Like any kind of large-scale computing system deployment ever, the short answer to the question “what should my fog compute deployment look like” is going to be “it varies.” But since that’s not a particularly useful piece of information, Cisco principal engineer and systems architect Chuck Byers gave an overview on Wednesday at the 2018 Fog World Congress of the many variables, both technical and organizational, that go into the design, care and feeding of a fog computing setup.

Byers offered both general tips about the architecture of fog computing systems, as well as slightly deeper dives into the specific areas that all fog computing deployments will have to address, including different types of hardware, networking protocols, and security.

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What is an inventory management system?

An inventory management system tracks purchases, keeps count of goods and supplies in stock, and reorders supplies when levels get low. More sophisticated inventory management systems can track stock location and will even predict the optimum time to reorder supplies, drawing on a variety of data, including past sales and weather forecasts.

Inventory management systems integrate with — or may potentially replace — purchasing and sales systems, and they provide tools to reconcile stock levels calculated from purchasing and sales with real-world counts taken from warehouses via barcode scanners or RFID readers.

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You remember Chromebooks, don’t you? They’re the small, inexpensive notebooks that were supposed to seriously eat into Microsoft’s market share by showing the world that you don’t need a big operating system to get big work done — just a lightweight one to get you internet access. Devices you could buy for less than the price of a piece of software. Hardware that would finally prove to the world that there’s no need for Microsoft Office and other big, client-based software — a free copy of Google Docs would do.

Things didn’t quite turn out that way. Windows laptops are thriving, and Chromebooks are rarely used in enterprises. Microsoft Office still rules the office suite world. Microsoft has no need to worry — right?

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In a wide-ranging, free-form chat on Tuesday night in San Francisco at the 2018 Fog World Congress, legendary computing figure Steve Wozniak discussed the future of technology and its role in making the world a better place.

Taking the stage alongside the senior director of Cisco’s corporate strategic innovation group, Helder Antunes, Wozniak took the audience through his personal history with technology, from phone hacking in the late 1970s, through his up-and-down relationship with Steve Jobs and Apple, to his current role as a sort of ambassador for the good that technology can do for the world.

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Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle will reap a financial windfall by offering blockchain as a service (BaaS), a market that’s quickly growing as companies look for ways to use the distributed ledger technology without spending a lot of money.

If just 2% of servers act as blockchain nodes some day, the BaaS market would reach $7 billion, according to Bank of America research analyst Kash Rangan.

In a note to investors yesterday, Rangan named nine companies best positioned to take advantage of the BaaS movement. Along with BaaS providers Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, Rangan named IBM, Salesforce.com, and VMware as leaders in the space. He also said real-estate/mortgage companies with blockchain-based online services, such as like Redfin, Zillow, and LendingTree, will also benefit. Those services digitize the transfer of property.

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Microsoft yesterday released Windows 10 October 2018 Update, the year's second - and final - feature upgrade but will not begin pushing it onto PCs until next week.

Consumers will see the upgrade offered starting Oct. 9, the first day of automatic availability.

"If you already have a Windows 10 PC and have automatic updates enabled, the update will be delivered to you when it's ready for your machine," cautioned Jennifer Chen, a company communications manager, in a post to a company blog Tuesday.

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Office 365 subscribers always have the latest version of Microsoft Office — currently Office 2016. They also get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office 2016 without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they’re available. We’re doing this for you, so you don’t have to.

Following are key updates to Office 365 for Windows since Office 2016 was released in September 2015 — all the 2017 updates and the most important ones from 2016 and late 2015, with the latest releases shown first. We’ll add info about new updates as they’re rolled out.

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The launch of a big Windows 10 update like the October 2018 Update isn’t the end of a process — it’s really just the beginning. As soon as a major update is released, Microsoft quickly gets to work on improving it by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.

Here we’ve summarized what you need to know about every Windows 10 update being released to the public. First come updates to the currently shipping version of Windows 10 — version 1809, known as the October 2018 Update — with the most recent updates on top. (Note that the October 2018 Update is on a phased rollout, so you may not have received it yet.) Below that are updates to version 1803, known as the April 2018 Update; 1709, known as the Fall Creators Update; and finally updates to version 1703, known as the Creators Update. For each build, we’ve included the date of its initial release and a link to Microsoft’s announcement about it.

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Slack might be pinning its hopes on channels becoming the most common method of business communication, but its latest acquisition shows the continued importance of email for getting work done.

Last week, Slack touted its acquisition of Astro as a move designed to help it build out its own email management capabilities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The purchase came just ahead of the company’s Frontiers user conference in New York City, which begins today.

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I take it as an article of faith that you don’t want to install the latest version of Windows 10 right away. As we’ve seen, repeatedly, upgrading to a new version of Windows 10 as soon as it’s out leads to madness.

For almost everyone, the new features in Windows 10 version 1809, a.k.a. the October 2018 Update — new emojis, long overdue clipboard improvements, more convenient updates — just aren’t worth the bother of installing and setting up an entirely new copy of Windows. (Unless you really want Candy Crush Soda Saga installed for the umpteenth time.)

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It’s the classic Industrial IoT problem – a 40-plant network of old-school manufacturing and production lines, run digitally by 9,000 outdated programmable logic controllers running on legacy Windows industrial PCs, was having difficulty in minimizing downtime.

According to fog computing and automation startup Nebbiolo Technologies – which declined to name the client directly, saying only that it’s a “global” company – the failure of one of those Windows IPCs could result in up to six hours of downtime for said client. They wanted that time cut down to minutes.

It’s a tricky issue. If those 9,000 machines were all in a data center, you could simply virtualize the whole thing and call it a day, according to Nebbiolo’s vice president of product management, Hugo Vliegen. But it's a heterogeneous environment, with the aging computers running critical control applications for the production lines – their connections to the equipment can't simply be abstracted into the cloud or a data center.

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Many companies boast about going entirely digital, but continue to work with mountains of documents. Don't be that company.

The bulk of said documents are normally those that require signatures, like contracts, tax forms, reimbursement sheets, and — well, the list is seemingly endless, which also means that the work allocated to creating and organizing them also never stops. A simple solution? Electronic signatures or eSignatures.

Having the same legal weight as handwritten signatures, eSignatures could revolutionize the way you do business, and could potentially pave the way for more profit and innovation. And using a renowned tool like HelloSign can help ease your journey in the transition.

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Microsoft will handle Windows 10 upkeep as part of the device-as-a-service (DaaS) Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) subscription, the company said at its Ignite conference.

"We will manage all the updates that happen on this device," Nathan Mercer, a senior product marketing manager, said in a 15-minute session on MMD at last week's Ignite. "We'll manage all the Windows 10 feature updates. You'll be getting Semi-annual Channel updates for this device. We'll also be managing the Office updates and the monthly quality updates that come from Windows as well."

Those twice-annual feature upgrades and monthly security updates - as well as a host of other bug fixes for Windows that shoot out the refresh pipeline - will be delivered through Windows Update for Business (WUfB), a spin-off of the better-known Windows Update service.

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An official release candidate of PyTorch 1.0, the Python-centric deep learning framework created by Facebook, is available for developer testing. One of the most touted features of the new release is the ability to define models by writing Python code that can be selectively accelerated—similar to how competing frameworks work.

Python’s traditional role in machine learning has been to wrap high-speed, back-end code libraries with easy-to-use, front-end syntax. Anyone who writes machine learning modules in Python quickly discovers that native Python isn’t nearly fast enough for performance-critical research work or production use.

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It’s Murphy’s Law of Data: The data you have isn’t always in the format that you need. And not all problems have to do with mistakes or gaps in the data. Sometimes you’ve got wide data that needs to be long; or long data that needs to be wide.

Let’s work on an example. Here, I’ll read in a spreadsheet of home prices in 5 U.S. metro areas: Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and San Jose (which I’m calling Silicon Valley). More specifically, data about home prices every two years, when all cities started with an index of 100 in 1995. This data runs from 2000 to 2018.

Here’s a look at the spreadsheet:

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As today's workforce grows more fragmented and scattered, companies are scrambling to find ever-better ways to keep employees connected so they can collaborate easily on work. 

Given the rise of remote offices, flexible hours and corporate globalization, that's not always easy. And that conundrum helps explain the rise of Slack five years ago and – more recently – Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Workplace by Facebook and a variety of other options.

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In the first half of this JavaWorld introduction to Apache Kafka, you developed a couple of small-scale producer/consumer applications using Kafka. From these exercises you should be familiar with the basics of the Apache Kafka messaging system. In this second half, you'll learn how to use partitions to distribute load and scale your application horizontally, handling up to millions of messages per day. You'll also learn how Kafka uses message offsets to track and manage complex message processing, and how to protect your Apache Kafka messaging system against failure should a consumer go down. We'll develop the example application from Part 1 for both publish-subscribe and point-to-point use cases.

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When the big data movement started it was mostly focused on batch processing. Distributed data storage and querying tools like MapReduce, Hive, and Pig were all designed to process data in batches rather than continuously. Businesses would run multiple jobs every night to extract data from a database, then analyze, transform, and eventually store the data. More recently enterprises have discovered the power of analyzing and processing data and events as they happen, not just once every few hours. Most traditional messaging systems don't scale up to handle big data in realtime, however. So engineers at LinkedIn built and open-sourced Apache Kafka: a distributed messaging framework that meets the demands of big data by scaling on commodity hardware.

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