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.)
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More than one organization has been working on solving a major blockchain conundrum: how to improve sluggish transaction performance.
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(Insider Story)

A crucial part of securing IT infrastructure, applications and services is asking independent white hat hackers to hack it. Hackers will try to break in regardless, so you might as well be part of the process to maximize the benefits. Unfortunately, not every company has the resources to hire a penetration testing team.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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(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.
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A mindbending new Avengers: Infinity War theory hints at Captain Marvel’s importance in the Marvel Universe’s future, and even Tony Stark’s ultimate sacrifice.

Brij Mohan Amar Rahe movie review: After confronting sexuality in Lust Stories and crime in Sacred Games, Netflix’s latest original combines both in this comedy caper.

Microsoft’s open source development tool is an important piece of the developer’s toolkit. Built using GitHub’s cross-platform Electron framework, Visual Studio Code is a full-featured development editor that supports a wide selection of languages and platforms, from the familiar C and C# to modern environments and languages like Go and Node.js, with parity between Windows, MacOS, and Linux releases.
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