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Monday, January 20
Kickin’ It “Return of Spyfall”
(8:30 PM – 9:00 PM ET/PT)

Jack and Milton get the surprise of their lives when they are invited to join an elite team ofteenage spies that handle secret missions.

This is how Nathanael West describes a group of people in Hollywood who have gathered around a theater so they can catch a glimmer of a movie star.

The passage comes from The Day of the Locust:

The official Nintendo UK webstore has currently reduced a whole bunch of digital Nintendo 3DS and Wii U titles. You can grab the Wonderful 101 for £8.95, and a ton of other acclaimed titles. Be warned though that they are digital download codes. Whether this is a pricing error remains to be seen, as titles such as Animal Crossing: New Leaf and Pikmin 3 have reverted to their original pricing.

France’s Bouygues Telecom has effectively abandoned its program for using mobile phones as contactless payment devices, according to a report in NFC Times, a publication devoted to the relevant technology.

The report states that top executives associated with Bouygues’s near-field communications (NFC) efforts have left or are leaving the company. It says Bouygues, France’s third-largest mobile operator and a pioneer in the NFC field, will participate alongside banks and other telcos in a delayed national push for building out NFC infrastructure – making sure shops support the technology at the point of sale.

However, it says Bouygues will supply no promotion or customer support, and won’t provide “updates to the technology”. The reason for this is apparently financial – Bouygues is undergoing restructuring and is looking to cut costs – but it’s hard not to see this in a wider context.

NFC is still not a sure thing when it…

Computing requirements can fluctuate dramatically from workload to workload. Some applications need to crunch through data, while others perform more-mundane functions such as serving customer-facing web pages. Only the demands of each workload should dictate its underlying infrastructure.

Therefore, the flexibility to choose and easily manage exactly the right combination of components is critical. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to IT infrastructure. Choice matters.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the economics associated with the cloud can best be maximized through a hybrid design incorporating bare metal. Combining dedicated servers with your cloud instances can both reduce the costs of crunching data and improve performance. This may also reduce compliance and security concerns with single-tenant components in the background for your sensitive databases and multitenant cloud instances for your customer-facing front end.

Pure-play cloud services can be as limiting as they are empowering. Pure bare metal providers can slow down your…