IT Environment & Cloud

Using cloud services within a modern IT environment is inevitable for many organisations, as the benefits of greater flexibility, agility and lower cost are proven. But CIOs need assurances they can continue to provide the same levels of service in a mixed environment of cloud and legacy IT as they have done by relying on advanced tools to manage their in-house systems.
At a roundtable debate hosted by Computer Weekly, in association with Oracle, IT leaders met to share their experiences of managing service assurance and systems performance in cloud and legacy IT environments.

Several delegates agreed that the key potential benefits of moving to a cloud-style infrastructure are:

• Chargeback – the ability to reclaim usage costs directly from users;
• Self-service – for users to turn resources on and off themselves on demand;
• Elasticity – whereby computing resources can be scaled up and down on demand.

Mozy Online Backup Open in a New Window

Mozy Online Backup

Offers online backup storage facility for home and business users. Mozy software syncs your files so that backups are secure. You can retrieve files during virus attack, hard disk crash etc.,

 

http://www.mozy.com/

Facial Recognition Lets Apps Guess Your Age

Facial Recognition Lets Apps Guess Your Age

A service offered by Face.com is almost as good as humans at judging someone's age from a photo.

Age estimated: In reality, Alec Baldwin is 53, so the estimated age range is correct. Photos of actors and models are often judged by Face.com's system be younger than they really are.
Face.com

Web users have become used to the idea that most of what they read online—whether it's Facebook comments or personal e-mails—is scanned by software that tries to serve up relevant ads. But soon online advertising companies may start serving up ads based on the age of people in photos that you're viewing on a page.
That's thanks to startup Face.com, which already offers a face-recognition service that websites or apps can use to count the number of faces in a photo, tell their gender, or match them to known individuals. Starting this week, that service will also guess the age of the faces it spots in photos and ad networks and other Web and mobile companies already have plans to use it.
"You send us a photo with a face in it, and it'll send back an estimate of their age," says Gil Hersch, CEO and cofounder of Face.com, which is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. To use the service, programmers have their software send photos to Face.com over the Internet and receive back the results of the analysis. Face.com returns an upper and lower range on the age of the face, a specific estimate, and a confidence score. A demonstration site shows the information that Face.com calculates from a photo.
"We heard from a bunch of clients that they're interested in adding age detection for a variety of applications," says Hersch. "Ad services is one." He says some ad services companies are already using the gender-detection capabilities of Face.com's technology to help choose which ads to display next to a photo.
The operators of video chat sites that pair up strangers have also expressed an interest in age detection, says Hersch. They already use Face.com's service as a kind of safety feature to ensure that people are showing video of their faces. "They're trying to match you with other chatters, and age detection could help with that," says Hersch.
Roughly 45,000 software developers are currently registered to use Face.com's service, which Hersch says processes "a few billion" photos every month.
Face.com's ability to guess age comes from training software on a collection of hundreds of thousands of photos that had been labeled by people who made their own attempts to judge the age of people in them. Face.com's software matches human guesses of the age of a face in a photo about 90 percent of the time, but the company has not compared its accuracy against the true age of people.

7 Best Programming Tools for Multicore Development

Bangalore: Multicore processors rule the modern technology with an outstanding performance and durability which is pushing the single core chips into a near history. But when it comes to programmers, developing for multiple CPU cores on a single chip can be tiresome, considering the difference between both.  According to James Reinders, Intel’s director, "your approach to getting work done can be very different when you want to be able to do it concurrently or in parallel."

To help developers in ease of transition to multicore development, there is a bunch of powerful tools available now from many companies which are compiled by Infoworld.

Intel Parallel Studio

Intel’s Parallel Studio development suite is exclusively meant for developing programs for parallel computing. The tool features a threading assistant, optimizing compiler, libraries, a memory error and thread checker, and a threading performance profiler. It enables Visual Studio C/C++ developers to take full advantage of multicore processors, enabling Windows application developers to transform legacy serial apps into software meant for multi-core systems.

The World's Most Sensitive Scale Can Weigh Single Protons

Atom, With Protons Wikimedia Commons

A group of scientists at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology have created a new scale (and process for weighing) that increases the accuracy of small-scale, um, scales to new heights. Their new scale, which uses short nanotubes at very low temperatures, was able to measure the vibration of items down to a single yoctogram, one septillionth of a gram. For some (possible helpful) scale (that word again!), a single proton weighs 1.7 yoctograms. The scale could be used in the future for medical diagnostics as well as research.