Republican presidential candidate and former tech-executive Carly Fiorina has called on Apple and Google to provide greater access to information about their users to the FBI and law enforcement in order to aid investigations.
Computer languages have a strange shelf life. The most popular among them experience explosive growth driven by herding behavior akin to that of the fashion industry. But when they fade from the spotlight, something odd happens. Instead of disappearing like a pop song or parachute pants, they live on and on and on and on. The impetus behind this quasi-immortality? It's often cheaper to maintain old code than to rewrite it in the latest, trendiest language.
Nearly every company in the world has thousands of vulnerabilities that hackers can easily exploit. For anyone working in IT, this is not a bombshell announcement. It's business as usual.
A camera-equipped drone carrying a bottle marked with the radioactive symbol was discovered on the roof of the Japanese prime minister's office in central Tokyo on Wednesday morning.
The big languages are popular for a reason: They offer a huge foundation of open source code, libraries, and frameworks that make finishing the job easier. This is the result of years of momentum in which they are chosen time and again for new projects, and expertise in their nuances grow worthwhile and plentiful.
Everyone wants faster database queries, and both SQL developers and DBAs can turn to many time-tested methods to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, no single method is foolproof or ironclad. But even if there is no right answer to tuning every query, there are plenty of proven do's and don'ts to help light the way. While some are RDBMS-specific, most of these tips apply to any relational database.
Last week I discussed design considerations for APIs, given that APIs aren't applications and shouldn't be treated as such. At small scales, APIs that come along for the ride with bulky Web frameworks might be fine, but beyond that you're asking for trouble. If you're building an API that will serve a large number of clients, your API code should be thin and tight, as well as make liberal use of caching. Otherwise, the future headaches will be crippling.
Out with the old, in with the new, as the saying goes -- but when it comes to an overhaul of one of the Internet's most fundamental protocols, what exactly is coming in with the new?
Capacity planning needs to provide answers to two questions: What are you going to need to buy in the coming year? And when are you going to need to buy it?
The chances are pretty good that you have a wireless home network, or you've been asked by friends, family or co-workers to help install one in their home.