itwbennett writes:
Facebook has released as open source a debugging tool for JavaScript, called Flow. Flow is a static type checker, one that ensures that when a program is run that its variables, functions and other elements of code will adhere to their original specifications. 'Flow improves speed and efficiency so developers can be more productive while using JavaScript,' Facebook engineers said in a blog post on Tuesday.
66756277
submission
sfcrazy writes:
Nokia surprised everyone when it announced the N1 Android tablet during the Slush conference in Finland, today. There is a twist in the story though: This is not a Nokia device.
Nokia doesn’t have a device unit anymore: it sold its Devices and Services business to Microsof, in 2013. N1 is made by Chinese contract manufacturing company Foxconn, which also manufactures the iPhone and the iPad.
But Nokia’s relationship with Foxconn is different from Apple’s. You buy iDevices from Apple, not Foxconn; you call Apple for support, not Foxconn. You never deal with Foxconn.
In the case of N1, Nokia will be nowhere in the picture. Foxconn will be handling the sales, distribution and customer care for the device. Nokia is licensing the brand, the industrial design, Z Launcher software layer and IP on a running royalty basis to Foxconn.
66756149
submission
JG0LD writes:
Four prominent members of the Debian community have stepped down or reduced their involvement in the project as a result of an increasingly bitter argument over the future of the widely influential Linux distribution.
66697455
submission
jfruh writes:
There's a lot more to building a new hospital than just unrolling a blueprint these days. This video shows some of the tools used to help people better navigate the complex infrastructure that underlies a high-tech building: designs that can be viewed with 3D glasses, and tiny drones that can fly into the worksite to check on hard-to-reach spaces.
66587423
submission
itwbennett writes:
Earlier this week, Microsoft patched a 19-year-old security vulnerability that has been present in every version of its operating systems since the release of Windows 1995. As the IBM researchers who discovered the bug put it, it’s been 'sitting in plain site' while other vulnerabilities in the same library have been fixed over the years. While it may seem surprising that a critical error in such a major piece of software, used by so many people, could go unnoticed for decades, it’s actually not that uncommon, writes ITworld's Phil Johnson, who rounded up 10 more examples of software bugs that were particularly long-lived — not all of which have yet been fixed.
66580389
submission
jfruh writes:
As Microsoft focuses its Xbox line firmly on games, Sony seems to be taking the opposite track with the PlayStation. PlayStation Vue will be a new TV service for PlayStation 3 and 4 users that allows both live viewing of TV and watching episodes later at your leisure. Beta testing begins soon in New York.
66580045
submission
jfruh writes:
To the chorus of companies opposed to President Obama's net neutrality proposals, add another: Cisco. The networking giant says the regulations would deter ISPs from making investments in their networks, which would in turn hurt sales of Cisco equipment.
