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Do Older Macs Need Antivirus? What You Should Know – The Mac Observer

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

Do older Macs need an antivirus? One reason you may have chosen Mac over Windows is that youve heard the old saying that Macs dont need antivirus software. However, this isnt exactly true. While there are security measures in place to protect your Mac, malicious websites and cybercriminals are typically capable of staying a step ahead of todays modern security. This is especially true when running an outdated macOS.

Citing evidence from one of Apples key employees, Ill take a look at some reasons why its a good idea to have antivirus software on your older Mac. I will also explain some of the security measures already put in place by the company. While there is native Mac malware protection, you may want a solid option that can keep up with modern cybercriminals and threats.

Yes, it is safe to use a Mac without antivirus. To an extent. The features and power of a Mac mean its not a critical necessity to use third-party antivirus software, so long as you can keep the machine up to date. Apples security updates focus on targeting specific types of malware and malicious programs to help protect you, but be aware that cybercriminals, hackers and malware makers are constantly on the hunt for an attractive target.

While Apple does its best to stay up to date on security threats and malicious software programs, cybercriminals remain vigilant in staying one step ahead. Security issues are only going to increase if you are using an older machine, as they can be susceptible to various malware types. Security patches and other built-in security features are critical security measures, and running an older Mac may prevent you from receiving certain security software.

In recent years, Apple has taken notice of malware attacks, and the companys own Craig Federighi has deemed the problem unacceptable. In May of 2021, Federighi noted that there are over 130 types of malware on Mac, with one piece of malware that had an impact on nearly 300,000 machines. Proper malware detection is crucial to dispel any potential threats, especially if you are using an older Mac.

Yes, Mac systems have built-in protections, including XProtect and Gatekeeper. Available with macOS, XProtect is antivirus software that updates regularly and automatically. XProtect will run and perform automatic scans anytime an application is opened or changes are made. Gatekeeper, on the other hand, ensures that users are running only authenticated software, ensuring that you are not running an unwanted program.

Considering these programs were released in 2009 and 2012, the likelihood that you are running a device that excludes them is low. While both are valuable pieces of software, older devices can still be victims of emerging threats. While users can try and follow their common sense by being sure to avoid suspicious links, fraudulent websites, and suspicious emails, it may not be enough in this modern age.

For those running an older Mac, a third-party antivirus solution may be just what they need. Many antivirus software options offer features and services beyond whats available in macOS, which ensures proper protection from potential threats and different types of malware.

Intego Mac Internet Security can be a third-party antivirus software alternative for those who use an older Mac. A powerful anti-virus software and a great app for malware and malware detection, Intego Mac Internet Security provides firewall protection as well. Additionally, Intego specifically works for Macs that go as far back as macOS 10.12, meaning youve got protection even for your older systems.

Intego Internet Security X9 provides real-time scanning and 24-hour protection, protecting you from strains of malware and unwanted software. Not only is it a powerful malware scanning tool thanks to VirusBarrier X9, but Internet Security subscribers also get NetBarrier X9, which protects networks and firewalls.

Going with Intego means that even older machines can still receive built-in antivirus technology and protection from different types of malware. Its a fantastic product that offers users complete control.

Intego Internet Security Block all malicious threats and use one of the most powerful Mac antivirus tools.

Another great option if youre running an older Mac is Bitdefender Internet Security, which is capable of running on macOS 10.10 and newer. A perfect choice if you are running an older Mac, Bitdefender is the most consistently rated antivirus software for 10 years running. Offering a variety of security packages, you can control how much protection you receive.

Offering a variety of services, users can get a basic virus protection plan for a good price. However, you are also able to bundle their antivirus software alongside other services, such as a VPN, password manager, parental controls, and more. A security suite packed with features, Bitdefender is a great alternative if you are using an older Mac.

From automatic updates to firewall options and a powerful antivirus tool, Bitdefender provides stellar real-time malware protection, making it a fantastic third-party option.

Bitdefender Internet Security Bring ultimate antivirus protection for your old Mac by using this trustworthy program.

If youre looking for a good third-party option or are looking for antivirus software options in general, TotalAV may be the way to go. Fighting against malicious software programs, TotalAV provides real-time malware protection, even for older Macs. Available for macOS 10.9 or higher, this anti-virus is great if you are running an older machine.

Not only can it protect you from malicious software programs by offering real-time malware protection, but it also comes with an adblocker, spy-blocker and anti-ransomware measures. Giving you a solid option for complete protection.It can be just what your old Mac needs to stay protected.

TotalAV Solve all cyber threat-related issues on your Mac with the TotalAV software.

Yes, Macs need antivirus software. However, remember that your Mac does provide its own built-in antivirus software thanks to programs like Gatekeeper and XProtect. If anything, you should be aware that there are third-party options available that not only provide powerful antivirus tools, but can extend their abilities beyond what Apple provides.

In modern times, cybercriminals are often capable of staying one step ahead. While Apple does provide Macs with virus protection and security, an older Mac is likely to need more protection against conventional threats. Do your best to keep your machine up to date, and remain vigilant when traversing the internet.

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Do Older Macs Need Antivirus? What You Should Know - The Mac Observer

Is Mojo The Fortran For AI Programming, Or More? – The Next Platform

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

When Jim Keller talks about compute engines, you listen. And when Keller name drops a programming language and AI runtime environment, as he did in a recent interview with us, you do a little research and you also keep an eye out for developments.

The name Keller dropped was Chris Lattner, who is one of the co-founders of a company called Modular AI, which has just released a software development kit for a new programming language called Mojo for Linux platforms. Lattner is probably one of the most important people in compilers since Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language in the early 1970s at AT&T Bell Labs for the original Unix. Ken Thompson created its predecessor, B, also while at Bell Labs, and interestingly now works for Google, which we might even call Ma Search, and created the Go language for system-level programming (like Kubernetes) that is like many, many languages, a derivative of C.

Every new domain has its programming languages that evolve with that domain, and every platform has its preferences, as does every programmer. And thus, the cornucopia of programming languages have evolved in that Cambrian explosion manner. This magnificent programming language genealogy tree from Wikipedia, which was created by Maximilian Drrbecker and which ends in 2008 so it is missing a bunch of stuff, gives a pretty good overview of the first couple of decades of the dominant programming languages beyond plug boards and assembler and how they relate to each other or dont. Love this:

For many of us of a certain age, the dawn of the PC era meant that BASIC was transformative in our lives because it gave us the power of programming at a price that we could afford. But no one would call it a great language for creating complex, modern applications. Even in 1985. Many of us learned FORTRAN (now less shouty as Fortran) and COBOL and got a taste of other esoteric languages ours were Pascal and Smalltalk. We talked about why Fortran persists and its skills gap problem recently.

We were too busy doing other things starting businesses and raising families to get into Java, PHP, and JavaScript, but we call these three out from the chart because they solved very specific problems in enterprise computing at the time, which is ultimately what we care about here at The Next Platform. We love theory, but we love practice more.

Java was created because C and C++ were too damned hard and an unnecessarily so in a macho kind of way for programmers in the enterprise who just want to craft business logic and not have to worry about system architecture. They wanted the ease of COBOL, RPG, and similar high level languages and they want to have the complexity of the underlying hardware things you really need to know about with C and C++ underneath a virtual machine that interprets the language and that allows for a certain degree of compilation for performance but which ensures the maximum platform portability. While some have joked that Java has the portability of C++ and the readability of assembly, it was an obvious improvement, which is why Java took off in the enterprise in application areas where performance, in an absolute sense, was not as much of a concern as programmer productivity and quick turn around on code. We had so many clock cycles and threads laying around, and you know the server makers were happy to sell machines to run this interpreted program rather than a strictly compiled one that ran like a bat out of hell on cheap iron. Still, when it comes to performance, a lot of modules of code are still written in C or C++ within a stack of Java.

PHP and JavaScript did for the front end of applications what Java did for the backend. There are others, of course.

Making such statements, we are bracing for and absolutely expecting contrarian opinions. There is nothing like talking about programming languages to bring out the prides and prejudices. Which is fun and fine. But make no mistake, and dont just listen to all of the AI whitewashing that Modular AI is doing, which helped them to raise $100 million in venture funding two weeks ago. Lattner and his Modular AI co-founder, Tim Davis, dont just want to fix AI programming. They want to fix programming. And if there are two people who can do that in a way that Dennis Ritchie with C and James Gosling with Java and Ramus Lerdorf did with Personal Home Page Lattner and Davis are those two.

Here in the third decade of the 21st century, if you asked programmers what language a newbie should learn, we think most of them would say Python, which is a language created by Guido von Rossum more than two decades ago to make it easier for programmers to do neat things.

Pythonic languages (and there are many) are not in love with their own complexity, just like languages such as BASIC, RPG, and COBOL are not. Other languages are definitely in love with their own complexity and they are macho about it. But in this era where software makes up a by-far dominant portion of the overall IT budget, we dont have time for this.

If you put a gun to the heads of most programmers and asked the same question what programming language should you learn? they would probably say C or C++ because they are universally applicable and ultimately more useful in terms of both portability and performance for both the code and their careers. In the corporate enterprise, the programmers would no doubt say Java, which is C++ playing on idealized hardware in a sense.

Lattner and Davis think this is a false dichotomy, and with Mojo they are creating a superset of Python that can do all of the same high-level stuff and can even absorb and run literal Python code in its runtime while at the same time giving Mojo the same low-level performance programming that C and C++ offer and that has given them such longevity in the market. (Maybe we can think of it as the lovechild of C++ and Python.) The Mojo runtime can do CPython code, but it can do its own stuff, too. And this is the key.

The pedigree of Mojos creators is impeccable. Lattner got a bachelors degree in computer science at the University of Portland and was a developer on the Dynix/ptx Unix variant for the big X86 NUMA boxes from Sequent Computer Systems for a while. Lattner got his masters and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after the Dot-Com Boom, and created the Low Level Virtual Machine project with his advisor, Vikram Adve. LLVM is, of course, integral to most compilers today, and it is a set of compiler tools that uses a language-independent intermediate representation that is constructed from any high-level programming language on its front end that can be targeted and compiled down to any instruction set for any kind of device on its back end. The important thing about LLVM, according to Lattner, is that it is modular and extendible through APIs the LLVM toolchain is like the non-monolithic code that programmers are trying to create, which means they can tweak it to do all sorts of things.

While at Apple, Lattner drove the development of Clang and Swift, two C-alikes, and then did a brief stint at Tesla as vice president in charge of its Autopilot software, and then moved to Google to be the senior director of the TensorFlow AI framework that Google had open sourced a few years prior.

It was at Google that Lattner met Davis, who has a bachelors degree in chemical engineering from the University of Melbourne and a law degree from Monash University in Australia as well as studying computer science at Stanford University. Davis founded his own machine learning startup, called CrowdSend, in 2011 and did the engineering for another startup called Fluc in 2013, where he spent three years before becoming a product manager in the Google advertising business in 2016. Davis joined the Google Brain team to work on TensorFlow in 2018 and was one of the creators of the TensorFlow Lite variant, and eventually became the group product leader for machine learning at the company, leading the development of machine learning APIs, compilers, and runtimes.

In September 2019, both Lattner and Davis were the tag team distinguished engineer and product manager for TensorFlow when the Multi Level Intermediate Representation, or MLIR, compiler infrastructure for heterogenous compute engines was contributed to the non-profit LLVM Foundation for which Lattner is the benevolent dictator for life. The two left Google in January 2022 to start Modular AI.

The name Modular AI is important, and not the AI part except for the fact that this is a great place to start a new programming language like Mojo. There are so many different ways to get code onto so many different kinds of compute engines that it is enough to make your stomach churn, and there is a modicum of lock-in, intended (as with Nvidias CUDA stack) or not (as with AMDs ROCm and Intels OneAPI).

The tools used to deploy AI models today are strikingly similar to compilers and tools in the 1990s and 2000s, wrote Lattner and Davis when Modular AI was unveiled back in April 2022. We see severe fragmentation across these systems, with a wide variety of hardware, each having bespoke tools. The worlds biggest tech companies have built multiple in-house toolchains specific to different hardware products over the years, and these are often incompatible and share little code. How many flaky converters and translators does one industry really need?

One should do. Ahem.

Lattner and Davis unveiled the Mojo language in May of this year,

What got us to writing about Mojo was the fact that the first software development kit, obviously for Linux, was released yesterday, with SDKs on the way for Windows and MacOS/iOS platforms coming down the pike.

Mojo itself was unveiled in May of this year, and over 120,000 developers gave come and kicked the tires on this new language and over 19,000 of them are chatting away about it on Discord and GitHub. It is illustrative to hear why Lattner and Davis created Mojo directly from them, so you should read that manifesto.

One of the big changes between Python and Mojo is that Mojo is multithreaded and can run across multiple cores, and because of this, Modular AI can show a 35,000X speedup calculating Mandelbrot sets compared to the CPython runtime in Python 3. That is a much bigger performance increase than using the PyPy variant of Python that has a just-in-time compiler and it even beats the tar out of moving the code to C++, which is neat:

To our eyes, this just shows how interpreted languages should never be left uncompiled, given the tremendous need for compute and the flattening of the cost curves thanks to the creakiness of Moores Law reductions in the cost of transistors on compute engines.

To show that the Mojo pudding has some proof, Modular AI created its own Modular Inference Engine, which can take trained AI models from TensorFlow and PyTorch machine learning frameworks, the JAX numerical function transformer, the XGBoost turbocharger for gradient descent calculation acceleration and accelerate the heck out of them and then output transformed and accelerated inference models for compute engines based on Intel and AMD X86, various Arm, and various RISC-V CPUs as well as for GPUs from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.

Here is the speedup of the Modular Inference Engine compared to TensorFlow and PyToch on various AWS instances using Intel Xeon SP, AMD Epyc, and Graviton2 instances running on Amazon Web Services:

While Modular AI is focusing its attention on the AI sector right now, there is nothing to say that Mojo cant become a true system software programming language like C and C++ has always been and unlike Java ever was. Wouldnt it be nice to have a unified way to program front-end and back-end applications? Something like what JavaScript and Node.js are trying to do in a more limited sense for applications that are focused mainly on I/O operations. With so many Python programmers in the world now, maybe this would be a good thing, and not just for AI. But apparently, just like what was good for GM was good for America in the glory days after World War II, maybe what is good for AI is good for IT.

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Is Mojo The Fortran For AI Programming, Or More? - The Next Platform

NVIDIA Partners With India Giants to Advance AI in World’s Most … – Nvidia

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

The worlds largest democracy is poised to transform itself and the world, embracing AI on an enormous scale.

Speaking with the press Friday in Bengaluru, in the context of announcements from two of Indias largest conglomerates, Reliance Industries Limited and Tata Group, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang detailed plans to bring AI technology and skills to address the worlds most populous nations greatest challenges.

I think this is going to be one of the largest AI markets in the world, said Huang, who was wrapping up a week of high-level meetings across the nation, including with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leading AI researchers, top business leaders, members of the press and the countrys 4,000-some NVIDIA employees.

The companies will work together to create an AI computing infrastructure and platforms for developing AI solutions. It will be based on NVIDIA technology like the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud.

GH200 marks a fundamental shift in computing architecture that provides exceptional performance and massive memory bandwidth, while DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud, makes it easier for enterprises to train their employees in AI technology, access the technology internally and provide generative AI services to customers.

In his exchange with more than a dozen of Indias top tech journalists following the announcement, Huang said computer science expertise is a core competency for India, and that with access to technology and capital India is poised to build AI to be able to solve challenges at home and abroad.

You have the data, you have the talent, Huang said. We are open for business and bring great expertise on building supercomputers.

During the freewheeling back and forth with the media, Huang emphasized Indias strength in information technology and the potential for AI to accelerate the development of the nations IT industry.

IT is one of your natural resources. You produce it at an incredible scale. Youre incredibly good at it. You export it all over the world, Huang said.

Earlier, after meeting with many of the regions top technology leaders including startup pioneers, AI proponents, and key players in Indias digital public infrastructure Huang hailed Indias moment, saying the nation is on the cusp of becoming a global AI powerhouse.

While India has well-known technical capabilities distinguished technical universities, 2,500 engineering colleges and an estimated 1.5 million engineers many of its 1.4 billion people, located across sprawling metropolitan areas and some 650,000 villages, collectively speaking dozens of languages, have yet to fully benefit from this progress.

Applied in the Indian context, AI can help rural farmers interact via cell phones in their local language to get weather information and crop prices. It can help provide, at a massive scale, expert diagnosis of medical symptoms and imaging scans where doctors may not be immediately available. It can better predict cyclonic storms using decades of atmospheric data, enabling those at risk to more quickly evacuate and find shelter.

Reliance Industries and Tata Communications will build and operate state-of-the-art AI supercomputing data centers based on such technology, utilizing it for internal AI development and infrastructure-as-a-service for Indias AI researchers, companies and burgeoning AI startup ecosystem.

That effort, Huang said, during his conversation with the Indian technology press, promises to be part of a process that will turn India into a beacon for AI technology.

AI could be built in India, used in India, and exported from India, Huang said.

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NVIDIA Partners With India Giants to Advance AI in World's Most ... - Nvidia

U.S. should use Nvidias powerful chips as a chokepoint to force adoption of A.I. rules, DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman says – Fortune

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

One of the leading figures in A.I. wants Washington to force the rest of the world to follow its lead on regulating the new technologyand use Nvidia to do it.

Nvidias processors are key to training the large language models that power AI bots like OpenAIs ChatGPT and Googles Bard. That makes the companys products an incredibly practical chokepoint that would allow the U.S. to impose itself on all other actors in AI, Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, told the Financial Times in an interview published Friday.

In July, Inflection joined six other companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, at the White House to commit to managing AI risks. The pledges include promises to rigorously test AI models before releasing them to the public, invest in cybersecurity, and develop measures to reveal when content is AI-generated.

The U.S. should mandate that any consumer of Nvidia chips signs up to at least the voluntary commitmentsand more likely, more than that, Suleyman told the Financial Times, referring to the promises made at the White House.

Nvidia declined to comment.

In 2010, Suleyman cofounded DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2015. The companys AlphaGo program famously beat a world champion Go player in 2016.

He then left Google in early 2022, and founded a new AI company, Inflection AI, a few months later. Earlier this year, Inflection AI announced its chatbot Pi, designed to serve as a digital assistant. Inflection AI is now valued at $1.3 billion following a June funding round that included Nvidia, Microsoft, and Bill Gates.

Despite Suleymans insistence that the U.S. can set the agenda, Washington is behind its peers in Europe and China when it comes to thinking about how to regulate the new technology. Suleyman himself admitted to the Financial Times that the U.S. was falling behind, calling the odds of passing legislation very low.

The European Union is currently considering the so-called A.I. Act, which would judge the risk level of different uses of AI. Programs considered high-risk, such as those whose decisions can harm a person, will have to go through multiple rounds of testing before release. Some uses of AI, like facial recognition, could be banned entirely.

European business leaders are worried that overregulation may put Europe at a disadvantage compared to the U.S. The European Parliament is expected to pass some version of the act later this year.

Yet Suleyman praised Europe, saying it was heading in the right direction in his interview with the Financial Times.

China has also taken an early lead in setting rules on AI. Last December, regulators imposed rules on deepfake technology, barring its use for fake news and requiring a notification that an image or video was altered. Censors followed that up with regulations on generative AI last July. Chatbots need to pass a security review and uphold core socialist values, yet the rules also promise to support further innovation and do not refer to penalties for companies that breach the rules.

The lighter-than-expected rules were a boon to Chinas tech companies, with Baidu CEO Robin Li calling them more pro-innovation than regulation in an earnings call in late August. Regulators gave Baidu, along with several other Chinese tech companies, the green light to release chatbots to the public last week.

Some U.S. tech leaders have warned against stringent U.S. regulation of AI, citing a fear that it would give China a lead in the new technology.

Nvidia may not be too keen on being used as leverage for any particular agenda.

The companys chips are critical for any company working on AI. Demand for Nvidia processors helped to boost sales at its data center segment (which correlates to demand for AI) by 171% year on year for the most recent quarter.

But thats also put the company in the crosshairs of U.S. regulation, as the Biden administration tries to limit Chinas ability to develop AI.

Last September, both Nvidia and fellow chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices revealed that the U.S. barred them from selling their most advanced chips to Chinese companies.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration banned new U.S. investments into Chinese companies working on strategic technologies like semiconductors and AI. The White House is also reportedly considering further controls on chip sales to China, as well as limiting Chinese access to U.S.-based cloud computing services.

Chinese companies are now hurriedly snapping up billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips to get ahead of new controls, the Financial Times reported last month.

Nvidia makes up to 25% of its data center revenue from China, according to CFO Colette Kress on the companys earnings call in August. While the company doesnt see an immediate material impact from expanded export controls, Kress warned that restrictions in the long term will result in a permanent loss of opportunity for the U.S.

Still, the White House isnt concerned about blowback to U.S. chip companies.

The U.S. is trying to choke [Chinas] military capacity, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told NBCs Meet the Press on Sunday, following her recent visit to China.

That leaves a lot of room for companies to sell chips that are not the leading-edge, Raimondo said. Billions of dollars in sales would create revenue for American companies, which they can plow back into research and development, which allows us to lead the world in innovation, she continued.

Update, September 5, 2023: This article has been updated with a response from Nvidia.

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U.S. should use Nvidias powerful chips as a chokepoint to force adoption of A.I. rules, DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman says - Fortune

Here’s Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s public memo on Google at 25 – The Verge

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

To everyone around the world who uses our products, our employees, and our partners:

This month, Google will celebrate our 25th birthday. Its a huge privilege to reach this milestone, made possible by the people who use our products and challenge us to keep innovating, the hundreds of thousands of Googlers past and present who have given their talents to building those products, and our partners who believe in our mission as much as we do.

Its a time for some gratitude, and a moment to reflect.

Ive been thinking a lot about how far technology has come over the last 25 years and how people adapt to it. Years ago, when I was studying in the U.S., my dad who was back in India got his first email address. I was really excited to have a faster (and cheaper) way to communicate with him, so I sent a message.

And then I waitedand waited. It was two full days before I got this reply:

Dear Mr. Pichai, email received. All is well.

Perplexed by the delay and the formality, I called him up to see what happened. He told me that someone at his work had to bring up the email on their office computer, print it out, and then deliver it to him. My dad dictated a response, which the guy wrote down and eventually typed up to send back to me.

Fast forward to a few months ago: I was with my teenage son. He saw something interesting, took some quick pictures and shared them with his friends. Then they exchanged a few messages, and it all seemed faster than the time it would take me just to pull out my phone.

How I communicated with my dad all those years ago compared with how my son communicates today shows just how much change can happen across generations. Technology that takes us years to adapt to is second nature for our kids. Ideas my dad marveled at as science fiction taking a call from your watch, or telling your car to play your favorite song make my children shrug.

Those shrugs give me great hope for the future. They set a high bar for what the next generation will build and invent...and I cant wait to see what will maketheirchildren shrug, too.

An essential truth of innovation is that the moment you push the boundary of a technology, it soon goes from extraordinary to ordinary. Thats why Google has never taken our success for granted.

It all started with a search

Larry and Sergey first wrote down our mission 25 years ago: to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. They had an ambitious vision for a new kind of search engine to help people make sense of the waves of information moving online. The product they built, Google Search, went on to help billions of people around the world get answers to their questions.

For a few years, I was one of those people experiencing Google like any other user of the web. I remember feeling blown away by Googles ability to find the best answer for the most esoteric questions, from a tiny detail buried in a stores customer service page to an obscure football rule.

The questions Ive asked Google have evolved over time: How do you fix a dripping faucet? Fastest route to Stanford Hospital? Ways to calm a crying baby? And right around spring of 2003, perhaps: How to ace a Google interview? And over time, Google got much better at answering them.

Its been inspiring to see what people have done with the answers totheirquestions, be it to find health care or comfort in difficult times, learn new skills, pursue new career paths, or start new businesses. The idea that a student in rural Indonesia could access the same information as a professor at Stanford was revolutionary, and has changed lives and our world for the better. Its opened up access to education and entrepreneurship like nothing else before it, or since.

Search also laid the foundations for Google to make an economic impact beyond our own walls. Our advertising platforms and tools started out with a premise as simple as Search itself: to help businesses reach customers who were already looking for the kinds of products and services they offer. It was a platform that appealed to small businesses in particular, like the mail-order business selling lobsters that was the first to sign up. And also like Search itself, the ability for any business to advertise online has had a truly transformational impact, helping millions of businesses become part of the digital economy.

A quarter century of questions

Search is still at the core of our mission, and its still our biggest moonshot with so much more to do.

Of course, Google today is more than a search box. We have 15 Google products that each serve more than half a billion people and businesses, and six that serve more than 2 billion users each.

Like most Google searches, all those products started with a question, too. With Gmail it wasCould we offer 1 GB of storage to every person?In 2004, when Gmail launched, that volume of storage was over 100X what most other free webmail services were offering!

Then a few years later, we saw an opportunity to dramatically improve web browsers and in turn the web for people everywhere. So with Chrome we asked:Could we build a browser that made the web better, with simplicity, speed, and security at its core?Right before launch, I had my own question:Will people use this?

YouTube dared to ask:What if we gave everyone a way to share what they know with the world?And today, its become a powerful platform for learning and knowledge.

The questions have kept coming, and weve kept improving and expanding our products with new answers:What if Google Maps enabled people to see every street in the world in detail? What if we built a translation tool that allowed people to access information, and communicate in multiple languages? What if you could search and find all your old photos by simply describing what you wanted to see?

Weve also asked ourselves how we could best share our tools, breakthroughs, and infrastructure with others. Google was built in the cloud from the start, even though we only launched our Cloud business in 2008. Today, Google Cloud has become one of the top enterprise companies in the world. Partners across industries are using Google technology to improve customer support and supply chain efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint, build new applications, and get more done with AI. Like our advertising clients before them, Clouds partners are operating better, growing faster and creating jobs, with our help.

Of course, not every question we asked ended up as a success. In any 25-year journey, you take a few lumps, learn the lessons and work to do better. Remember Google Wave?

Weve also faced hard questions about our future as a company. In the 2000s it was how long can the web really last? In the 2010s, people asked if we could adapt to the era of mobile computing, and whether search was over? Each time, weve answered by coming back even stronger. Weve done this guided by a singular focus on our mission, our belief in applying deep computer science to make peoples lives better, and a healthy disregard for the impossible.

A healthy disregard for the impossible

That healthy disregard is why weve been able to take on problems others couldnt or wouldnt. There was, for example, this impossible idea of putting a powerful computer in everyones pocket, no matter their income or internet connectivity. Today, Android runs on 3 billion devices all over the world, from the latest foldables to entry-level phones. Its been at the core of our efforts to make the internet more accessible for everyone, and inspired other, transformative products. Likewise, Chromebooks made computing available to schools all over the world. And Google Pixel puts the best of our latest technology machine learning-powered cameras, speech recognition, transcription capabilities, tensor chips and more directly into peoples hands.

Which brings us to AI. Google has been investing in AI since almost the beginning. We were one of the first to use machine learning in our products, starting in the early 2000s, for spelling corrections, improving the quality of ads, and showing suggestions and recommendations.

Then, in the early 2010s, there was real excitement around deep neural networks. In 2012, a few of us went along to a demo in a meeting room near Charlies, our main campus cafe. I remember watching in awe as the Research team showed us the progress theyd made with image recognition, driven by breakthroughs in neural networks. It was the first moment I thought to myself: this is really going to change everything!

I had a similar feeling when I saw the groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research happening at DeepMind, focused on understanding the nature of intelligence. This progress deeply influenced my thinking, when I became CEO in 2015, that Google should pivot to be an AI-first company.

More questions followed.How to power this new generation of computing?So we invented Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs which provided dramatic performance improvements of 30X to 80X for machine learning over other hardware at the time, and powered the AlphaGo computer that beat the Go world champion Lee Sedol in 2016. Around the same time, we released our landmark Transformer paper in 2017, which created the neural network architecture thats the foundation for most of the generative AI and large language models today.

Many of these technology breakthroughs have led to some of our most incredible product innovations. Search results for complex queries got much more helpful because of large language models like MUM and BERT. Weve created entirely new ways for people to express what theyre looking for through voice, images, and even asking questions about what they see with multisearch. Now, generative AI is helping us reimagine our core products in exciting ways from our new Search Generative Experience (SGE), to Help Me Write in Gmail. And earlier this year, we launched Bard, an early experiment that lets people collaborate with generative AI.

My favorite moments are seeing how our products can make a difference in peoples lives: Whether its a busy parent taking a photo of their craft drawer and using Bard to inspire a rainy day project for their kids; a traveler using Lens to translate a train schedule in a foreign country; or, more profoundly, a family able to hear the voice of a man with ALS, thanks to our research on speech recognition and synthesis.

Designing products that help people at scale is both a privilege and a responsibility. People have their own questions:Can we trust these new technologies?We think deeply about how to build responsible technology from the start, whether its making sure everyones information is protected and secure, or keeping people safe from bad actors online.

This also includes engaging in the important debates about how those technologies will shape our society, and then finding the answers together. AI is a key part of this. As excited as we are about the potential of AI to benefit people and society, we understand that AI, like any early technology, poses complexities and risks. Our development and use of AI must address these risks, and help to develop the technology responsibly. The AI principles we launched in 2018 are an important part of how we do this. These principles prompt questions like:Will it be helpful to people and benefit society, or could it lead to harm in any way?They also shape our product development and AI applications, and guide us in finding solutions to emerging issues. For example, just last week we introduced SynthID, a tool for watermarking and identifying AI-generated images, which will help address an important issue around transparency. Well continue to engage with experts and the community to keep learning and improving.

Looking ahead

As we look ahead, Ive been reflecting on the commitment from our original founders letter in 2004: to develop services that improve the lives of as many people as possible to do things that matter.

With AI, we have the opportunity to do things that matter on an even larger scale.

Were just beginning to see what the next wave of technology is capable of and how quickly it can improve. One million people are already using generative AI in Google Workspace to write and create. Flood forecasting now covers places where 460+ million people live. A million researchers have used the AlphaFold database which covers 200 million predictions of protein structures, helping with advances to cut plastic pollution, tackle antibiotic resistance, fight malaria, and more. And weve demonstrated how AI can help the airline industry to decrease contrails from planes, an important tool for fighting climate change.

Still, there is so much more ahead. Over time, AI will be the biggest technological shift we see in our lifetimes. Its bigger than the shift from desktop computing to mobile, and it may be bigger than the internet itself. Its a fundamental rewiring of technology and an incredible accelerant of human ingenuity.

Making AI more helpful for everyone, and deploying it responsibly, is the most important way well deliver on our mission for the next 10 years and beyond.

And now AI will allow us, and others, to ask questions like:

How could every student have access to a personal tutor, in any language, and on any topic?

How could we enable entrepreneurs to develop new forms of clean energy?

What tools could we invent to help people design and create new products and grow new businesses?

How can fields like transportation, or agriculture, be reimagined?

How could we help communities predict and prepare for natural disasters?

As these new frontiers come into view, we have a renewed invitation to act boldly and responsibly to improve as many lives as possible, and to keep asking those big questions.

Our search for answers will drive extraordinary technology progress over the next 25 years.

And in 2048, if, somewhere in the world, a teenager looks at all weve built with AI and shrugs, well know we succeeded. And then well get back to work.

Thanks for an amazing 25,

-Sundar Pichai

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Here's Google CEO Sundar Pichai's public memo on Google at 25 - The Verge

50 programs that solve Microsoft Windows problems quickly – PCWorld

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

No matter how much experience you have with Microsofts Windows, it can still be improved by turning to software and tools that can make the operating system that much better.

Take Windows 11, for example: When Microsoft introduced it with extremely strict system requirements in autumn 2021, it was only a matter of time before those barriers could be circumvented.

In order to install the new operating system on older PCs, the registry first had to be changed manually. Later, this could be simplified with a batch file, and now even that is superfluous thanks to Rufus, a small tool for creating bootable USB sticks. Now, with just a few additional mouse clicks, you can run Windows 11 on almost any computer.

Lets start this look at helpful, dead simple Windows software with that very program, before diving deeper into several different categories.

Download the installation file for Windows 11 from Microsoft via the option Download a Windows 11 disk image (ISO).

Now insert a flash drive with at least 8GB of storage space into the computer. Start Rufus, click on Select on the interface, select the Windows 11 ISO file, and then click Start. The Customize installation dialogue then appears, giving you an option to avoid Windows 11s obligation to set up an online account. Follow the setup process until Windows 11 is installed.

This Rufus-loaded flash drive will not only reinstall Windows 11 on any PC, but also upgrade any Windows 10 installation via the setup.exe file!

If you want to move an older Windows 10 system 1:1 to a new PC, we recommend Easeus Todo Backup. With it, you create an image of your old computers storage, from which you restore your system with all settings, programs, and data on your new PC. In addition, Windows 10 can then be upgraded to Windows 11 without any problems.

To install an older Windows version for example Windows 8.1, 10, or 11 version 21H2 save it to your storage with Windows ISO Downloader and create a setup flash drive from it with Rufus.

Depending on the Windows version, the hardware and the history of the PC, you may need a product key to activate the operating system for the new installation. You can read this key on your existing system with Showkeyplus.

Reset Windows Update Tool solves various update problems: Almost 20 features are available after starting the program with administrator rights.

If you have installed several versions of Windows, Linux, or other operating systems on your computer, you can use Easy BCD to adjust the boot entries and their prioritization.

Creating a flash drive as a multiboot system for booting different live systems was a complex matter for a long time. Ventoy fundamentally changes that. With this tool, all you have to do is make the flash drive bootable by clicking on Install and then simply save the ISO files on the stick within Windows. After booting from the flash drive, you select the desired live system via the Ventoy interface. The key benefit here is you dont need to create a new bootable flash drive when a new system version appears, but simply replace the older one with the new ISO file. Another plus: You can continue to use free space on the USB stick to save and transport your data.

Glary Utilities makes both problem analysis and their elimination possible with a mouse click, everything else is done automatically by the software in the background.

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The promise of 1-click maintenance is hit or miss on the PC. The causes of possible errors are too varied and the solutions too complex. That said, Ccleaner and Glary Utilities are always worth a try. You can start the system analysis and the subsequent problem elimination with just one mouse click.

Bootracer requires a few more clicks. The program analyzes the start-up process and breaks it down into individual segments. This shows at a glance which process or autostart program has a problem. You can choose to start the boot analysis as a normal complete Windows start, or limited to the system without autostarting software. The wizards make it easy to use Bootracer, including the necessary restarts. You can see in the details where and why your start-up may take an unusually long time. These limitations help to get to the bottom of the cause or, if it makes sense, to exclude the software in question from autostarting when Windows loads.

The analysis tools Hwinfo and Speccy show whether something is wrong with your hardware. Both programs provide a wealth of information and sensor measurement data. Even more information on your processor is provided by CPU-Z and Core Temp, while GPU-Z digs deep into graphics card details. Unknown Device Identifier is helpful in identifying unknown components; the tool shows many more components than the native Windows device manager.

Memtest86 tests the main memory for errors, while Crystaldiskinfo analyzes SSDs and magnetic hard drives by reading out the SMART parameters. A look at the overall status shows whether everything is OK. The tool sounds an alarm in the event of abnormal values, which is very important for drives full of personal data.

Snappy Driver Installer recognises outdated hardware drivers and automatically updates them with the latest versions if desired.

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Snappy Driver Installer checks whether your installed hardware drivers are up-to-date. The tool starts without installation. Click on the option Download indices only and wait until the system analysis is complete. Now, if desired, activate the Restore point field. To replace all obsolete drivers, continue by clicking on Select all Install at the top left. Alternatively, check the obsolete entries individually. Due to the file sizes of some drivers, downloading and installing may take some time.

Windows Explorer and the desktop are always used on a computer even if mostly unconsciously. While Microsoft has equipped the file manager with tabs in Windows 11, you have to retrofit the file explorer tabs into Windows 10.

To do this, install Qttabbar, restart the PC, open Explorer, and click on the down arrow in the View tab under the Options symbol on the right. There, you activate the list entry Qttabbar to show the new tab bar.

The free version of Tidy Tabs allows up to three tabs in a window, across programs for example, an Excel sheet, a Word document, and Outlook. It makes it easier to view pictures with a large preview that you start and close by pressing the space bar.

Treesize Free shows you at a glance which files are eating up space on your hard drive. The already mentioned Ccleaner also offers a quick search function for duplicate files (Extras - Duplicate Finder). Other tools like Anti-Twin offer more options, but are more complicated to use.

Small intervention, big effect. Capslock Goodbye prevents you once and for all from accidentally pressing the Caps Lock key again.

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Clipboard Master can do more and is more convenient than the Windows clipboard. If youre annoyed by accidental clicks of the caps lock key, Capslock Goodbye is the tool for you. The software deactivates the key or assigns an alternative function to it. Desktop OK restores the icon placement on the desktop if it has been mixed up.

Three other programs provide more order (and more space on the hard disk): Should I Remove it shows which pre-installed software you can safely delete on new computers. O&O Appbuster makes it easier to remove Windows apps that hardly anyone needs. Unchecky prevents the secret installation of unwanted programs and toolbars. Its a godsend.

Remote help, i.e. taking over a remote computer via the Internet, is not only efficient, but also very simple with just one click in TeamViewer Quicksupport. The person who needs help starts the tool and gives his or her displayed ID and password to the helper. The helper takes care of the rest with the fully comprehensive Teamviewer software, which is also free for private use.

Changes to hard drives and partitions have a profound effect on your system and are often not easy to reset. Smaller tools can cause much less damage: Superdiskformatter, for example, allows you to change the file system (FAT32, NTFS, etc.) except for the Windows partition. Fat32formatter formats almost arbitrarily large data media as a FAT32 system, and Drive Letter Changer is used to assign fixed drive letters to USB drives.

Raidrive assigns a drive letter to cloud storage devices such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive for quick 1-click access in Explorer. To do this, select a storage service and a letter via Add, log in with your login data and allow Raidrive to access the cloud. Done!

Cloudevo combines several cloud storages under Windows into one drive. This is convenient and allows you to store even oversized files on the internet.

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Cloudevo also simplifies the handling of online storage by combining diverse cloud storage pools into a single drive with theoretically unlimited capacity. This is also possible with several free accounts from the same provider. While you as a user only see your Cloudevo drive, the service behind it automatically distributes the stored data to the various cloud storage providers.

Drive pooling with local drives, for example with several USB drives, can be done with Liquesce. Data that is too large to be sent by email can be forwarded with O&O FileDirect. The software creates an access link to your PC, which the recipient can use to transfer the shared data. Your computer must be switched on and online during the transfer.

If Windows blocks access to certain files, thus preventing deletion, renaming, or copying, Lock Hunter releases them again. You can change other permissions of folders and files with Attribute Changer.

Have I been pwned? and HPI Identity Leak Checker are not programs to install, but a simple mouse click is enough here too. Just type in your email address and youll know whether your account has been affected by one of the countless account and password hacks. If so, please be sure to change the corresponding password!

Defender UI provides a new, easier-to-use interface for all Microsoft security features than the integrated Windows Defender offers. The software contains four predefined security profiles and clearly groups together many security features and settings otherwise scattered throughout the operating system.

Virustotal Uploader simplifies the process of uploading potentially dangerous files to the Virustotal scanning platform. Instead of manually calling up the website, selecting the file. and uploading it, this free app works much faster via the Windows context menu. The browser plug-in I dont care about cookies eliminates the hassle of deselecting cookies on many websites by blocking or hiding the usual pop-up dialogues. It is best to combine the add-on with the automatic deletion of all cookies when you close your browser.

Wipe is suitable as a supplement for removing online traces. The software not only deletes browser data, but also temporary files and more.

You can securely delete data from your hard drive with Eraser: The name says it all.

Ungoogled Chromium is a special fork of the free Chromium browser, on which Google Chrome is also based. Unlike Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium does without any Google services for more privacy.

Simple Code Generator creates QR codes for private information that you wouldnt want to entrust to an online QR generator, such as mail addresses, Wi-Fi access information, Outlook or personal contacts, and the like.

Last but not least is USB-Logon. It lets you create a USB stick for fast and secure Windows logon without a password. USB-Logon is a good alternative for PCs without a Windows Hello-enabled webcam or fingerprint sensor.

The Microsoft Powertoys tool collection has grown to over 20 amazingly helpful features, many of them with (almost) one-click operation. For example, Always on top keeps any program window visible in the monitor at all times; Awake switches off the power settings for a certain time; FancyZones allows multiple windows to be easily arranged even under Windows 10; the File Explorer Add-Ons show the contents for various file formats as a large preview; and Image Resizing changes the size of photos simply via the context menu. Also via the context menu, PowerRename functions allow automatic renaming of files.

Because we had to wait so long for it, the new PowerToys feature Paste as plain text is downright ingeniously simple. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Windows-Alt-V inserts the content stored in the clipboard unformatted into any program ideal, for example, for quickly transferring web content into word processing.

This article has been translated from German to English and originally appeared on pcwelt.de.

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50 programs that solve Microsoft Windows problems quickly - PCWorld

Cloud first is deadcloud smart is whats happening now – InfoWorld

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

Hybrid cloud, meaning some on premises and some off premises, is already the default architecture for IT and has been for a while now. However, until this point, hybrid has been seen as that interim state on a journey to what many might condescendingly call cloud maturity en route to full public cloud. But now it seems IT leaders realize that hybrid may not be a transitory stateit may actually be the preferred state.

More customers are looking at hybrid as a permanent state because of the welcome flexibility it brings to IT, allowing organizations to use existing architecture in their data center while still taking advantage of clouds benefits to optimize costs and extend on-premises IT capabilities.

Hybrids popularity is also getting a boost from companies that are predominantly on premises, but eager to exploit the latest technology found in cloud models. Organizations need greater processing power as they turn to advances such as AI to help them process and analyze data faster and more efficiently. The cloud route offers enterprises a flexible and scalable way to meet these increasing processing needs without needing to invest in costly hardware, while also addressing cybersecurity concerns. This is an excellent use of public cloud.

But this isnt a transition you can navigate without careful planning. In fact, if youre too hasty, you might move things into the cloud that will leave you saddled with a negative ROI.Some companies still get tripped up by failing to do proper planning and wind up moving the wrong workloads to the cloud, forcing them to backtrack and start again from scratch.

In addition to the expense and embarrassment of an ill-advised cloud migration, organizations are left on the sidelines as data continues to grow at exponential rates. Instead of becoming more efficient and productive, theyre unable to achieve the desired business outcomes that would be the reward of a successful cloud migration and risk falling behind the competition.

Why do some migrations fail? What often happens is infrastructure teams are forced to scramble to keep up with the demands and requirements as applications get moved to the public cloud. The net result is an inefficient hodgepodge of a solution that hurts performance.

Thats because cloud projects are usually driven by software architects who often map out these projects without involvement or feedback from the organizations infrastructure architectswith predictable results. Cloud masterfully abstracts the performance-impacting nature of infrastructure realities, and software architects are all too keen to believe this apparent absence is actual absence of anything to worry about. However, that is often not the case.

The goal should always be to put the right workload with the right data into the right place. But some types of workloads are not going to work well in the cloud because they dont translate well to a microservices architecture with higher latency from network, storage, and inter-services messaging. In those instances, perhaps the best decision is to leave things as they are for some applications. As one customer once said to me, Sometimes monolithic is optimal.

Straightening this outand better optimizing hybrid cloud deployments to find the right balancerequires better communication between the infrastructure and software architecture teams. This will take some doing considering that developers have usually spearheaded cloud initiatives inside their organizations.

Theres an urgency to fix this sooner than later because hybrid cloud demand is kicking into high gear. More than three-quarters of enterprises now use two or more cloud providers, and one-third have more than 50% of their workloads in the cloud.

Further, both on-premises and public cloud investment are only expected to increase in the coming years, withGartnerpredicting that end-user spending on public cloud services will reach nearly $600 billion this year.

Hybrid cloud is a way for organizations to leverage the benefits of both public and private clouds as they move their workloads. Further, hybrid offers more options to host workloadswhether that be on premises, in a hosted private cloud, or in a public cloud. That flexibility also contributes to a more optimized IT infrastructure and lower costs as companies optimize resource allocation and improve the performance of their cloud infrastructure.

Companies also stand to reap a security bonus by being able to leverage the security benefits of public and private clouds. With private clouds, they gain more control over security. In the public cloud, they benefit from more advanced security approaches.

Many organizations are also looking at hybrid cloud to cap skyrocketing monthly public cloud bills, a challenge exacerbated by cloud sprawl, where organizations operate several different clouds for the same or similar workloads instead of matching the right workload to the right cloud. Further, the cloud storage costs associated with managing all that data add strain on corporate budgets at a time when CFOs are in no mood for financial surprises.

Pay as you go is greatprovided you understand exactly how you go. Otherwise, you may be paying for something thats different than what you intended. This is particularly true of storage, which tends to be long-lived and steadily growing, the worst of combinations for pay as you go.

So, is cloud first dead? I think for the most part it is.And its being replaced by the cloud smart movement. Cloud smart involves making the best use of cloud concepts whether they are on premises or off and fundamentally making the most rational choice of locality as part of the thinking.

A cloud smart architectural approach is essential because it enables enterprises to optimize their on-premises IT infrastructure and leverage the benefits of the cloud as well. With cloud smart architecture, enterprises can design and deploy highly available, scalable, and resilient solutions that have cloud operating characteristics to adapt to their changing business needs.

After the initial rush to public cloud, this belated dose of reality is a positive. It reflects the recognition that there needs to be a smarter balance right between what's on premises vs. what's in the public cloud. Knowing how to strike the right balancewith the understanding that not every application is meant for the cloudcan ensure that you optimize performance, reliability, and cost, driving better long-term outcomes for your organization.

Bharti Patel is SVP, head of engineering at Hitachi Vantara, leading the companys cutting-edge data and infrastructure product offerings.

New Tech Forum provides a venue to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all inquiries tonewtechforum@infoworld.com.

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Cloud first is deadcloud smart is whats happening now - InfoWorld

Uganda: Experts Say Cloud Storage Is the Future – AllAfrica – Top Africa News

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

Technology keeps evolving and with each update comes a better way to perform a task.

One of the innovations is cloud computing technology, which allows individuals and businesses access to certain data or services in a location separate from end users.

Cloud storage has grown increasingly popular among businesses that need larger storage space and seeking an efficient off-site data backup solution.

Huawei Technologies among others is one of the most recognized cloud service providers in

Uganda.

In 2022, Ethan Bampaire, the team lead at Klark.io, a product of Campaignity Technologies was among the selected beneficiaries to get Huawei's cloud tech offer.

The company creates content, social media advertising, gets leads, and builds AI technologies to convert sales for their business-to-business SME clients.

"We do all this and more on our Klark platform which is hosted in the cloud," he told the media.

. With hefty server costs reduced, Bampaire says they can think about other things.

"We are experimenting a bit more such as with Artificial Intelligence (AI) for optimized operations. We can also increase the random access memory (RAM) and disk space for optimal operation," he said.

The company had also suffered downtime though not as severe as to cause client complaints.

The Huawei cloud, however, is mainly appreciated by developers on the back end due to higher speeds, resulting in greater capacity, and a more flexible platform.

"We delved into some manual processes such as Open AI which did not depend on a third party. With Huawei, they are faster which boosts our research and development arm," Ethan added.

Early this year, David Kombe of Bluss Tech, a web application building company was among the selected companies to get an offer from Huawei Cloud.

Blue Streams Solution first interfaced with Huawei Technologies during the National ICT Job Fair 2022 that was at Makerere University through that interaction, they were able to be among the selected companies to get a good Huawei cloud offer.

While the small-scale tech company was not unaware of the technology, it relied on other cloud providers whose costs were higher.

Kombe said the technology company transferred all their services to Huawei servers which has allowed them to build capacity resulting in more clients.

Opportunities in cloud

Cloud computing helps businesses stay at the forefront of technology without making large investments in purchasing, maintaining, and servicing equipment.

Cloud computing technology gives users access to storage, files, software, and servers through internet-connected devices which include computers, smartphones, tablets, and wearables.

Some of the technologies offered include infrastructure as a service (IaaS), communication as a service (CaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).

Users shift to cloud services

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) can benefit significantly from cloud technologies due to its various advantages.

Elijah Mwesigwa, the IT and cloud solutions specialist at Huawei Technologies, said cloud is crucial because most SMEs have brilliant economy-advancing ideas but few resources to invest in their business.

"Building and maintaining a physical data centre is very costly and often relies on the capital expenditure model. This is where one buys servers based on estimates, which may be over, or underestimated. With cloud, that is dealt with as cloud payments are based on need. Therefore, cloud gives businesses more power to think about business advancement as it handles the operation end," he said.

Cloud services allow SMEs to easily scale up or down their resources based on business needs. "This flexibility is particularly beneficial for businesses with fluctuating demands or growth," Nabukenya Beatrice, a cloud services engineer at NITA-U stated.

According to the expert from NITA-U, cloud services can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, enabling employees to work remotely or on the go which enhances collaboration and improves productivity.

Cloud services providers handled system updates, security patches, and

maintenance tasks whereas with a physical setting, an SME will need a systems administrator to create a

recovery database that could also get corrupted.

"Cloud providers offer robust data backup and recovery mechanisms, ensuring that critical business data is safe and can be restored in the event of a disaster or data loss,"Nabukenya added.

Technological advancement

With recent technological advancements, the transport sector has the potential to witness significant breakthroughs that can revolutionize the way people move goods and services.

With Uganda's economy and population experiencing steady growth, government has been pushed to invest significantly in new infrastructure, particularly roads to accelerate socio- economic development.

As the demand for efficient transportation solutions continues to rise, the need for digitization in Kampala's transport sector has become increasingly evident.

According to a recent report, the fast-growing capital city has seen an influx of commuters and passengers relying on buses and commuter taxis for daily travel, making it imperative to adopt modern technologies to streamline operations and improve customer experience.

Digitalisation and the shift away from internal combustion engines emerge as two megatrends shaping the future of transportation and mobility.

The driving licence, motor vehicle registration, and related services are all digitised.

In developed countries and dynamic emerging markets such as China, digitisation of the transport sector is in advanced stages.

Digitalisation is becoming increasingly crucial for modern modes of transport, enabling coordinated traffic management systems, remote ticketing, and booking for metro and long-haul services.

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In the context of digitisation, tech startups such as Kacyber play a crucial role in streamlining and improving the efficiency of public transportation in Uganda.

Kacyber offers digital ticketing solutions for buses and Uganda Railways Corporation commuter trains, helping to manage transactions and data storage for millions of passengers.

The company's exponential data growth underscores the need for cloud services and data collocation to support its expansion and ensure smooth operations.

Innocent Orikiriza, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Kacyber, recently revealed that on average, a single bus in Uganda issues about 90 passenger tickets daily of which their tech support system is required to store this data for some time due to monetary regulations.

Therefore, with the increasing data generation and storage requirements, the need for cloud services has become eminent for Kacyber to flourish.

However, being a tech startup, Kacyber faces financial constraints to afford such extensive storage facilities.

Recently, they received a proposal from Huawei, a technology company providing a timely and welcome solution.

Huawei's storage services will allow Kacyber to manage its data efficiently, ensuring a seamless and scalable business expansion.

Digitisation not only streamlines operations, but also contributes to cost savings and accountability in the transport sector.

However, according to experts, a national cloud infrastructure is necessary to support data storage and encourage widespread digitization across various industries and sectors for instance transport.

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Uganda: Experts Say Cloud Storage Is the Future - AllAfrica - Top Africa News

How to Turn an Old PC Into NAS – GameCrate

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

If youve been on the Internet for any time at all, youre probably aware that you can repurpose an old PC into an at-home server or NAS, which is shorthand for network attached storage. But when so many ready-made solutions exist, why would you? And how exactly do you turn an old PC into a NAS machine anyway?

To help you get started and understand what you can do with your old PC to transform it to a NAS, well go over all of that and more.

Purpose-built NAS solutions are great if you just want something quick and easy to use. But using an old PC as a NAS server offers a few advantages over a pre-built solution.

Its Cheaper If you already have an old PC lying around, then of course its cheaper to use than a dedicated NAS solution. But even if you dont, you can pick up an old workstationlike a Dell OptiPlex 9020for dirt cheap. Then, just add software and drives (discussed below) and youre done!

Greater Flexibility Repurposing an old PC to use as a NAS server allows you the modularity of a PC, both in terms of software and hardware. Want to add faster networking, a GPU for media transcoding, or additional SATA ports for more drives? Simply slot in an appropriate PCIe card. Plus, if you outgrow your old PC NAS solution, you can always build your own NAS/media server and bring over your PCIe cards to your new build.

More Powerful A pre-built NAS computer may be easier to set up, but theyre also less powerful. You dont need a lot of CPU power to dole out files over your network, but if you also want to use something like Plex, you might find an old computer can handle the job better. For example, a Synology DS218+ might struggle to transcode on a Plex server, while an old OptiPlex 9020 (running a 4th-gen Intel processor) will handle the job with relative ease.

If you want to turn an old PC into a NAS server, then youll need to figure out which operating system you want to use. And if youre planning on installing a new operating system on the computer, youll also want to grab a flash drive for this part.

When it comes to choosing an operating system for a NAS server, youve got tons of choices. Since selecting an OS can be a deep rabbit hole, well quickly go over a few of the more popular ones and cover some advantages and disadvantages of each one.

If youre repurposing an old Windows machine, you may be happy to know that you can also use Windows for NAS purposes. You can set up the drives in the computer to be used as network drives or use third-party software like Resilio Sync to use the computer as a personal cloud.

Read more: How to manage syncing across your Windows 10 devices

The main advantage of Windows is that its easy to use. If youre already acclimated to the Windows environment, then you wont need to learn much to get your system up and running. And if your old PC already has Windows installed, you wont even need to go through the trouble of setting it up (though a fresh install is certainly a good idea).

However, for all of its ease of use, Windows is not nearly as robust of a system for NAS as other operating systems. It lacks software RAID functionality, and frequent bugs and updates can cause a bit more downtime than youd like. Also, with all the telemetry and background tasks running, it isnt as fast or efficient as the other NAS-centric OSes.

One of the most simple and effective NAS operating systems is OpenMediaVault. Being Debian-based, its known as being one of the more beginner-friendly NAS operating systems and has an incredible range of hardware support.

Its also rather robust. Not only is it fairly capable out of the box, but it also has tons of official and third-party plugins available. In fact, the only real knock against it is that it might lack some support and polish that other NAS OSes have.

Another excellent choice for running your new old-PC-turned-NAS computer is UnRAID. Like OpenMediaVault, UnRAID is easy to set up and use, and works excellently as a NAS OS. In fact, theres a ton of overlap between the two.

One of the notable advantages of UnRAID is that it functions like a Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) system, in that it doesnt stripe or mirror drives. Rather, it spreads files across drives with even parity and offers fault protection to guard against data loss. Unlike a standard RAID array, this makes adding disks to your NAS much easier, since you wont need to add multiple drives at a time in order to increase your NAS capacity.

Of course, there are some downsides to UnRAID compared to other alternatives. First, when drives are added to a standard RAID array, you usually see a performance increase. But with UnRAID, the additional overhead of adding a drive can actually cause a small performance hit.

Other than performance issues, UnRAID does have a drive limit of 30 drives in a single instance. For most, this shouldnt be an issue, but it is a limitation nonetheless. And finally, UnRAID is a paid operating system, so if you arent prepared to shell out money for an OS, then you might want to look elsewhere.

If youre looking for a powerful, fully-featured NAS OS, then you might consider TrueNAS. Formerly split between two versions (FreeNAS and TrueNAS), TrueNAS has rebranded itself and split into three editions: TrueNAS Core, TrueNAS Enterprise, and TrueNAS Scale.

You can find a comparison between the three here. But to sum up the differences, TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Scale are free, community-driven operating systems (with Scale also receiving professional support) that are hardware-agnostic. TrueNAS Enterprise, however, is a paid version limited to iXsystems hardware only.

TrueNAS is a staple among NAS administrators, providing features like bit-rot detection and correction, multi-level encryption, and support for a range of cloud providers. TrueNAS also uses the OpenZFS file system, a powerful open-source file system that combines speed and protection against data corruption.

Of course, TrueNAS isnt completely without fault. Because its a more robust operating system than other NAS OSes, it does require more powerful hardware. And because TrueNAS Core is based on FreeBSD, it doesnt have the widest range of hardware support (though TrueNAS Scale is based on Debian and may mitigate this issue).

Intel X520-DA1,10Gb PCI-E NIC Network Card

As mentioned before, you can always upgrade your hardware to accommodate your needs. Well go over a few different types of hardware you can add to your old PC to help increase its functionality as a NAS server.

Intel X520-DA1,10Gb PCI-E NIC Network Card

Depending on your setup, your computers network interface could bottleneck the performance of your NAS, leading to slower file transfers and network streaming. By adding a faster PCIe network card, you can easily increase your NAS network throughput.

BMW expands its deal with Amazon Web Services to include … – The Verge

September 11, 2023 | Author: admin

BMW says it will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud software to manage data from its autonomous vehicles.

The company has a preexisting deal with AWS to handle data from its connected cars. Now, the German automaker is expanding that deal to include data from its next-generation advanced driver-assist system (ADAS), which is partly powered by Qualcomms Snapdragon Ride Vision platform.

Generative artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, machine learning, and storage capabilities

BMW says AWS will help provide cloud storage from data related to generative artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, machine learning, and storage capabilities to help accelerate the delivery of highly automated BMW vehicles.

The AWS software will be integrated intoBMWs Neue Klasse platformfor its future lineup of electric vehicles, due out in 2025. This platform will process roughly triple the volume of vehicle data compared to the current generation of BMW models, the company says.

Driver-assist features, like adaptive cruise control, parking assist, and partially automated highway driving, create tons of data from engineering teams to process and analyze for future updates and improvements.

For example, the platform provides the framework needed to process, catalog, and store millions of miles of real-time driving data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Engineers and data scientists can then search, identify, and visualize relevant driving scenes to develop and train models using Amazon SageMaker, AWSs service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models in the cloud and on the edge.

BMWs Neue Klasse vehicles will have significantly expanded brain power over existing models. The onboard computer will be able to process 20 to 30 times the data volume of previous models or around double the amount of data that was previously possible. This will enable a greater fusion of the vehicles sensors, which will help enable higher levels of autonomous driving. The companys iDrive driver-assist feature is designed to support both Level 2 and Level 3 autonomous driving systems.

Advanced driver-assistance systems, defined as Level 2 by the Society of Automotive Engineers, include lane keeping, blind spot detection, automatic emergency braking, and adaptive cruise control. Most major automakers include some version of advanced driver assistance in their vehicles today. Level 3 refers to highly automated driving, also called conditional automation, where the driver still needs to be able to take over the vehicle upon request.

See the article here:
BMW expands its deal with Amazon Web Services to include ... - The Verge

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