The content below is taken from the original (Three Tips on Data Center Employee Safety), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Windows Update for Business will arrive later this year), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Microsoft announced Windows Update for Business but it has yet to be released, expect it to arrive later this year.

The post Windows Update for Business will arrive later this year appeared first on Petri.

The content below is taken from the original (Bluetooth replacement sends wireless signals through your body), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The current crop of smartwatches use Bluetooth technology to connect the wearable with a user’s phone, and that’s really the only viable option right now. Bluetooth dominates short-range wireless communication, but a team […]

The content below is taken from the original (Canyon’s Smart Bike Computer puts Android Wear on your handlebars), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

When you’re cycling up a steep incline, hunched over the handlebars and desperately willing your legs to keep going, you don’t want to be messing around with your phone or a second-rate cycling computer. Bike manufacturer Canyon has teamed up with Sony to find a solution — and the fruits of their labor is the Smart Bike Computer. It runs on Android Wear, so the 1.6-inch touchscreen can display a bunch of popular cycling apps including Strava and Google Maps. The small, waterproof unit slides directly into the stem, ensuring the sleek stylings of your ride aren’t ruined, and can connect to your phone over Bluetooth. In addition, it boasts up to 8 hours of battery life, built-in GPS and 4GB of internal storage, so you can leave your handset at home and still use some of its essential features.

The downside? Canyon is calling it a "concept," so there’s no guarantee it’ll hit store shelves. Having said that, the company is aiming for a spring 2016 release, with an estimated price of €200. Of course, you could always wear an Android Wear smartwatch, but having it directly on the bike could be useful if you take pedal-power seriously.

[Image Credit: Canyon]

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Source: Canyon

Tags: AndroidWear, bike, Canyon, cycling, Smart Bike Computer, Sony

The content below is taken from the original (WD’s latest cloud tech gives you a reason to forget Dropbox), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Let’s be honest: the cloud features bundled with hard drives tend to suck. They’re seldom more than nice freebies that you ignore while you set up Dropbox, Google Drive or another more sophisticated option. However, WD (aka Western Digital) might give you an incentive to try its in-house offering. It’s launching My Cloud OS 3, a platform that gives connected hard drives (including network-attached storage) some of the features you take for granted on dedicated online services. It’ll automatically sync not just between PCs, but from the camera rolls of your mobile devices. You’ll have web- and app-based access to your storage, as well. True, you can find this kind of syncing elsewhere, but this gives you an alternative that won’t leave you feeling pangs of regret… so long as you’re using WD storage, at least.

The platform depends on having the right hardware and software, but you don’t have to wait long for that. WD has already introduced an updated version of its dual-drive My Cloud Mirror that has My Cloud OS 3’s perks, and the My Cloud Albums app for Android and iOS will help you share photos when it arrives in late September. The real question is whether or not WD’s upgrade is enough to get your attention. After all, WD’s arch-rival Seagate is shuttering its Wuala cloud service in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Dropbox and Google. Even though WD is doing a lot to keep its personal cloud option up to date, you may be happy syncing through a service you already use.

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Source: Western Digital

Tags: cloudstorage, internet, mycloud, mycloudos3, nas, NetworkAttachedStorage, storage, wd, wdsync, westerndigital

The content below is taken from the original (Algorithm turns any picture into the work of a famous artist), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

A group of German researchers have created an algorithm that basically amounts to the most amazing Instagram filter ever conceived: a convolutional neural network that can convert any photograph into a work of fine art. The process takes an hour (sorry, it’s not actually coming to a smartphone near you), and the math behind it is horrendously complicated, but the results speak for themselves.

The algorithm leverages how complex neural networks process object recognition to help it rebuild photographs in the style of specific artists. On a very basic level, the network treats the art style of a source image as a "texture," and filters the target image through several layers of computational units to create a representation of it that agrees with the features of the original art. It’s a pretty neat trick, but not the actual point of the group’s research — the art project is simply an example that shows that convolutional neural networks are now capable of separating the content and style of an image.

That said, researchers admit that content and style have to be careful balanced if the output image is to make any sense — too much focus on style, and the output image won’t look anything like the original photograph. The group plans to publish an additional paper on the algorithm in Nature later this year — but you can read the original report at the source link below.

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Via: Washington Post

Source: Corell University

Tags: art, imagerecognition, NeuralNetwork, picasso, vangogh

The content below is taken from the original (D-Wave: ‘Whether or not it’s quantum, it’s faster’), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Quantum computer maker prepares new benchmark it says explains … something

D-Wave is getting ready to drop a new benchmark on Arxiv, which the company says demonstrates its latest 1000-qubit processor outperforming classical machines.…

The content below is taken from the original (ClearSky: Keeping your premises free of unwanted clouds), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Allowing you to forklift your silos the hell out of Dodge

Interview Dump your on-premises SAN and fly to the cloud via an all-flash on-ramp: that’s the message from startup ClearSky Data. Enterprises should access all their data, throughout its lifecycle, via a fully-managed service and, implicitly, hit the eject button on their on-premises data-storage equipment.…

The content below is taken from the original (UPC to be renamed Virgin Media in Ireland), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Cable TV and broadband player UPC is to be renamed Virgin Media in Ireland, the company confirmed today (28 August).

The post UPC to be renamed Virgin Media in Ireland appeared first on Silicon Republic.

The content below is taken from the original (Balloon Sends a Link for Anyone to Add Files to Your Dropbox), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

When you’re trying to collect together a lot of files, it’s a pain to everyone on the same page. If you’re a Dropbox user, Balloon is a web app that lets you create a single link you can send to people so they can add files to your Dropbox without needing a Dropbox account themselves.

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The content below is taken from the original (Construction drones can keep track of progress and lazy workers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Cameras that keep an eye on construction sites aren’t anything new, but the folks in charge of building the new Sacramento Kings stadium in California are using something a bit more high-tech than usual. Several camera-equipped drones operated by a company called ImageInFlight patrol the site to collect footage, which are then converted into 3D images. These images are run through software developed by a team from the University of Illinois, which compares them to architectural plans and previous images to measure progress. The method makes it easy to see if anything’s behind schedule and which group of workers need to be more efficient.

As you can imagine, though, being observed by an autonomous drone can feel a bit disconcerting, if not downright post-apocalyptic, for some people. One of the software’s developers, Mani Golparvar-Fard, however, says cameras or people observing construction isn’t new to the industry. "Yes, making this autonomous has a different feeling for the workers," he told MIT’s Technology Review, "But you have to keep in mind that it’s not really questioning the efficiency of the workers, it’s questioning what resources these guys need to be more efficient."

The University of Illinois team is also working on getting drones to attach cameras on construction sites, as well as on a crowdsourcing platform that sounds like a micromanaging boss’ dream. People can use the platform to categorize workers in video footage to see what they’re doing with their time during work hours.

[Image credit: Golden 1 Center]

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Source: Technology Review

Tags: constructiondrone, drone, sacramento

The content below is taken from the original (Scientists figure out why interleaved phone books can’t be pulled apart), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

It’s well known that two phone books with their pages interleaved are almost impossible to separate because of friction, but the exact cause was a mystery until now.

The content below is taken from the original (Dodge Kickstarter Fees And Take Crowdfunding On Your Site With Celery Launch), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

 Why pay Kickstarter or Indiegogo 5% when most crowdfunding traffic comes from project creators and their own promotion? And why publicize a crowdfunding page that will only live for a month instead of a business’ own website that can take orders forever? That’s the idea behind Celery Launch, which lets people accept crowdfunding, pre-orders, and traditional purchases from their… Read More

The content below is taken from the original (NASA’s 3D Printed Rocket Parts Actually Work), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

 Today, NASA tested a 3D printed turbopump, one that was put together with 45% fewer parts than pumps made any other way. This obviously saves time and money, but come on…NASA is slowly 3D printing an entire freaking rocket. That’s cool. NASA referred to the rocket turbopump as “one of the most complex, 3D printed rocket engine parts ever made.” It went through about… Read More

The content below is taken from the original (How Edge Data Center Providers are Changing the Internet’s Geography), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (Magic Tree), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

The content below is taken from the original (GoGo gets the green light for its next-gen in-flight internet), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

In-flight internet comes with a kind of technological ambivalence — the fact that it exists at all feels like a complete miracle, but at the same time it almost always totally sucks. Don’t worry though, it’s about to get better: GoGo, one of the largest providers of commercial in-flight internet, just got approval from the FAA to launch its next generation of mile-high internet. If testing goes well, you could be pulling down 70 Mbps on select flights later this year.

The big difference is how the new and old GoGo systems get the internet to the plane. Fly today, and your plane will be receiving internet from terrestrial radio towers — transmitters a lot like the cell phone towers you already use, but with their antennas pointed towards the sky. The new 2Ku satellite system beams information down from Ku-band satellites orbiting 22,000 miles above the Earth. It’s basically the exact same tech behind GoGo’s ground-to-orbit experiments, but with an extra antenna to dedicated exclusively to sending data back to the satellite.

GoGo says that seven commercial airlines have already signed up for the new technology’s deployment, and hopes to start upgrading most of its partner airlines in early 2016. In the meantime, it’ll be putting the final touches on the technology behind closed doors.

[Image credit: robpegoraro/Flickr]

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Source: GoGo

Tags: 2ku, GoGo, gogo2ku, inflightinternet, internet, travel

The content below is taken from the original (AMIDuOS Lets You Run Android Apps on Windows 10 Devices), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

If you want to run your favourite Android apps on your Windows 10 tablet, desktop or laptop then AMIDuOS is here to make the whole process smooth and pain-free.

The content below is taken from the original (Explore the world’s economy in Harvard’s trippy 3D map), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Wrapping your head around the planet’s economic activity isn’t easy, even if you study economics for a living. However, Harvard’s Owen Cornec (he of WikiGalaxy fame) believes he can help. He built the Globe of Economic Complexity, a web-based map that lets you explore Earth’s economic relationships through 3D "confetti." It looks more than a little psychedelic, but it’s incredibly detailed. You’ll not only see the range of exports in a given country, but their volumes, their destinations and the intricate connections between products. Frankly, it could be helpful even if you’re outside of academia — it can provide important context for news stories and otherwise explain machinations that would normally remain confusing.

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Source: Globe of Economic Complexity

Tags: earth, economics, economy, education, harvard, harvarduniversity, internet, map, video

The content below is taken from the original (Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Back when you could still get results by inserting a floppy

Microsoft released Windows 95 on 24th August 1995, followed a week later by Office 95, and accompanied by a publicity campaign featuring the Rolling Stones song Start Me Up.…

The content below is taken from the original (Twinword Finder for Chrome Instantly Scans Web Pages for Key Information), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

When you’re scanning a web page for information, a quick CTRL+F search can help you find specific words faster. The Twinword Finder for Chrome, however, takes that word scanning to the next level by also searching for related terms and only highlighting sections that are pertinent to your search.

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The content below is taken from the original (OLPC heir reveals modular laptop design), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

‘Infinity’ allows kids to swap out components, even the screen

One Education, an Australian offshoot of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has opened preview sales for an heir to the XO computer.…

The content below is taken from the original (The agonizingly slow decline of Adobe Flash Player), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

This story on Adobe Flash was supposed to turn out a bit differently.

The idea was to talk with some of the biggest websites still using Adobe’s browser plugin, which has fallen out of favor within tech circles for its constant security issues and thirst for system resources. Maybe they could explain why Flash is still necessary, offering a counterpoint to the resounding calls to end its existence.

Instead, most of the proprietors of Flash-reliant websites I contacted didn’t want to talk at all. HBO, NBC, CBS, Zynga, King, Showtime, Pandora, and Spotify—all of which require Flash on their desktop sites—declined to comment. Major League Baseball, Slacker Radio, Hulu, and the BBC didn’t respond to inquiries.

My attempted survey wasn’t a total failure. Among the sites that were willing to talk, all of them are planning to move beyond Flash Player within a year or so. But even if the era of Flash is winding down, it will be a while until it’s completely wiped from the web.

What’s Wrong With Flash

If you need an explainer on why Adobe Flash Player must go, the best resource remains a five-year-old essay by Steve Jobs. At the time, Jobs was merely explaining why Flash would never show up on iPhones and iPads. But today much of the 1,700-word missive serves as takedown of the technology as a whole, applying just as well to laptops and desktop PCs.

Flash is also a notorious resource hog.

Security, for instance, remains a major concern, with new exploits popping up on a regular basis. In one recent example, hackers were even able to break through the sandboxing that’s meant to minimize vulnerabilities in Google Chrome. Flash is also a notorious resource hog, which is a problem as laptops become thinner, lighter, and more reliant on power efficiency for long battery life.

All of this has brought calls to kill Flash to a fever pitch, not just on mobile devices, but everywhere. Alex Stamos, Facebook’s chief security officer, wrote on Twitter last month that Adobe should set a firm end-of-life date for the plugin. Meanwhile, an "Occupy Flash" website has popped up, urging users to uninstall Flash and asking developers to use alternative technologies such as HTML5.

Still, a mass exodus or firm cutoff for Flash would be easier said than done.

Flash: still required all over the web

Moving Beyond Flash

Despite the pressure from tech circles, the sites I spoke with said they simply weren’t able to start moving away from Flash until recently, when better technology become available. And even now, it’s going to take time for them to finish building the necessary tools.

"Originally, Flash was necessary to solve a couple problems," says Adam Denenberg, chief technical officer for streaming music service iHeartRadio. "Streaming was difficult, especially for live stations, and there were no real http-supported streaming protocols that offered the flexibility of what was required a few years back."

While Denenberg says there’s not much reason to deploy a new Flash-based streaming solution at this point, iHeartRadio still needs time to make the transition from its existing platform. The company already uses HTTP Live Streaming for its own online radio stations, but some of its third-party broadcasters still rely on Flash. An internal project is under way to convert those sources to HTTP Live Streaming on the fly, and the company also has to finish rebuilding its own media player in HTML5. All told, iHeartRadio hopes to be completely Flash-free by the end of the year.

Autodesk, meanwhile, is wading in slowly with an HTML5- and WebGL-based version of its Pixlr online photo editing tools. A beta version of Pixlr Express is coming later this summer.

Even so, Pixlr has no plans to discontinue the Flash versions of its editing tools. That’s because a sizeable chunk of its users are running older browsers in legacy operating systems that don’t support HTML5 and WebGL.

That speaks to a larger issue, which is that many users outside of the tech bubble don’t particularly care whether they’re using Flash or not. Bjørn Rustberggaard, cofounder of online video editing tool WeVideo, says he hasn’t seen a lot of requests from users to offer a Flash-free version. Most of them just want the app to work regardless of what browser they’re using.

"If it’s a mom making stories about her children, or if it’s a student editing a history project, or it’s a professional journalist using it to break the news, it really doesn’t matter if the industry is getting rid of Flash, as long as it works for them," Rustberggaard says.

Nonetheless, WeVideo has been experimenting with an HTML5 version for a few years now, and aims to offer it to users early next year. Again, the company has been waiting for certain APIs and low-level audio and video support across all major browsers. "For us, it’s basically a timing issue," Rustberggaard says. "When will HTML be good enough so it just works?"

Slow, Steady Slip

In the end, websites won’t really need the motivation to get rid of Flash in the form of a hard cutoff date. As web technology allows for alternatives, market forces will ultimately demand that more websites make the switch of their own volition.

With HTML5 and WebGL, we have an opportunity to even go beyond what Flash is today.

iHeartRadio, for instance, wants its radio stations to work in any web browser, including mobile browsers that don’t support Flash, which is a big reason why the company is pushing so hard now for an HTML5 player and HTTP Live Streaming. "When you consider the increase of traffic heading to mobile, an HTML5-supported player is even more important, and ultimately required," Denenberg says.

The fact that Adobe has essentially stopped trying to do anything new and innovative with Flash is also prompting developers to move on. Looking forward, Autodesk’s Heermann expects that Pixlr’s HTML5 and WebGL versions will include new features, while supporting platforms that aren’t as Flash-friendly.

"Flash is maintenance mode," Heermann says. "Adobe’s still fixing bugs and security problems, and it’s a reliable platform, but with HTML5 and WebGL, we have an opportunity to even go beyond what Flash is today."

Even the ability to attract developer talent could be a liability if websites stick to Flash. That’s a major reason WeVideo is looking to switch, despite a lack of requests from users. "Developers are passionate about technology, and nobody wants to spend a lot of hours maintaining and developing something that they think is dead," Rustberggaard says. "So to motivate your tech team, you really have to show that you’re ahead of the curve in terms of using technology."

Those forces seem to be working in more than just anecdotes. Five years ago, 28.9 of websites used Flash in some way, according to Matthias Gelbmann, managing director at web technology metrics firm W3Techs. As of August, Flash usage had fallen to 10.3.

But larger websites have a longer way to go. Flash persists on 15.6 of the top 1,000 sites, Gelbmann says. That’s actually the opposite situation compared to a few years ago, when Flash was used on 22.2 of the largest sites, and 25.6 of sites overall.

In other words, the larger the site, the slower it is to move away from Flash—and, perhaps, the more ashamed it is to admit it.

[Lead image: Flickr user Thecrazyfilmgirl]

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• How Airbnb Adapted For China
• Hackers Make Good On Threat To Reveal Stolen Ashley Madison Data
• Reddit Just Hired Its First-Ever CTO
• Company That Blocked Wi-Fi Hotspots At Conventions Must Pay $750,000 Fine To FCC

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Tags: adobe, fastcompany, flash, flashplayer, partner, syndicated

The content below is taken from the original (Google suffers data loss as data center gets hit by lightning 4 times), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.

Lightning doesn’t often strike the same place twice, but for one of Google’s data centers in Belgium, it struck four times. The lightning didn’t strike the data center directly, rather the four successive […]