ZTE Zmax Pro: Solid-performing budget smartphone

Walking a mile in another man’s smartphone is the best way to review a smartphone. During the past 10 days, I walked the shoes of the ZTE Zmax Pro user. It was a challenging review to prepare and write because it is a great phone (priced at $99 with ZTE and Metro PCS subsidies). But how do I explain it? What follows are case study references for evaluating budget smartphones.Flagship, top tier $600 - $700 phones are easy to review. HTC, Samsung and Motorola rarely miss their mark. Every vendor in the supply chain cooperates with the phone maker—from System on a Chip (SoC) makers to plastic extrusion suppliers—to push past the specs and the build quality of the last, most recently announced flagship smartphone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 rumored to feature fast-charging capability

Just when you thought you knew everything there was to know about Apple’s upcoming iPhone 7, a new rumor claims that Apple’s next-gen iPhone will incorporate new fast-charging technology that will enable the device to get up to a full charge much more quickly than is currently possible.Sourced from Twitter user The Malignant, the iPhone 7 will reportedly support and, in turn, will presumably come with a charger that will support five volt/two amp charging, a considerable step up from the 1 amp charge that currently comes with the iPhone. #Apple according to the source (导航i世界) seems #iphone7 will support #fastcharge at least 5V2A pic.twitter.com/Lu0AqnVHudTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Salesforce snaps up analytics startup BeyondCore

Salesforce.com has acquired business intelligence and analytics startup BeyondCore, as part of its strategy to make its software more intelligent.“I am thrilled [to] announce @Salesforce has acquired @beyondcoreinc to enhance the AI capabilities of Analytics Cloud,” wrote Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a tweet on Monday.The financial terms of the deal were not not disclosed.BeyondCore in San Mateo, California, had already started integrating its product with the Salesforce platform. At the Gartner BI Summit earlier this year, the company showed off this integration, which would be part of its upcoming BeyondCore 7 release, wrote CEO Arijit Sengupta in a blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Importance of the Network Software Supply Chain

At Networking Field Day 12, we heard from a number of vendors that offered solutions to some common enterprise network problems, from management, to security, and more. However, there were a few presentations that didn’t seem directly applicable to the canonical network admin’s day-to-day. This was made clear by some comments by delegates in the room, as well as others tweeting about the presentation. Accelerating the x86 Data Plane Intel, for instance, spent a significant amount of time discussing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), which provides a different way of leveraging CPU resources for fast packet processing.

The Importance of the Network Software Supply Chain

At Networking Field Day 12, we heard from a number of vendors that offered solutions to some common enterprise network problems, from management, to security, and more.

However, there were a few presentations that didn’t seem directly applicable to the canonical network admin’s day-to-day. This was made clear by some comments by delegates in the room, as well as others tweeting about the presentation.

Accelerating the x86 Data Plane

Intel, for instance, spent a significant amount of time discussing the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), which provides a different way of leveraging CPU resources for fast packet processing.

In their presentation, Intel explained the various ways that they’ve circumvented some of the existing bottlenecks in the Linux kernel, resulting in a big performance increase for applications sending and receiving data on the network. DPDK operates in user space, meaning the traditional overhead associated with copying memory resources between user and kernel space is avoided. In addition, techniques like parallel processing and poll mode drivers (as opposed to the traditional interrupt processing model) means packet processing can be done much more efficiently, resulting in better performance.

This is all great (and as a software nerd, very interesting to me Continue reading

Software-defined storage hits the bargain rack

Some small and medium-sized businesses need fast, and flexible storage gear as much as large enterprises. The need to quickly spin up new applications, even without a storage specialist on staff, can drive those demands. The gear for doing so is gradually getting more affordable.On Monday, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise extended two of its storage product lines into more affordable territory, in one case adopting an ARM processor to help cut the cost of a system.HPE says the new systems give smaller organizations a way in on two of the hottest trends in enterprise storage: software-defined storage and flash. The former helps to line up the right storage for each application, even as a company’s demands quickly change, while the latter can give a speed boost to any type of storage arrangement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Software-defined storage hits the bargain rack

National interest is exploitation, not disclosure

Most of us agree that more accountability/transparency is needed in how the government/NSA/FBI exploits 0days. However, the EFF's positions on the topic are often absurd, which prevent our voices from being heard.

One of the EFF's long time planks is that the government should be disclosing/fixing 0days rather than exploiting them (through the NSA or FBI). As they phrase it in a recent blog post:

as described by White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, Michael Daniel: “[I]n the majority of cases, responsibly disclosing a newly discovered vulnerability is clearly in the national interest.” Other knowledgeable insiders—from former National Security Council Cybersecurity Directors Ari Schwartz and Rob Knake to President Obama’s hand-picked Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies—have also endorsed clear, public rules favoring disclosure.

The EFF isn't even paying attention to what the government said. The majority of vulnerabilities are useless to the NSA/FBI. Even powerful bugs like Heartbleed or Shellshock are useless, because they can't easily be weaponized. They can't easily be put into a point-and-shoot tool and given to cyberwarriors.

Thus, it's a tautology saying "majority of cases vulns should be disclosed". It has no bearing on the minority of bugs the NSA is interested in -- Continue reading

VMware NSX is the Networking Bridge to a Multi-Cloud Future

Across industries, the race is on to digital transformation. It’s all about business innovation and redefinition. The transformations are huge: Tesla isn’t just a car manufacturer; it’s a software business that makes cars. CITI is a software business that makes loans. GE is a software business that makes industrial equipment.

Like most of the customers we talk with, your business is also going through a transformation. Lots of change. Lots of disruption. Lots of innovation. More apps, representing more services and new business models. More lines of business empowered to make decisions about the IT they’ll use to take their innovations to market. And there’s no doubt that a huge enabler of all of this has been the cloud.

Consider what some of the leading industry pundits are predicting:

By 2019, the majority of virtual machines (VMs) will be delivered by IaaS providers.
By 2019, more than 30% of the 100 largest vendors’ new software investments will have shifted from cloud-first to cloud-only.
By 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today
By 2020, 50% of applications running Continue reading

TmaxSoft is using clear licensing to woo Oracle database users

It's no secret that Oracle's aggressive licensing tactics can be a source of considerable pain for its customers, and that's just where TmaxSoft is betting it has an edge. Not only does the company promise users of its Tibero database roughly half the license fees, it also uses a licensing model so transparent that it recently became the first to be verified by the Campaign for Clear Licensing.Tibero's price list is "a single page and very easy to understand," said Martin Thompson, chief agitator for CCL, when the verification was awarded late last year. "The prices and products are clearly set out, and there are no hidden extras that customers need to look out for.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Meeting Server simplifies collaboration

I recall my first conversation with Rowan Trollope, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Internet of Things (IoT) and applications, back in 2012. He joined Cisco to head up the companies Collaboration Business Unit, and it was clear from our first conversation that collaboration under Trollope would be markedly different than it had been.The calling card for Cisco Collaboration has always been great technology, but the usability of the products has been mediocre. So, this became one of the primary focus areas for Trollope. For example, when a user receives an invitation for a WebEx meeting, he or she used to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the email and look for a hyperlink to click. Now there’s a big button at the top of the invitation that says “Join WebEx,” making the product significantly more usable, particularly for mobile users.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA hacked? Top cyber weapons allegedly go up for auction

An anonymous group claims to have stolen hacking tools that might belong to the National Security Agency and is auctioning them off to the highest bidder.It’s a pretty bold claim, but the hackers have offered sample files, and some security researchers say they appear to contain legitimate exploits.The files were allegedly stolen from the Equation Group, a top cyberespionage team that may have links to the NSA.The Equation Group is known to use some of the most advanced malware and probably helped develop the infamous Stuxnet computer worm, according to security firm Kaspersky Lab.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA hacked? Top cyber weapons allegedly go up for auction

Worth Reading: IPv6 inside LinkedIn

Adding a new network stack requires that the security is at least equivalent to the previous IPv4 security. One approach could be to use a filter to deny all IPv6 traffic and work from there. However, once a device becomes IPv6 aware, you may break services if the device cannot reach the destination over IPv6 and the application either does not gracefully fallback to IPv4 or does not do so in a timely manner. Therefore, we took a different approach. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

The post Worth Reading: IPv6 inside LinkedIn appeared first on 'net work.

Why private clouds will suffer a long, slow death

A couple of weeks ago Amazon announced its quarterly numbers. As has been the case over the past year or so, the numbers looked good. Really good. Derided for years as a profitless company propped up by investor largesse, Amazon grew its revenues by 31 percent, from $23.9 billion to $30.4 billion, while profits leapt 832 percent, from $92 million to $857 million.Most of the profit came from AWS: on $2.88 billion in revenues, AWS reported $718 million in operating income. In Q216, AWS grew 58 percent year over year (YoY), down slightly from Q1’s 64 percent, but still healthy. As I wrote earlier this year, AWS’s curious failure to align with Amazon’s overall low-margin approach to pricing indicates that it is deliberately keeping prices high to avoid further increasing customer demand. Said another way, AWS’s growth is governed by capacity, not customer demand — which means we can expect it to continue its 50 percent growth rate for the next several years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Laptops most often stolen from most unlikely place

The rise of mobile in the enterprise has led many CIOs to become concerned about the potential for data loss due to a lost or stolen device — phones, laptops and the like lost in taxis, restaurants and hotel rooms. But a new study has found that CIOs also need to spend more time focusing on the office itself.In July of this year, Kensington, a supplier of desktop and mobile device accessories (including laptop locks), surveyed 300 U.S. IT professionals from a range of industries for its IT Security & Laptop Theft report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Laptops most often stolen from most unlikely place

Where Clinton and Trump stand on tech issues

This presidential election presents one of the clearest choices in U.S. history between two major-party candidates. But one thing has been rarely discussed: Where do the candidates stand on tech issues? Whether it’s net neutrality, investing in tech infrastructure, building an educational pipeline of tech workers, privacy or any of several other tech issues, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton take very different approaches. It’s worth looking at their varied stances. Let’s start with net neutrality. For Clinton, it’s straightforward. She supports the FCC’s rulings in favor of net neutrality. Trump opposes the concept. His primary statement on the matter came in a tweet in which he called President Obama’s support of net neutrality an “attack on the internet.” His full tweet is: “Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tim Cook’s first 5 years: Apple’s CEO on failure and why he still believes in surprises

We hear from Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company’s quarterly earnings calls, but lately the leader of Apple has been opening up in ways that non-analysts can understand. First he sat down with Fast Company, and on Monday an in-depth Washington Post interview on Cook’s 5-year anniversary as CEO offered more insight into the company’s past failures and future surprises. A lot has changed in the last five years, Cook told the Post. Steve Jobs passed away just six weeks after Cook took the reins, which came as a shock, he said. Apple expanded its product lineup after Jobs’s death, and some of those devices were conceived of and developed entirely without Jobs’s input. Apple just sold its 1 billionth iPhone, even as analysts and investors fret over the smartphone’s declining revenue. There are bigger changes in store, Cook said, though he played coy as usual.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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