Microsoft has revealed that Windows 10 will be available this summer in 190 countries and 111 languages.
“I can’t wait to see how amazing companies around the world will continue to innovate with devices running Windows 10,” wrote Terry Myerson, executive vice president of operating systems at Microsoft, on the company’s blog. “Working together, I know we can create some incredible experiences with Windows 10 that will truly delight our customers.”
Windows 10 will feature Cortana, universal apps, holograms and an IoT version.
White House wants federal sites to enforce HTTPS
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has released a draft proposal advising all federal sites and services to adopt the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
“The American people expect government websites to be secure and their interactions with those websites to be private,” said the proposal. “Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure offers the strongest privacy protection available for public Web connections with today’s Internet technology.”
The proposal would require all newly developed federal websites to deploy HTTPS. In addition, all existing federal websites and services would have to make the switch within two years.
Facebook bolsters Presto Big Data query engine
Facebook has announced dramatically improved performance, new features and larger scaling capabilities in Presto, its open-source SQL and Hadoop query engine.
Presto, a columnar SQL query engine with features such as predicate pushdown and lazy reads, is optimized for running ad hoc distributed interactive analytics queries against large data sources. Since its release in late 2013, the engine has been adopted by companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Netflix. But according to a Facebook Code blog post from software engineer and Presto creator Dain Sundstrom, Presto’s reliance on its original Hive-based Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) file format reader was holding back performance.
Facebook has announced a new Presto ORC reader optimizing Presto’s pushdown and lazy read features, which according to Sundstrom has sped up query performance by 3x, CPU time by 4x and end-to-end query latency by up to 3x in larger batch sizes.
Google awarded virtual keyboard patent
Google has been granted a patent for a touch-typing emulator that can turn any flat surface into a virtual keyboard. The patent details audio sensor technology that plugs into a smartphone or tablet on a flat surface. The user taps on the surface as if it’s a keyboard, and the audio sensors pick up the vibrations of the taps and relay them to a virtual keyboard for the user.
Red Hat releases Red Hat Developer Toolset 3.1 Beta
Red Hat has announced beta version 3.1 of its developer tools. The latest release features:
- GNU Compiler Collection 4.9.2
- Eclipse 4.4.1 with support for Java 8
- Updated packages such as GDB 7.8.2, Dyninst 8.2.1, SystemTap 2.6 and Itrace 0.7.91
The Red Hat Developer Toolset allows developers to create apps and deploy them across multiple Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions, according to the company.
