Visual Studio infected with HTML5 by ‘rogue faction’
There's nothing to stop you working with HTML5 in Visual Studio. Except for the fact that you can't use many of the features that polish the .NET-editing experience.
That wasn't a problem for Microsoft until it decided HTML5 was the future of coding on PCs, devices, and the web, unveiling a very Web- and HTML-centric next version of Windows.
Eyes have been turning slowly to the next of Visual Studio, to see how Microsoft's tooling story plays out. Read more...
iOS 5 closes Apple’s infamous homescreen webapp gap
Apple's iOS 5 will close the speed gap between web apps run inside the company's Safari browser and those that run in "fullscreen mode" from the iOS home screen, according to a web post from a developer with early access to the operating system.
With the current version of iOS, web applications saved to the iOS home screen and launched into "fullscreen mode" do not benefit from certain tools built into Safari, including the browser's new Nitro JavaScript engine.
"The embedded web viewer does not take advantage of Safari's web performance optimizations." Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told The Register in March (no, really, she did). Apparently, these optimizations also included certain Safari caches and the browser's "asynchronous" rendering mode. Read more...
Japan takes back first place on Top 500 supercomputer list
A Japanese computer has taken first place on the Top 500 supercomputer list, ending China's reign at the top after just six months. At 8.16 petaflops (quadrillion floating-point calculations per second), the K computer is more powerful than the next five systems combined.
The K computer's performance was measured using 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores, almost twice as many as any other system on the Top500 list. The computer is still under construction, and when it enters service in November 2012 will have more than 80,000 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs according to its manufacturer, Fujitsu.
Japan's ascension to the top means that the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer, which took the number 1 position in November last year, is now in second spot with its 2.57 petaflops. But China continues to grow the number of systems it has on the list, up from 42 to 62 systems. The change at the top also means that Jaguar, built for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), is bumped down to third place. Read more...
SGI, Intel plan to speed supercomputers 500 times by 2018
Silicon Graphics International hopes by 2018 to build supercomputers 500 times faster than the most powerful today, using specially designed accelerator chips made by Intel, SGI's chief technology officer said.
SGI hopes to bring a massive performance boost to its supercomputers through highly parallel processors based on Intel's MIC (many integrated cores) architecture, said Eng Lim Goh, CTO at SGI. In conjunction with Xeon server CPUs, the MIC chips will run millions of threads in parallel, which will help scale supercomputer performance.
Chips based on the MIC architecture mix standard x86 cores with specialized cores to boost high-performance computing. Today's fastest supercomputers top out at around 2.5 petaflops (2.5 thousand trillion calculations per second), but efforts to improve throughput and on-chip performance are under way. IBM, for example, said it will use pulses of light to accelerate data transfers between chips. These and other measures could lead to supercomputers that can deliver performance of over one exaflop, or 1000 petaflops, by 2020. Read more...
Your top talent deserves your best effort
During the downturn, you likely worked hard to keep your best performers on board. Now that conditions are improving, your retention efforts are even more vital, especially for top talent.
Highly skilled employees who have stuck with secure positions may now be taking a fresh look at their options. And even those who aren't actively seeking new opportunities are hearing plenty about them from their friends in the industry.
Don't wait until you lose a key team member to make retention a priority. Here are five ways to keep your most important employees engaged and motivated. Read more...
Huawei unveils 7-inch tablet running Android 3.2
Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer Huawei unveiled a 7-inch tablet running version 3.2 of Google's Android mobile OS on Monday. It plans to sell the device in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and some European countries in the third quarter.
Huawei unveiled the new 7-inch tablet, called the MediaPad in a webcast on Monday.
The tablet is the first to use version 3.2 of Google's Android OS, details of which have not yet been posted on Android.com. Where the 1.x and 2.x versions were designed for smartphones, the 3.x versions are optimized for tablets.
Versions 3.0 and 3.1 were designed to run on 10-inch tablets, according Victor Xu, Huawei's chief marketing officer for devices. Android 3.2, however is specifically designed to run on a 7-inch tablet, he said. Read more...
Sega customer database hacked
Video game company Sega had a database hacked and sensitive information on about 1.3 million customers has been compromised, according to media reports.
The database of the Sega Pass website includes customer names, dates of birth, email addresses, and encrypted passwords.
Various media outlets have been able to confirm the attack with officials from the Japanese company. The news site Playstation Lifestyle posted the text of an email that Sega reportedly sent to Sega Pass registered users on Friday night informing them of the breach. Read more...
Viridity calculates energy cost of applications
Viridity has updated its data center infrastructure management software to let businesses keep track of how much electrical power is being consumed by individual applications and lines of business, the company will announce Monday.
DCIM tools are becoming more widely used as companies try to manage energy use more closely to reduce bills in their data centers. Gartner estimated last year that 60 percent of data centers will be using some form of DCIM software by 2014, up from just 1 percent last year.
That also means DCIM is becoming a crowded market. The 451 Group has counted more than 40 DCIM vendors and expects consolidation to occur. Many of the vendors provide tools that measure the power drawn by equipment and analyze the data to help with capacity planning and where to put new hardware. Read more...
Attackers exploit latest Flash bug on large scale, says researcher
Hackers are aggressively exploiting a just-patched Flash vulnerability, serving attack code "on a fairly large scale" from compromised sites as well as from their own malicious domains, a security researcher said Friday.
The attacks exploit the critical Flash Player bug that Adobe patched June 14 with its second "out-of-band," or emergency update, in nine days.
"CVE-2011-2110 is being exploited in the wild on a fairly large scale," said Steven Adair, a researcher with the Shadowserver Foundation, a volunteer-run group that tracks vulnerabilities and botnets. "In particular this exploit is showing up as a drive-by in several legitimate websites, including those belonging to various NGOs [non-government organizations], aerospace companies, a Korean news site, an Indian government Web site, and a Taiwanese university." Read more...
Google follows through on ‘mobile first’ philosophy
Capitalizing on Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt’s promise last year to make “mobile first” in an effort to commit to phone software development and global accessibility, the company announced Monday the addition of image queries and voice search to its desktop offerings from its existing mobile operations.
From the mobile image recognition app Google Goggles, Google has added image queries to the desktop, allowing users to ask Google to recognize what is depicted in a photo or drawing by pasting the image into the search box. Whereas voice search, which is now offered for any computer user with a microphone, has come from Google’s Android operating system and its search and maps applications for other types of mobile phones. Read more...
FTC lets Microsoft proceed with purchase of Skype
The Federal Trade Commission is letting software giant Microsoft Corp. proceed with its largest deal ever, an $8.5 billion bid for web chat and call service Skype.
The FTC announced Friday that it had finished its review of the buyout so it can proceed if the Department of Justice also approves. Both agencies must review any deal worth more than $65.2 million, according to the FTC's website. Read more...
Oracle wants a big piece of Android’s ad revenue
Oracle (ORCL) is known for some epic lawsuits, often throwing its weight around in California courtrooms over software licensing and patents. Coming off a recent victory against SAP (SAP), Oracle’s throwdown against Google (GOOG) is just getting warmed up, as the software maker seeks billions in damages over claims that Android software uses technology related to the Java programming language. It’s a drama that’s been building its plot since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, and Java along with it. The full extent of Oracle’s claims were finally disclosed yesterday in a San Francisco federal court, when the company sought to prevent Google from filing under seal documents in the case stating Oracle’s monetary claims. Read more...