Новости за 21.03.2016

Everyone is busy these days, sure, but research shows that most people are wasting chunks of time throughout their day, whether it's fiddling with the latest tech toy or responding to every email that lands in their inbox.

N is what's next

The first developer preview of Android N is here.  At first blush, it looks a lot like its predecessor, Android Marshmallow. But beneath that layer of familiarity, you’ll find lots of little tweaks and improvements to Google’s mobile operating system. It’s early going for Android N, and a lot may change between now and the final release, but let’s dig in and take a look at some of what this new OS has to offer.

Everyone's known a "toxic" colleague. Maybe someone who's bullied them, undercut their achievements, or committed fraud or theft. Worse still is when that person seems to get away with it -- maybe they're also smart, motivated, highly productive -- but at what is it costing your business? According to Harvard Business School's visiting assistant professor Dylan Minor and Cornerstone's Michael Housman, the cost to your organization's overall well-being is too high to tolerate a toxic worker.

Vendor management is nothing new for most IT organizations. Progressive IT functions have built up their vendor governance capabilities for years. But the vendor management function today is being asked to oversee a host of new IT services, wrangle niche and nascent suppliers, and meet increasing performance expectations, with little increase — or worse, a decline — in funding. As a result, many are struggling to keep up.

As the rhetoric and legal wranglings of the FBI and Department of Justice fight against Apple’s encryption continue to escalate, it’s only natural that much of the debate centers on personal privacy and the symbiotic role our phones now play in our lives.. Even President Obama himself, siding with the FBI at the South by Southwest conference, stated, “You can’t take an absolutist stance on this. It’s fetishizing our phones above every other value, and that can’t be the right answer.”

Most of us in the tech sector are drawn to the “speed and feeds” – the technical specs that reveal what is better than the last dot release. We want faster processors, more solid state memory capacity and networks with lower latency. Yet, there are often Herculean jumps forward in technology that do more than just add a bit more capacity or speed. 

The modern workforce demands a new style of IT, according to Paul Chapman, CIO of cloud storage provider Box. Today's IT professionals must take the "friction out of how we get things done," he says, to enable workplace productivity and empower employees. This concept may sound simple, but the necessary changes often don't come easy for IT, Chapman says. "Smart people are figuring out pretty quickly what they need to do and why they need to do it, but they really struggle with 'How do we get there? Читать дальше...

In a survey released today, 27 percent of of U.S. office workers at large companies would sell their work password to an outsider, compared to a global average of 20 percent.

The IT skills gap and talent shortage remains an ongoing business challenge as technology becomes the cornerstone of nearly every industry. That shift means there is a bigger demand for tech pros with specific skill sets; and companies are hiring qualified individuals faster than schools can graduate candidates with the right skills.

New products of the week

Our roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.

Big data techniques such as collecting browsing habits for marketers could soon be adapted and made available to individuals. It wouldn’t be through traditional mass collection and analysis, but by a tool that will allow individuals to choose what they want to share with others.

The enterprise WAN has transitioned from dedicated TDM circuits with Frame Relay and ATM, to Packet-over-SONET and MPLS, and now to Ethernet-access services. However, two things have remained constant, WAN bandwidth is still expensive and provisioning WAN services can take a long time.

Is your company suffering from application bloat? Do you have expensive, overlapping legacy apps that need to be decommissioned as you move to modern, lightweight apps, or to the cloud. Do you have zombie apps lurking in your IT infrastructure, applications that nobody uses anymore but that are still live and contain sensitive data?

Apple's iMessage system has a cryptography flaw that allowed researchers to decrypt a photo stored in iCloud, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.

There’s sure to be much magic at Apple’s March 21 spectacular, but let’s not allow the possible introduction of a 5-inch iPhone 5se or mini iPad Pro to stop the speculation over what comes AFTER that with the iPhone 7 and its various iterations.