Since the dawn of the century, Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has been at the core of many, if not most, enterprise web-centric, service-oriented, cloud-capable computing assemblies. Lately, though, even its proponents have been asking if the venerable framework has outlived its usefulness, and is being supplanted by lighter, nimbler and simpler setups, such as containers, cloud services, or APIs. Photo: Joe McKendrick All this is happening […]
Most Popular 1 Donald Trump Is Not Too Big to Fail 2 Courageous House Progressives Raise ‘Justice and Fairness’ Objections to Certifying Trump 3 Sherrod Brown Is the First Senator to Say ‘No’ to Jeff Sessions 4 This Monday, Join Protests Across the Country to Block Trump’s Climate-Denying Cabinet Picks 5 Why Workers Everywhere Should Be Scared by Kentucky’s Assault on Unions A Fascist Original Having said […]
PICKS are stories from many sources, selected by our editors or recommended by our readers because they are important, surprising, troubling, enlightening, inspiring, or amusing. They appear on our site and in our daily newsletter. Please send suggested articles, videos, podcasts, etc. to [email protected]. Western Economist Fingers Russia as “Panama Papers” Source (Gerry) The hackers who released the huge cache of files known as the Panama Papers […]
There are two stories we can tell about US higher education. In the first, public two- and four-year colleges face increasing student service costs, 20 percent less state support than they received before the recession, and a shortfall they pass onto students, who now graduate with an average of $30,000 of debt. In the second story, those institutions have contained costs, keeping tuition increases at inflationary levels, […]
In 300 B.C., Carthage was one of the world’s largest cities with up to 700,000 people living within its walls. The Carthaginian republic was a force to be reckoned with, controlling inconceivable amounts of wealth and land all around the Mediterranean. However, just over a century later in 146 B.C., Carthage was burnt to the ground by the Romans. The destruction of Carthage was so thorough that […]
Submitted by Federico Pieraccini via Strategic-Culture.org, Understanding the objectives and logic that accompany the expansion of nations or empires is always of paramount importance in helping one draw lessons for the future In this series of four articles I intend to lay a very detailed but easily understandable foundation for describing the mechanisms that drive great powers. To succeed, one must analyze the geopolitical theories that over […]
2016 was fact-checking’s finest year [1]. No it wasn’t, it was the year of “post-truth” [2] — some preferred “post-fact” [3] — and fact-checking is a fool’s errand. The discussion about facts in journalism worldwide has rarely been as fractured and animated as it has been in 2016, so we collected 366 links, one for each day of the year, to try and make sense of what […]
Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com, On December 9, a panel of 3 judges in the Netherlands convicted Geert Wilders of incitement to discrimination, and also of insulting an ethnic group. Nonetheless, the two most recent polls show Geert Wilders, an anti-Islam, anti-migration politician far ahead of the pack. Wilders Heads Polls A quick check of Opinion Polling for the Dutch General Election, 2017 shows Wilders strongly […]
Amazon’s Echo Dot, a hands-free voice-controlled Alexa-enabled device, has enjoyed pretty rave reviews upon its release, simply because the device, a minute puck-shaped plaything, is far more capable than what its size suggests. Yes, the tiny flat cylinder sports Amazon’s proprietary voice-enabled virtual assistant Alexa, which is by and large its headline feature. It hears its owners, even when outputting loud music from its speakers, and it […]
When it emerged from stealth in 2011, MapR was an outlier in the Hadoop community. At the time, Hadoop was defined largely by two projects adapted from Google research: MapReduce, which introduced highly linear, massively parallel processing to big data, and the HDFS file system, which could accommodate data by the petabyte. And at the time, Hadoop was defined as an Apache open source platform. MapR’s message, […]
Submitted by Duane via Free Market Shooter blog, On Thursday, December 1st, Yasmin Seweid was allegedly assaulted by Trump supporters in NYC. According to BuzzFeed and the NY Daily News, the attack took place at the uptown 6 train stop at 23rd Street in midtown Manhattan. The assaliants allegedly called Seweid a terrorist, broke her bag strap, followed her when she tried to get away from them, […]
Submitted by Eric Zuesse via Strategic-Culture.org, Was the Cold War against communism, or against Russia? Russia was our ally in World War II, and we’d have a Nazi world today if 26 million Russians hadn’t died from Hitler’s bombs and attacks while Russia fought on with courage amidst desperation, finally to crush his regime. But Russia was communist, so the Cold War developed after that alliance (the Allies in […]
A new technique devised by MIT researchers can take data sets with huge numbers of variables and find approximations of them with far fewer variables. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it […]
We’ve all been warned that it is coming, but as SHTFPlan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, what is disturbing is that while technology surrounds us and *some* have concerns about privacy, most shrug at the massive amounts of data they are collecting about our lives, and the incredible level of control the system now has over each individual. This bill passed, clinging to the broadest base of “good intentions” […]
When I first moved to Mexico, I started working with a really cool organization called Palabra Radio, which is a community radio organization here in Oaxaca. I was really impressed with how communities were operating, owning, and sort of dealing with everything that comes with operating their own low power FM radio station. That gave me the idea to try and do something similar with mobile communication, […]
What are Australia’s policy options for responding to the internet threats of 2022? This question was explored in the 360° Cyber Game conducted jointly by RAND Corporation and the National Security College (NSC) at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra on Thursday. RAND has conducted two of these games before, in Washington DC and in Silicon Valley, and has written up the methodology and results in […]
NoHold, a Milpitas, California-based artificial intelligence (AI) company that pioneered chatbots in the 1990s, has launched a “quickstart” platform targeted towards small to medium size businesses (SMBs) and individuals interested in creating virtual assistants quickly, easily, and cheaply. The Sicura Quickstart platform allows SMBs and individuals to create a virtual assistant automatically by uploading word documents, tables, PDFs, and images. No programming or advanced technical skills are […]
Frank Land and Dame Stephanie Shirley unveil a plaque to mark the site of the world’s first business computer, installed 65 years ago. Photo: LEO Computers Society A plaque has been installed in Hammersmith, west London, where Lyons, the tea-shop company, ran the world’s first electronic business computer 65 years ago. Nothing remains of Cadby Hall, the two-acre site where Lyons had its head office, several bakeries, […]
The cashless society is catching up to all of us. As SHTFPlan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, Most of Europe has shifted that way, and now India is forcing the issue. In the United States, people are being acclimated to it, and may soon find that no other option is practical in the highly-digitized online world. Once that takes hold, the banksters, bureaucrats and hackers will have total […]
Don’t worry about the robots, worry about the humans. Image: iStock There’s a huge difference between the modest aims of the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning being used today, and the grand ideas of creating an artificial general intelligence that could match — and then rapidly exceed – the capabilities of a human mind As they develop, AI and machine learning will be able to […]
Authored by William Blum, originally posted at Strategic-Culture.org, On November 16, at a State Department press briefing, department spokesperson John Kirby was having one of his frequent adversarial dialogues with Gayane Chichakyan, a reporter for RT (Russia Today); this time concerning U.S. charges of Russia bombing hospitals in Syria and blocking the U.N. from delivering aid to the trapped population. When Chichakyan asked for some detail about […]
As a microcosm of the wrenches and stresses enterprise services are experiencing, Cognizant‘s week has been pretty fascinating. Last weekend Elliott Management took an activist controlling role in Cognizant, one of the most strategic services firms, with an open public letter to Cognizant’s management essentially chastising them for too much investment in the future and for not squeezing enough money out of the IT services world as […]
Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto Neural networks, machine-learning systems, predictive analytics, speech recognition, natural-language understanding and other components of what’s broadly defined as ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) are currently undergoing a boom: research is progressing apace, media attention is at an all-time high, and organisations are increasingly implementing AI solutions in pursuit of automation-driven efficiencies. The first thing to establish is what we’re not talking about, which is human-level AI […]
Government Communications Headquarters, the UK signals intelligence agency, in Cheltenham, United Kingdom. (UK Ministry of Defence). Alex Grigsby is the assistant director for the Digital and Cyberspace Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations. Two weeks ago, with much fanfare, the United Kingdom released a new strategy that sets out UK government’s approach to improving the country’s cybersecurity over the next five years. It follows the UK’s previous […]
The smart home is gaining ground, but it’s still a muddle of confusing standards, competing platforms, and gadgets that don’t do what you might expect. But the promise of products that can make your life a little easier is hard to resist, so I’m here to answer the inevitable questions that arise. Whether it’s figuring out the best connected door lock to assembling the right […]
Resident Evil 7 players will be able to transfer their saves between versions of the game bought on Xbox One and the PC Windows Store, raising questions as to whether the game will be part of Microsoft’s Xbox Play Anywhere scheme. In an article about features present in each format of the game, Dengeki (as translated by IGN Japan) reports that “the Windows Store version can share play data with […]
The viewership for Season 7 of AMC’s post-apocalyptic series The Walking Dead is considerably lower than it has been in recent seasons. As of this week’s episode, The Walking Dead’s ratings have dropped from 17 million at the Season 7 premiere down to 11 million for Episode 5, making for a 35 percent decline. Check out the graph from Wikipedia below (via EW) for an overview of […]
As night fell on June 15, volunteers at the Birstall Wellbeing Centre in West Yorkshire were preparing for their usual Wednesday group session. The centre offers Reiki healing, palm readings and holistic massage. Rebecca Walker, who opened the centre eight years ago, is haunted by that night in June. At about 6.30pm, a man in his 50s walked through the door. He was thin, on the short […]
Thanks to a new deep learning system called Caffe2Go, Facebook now lets users of its mobile app transform videos with artwork-inspired special effects in real time. The platform enables such on-the-fly style transfers by dramatically improving how efficiently artificial intelligence (AI) processes images and videos. With the help of Caffe2Go, users of Facebook’s iOS or Android app can quickly change the look of their photos or videos […]
Let’s see… “The third time is a charm,” or is it “Strike 3, you’re out!“? The final installment of this trilogy is Nissan’s competition to their own Sentra SE-R. That’s because there were basically two of these… the NX1600, which had 110 horsepower, and the NX2000, with the engine found in the SE-R. The SE-R, of course, had a trunk. Gone is the “Pulsar” name. The NX2000 gets a […]
