A "revolutionary" app enabling people to send and receive money just by using mobile phone numbers is to be made available to consumers across the UK. The Barclays Pingit allows users to send and receive cash to anyone with a UK current account and mobile phone number, without having to share bank details. Read more - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/banking/9085826/Barclays-launches-mobile-phone-money-transfer-app.html
Pay attention where you leave your security blueprints as these may end up stolen at some train station! Actually, this has happened to a French defence contractor who was carrying blueprints of a drone aircraft being developed jointly by France and United Kingdom. No informatics strategies or high-tech tools were used in this incident! Read the full story here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/24/drone_doc_theft_security_flap/
Amazon is working with the German University – Freie Universitat on the Plat_Forms contest of this year which will focus on cloud computing and scalability. The German contest has been going on a yearly basis since 2007, and it is based on a set of given requirements rather than allowing programmers to participate with all kinds of applications! But they can use different technology platforms such as, Java EE, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby. Prizes include AWS credits from Amazon, apart from those provided by the contest itself. The challenge includes a web-based application, with challenging Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements such as number of concurrent users it needs to support, guaranteed response times, fault tolerance, etc. Read more - https://www.plat-forms.org/platforms-2012-announcement
Microsoft has released an update that resolves an issue with VIA multi-core CPUs. Windows Thin PC allows users to repurposing existing PCs as thin clients. It enables customers to repurpose existing PCs as thin clients by providing a smaller footprint, locked down version of Windows 7. This provides organizations with significant benefits such as, reduced end point costs for VDI, excellent thin client experience using an enterprise ready platform. Microsoft recommends you to use Windows Thin PC to: • Help reduce the costs of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) while providing a rich remote desktop experience. • Help improved security with locked-down PCs and take advantage of existing management resources Get the update from here - http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28758
Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 on April 8th, 2014 which means that after this date, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates. Microsoft recommends users and organizations to migrate to the latest systems and is providing a Deployment Toolkit to accelerate and automate deployments of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2008, and Microsoft Office products. To download the toolkit and read more about the deployment process go here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd407791.aspx