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Today’s topics include IBM’s new all-Flash solid-state storage for cognitive workloads, Microsoft’s Power BI Reports application for mobile devices, Alphabet’s decision to fold its drone development project to focus on high-altitude balloons to deliver Internet connectivity to remote areas of the world and the latest WordPress update to fix security issues and bugs.
On Jan. 12, IBM launched new, all-flash storage packages for midrange and large enterprises that are aimed directly at systems that deploy big data analytics for cognitive-computing applications.
These are high-end applications requiring high availability and high performance at all times. IBM said its new solid-state storage packages are built to provide the speed and reliability needed for workloads ranging from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and financial transactions to cognitive applications.
Engineered integration between IBM Storage and IBM z mainframe Systems, including co-developed software that provides data protection and remote replication, is embedded in these new systems, IBM said.
After months of tinkering Microsoft has finally announced the general availability of mobile phone-optimized Power BI reports. Enabling users to accesses the company’s cloud-based business intelligence (BI) software and analytics service on the go is the priority for Microsoft.
Last summer, the company launched customizable phone dashboards, followed by the fall release of a Power BI mobile report experience that renders well on the small screens of Apple iPhones, Android phones and Windows 10 mobile devices. With a new update to the Power BI Desktop authoring software, users can craft reports that look at home smartphone displays.
Google parent Alphabet’s semi-secret X division has quietly killed off Project Titan, a drone initiative that the company had once touted as offering a new way to deliver or boost Internet connectivity in remote or poorly served areas or in regions struck by disasters.
Members of Titan Aerospace, a drone manufacturer that Google acquired in 2014 to enable the effort, have been absorbed by X and reassigned to other projects, a spokeswoman from X said this week. The personnel changes began in 2015 and continued through early 2016, but are being reported only now.
WordPress 4.7.1 was officially released on Jan. 11, providing users of the popular open-source content management system with an incremental update fixing 62 bugs and 8 security issues.
The WordPress 4.7.1 update follows the release of WordPress 4.7 codenamed ‘Vaughan’ that debuted on Dec. 6, 2016. Just over a month since its release, WordPress 4.7 has over 16 million downloads, according to WordPress.
Those millions of users began to receive notifications yesterday that their sites were being updated. Since the WordPress 3.7 release in October 2013, the open-source CMS has provided its users with an automatic updating system for incremental releases.
The most noteworthy security fix in the WordPress 4.7.1 update is for a vulnerability that isn’t actually within WordPress’ own code, but rather in open-source code from the PHPMailer library. PHPMailer is an email creation and transfer library for PHP that is used by WordPress.