There was once a transistor salesman working in Italy for an American semiconductor company. He cycled to see his customers and could only communicate with HQ by surface mail – so quotations could take a month. He rose to be the first non-American to sit on the company’s board. Then he returned to Italy, to …

Read full article: Fable: The Cyclist

There is an oil well tucked away near where I live, whose owners are now planning to exploit in a way that may or may not bugger up the local aquifers. Just as a side-note here, I am happy to accept that fracking and acidising could be safe. But, just to prove the company owning …

Read full article: Dinosaurs beneath my feet

Fagerhult will provide its own companies with its newly acquired IoT technology but competitors like Feilo and GE have only short term assurances.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service has increased the maximum number of instances supported in a single domain to 100, which increases the maximum storage capacity per domain to 150 TB on select instance types. This allows you to store and analyze up to five times more data for large analytic workloads and to horizontally scale search applications to meet the most demanding performance needs. To request an increase beyond the default per domain limit of 20 instances, simply submit a service limit increase request .

You can now use Amazon Athena to query encrypted data stored in Amazon S3. You can query data that’s encrypted using Server-Side Encryption with Amazon S3-Managed Encryption Keys, Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) – Managed Keys, and Client-Side Encryption with keys managed by KMS. Amazon Athena also integrates with KMS and provides you an option to encrypt your result sets. To use this feature via the JDBC driver, you will need to download the latest version of the driver. The new JDBC driver has improved performance, support for cancelling queries and several bug fixes.

We are excited to announce a 17% price reduction for Amazon Kinesis Firehose from $0.035 per GB to $0.029 per GB of data ingested. We have also introduced a tiered pricing plan to further reduce prices by an additional 26% to as low as $0.020 per GB of data ingested when your data volume reaches certain tier. With these two changes, you can now save up to 43% in costs when loading streaming data using Amazon Kinesis Firehose. For more information, see our pricing page.

We are pleased to announce support for Host-based routing on the Application Load Balancer. Host-based routing allows you to route a request based on host field in the HTTP header. To enable you to route to multiple services or containers using domain and path, we are also increasing the numbers of rules you can create on your Application Load Balancers to 75.

You can now create charts to track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), export data from analyses as CSV files, define custom ranges when importing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and create aggregate filters for SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation, Engine) data sets. In Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition we’ve added support for AD Connector, providing another option for on-premises Active Directory connectivity. For more information, see the latest AWS Big Data Blog post on QuickSight .

As communities face challenges with long-term water scarcity and traditional sources are stressed, alternative water treatment projects are becoming more mainstream.

The Trump Administration has begun to implement promised reforms at the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with a rollback of the Obama Administration’s Waters of the U.S. rule.