Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Dan Heilman.

The software Relevant Products/Services unit of General Electric on Monday announced its "Industrial Dojo," in collaboration with the Cloud Foundry Foundation, intended to strengthen its efforts to solve challenges in the so-called industrial Internet.

The Cloud Foundry Dojo program allows software developers to work on open source projects to learn the inner workings of the core technology and the agile development environment, along with recommended methodologies for contributing code for development in the Internet of Things (IoT)…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Caroline Donnelly.

The closure of the Tor Cloud Project should be seized by users as an opportunity to find an alternative way to access the internet anonymously using the cloud, its operators have claimed.  The Tor Cloud Project was set up in November 2011 so users could deploy Tor bridges using Amazon EC2 instances and – in doing so – donate bandwidth for other members of the Tor network to use.

However, since hitting peak usage in mid-2013, the number of Tor Cloud bridges being deployed has steadily dropped off and now the operators of the pro-privacy internet network have called time on it completely…

Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Ted Greenwald.

Paging Sarah Connor!  After decades as a sci-fi staple, artificial intelligence has leapt into the mainstream. Between Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, IBM’s Watson and Google Brain, machines that understand the world and respond productively suddenly seem imminent.

The combination of immense Internet-connected networks and machine-learning algorithms has yielded dramatic advances in machines’ ability to understand spoken and visual communications, capabilities that fall under the heading “narrow” artificial intelligence. Can machines capable of autonomous reasoning—so-called general AI—be far behind? And at that point, what’s to keep them from improving themselves until they have no need for humanity?…

Grazed from Wired.  Author: Editorial Staff.

BEN URETSKY HAD a shoebox filled with $10,000 in cash.  He worked for a company that rented computer power from a data center in Brooklyn, New York, and this was a company where “cash was king.” “I was paid in cash, and I literally had a Nike shoebox where I would put the money away,” says Uretsky, who immigrated from Russia at the age of five and grew up in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn.

“Don’t ask me why.” The company was called Like Whoa, and it no longer exists. But with that $10,000, Ben Uretsky and his brother Moisey set up their own computers at a data center across the river in Lower Manhattan, hosting websites and other software for anyone who came knocking…

Grazed from ComputerDealerNews.  Author: Jeff Jedras.

 NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson is known for his, shall we say, frank assessments of the business decisions of his enterprise resource planning (ERP) software competitors. During his keynote this year through at the annual SuiteWorld user conference, Microsoft was moved from the foes category to the friends.

After all, it would have been awkward had Nelson launched his usual broadside at Microsoft – and then had CEO Satya Nadella pop up on the video screen to greet SuiteWorld attendees. In fact, NetSuite and Microsoft will be working together a lot more closely in the future…

Grazed from GovLoop. Author: Catherine Andrews.

Today, nearly every agency, department, and government sector uses cloud computing. Some use it to build more robust IT infrastructures and replace legacy systems, while others use scalable software services to increase the agility of their platforms. Of course, others also use cloud to cut costs and even increase IT security.

Cloud is quickly becoming the IT backbone of government and, as a govie, you probably use it every single day. But do you know exactly how cloud is being used? Do you know the multitude of ways it can be deployed to serve a wide variety of purposes? Do you even really know what cloud is?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

Last week at Interop and Cloud Connect, I shared a bit about how my staff and I have worked through some very natural fears about our organization expanding the production use of cloud computing. The bottom line: It’s all about communication, mutual flexibility, managing the real operating risks, dispelling irrational fears, and providing a career path forward.

As with many IT and leadership topics, the "how" matters just as much as the "what." The "how" we did it is what I focused on in my Cloud Connect slide deck, and what I explore here…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Corp currently is not weighing an offer for Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N), two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, dampening speculation that Microsoft could be drawn into bidding for the cloud software company. Bloomberg News, citing people with knowledge of the matter, reported earlier this week that Microsoft was evaluating a bid for Salesforce after the latter was approached by another unnamed would-be buyer.

Microsoft considers Salesforce’s current market valuation expensive, one of the people said. It is possible that Microsoft could review a bid for Salesforce in the long term, the other person said. The sources asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. Microsoft and Salesforce both declined to comment…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

ANSYS customers can now deploy consistent enterprise-specific simulation workflows and data to more engineers, regardless of geographic location or business unit with today’s launch of ANSYS 16.1 and ANSYS Enterprise Cloud. The new solution, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifies and accelerates the transition to cloud-based simulation by providing a reference architecture for end-to-end simulation that can be deployed within days – minimizing risk while boosting productivity.

Customers who adopt the ANSYS Enterprise Cloud can scale their simulation capacity – including infrastructure and software assets – on demand, in response to changing business requirements, optimizing efficiency and cost while responding to the growing demand for wider use of the technology…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

That didn’t take long. A little over a month ago, cloud company Nebula closed up shop. This week, Oracle said it’s hired 40 of Nebula’s engineers, according to Re/Code. Oracle cloud chief Peter Magnusson, a former top technologist at Google and Snapchat, told the publication that Oracle approached the group soon after news of Nebula’s demise.

It’s easy to see why. Nebula focused on OpenStack, a hot niche of open-source cloud software that many companies are looking to use in their future infrastructure. Most big companies that now run their own servers on-premises or in data centers, see cloud computing as a more flexible and possibly cheaper way to run their applications and store their data…