So you’re in the market for a new iPad. Excellent choice—I couldn’t live without mine. It’s my companion when I’m catching up on news and email in the morning over tea, reading a comic book in the evening to unwind, or watching a movie while traveling on a plane. Update 6-22-2017: This article has been updated to include information about the new 2017 iPad, as well as the upgrades to the iPad Pro line.But these days, picking an iPad can be tricky. Apple currently sells four different models of iPad, with prices ranging from $329 to $1229. There are size, storage, color, and connectivity options to consider. All in all, there are 60 different variations of iPad from which to choose. So which iPad is right for you? Read on.When size matters: 12.9 inch-iPad ProThis iPad Pro is definitely the biggest iPad, with a 12.9-inch diagonal screen. It’s a bit like someone ripped the screen off of a 13-inch laptop and turned it into an iPad. The iPad Pro … [Read more...]

The newly-announced Echo Show is available for pre-order in black or white and the shipping date is finally right around the corner: Wednesday, June 28. If you're interested, there are two things you need to know. Right now if you buy two of them and enter the code SHOW2PACK at checkout, you'll activate a $100 discount. So you'll get two new Echo Shows for the price of two standard Echos. Go in on this deal with a friend, or buy a few for yourself (they work very well in multiple rooms). The other thing you should know is that by selecting Prime 2-day shipping, Amazon will actually have the Echo Show on your doorstep the very day it's released. Echo Show brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things. Amazon has announced an integration with some of the big names in wireless security cams, so you can simply say "Alexa, show me the front door camera". Echo Show should make a good kitchen assistant as well -- just ask for a recipe. You can watch news … [Read more...]

With the initial release candidate build for Java 9 now published, Oracle has proposed that from here on out, only “showstopper” bugs be fixed for the production Java 9 release, which is due September 21.The proposal floated this week represents a further tightening up of bug-fixing goals for RDP (Rampdown Phase) 2 of the Java upgrade. The plan calls for fixing all P1 (Priority 1) bugs critical to the success of Java Development Kit (JDK) 9. Also, builders would decommit from fixing any bugs not new in JDK 9 and not critical to the release, even if they had been targeted for fixing.[ Keep track of what’s changed in Java 9 in InfoWorld’s live changelog, “What’s new in Java 9.” | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's App Dev Report newsletter. ]The proposal would defer any P1 bugs new in JDK 9 but that are either not critical to the release or, for good reason, cannot be fixed in this upgrade. Bugs designated P2 to P5 would … [Read more...]

Java 9 Standard Edition should bring big benefits to developers—as soon as it actually arrives, now slated for September 21.The planned update to the popular enterprise language and platform is set to offer a world of new capabilities. Among these are modularity, an experimental version of ahead-of-time compilation, and a REPL (read-eval-print-loop).[ The big 4 Java IDEs reviewed: See how Eclipse, NetBeans, JDeveloper, and IntelliJ IDEA stack up. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's App Dev Report newsletter. ]Proposal: Fixes to most Java 9 bugs are on hold[ADDED June 23, 2017] With the initial release candidate build for Java 9 now published, Oracle has proposed that from here on out, only “showstopper” bugs be fixed for the production Java 9 release, which is due September 21.The proposal floated this week represents a further tightening up of bug-fixing goals for RDP (Rampdown Phase) 2 of the Java upgrade. The plan calls for fixing all P1 … [Read more...]

Here’s a shocker: Wal-Mart is telling some technology companies that if they want Wal-Mart’s business, they can’t use Amazon Web Services. (Wal-Mart says it simply doesn’t want customers storing Wal-Mart’s sensitive info on AWS.) That’s a tall order for technology companies that may have invested millions in their tech running on AWS.However, if you see it from Wal-Mart’s point of view, Amazon.com’s retail business is costing it billions a year in lost sales, so why not fight back by reducing Amazon’s AWS income from not just Wal-Mart but Wal-Mart's customers? After all, Amazon.com refuses to sell products from Apple and Google that compete with its own streaming devices and services. The larger lesson here for enterprises is that can politics be part of the price of your choice of public cloud . You’ll find that both existing and potential customers are concerned about the platform you use, including your selection of … [Read more...]

You may not realize it, but you probably come across machine learning just about everywhere—in retail, health care, public transportation and more—and it’s only going to increase in ways that we can’t even imagine.While you probably had conversations with chatbots on websites or calls with customer service—there are many other types of machine learning applications that are silently working behind the scenes, including those that help organizations predict patterns and behaviors.These apps are able to sift through huge amounts of data and make sense of it—once they have been “taught” what to look for. This has created demand for data scientists to build algorithms that can find patterns to predict outcomes and behaviors.[ Chatbots should be part of your intelligent systems arsenal: Build chat bots with Microsoft's Bot Framework • Cortana moves way beyond being a personal assistant. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with … [Read more...]

If we go back to 2009, the work to define NVM Express (NVMe) had just begun, and around that same time, Microsoft Azure made its first major purchase of Serial ATA (SATA) based solid-state drives (SSDs) to help accelerate its storage servers by offloading the storage commit log. Microsoft knew that non-volatile memory (e.g, NAND Flash) would become very important for cloud computing, although it was still very expensive and restricted to use in limited applications. It was also clear to Microsoft that the SATA interface would be unsuitable to handle the performance of future high performance SSDs.In 2011, as NVM Express had just had its first revision published, a competing standards proposal came on the scene called SCSI Express. SCSI Express was designed to use the traditional SCSI command set (including three decades of legacy infrastructure for hard drives) on top of the PCI Express interface. Looking at the technical merits, there was consensus in the Microsoft Windows and Azure … [Read more...]

By Bharath Vasudevan, Product Manager, HPE Software-defined and Cloud GroupOne of the greatest threats to any business is a lack of productivity. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even with technology improvements, employees today are not necessarily more productive. IT teams in particular face technological issues that can actually hinder productivity. In fact, according to insight from Deloitte, "80% of time, energy, and budgets are consumed by the care and feeding of the IT stack."As such, IT teams spend most of their time making sure their data centers don’t experience down time due to lost data or performance issues – a problem that can cost IT organizations up to $9,000 per minute of down time. This type of burden decreases employee productivity and leaves IT professionals with little time to innovate when they could be spending time adding true value to their organizations. Complicated IT systems can also wreak havoc on areas of the organization … [Read more...]

Over the past year, Google’s TensorFlow has asserted itself as a popular open source toolkit for deep learning. But training a TensorFlow model can be cumbersome and slow—especially when the mission is to take a dataset used by someone else and try to refine the training process it uses. The sheer number of moving parts and variations in any model-training process is enough to make even deep-learning experts take a deep breath.This week, Google open-sourced a project intended to cut down on the amount of work in configuring a deep learning model for training. Tensor2Tensor, or T2T for short, is a Python-powered workflow organization library for TensorFlow training jobs. It lets developers specify the key elements used in a TensorFlow model and define the relationships among them.[ Learn how to write apps that take full advantage of machine learning: Data in, intelligence out: Machine learning pipelines demystified • Google’s machine-learning cloud pipeline … [Read more...]

Industry benchmarks and analyst reports are bibles for many people in IT, providing independent assessment of vendors product and technology claims. But too many people take them literally. The fact is that they should be treated with much more skepticism than they are typically given. The devil is in the details—rather, in the methodology.I know that from personal experience: I now work at and have worked for multiple software vendors that have been frequently covered by analyst firms both positively and negatively. I’ve personally assisted in tuning for benchmarks including specs to present my companies’ best face.[ InfoWorld's quick guide: Digital Transformation and the Agile Enterprise. | Download InfoWorld’s essential guide to microservices and learn how to create modern web and mobile applications that scale. ] There’s nothing wrong as a vendor in putting your best face forward and trying to encourage those analysts to support your point of view, But … [Read more...]

Ruby has had a reputation as a user-friendly language for building web applications. But its slippage in this month’s RedMonk Programming Language Rankings has raised questions about where exactly the language stands among developers these days.The twice-yearly RedMonk index ranked Ruby at eighth, the lowest position ever for the language. “Swift and now Kotlin are the obvious choices for native mobile development. Go, Rust, and others are clearer modern choices for infrastructure,” said RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady. “The web, meanwhile, where Ruby really made its mark with Rails, is now an aggressively competitive and crowded field.”[ Download the InfoWorld megaguide: The best Python frameworks and IDEs. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]Although O’Grady noted that Ruby remains “tremendously popular,” participants on sites such as Hacker News and Quora have … [Read more...]

With Open IOS XE, Cisco is changing the gameOld-school network engineers probably remember the Cisco 2500-series router. It ran a slow Motorola 68000 CPU, the monolithic IOS operating system, and did one thing only:  route packets.Routers and switches have certainly sped up since then, and the operating system has been modernized, but networking hasn't changed much otherwise. We still use CLI and SNMP to manage our networks the same way we did in the 1990s.With Open IOS XE, however, Cisco is changing the game. We now support powerful programmable interfaces like NETCONF and YANG. We can easily on-board devices without tedious manual configuration, and we can host Python scripts and applications all directly on the box.Day 0 Provisioning If you were given 50 switches to configure, how would you do it? If you're like most network engineers, you would configure one, paste its configuration into Notepad, tweak a few values, paste that back into the next switch, and repeat. Aside … [Read more...]

Melding Java and web development, CheerpJ is being readied as compiler technology that takes Java bytecode and turns it into JavaScript, for execution in browsers. Based on the LLVM/Clang compiler platform as well as Learning Technologies’ own Cheerp C++-to-JavaScript compiler, CheerpJ takes Java bytecode and turns it into JavaScript without needing the Java source.In CheerpJ, applications and Java libraries are converted to web applications, so there is no need for plug-ins or Java installations. Server-side Java components can become client-side browser-based libraries while native Java code serves as platform-independent components for the Node.js server-side JavaScript platform.[ Use JavaScript in your dev shop? InfoWorld looks at 6 best JavaScript IDEs and 22 JavaScript frameworks ready for adoption. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld’s App Dev Report newsletter. ]CheerpJ features an offline compiler moving Java bytecode to JavaScript as well as a … [Read more...]

Twain Tyler helps startups change the way teams build and ship applications, and writes about container security for Twistlock. Is Docker secure? That’s the million-dollar question as more and more organizations migrate production workloads to containers.But that’s a simplistic question, and there is not a yes or no answer. Instead of thinking in binary terms about Docker security (that is, trying to decide whether it is secure or not) it’s better to delve into the details of how Docker works in order to understand how the Docker security paradigm plays out.[ Also on InfoWorld: Linux containers and Docker explained. | Docker fundamentals. | To the cloud! Real-world container migrations. | Dig into the the red-hot open source framework in InfoWorld’s beginner’s guide to Docker. ]So, let’s take a look at how Docker works and what that means for container security.To answer the question whether Docker is secure, we’ll first take a look at the … [Read more...]

“The right tool for the right job.” If such wisdom holds true anywhere, it certainly holds true with the choice of database a developer picks for a given application. Document databases, one of the family of data products collectively referred to as “NoSQL,” are for developers who want to focus on their application rather than the database technology.With a document database, data is not stored in tables with distinct column types. Instead, it’s stored in freeform “documents” with any number of fields and any number of nested structures. Such documents are typically represented as JSON, and updated either by way of APIs or by sending JSON to a REST endpoint. Most every modern programming language supports JSON and REST, so working with a document database feels more like working natively with those data structures rather than working with a traditional database.This schemaless design, as it is called, has its limitations. A developer must do … [Read more...]

With Open IOS XE, Cisco is changing the gameOld-school network engineers probably remember the Cisco 2500-series router. It ran a slow Motorola 68000 CPU, the monolithic IOS operating system, and did one thing only:  route packets.Routers and switches have certainly sped up since then, and the operating system has been modernized, but networking hasn't changed much otherwise. We still use CLI and SNMP to manage our networks the same way we did in the 1990s.With Open IOS XE, however, Cisco is changing the game. We now support powerful programmable interfaces like NETCONF and YANG. We can easily on-board devices without tedious manual configuration, and we can host Python scripts and applications all directly on the box.Day 0 Provisioning If you were given 50 switches to configure, how would you do it? If you're like most network engineers, you would configure one, paste its configuration into Notepad, tweak a few values, paste that back into the next switch, and repeat. Aside … [Read more...]

For the past few years, the IT industry as a whole has been under significant strain to become faster and more agile due to a rapidly growing data problem involving growth, capacity, and efficiency. It has been quite a whirlwind, to say the least.In the past, organizations only needed about 36GB of drive capacity in a data center. Today, drives are equipped with more than 6TB of capacity to support apps that are growing 5x faster than IT can deliver, and organizations are collecting more data than they ever did in the past.. In fact, IDC predicted that amount of available data will increase from 4.4 zettabytes (ZB) to 44 zettabytes by 2020 (1 ZB is a quadrillion GB!) This growth requires IT teams to spend about 80% of their time and budgets on managing the traditional solutions.Why? Performance becomes bottlenecked by limited capacity. Think of it this way – on a typical day, your normal sized cup of coffee will do the trick. But on the days when you need an extra boost, and you … [Read more...]

Intel’s “DevCon” has been going on for a handful of years now, and it’s emerged as a popular and interesting venue for those interested in HPC and newer fields like HPDA and AI/ML (High Performance Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning). This year the conference will be held Saturday and Sunday morning, November 11 and 12, in Denver.While Intel just announced a “call for submissions” for the 2017 conference, it seemed like a good time to also mention the available online materials from this conference.  The past resources are all freely available on the web. Previous HPC Developer Conferences have been very well rated by attendees, and that’s due to the high quality of the speakers who have participated in talks, tutorials, and panels.I often find websites difficult to navigate, especially when there is a lot of content. Intel’s DevCon website is no exception.  I can help by pointing out some key places … [Read more...]

Come microservice, come cloud, the line-of-business application is always going to be with us. We need to know how our businesses are working: how much we’re selling, how much we’re buying, how our customers are feeling, and every one of a thousand little markers that show the pulse of business.And that leaves us with the ever-present question: How do we show that information? That’s where business intelligence tools come in, to let us ask questions and get answers, exploring the ever-growing pool of business data we’re storing in our myriad business systems.[ Explore the power of the graph—the Microsoft and Office Graph, that is—in your apps: Microsoft Graph: The APIs to Office 365’s hidden riches • Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Teams reshape Office • Cortana moves way beyond being a personal assistant. | Keep up with hot topics in programming with InfoWorld's App Dev Report newsletter. ]Microsoft’s tool for that business … [Read more...]

The latest Garter Magic Quadrant report for cloud infrastructure is out. Usually, the release of a Magic Quadrant means I have to correct its findings when talking to my clients. Enterprises take these as gospel, managing by Magic Quadrant—and as a result picking their technology, often the wrong technology, for the wrong reasons.This time, I have good news: This cloud Magic Quadrant is one you can trust.In that chart, every provider in the upper right (the execution-plus-vision leadership quadrant)—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google—is truly a provider that matters in the IaaS space.[ Download InfoWorld's quick guide and get started with Azure Mobile Services for building apps today. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing newsletter. ]In the lower right quadrant (visionaries with execution challenges) are IBM and Oracle. That largely makes sense: They have the ability to buy companies and spend money to become “me too” providers. … [Read more...]