A major British Airways crash has highlighted the importance for businesses of testing backup systems and disaster recovery procedures to ensure that they work as planned. The airline experienced what CEO Alex Cruz described as “a major IT systems failure” that, he said, affected all check-in and operational systems. The failure on Saturday, May 27,…
Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May. It’s not just about work: AI software can now play chess, go, and some retro video games better than any human — and…
Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java. Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: “It’s time for a change. I’m leaving Boeing Defense (nee…
Steve Ballmer’s latest hobby, USAfacts.org, cast a spotlight on the effectiveness of local, state and federal governments when it launched in April. Its easy-to-read dashboards allow ordinary citizens to compare government’s performance of its core missions with spending at all levels. In a roundabout way, that’s made the former Microsoft CEO something of an evangelist…
Apple this week updated macOS Sierra to version 10.12.5 with more than three dozen security patches, and a change that lets users install Microsoft’s latest version of Windows 10 on their Macs. Sierra 10.12.5 “adds support for media-free installation of Windows 10 Creators Update using Boot Camp,” the update’s brief release notes read. Creators Update…
Facebook must pay a €110 million (US$123 million) for misleading the European Commission during an investigation of its takeover of WhatsApp. The fine is for telling the Commission it would not be possible to reliably match Facebook and WhatsApp accounts for the same user — something that would allow the company to better target advertising…
The future of Android will be a lot smarter, thanks to new programming tools that Google unveiled on Wednesday. The company announced TensorFlow Lite, a version of its machine learning framework that’s designed to run on smartphones and other mobile devices, during the keynote address at its Google I/O developer conference. “TensorFlow Lite will leverage…
Google is making it easier for people to dash off a quick email reply from Gmail on their smartphones. The Smart Reply feature, which offers a handful of contextually-aware, computer-generated responses, is coming to Google’s flagship email app for iOS and Android, the company announced at its I/O developer conference Wednesday. The feature provides users…
Google has made another leap forward in the realm of machine learning hardware. The tech giant has begun deploying the second version of its Tensor Processing Unit, a specialized chip meant to accelerate machine learning applications, company CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Wednesday. The new Cloud TPU sports several improvements over its predecessor. Most notably,…
SAP wants to speed up how analytics adapt to change. It’s doing that by embedding SAP Predictive Analytics’ machine learning capabilities in S/4Hana. “When you take something rules-based, you are not able to adapt predictions to new data,” said Mike Flannagan, SAP’s senior vice president for analytics, ahead of the company’s Sapphire Now customer conference…