The Treasury Department recently released a report urging state and federal regulators to revamp outdated statutes and support technological innovations such as AI, machine learning and blockchain that could make the U.S. financial system more nimble and competitive.
The 222-page report, commissioned by the Trump Administration 18 months ago, focused on non-bank financial services firms, such as credit lending, servicing organizations and payments networks, as well as fintech companies – tech vendors focused on innovation.
To read this article in full, please click here

Oracle has developed an open source specification for transmitting tensor data, which the company wants to become a standard for machine learning.
Called GraphPipe, the specification provides a protocol for network data transmission. GraphPipe is intended to bring the efficiency of a binary, memory-mapped format while being simple and light on dependencies. There also are clients and servers for deploying and querying machine learning models from any framework.
It includes:
A set of flatbuffer definitions. Flatbuffers are similar to Google protocol buffers, with an additional benefit of avoiding memory copy during deserialization. Flatbuffer definitions provide a request message that includes input, tensors, input names, and output names. Guidelines for serving models. Examples of serving models from various machine learning frameworks. Client libraries for querying models served through GraphPipe. Clients are available for Python, Go, and Java. There’s a plugin for Google’s TensorFlo..

Oracle has developed an open source specification for transmitting tensor data, which the company wants to become a standard for machine learning.
Called GraphPipe, the specification provides a protocol for network data transmission. GraphPipe is intended to bring the efficiency of a binary, memory-mapped format while being simple and light on dependencies. There also are clients and servers for deploying and querying machine learning models from any framework.
It includes:
A set of flatbuffer definitions. Flatbuffers are similar to Google protocol buffers, with an additional benefit of avoiding memory copy during deserialization. Flatbuffer definitions provide a request message that includes input, tensors, input names, and output names. Guidelines for serving models. Examples of serving models from various machine learning frameworks. Client libraries for querying models served through GraphPipe. Clients are available for Python, Go, and Java. There’s a plugin for Google’s TensorFlo..

Microsoft may have fixed July’s horrible, no good, very bad patches. Although the initial documentation for this month’s patches included warnings about many of the bugs that persisted from July, it ends up that the docs were wrong, and most of the known problems seem to be fixed.
As of early Reboot Wednesday morning, the patches seem to be behaving themselves. Of course, it frequently takes days or even weeks for bugs to appear, so you’d be well advised to avoid jumping into the unpaid battle zone for now.
To read this article in full, please click here

Like most big corporations, Apple’s financial statements always warn that currency fluctuation poses risks to its business performance — but it could mitigate such risk, perhaps with its own virtual money.
More stable than currency The problem with currency decline is that it impacts prices and revenues and can impact a company’s projected performance.
A Decluttr survey last year revealed that iPhones hold value longer than other smartphone brands. (At a stretch, you could argue that this makes them a more stable financial investment than some currencies.)
To read this article in full, please click here

More than one organization has been working on solving a major blockchain conundrum: how to improve sluggish transaction performance.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)

If you are developing a web application and you have picked Python as the language to build it in, that’s a smart move. Python’s maturity of development, robust libraries, and breadth of real-world adoption have helped make it a no-brainer for web development.
Zope2To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)

A 2018 cloud computing study by IDG Communications, InfoWorld’s parent company, has found that organizations continue to increase their investment and evolve their cloud environments to leverage the technology to drive their business forward. With 73 percent of the 550 surveyed organizations having at least one application, or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud, it is no longer a question of if organizations will adopt cloud, but how.
To read this article in full, please click here
(Insider Story)

This small IT service provider has two new customers about a hundred miles apart — and a serious barrier to serving one of them, reports a pilot fish working there.
“One of the customers had a cartridge tape unit attached to their existing system, but we couldn't read those cartridges,” fish says. “The other customer had a system with both a cartridge tape drive and an open-reel drive that handled tapes our system could read.”
Fish knows it should be possible to use the second customer's data center as a conversion facility to move data between cartridges and reels for the first customer — at least in theory.
Second customer is willing to give that arrangement a try. First customer creates a cartridge tape for a trial data-conversion test, and fish picks it up and drives to the second customer's data center.
To read this article in full, please click here

Deduplication is arguably the biggest advancement in backup technology in the last two decades. It is single-handedly responsible for enabling the shift from tape to disk for the bulk of backup data, and its popularity only increases with each passing day. Understanding the different kinds of deduplication, also known as dedupe, is important for any person looking at backup technology.
What is data deduplication? Dedupe is the identification and elimination of duplicate blocks within a dataset. It is similar to compression, which only identifies redundant blocks in a single file. Deduplication can find redundant blocks of data between files from different directories, different data types, even different servers in different locations.
To read this article in full, please click here