OStatic

Chromebooks are Spreading Out in the Educational Market

by Sam Dean on Feb 10, 2017

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In recent months, several prominent analysts have taken aim at media reports that have allegedly miscast how well Chromebooks--portable computers based on Google's Chrome OS platform--are doing in sales terms. "There has been a ton of misreporting as many lazy reporters and bloggers have characterized this as all sales, which it wasn't, or even consumer sales, which it most assuredly was not," Stephen Baker of the NPD Group, has told Computerworld, for example.

Chromebooks are actually a fast growing part of the portable computer market, though, and Chrome OS has become an entrenched operating system. Particularly in schools, these systems are making a difference, and now Asus and Acer are out with new models focused on the educational market.

New Benchmarks Show Big Increases in Spark Graph Processing

by Sam Dean on Feb 10, 2017

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Companies focused on Big Data have remained very focused on Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley.  According to Apache, Spark can run programs up to 100 times faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, and ten times faster on disk. When crunching large data sets, those are big performance differences.

The race is also on to speed up Spark-driven workloads. Now,  Diablo Technologies and Inspur Systems have announced the release of benchmark data showcasing the benefits of the Memory1 solution for Apache Spark workloads. By increasing the cluster memory size with Memory1, Diablo and Inspur claim they were able to cut processing times for graph analytics by half or more.

Cloudera and Intel Team on Accelerating Machine Learning Workloads

by Sam Dean on Feb 09, 2017

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In recent months, countless new machine learning tools have been open sourced, including tools from tech giants such as Google. Both machine learning and AI tools tend to place tough demands on hardware resources, though. With that in mind, Cloudera has announced a jointly tested solution with Intel to advance capabilities for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

"Benchmark tests on Cloudera with Apache Spark and the newly released Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL), demonstrate the combined offering can advance machine learning performance over large data sets in less time and with less hardware," the company reports. "This helps organizations accelerate their investments in next generation predictive analytics."

Netflix Open Sources a Slack Bot for Tracking GitHub Repositories

by Sam Dean on Feb 09, 2017

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Not many organizations have the technology expertise that Netflix has, and it may come as a surprise to some people to learn that the company regularly open sources key, tested and hardened tools that it has used for years. We've reported on Netflix open sourcing a series of interesting "Monkey" cloud tools as part of its "simian army," which it has deployed as a series of satellite utilities orbiting its central cloud platform.

Now, Netflix has announced the release of HubCommander, an open source Slack bot that can track and manage GitHub repositories.

Kodi Illegal, Open Source Now a Word

by Susan Linton on Feb 09, 2017

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Seems the top story today was the arrest of five individuals for selling devices loaded up with Open Source Kodi. Apparently the kits came with add-ons that allowed users to stream pirated content. In other news, Merriam-Webster has added the word "Open Source" to its database of official words, along with 1000 others. Jonathan Terrasi described his Linux awakening and blogger Dedoimedo said the GNOME version of openSUSE 42.2 is better than Plasma, but it still doesn't redeem the mediocre release.