科技新闻

As the coronavirus pandemic builds, businesses are already reeling from the economic impact. Here's how IT can adjust to a new reality of cost trimming and budget cuts.

Companies have scattered to the wind, once-formidable armies of workers enclosed in glass buildings now sundered, each employee at his or her own outpost, whether kitchen table, home office desk or lap in a quasi-quiet corner. IDG Special Report: Dealing with the Downturn 7 tips for coping with a limited IT budget (CIO) Where to look for cost savings in the cloud (InfoWorld) 5 tips for navigating supplier relationships in an economic downturn (CIO) How businesses can save money when everyone needs Office to work from home (Computerworld) 10 SD-WAN features you're probably not using, but should be (Network World) Flinging employees off the workplace carousel may have been as simple as a single "Go home" order, but ensuring that those workers can do their work from home and be productive at it (or even partially productive), takes work - a lot of work.To read this article in full, please click here

This developer who’s responsible for a daily report to the managers at a semiconductor manufacturing site decides to put together a process to automatically send out the report every weekday at 8 a.m., reports a pilot fish on the scene.The report does show up in managers’ inboxes pretty reliably, although there are occasional problems. When that happens, the developer gets a call and the report shows up.But eventually, in a business downturn, the developer is laid off.And starting the very next week, the report fails to appear in managers’ mailboxes.Fish and his colleagues aren’t sure what’s wrong, so they start looking for the automated process to generate the report.To read this article in full, please click here

It’s amazing how the tech community has come together to create resources for people now working from home and staying connected during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft has published a helpful how-to guide to build a crisis management communication site and created a way for SharePoint admins to easily provision the site design in your own tenant from the lookbook.To read this article in full, please click here

Disclaimer:  Most of the companies mentioned are clients of the author.With the impact of COVID-19, sales of laptops – particularly Chromebooks for education – have been going vertical, and several OEMs are reporting shortages. But the most common clamshell design goes back to the early 1990s, well before recent advances in processor technology, GPUs, memory, storage, operating systems, displays and even battery formulations.  We keep playing with different variants like the coming Microsoft Surface Neo, but they still fall well short of what you might have expected to evolve in the last 30 or so years. To read this article in full, please click here

Slack plans to integrate Microsoft Teams calling features into its own popular collaboration app, further enhancing available connections between the rival platforms. “We’re working on Teams integrations for calling features,” Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield said during a call with a financial analyst on Thursday, according to CNBC.Details about the integration, including an expected timeframe for availability, were not immediately available. To read this article in full, please click here

As IT pros around the world go all-out to support a workforce that's suddenly fully remote, many technology workers and companies are also joining efforts to alleviate the COVID-19 crisis in various ways, including developing products to combat the virus, tracking and predicting its spread, and protecting hospitals from cyberattacks.New York's technology SWAT teams New York officials are pulling together "Technology SWAT teams" as the state struggles to deal with COVID-19 outbreak."New York State is launching technology driven products with leading global tech companies to accelerate and amplify our response to COVID-19," the state said on its official website. "We are looking for impactful solutions and skilled tech employees to help. Individuals from leading global technology companies are being deployed across high-impact and urgent coronavirus response activities."To read this article in full, please click here

The “Apple will switch to ARM” story continues with TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s latest claim that Macs will begin the migration to Apple’s own ARM-based processors starting in 2021.Not one Mac, but many If the report is correct (which his claims often seem to be), the iPhone maker will introduce both desktop and notebook Macs equipped with its new processor starting in 2021.To read this article in full, please click here

The “Apple will switch to ARM” story continues with TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s latest claim that Macs will begin the migration to Apple’s own ARM-based processors starting in 2021.Not one Mac, but many If the report is correct (which Kuo's claims often seem to be), the iPhone maker will introduce both desktop and notebook Macs equipped with its new processor next year. To read this article in full, please click here

Pilot fish works for a health care organization that's looking for ways to cut costs and boost efficiency using IT — and there are some obvious targets.“One particular area where I felt we could make some gains involved the reports from outlying clinics,” says fish. “They were transmitted in files to a secure FTP server, and then employees would print out the files and enter the information into three different systems manually.”The organization has already bought a package that’s capable of receiving the reports, parsing them and feeding data to the three systems. In fact, the transmission can all be done through secure connections to the remote clinics systems — no more FTP required.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft’s next Windows 10 feature update, code-named 20H1, is coming very soon. We don’t know exactly when it will be released or what its official name will be, but its version number will be 2004.Windows 10 November 2019 UpdateWindows 10 October 2018 UpdateWindows 10 April 2018 UpdateWindows 10 Fall Creators Update (October 2018)To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

Google today said it will resume Chrome releases in two weeks and plans to make good on the multi-week suspension by skipping a version.Chrome 81, the upgrade that was previously slated for a March 17 debut, will instead launch in two weeks, on April 7.In the meantime, Chrome 80 will receive at least one more update - at some point next week, Google said - with fixes for vulnerabilities and what the search firm called "critical" issues. Releases of the Beta, Dev and Canary channels, which contain builds of decreasing polish and stability, either have already resumed or will this week.Google suspended Chrome releases on March 18, citing "adjusted work schedules" but clearly blaming the COVID-19 pandemic and its massive overturning of business and personal conduct.To read this article in full, please click here

Deciding when to upgrade business technology is never easy. You have to consider which pricing and deployment model is right for your business and how disruptive a new solution might be to employees. But you also must balance those concerns against the risk of opportunities lost because of older equipment and applications that are more vulnerable to cyberattacks and can inhibit productivity because of degraded performance or growing inefficiency.Outdated technology may even cost you your most valuable resource: People. Employees have come to expect workplace technologies that are easy to access from anywhere. A study by Unisys found that employees who work at organizations with legacy (read: outdated) technology are 75% more likely to be frustrated than their counterparts who work for companies that embrace new technology. The outcome? Legacy tech workers are 136% more likely to feel less productive and are 450% more likely to quit.To read this article in full, please click here

There’s never been a better time to explore a career in computer and network security. It’s exciting, professionals are in demand, and it’s lucrative too. In fact, you can earn salaries well in the six-figure range with just a bit of experience under your belt. And you don’t even need a full college degree to be successful either. You can get by with a little hard work and a certificate or two, like the kind you could earn after completing The Complete Cybersecurity Certification Training Bundle.To read this article in full, please click here

Apple’s 2020 iPhone launch plans seem to have been undermined by coronavirus, with both its anticipated smartphone launches delayed, possibly for months.Hey Siri, what on earth is happening? If everything had gone according to plan (it didn’t), Apple was expected to introduce an iPhone 9 in March and the first 5G-enabled iPhone 12 in September.To read this article in full, please click here