8 ways Lollipop 5.0 reinvents Android

Enhanced security, improved architecture, extensive APIs -- bold changes make Android 5.0 better for business

Android 5.0 Lollipop heralds a new era for the operating system, one aimed at unifying the Android experience across devices and built with business use squarely in mind. While iOS may have enjoyed early darling status in the enterprise, expect business organizations to take Android much more seriously going forward, thanks to a raft of significant improvements, an extensive set of new developer APIs, and clear signals that Google intends to lead the Android ecosystem more intentionally than ever before.

Acer Aspire Switch 10 flips the price tag

If you're looking for a bargain-basement, light-duty Windows 8.1 machine, the Switch 10 is a solid choice

While it's easy to find shortcomings with this 10.1-inch, Windows 8.1 touch tablet with detachable swing-around keyboard, the price can't be beat. With 2GB of memory and a 32GB solid-state drive, the base SW5-011 unit lists for $380, but you can get it online from several well-known hardware vendors for $300. At that price, it's worth a second look.

Microsoft brings Docker CLI to Windows

The Windows CLI brings Microsoft closer to full Docker container support, but many more pieces must still click into place

Will Docker ever run natively on Windows? Eventually, yes -- but despite Microsoft's steps in that direction, the road ahead remains long.

As part of the recent announcement of close collaboration between Microsoft and Docker, Microsoft contributed code back to the Docker client application to get it running on Windows. The result is a Docker CLI that can run on Windows machines. However, it's only useful for managing Docker on Linux systems -- Windows lacks the underlying components needed to run Docker natively.

Splice Machine 1.0 offers speedy, scalable SQL on Hadoop

Splice Machine update offers cross-integration with Hadoop apps and supports migration paths from other databases

The concept behind Splice Machine sounds like a dare: Take the Hadoop NoSQL data store and use it to create a SQL relational database solution that can scale as easily as Hadoop.

Now, after a beta testing period that began in May, Splice Machine 1.0 is available to integrate with traditional Hadoop jobs and backed by a support program that lets enterprises migrate existing workloads from Oracle, MySQL, and other traditional databases.

SDN in action: Hands-on with Cumulus Linux

Imagine being able to manage scores of network switches as easily as scores of servers; Cumulus Linux makes it happen

The stage is set for SDN (software-defined networking) to change the way we push data through our infrastructures, with the promises of more agile network provisioning and management, as well as more affordable network hardware. But for many, the SDN concept is still amorphous. What does SDN look like in practice?

That 'paper MSCE' holds more value than you might think

A multiple-choice test can't show who's good at real admin work, but it can show who understands the product well enough to invest in

Over the years, there has been a shift away from certification being considered relevant as a measure of admins' skills. The proliferation in the late 1990s of test-only admins led to the term "paper MCSE," referring to people who passed the required exams to gain the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer but had never done actual engineering work.

MongoDB, Cassandra, and HBase -- the three NoSQL databases to watch

With so many NoSQL choices, how do you decide on one? Here’s a handy guide for narrowing your choice to three

Hadoop gets much of the big data credit, but the reality is that NoSQL databases are far more broadly deployed -- and far more broadly developed. In fact, while shopping for a Hadoop vendor is relatively straightforward, picking a NoSQL database is anything but. There are, after all, in excess of 100 NoSQL databases, as the DB-Engines database popularity ranking shows.

Which should you choose?

25 years after Lotus Notes, IBM tries to reinvent email again

IBM's Verse borrows ideas from Google's Inbox, then adds Watson-powered querying to let users tame their email

Verse email from IBM is the sort of service you'd normally associate with a scrappy startup. Its mission: Make email less of a headache -- and, if possible, deal a blow to Google and its near-total dominance of the Web-based email market for individuals and businesses.

Admins and developers: Two teams separated by a common language

The admins and developers agree on a plan for a security fix, but in the ensuing fiasco, realize they weren't on the same page at all

Two tech teams are better than one, right? Only if they communicate well. For all their shared knowledge and experience, a company's system admins and developers can't prevent a security fix from derailing when both groups heard only what they wanted from the other at the outset. 

Time to secure the Web? EFF says HTTPS can soon be the norm

Led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Let's Encrypt wants to make HTTP an oddity within a few years' time

The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday announced a certificate authority effort to clear roadblocks in transitioning the Web from the HTTP protocol to the more secure HTTPS.

The initiative, called Let's Encrypt, was assembled by EFF along with Mozilla, Cisco, Akamai, IdenTrust, and researchers at the University of Michigan, said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at EFF, in a blog post. Plans call for launching Let's Encrypt next summer, with the authority automatically issuing and managing free certificates for any website needing them.

How to get Windows 10's best new features today

Windows 9? Fuhgeddaboutit. Microsoft skipped that digit and jumped straight to Windows 10 for the next-gen version of its operating system. Revealed at a preview event on September 30, Windows 10 aims to atone for the sins of Windows 8 by wooing PC power users with a mix of compromise and outright bribery.

How to turn off automatic app updates on Android and install apps manually

As convenient as it is to have your phone automatically install app updates as they become available, there are some good reasons for wanting to install apps manually. You may want to conserve your data plan usage, for example, or you may simply want to keep tighter control over what gets installed on your Android device. Sometimes the new version of a popular app might be buggy, but there's no easy way to revert to the old one, for example.

No matter your reasoning, it’s easy enough to toggle this setting and gain more control over the app updating process.

Microsoft fixes severe 19-year-old Windows bug found in everything since Windows 95

With help from IBM, Microsoft has patched a critical Windows vulnerability that flew under the radar for nearly two decades.

The bug has existed in every version of Windows since Windows 95, and would have allowed an attacker to run code remotely when the user visits a malicious website. IBM researcher Robert Freeman described the vulnerability as “rare, ‘unicorn-like’ bug found in code that IE relies on but doesn’t necessarily belong to.”

How to encrypt sensitive data? Put it in an encrypted container

You can't effectively password-protect a folder without encrypting it. And strictly speaking, you can’t truly encrypt a folder, because a folder is not actually a container. It just looks like one to the user. The data comprising the files inside any given folder may be strewn all over the drive’s media.

But there are alternatives. You can encrypt every file in the folder. You can put the folder into an encrypted .zip archive, or into an encrypted vault.

Too much tapping? Create your own Android and iOS keyboard shortcuts

We all have a phrase, a number, or another string of text that we type over and over again: a lengthy street address, your office number, or any other common bit of data you wish would simply flow from your fingertips to your touchscreen.

You can save yourself a ton of tapping by creating your own custom keyboard shortcuts for iOS and Android devices.

No, Google Glass isn't dead

Reports of its demise are premature -- but users and developers want Google to put up or shut up

Is Google Glass dead?

That's the question bouncing around online after a report from Reuters that out of 16 Glass app developers contacted, nine had stopped work on their projects or abandoned them completely.

It didn't help that Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who is known for wearing Google Glass to major events and even the beach, showed up at a recent red carpet event without his computerized eyeglasses. Bad timing there.

How to lose customers with excessive security

If your service or product security works like a prison, don't be surprised when users and customers go elsewhere

I fired my bank last week because I got tired of getting entangled in security systems that ensured I would be unable to access my online banking for days at a time, especially when I was traveling. My local branch manager said I was hardly alone in leaving the bank, and it's a good object lesson for what happens when security becomes overkill.

AWS squares up against Google in the Docker war

Docker is too new to gain massive enterprise adoption, but Amazon joins Google in providing the technology for when that time comes

At Amazon.com's re:Invent conference last week, CTO Werner Vogels announced Amazon EC2 Container Service, which he said would squeeze the complexity out of scheduling and maintaining Docker containers. The container service itself will be free, but you'll pay for the EC2 resources used.

IBM details plans for supercomputing future

IBM is placing more accelerators, CPUs, and FPGAs at multiple layers in supercomputers

IBM plans to load future supercomputers with more co-processors and accelerators to increase computing speed and power efficiency.

Supercomputers with this new architecture could be out within the next year. The aim is to boost data processing at the storage, memory and I/O levels, said Dave Turek, vice president of technical computing for OpenPower at IBM.

That will help break down parallel computational tasks into small chunks, reducing the compute cycles required to solve problems. That's one way to overcome scaling and economic limitations of parallel computing that affect conventional computing models, Turek said.

AT&T kills the 'permacookie,' stops tracking customers' Internet usage (for now)

The mobile carrier says it was testing the tracking technology, but it didn't rule out reintroducing permacookies in the future

In recent weeks, Verizon and AT&T have been caught up in a privacy firestorm over their use of so-called "permacookies," a method of tracking what their users do while browsing the Web with the intent of sharing that data with advertisers. Verizon's permacookie program lives on, but AT&T has ceased the practice, ProPublica reported on Friday.

Can Amazon Web Services be stopped?

A deafening buzz at Amazon's AWS re:Invent show and eye-popping AWS adoption numbers signal gathering momentum

Splunk CEO Godfrey Sullivan said it in the fewest words: “Cloud is the new data center, and AWS is the best data center.”

Sullivan was part of a chorus of corporate chieftains and tech leaders singing praises to the No. 1 cloud at AWS re:Invent, which drew an estimated 13,500 attendees to Las Vegas last week. Enterprises from Johnson & Johnson to Major League Baseball to the AWS poster child, Netflix, touted their production cloud deployments. Dozens of startups, many native to AWS, explained how they’re cleverly leveraging Amazon infrastructure and services.

4 ways Docker is remaking Linux

Red Hat, Ubuntu, Suse, and CoreOS are following different paths for adopting Docker and its virtualization technology

When containers first appeared in Linux, the natural assumption was that it would be yet another of many technologies that Linux has assimilated.

But then came Docker, a novel use of containers to make apps portable and self-contained. It's set Linux vendors scrambling, both to to rethink the way containers are implemented in Linux and to see how Linux can be reworked around Docker's application-centric model. 

Here's how four major enterprise Linux distributions are readying themselves for a Docker-ized future.

Microsoft upgrades its F# functional language

Preview of F# 4.0 features runtime, compiler, and language enhancements

The F# team at Microsoft is offering a pre-release of the 4.0 version of the language, featuring core runtime and compiler improvements.

The object-oriented F# is Microsoft's entry into the burgeoning landscape of functional languages, which also features Scala, Clojure, and now even Java. Microsoft released F# code under open source license four years ago.