Category: News

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Grace L. Williams.

From Oct. 27 to 29, three Microsoft (ticker: MSFT ) insiders including iconic co-founder Bill Gates sold 12,525,000 shares for $578,746,953, an average of $46.21 each. Gates’ transaction was the largest, a 10b5-1 planned sale of 12,500,000 shares for $577,601,150. Gates now directly holds 285,492,934 shares, a stake of 3.4% in Microsoft, down from 3.6%. His most recent previous transaction was on July 30 when he sold 7,589,200 shares for $331,000,000, an average of $43.62 each, also through a 10b5-1 planned sale.

Frank H. Brod, corporate vice president, finance and administration, and chief accounting officer, sold 22,000 shares for $1,007,980. Brod now directly holds 115,708 Microsoft shares. His most recent previous transaction was on July 28 when he sold 1,500 shares for $66,100, an average of $44.04 each. Maria M. Klawe, a director, sold 3,000 shares for $137,895 in her first open-market transaction. Klawe now directly holds 23,105 Microsoft shares…

Read more from the source @ http://online.barrons.com/articles/bill-gates-578m-planned-microsoft-stock-sale-1415051937?mod=rss_barrons_inside_scoop

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

OpenStack, the fast-growing open source cloud computing platform that now has the backing of more than 200 companies, is holding its semiannual developer conference in Paris this week. With over 4,500 attendees, it’s the organization’s largest event so far. While this illustrates the interest in the platform, the project is also facing a set of new challenges with its growing popularity.

During today’s keynote a number of speakers noted that the project’s six-month release cycle makes it harder for large organizations to adopt the platform. The head of BMW’s datacenter Stefan Lenz, for example, noted that too many big changes happen from release to release. "We need more stability in the future," he noted. "But that doesn’t prevent us from using it right now as it is."…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Human error is responsible for one in five data loss errors, according to the latest study from cloud provider Databarracks. The study, the fifth annual Data Health Check report, found that employee idiocy was the third most popular reason for data going missing with 18% of the vote, behind software failure (19%) and hardware failure (21%). Interestingly, corruption and theft were responsible for 15% and 7% of the poll respectively.

Yet it’s the larger companies who continue to foul up. 22% of large organisations listed human error as the main cause of data loss over the last 12 months, compared to 6% of small organisations. The report examines the cost of backup and disaster recovery. While a third (32%) of respondents spend less than half an hour on backup, a similar number (33%) take more than two hours or employ dedicated staff…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

For an industry run according to logic and rationality, at least outwardly, the tech world seems to have a surprising weakness for hype and the ‘next big thing’. Perhaps that’s because, unlike — say — in sales or HR, where innovation is defined by new management strategies, tech investment is very product driven.

Buying a new piece of hardware or software often carries the potential for a ‘disruptive’ breakthrough in productivity or some other essential business metric. Tech suppliers therefore have a vested interest in promoting their products as vigorously as possible: the level of spending on marketing and customer acquisition by some fast-growing tech companies would turn many consumer brands green with envy…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mining companies around the world are facing many challenges, such as managing unique operational complexities and staying profitable in tough economic times, under tremendous global pressures. "Cloud has long been touted as one of the Internet’s greatest success stories, revolutionising many industries by improving operations, efficiencies, accuracy and so on," says Richard Vester, director of Cloud Services at EOH. "Mining is no different, and we are seeing organisations in this sector realising the potential of cloud in transforming the industry, and slowly embarking on a cloud journey."

Vester says cloud is set to be a major driver for growth in the mining industry, which is very competitive, and deals with fixed resources. "Mining organisations who adopt cloud can look forward to vast improvements in operations and well as major returns on investments. At the same time, adopting cloud will greatly reduce general running costs."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138964:Mining-benefits-from-cloud-adoption

Grazed from TheHill. Author: Cory Bennett.

U.S. tech companies are worried a German law under debate could bar them from doing business in that country if it is approved. The bill could require companies to turn over source code and proprietary data to the German government or to private critical infrastructure companies, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

U.S. companies see the language as a way to exclude them from government contracts, given German fears over the National Surveillance Agency’s (NSA) ability to access U.S. companies’ data. Although the bill is still in draft form, it is expected to eventually pass. The measure is the latest in a long string of incidents that have U.S. businesses worrying about lost revenue overseas following the disclosures of NSA spying programs…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Patrick Moorhead.

This weekend was Formula 1 racing weekend. In my hometown, Austin Texas. Many may not believe it, but Austin is actually home to a US Formula 1 race track, and there are other international races here. Each year tens of thousands come from all around the world, representing the pinnacle of wealth, and they descend on Austin, the same town that boasts a “keep Austin weird” campaign.

As unlikely as that seems to be as a combination, it is similar to the combination of Stratus and high availability private clouds. When most think about the move to private cloud, they think about more conservative vendors like VMware VMW +1.57% and IBM IBM -0.4% leading customers down that path, but in reality, something that all of the big vendors still don’t have in their OpenStack solutions – high availability – is being delivered by Stratus, a company that cut its teeth on the idea of “always on” computing in the enterprise. Download our paper for detail on how they are making this happen…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2014/11/03/does-stratus-have-the-formula-for-success/

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Annoucement.

New research released today by CompTIA, the information technology (IT) industry association, reveals that more than 90 percent of companies are using some form of cloud computing, a clear indication that the cloud has quickly become an essential ingredient of modern IT.

CompTIA has defined four stages of cloud adoption: Experiment, Non-critical Use, Full Production and Transformed IT. Companies will move through these stages based on several factors, including technical know-how, risk tolerance and budgetary constraints.  But as users move beyond experiments and trials into more advanced applications, they’re also facing more challenges, according to CompTIA’s Fifth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Editorial Staff.

The problem with encrypting data is that sooner or later, you have to decrypt it. Keep your cloud files cryptographically scrambled using a secret key that only you possess, and it’s likely no hacker will have the codebreaking resources necessary to crack them. But as soon as you want to actually do something with those files—anything from editing a word document or querying a database of financial data—you have to unlock the data and leave it vulnerable. Homomorphic encryption, a still-mostly-theoretical advancement in the science of keeping secrets, could change that.

A homomorphic encryption scheme is a crypto system that allows computations to be performed on data without decrypting it. A homomorphically encrypted search engine, for instance, could take in encrypted search terms and compare them with an encrypted index of the web. Or a homomorphically encrypted financial database stored in the cloud would allow users to ask how much money an employee earned in the second quarter of 2013…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Divina Paredes.

Cloud computing is uniquely susceptible to the perils of myths due to the nature, confusion and hype surrounding it, says David Mitchell Smith, Gartner vice president and fellow. Myths are sometimes harmless but they do have an effect on how we approach solutions and can impede innovation, he states in a recent research paper. “Many myths are rooted in fear and misunderstanding. They can drive decisions and strategies based on fear and this leads to oversimplifications and mantras that are the real dangers.”

Even with a mostly agreed on formal definition, multiple perspectives and agendas still conspire to mystify the subject ever more. Add the incessant hype and there can be a resultant confusion that permeates IT (and beyond) today, he says. He lists some of the most “dangerous and misleading” cloud myths…