Biggest, fastest, occupying the most racksImage by ThinkstockThe latest Top500 supercomputer rankings are out today, to coincide with the annual SC15 conference, which is being held this year in Austin, Texas. While there are plenty of names familiar to Top500 watchers in the new top 10, there are also some new faces. Or, there would be if supercomputers had faces. Have a look.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Blue Jeans 3.0Key features: new integrations and centralized control, ROI and management tools. Specifically, Blue Jeans 3.0 will include: A refreshed and unified user interface offering new audio capabilities and one-click connections; WebRTC support for Google Chrome, including a new user interface, new audio capabilities, and usability improvements for frictionless meeting entry. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google's self-driving car had a run-in with the law this week.A Mountain View, Calif. motorcycle police officer pulled over a Google autonomous car for driving too slowly, and a photo of the roadside stop posted to Facebook by Zandr Milewski has gone viral.
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Google responded to the hubbub yesterday on its Self-Driving Car Project page on Google+.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lithium-oxygen batteries will be 10 times as energy-dense as the lithium-ion technology we're using today. It will be significantly lighter than anything we've seen to date.Why the obsession with weight reduction in batteries?Weight is an issue in vehicle battery chemistry because the heavier a vehicle is, the more power you need to propel it. Which means you need more batteries. That results in more weight, and it becomes an ever-decreasing circle.Diminishing returns
As things stand now, you can't just keep adding more powerful batteries, because they add weight and size, and actually result in that diminishing return.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The OS that took over the worldImage by David Marsh/FlickrLet's just get this out of the way: this isn't the year of Linux on the desktop. That year will probably never arrive. But Linux has gotten just about everywhere else, and the Linux community can take a bow for making that happen. Android, based on the Linux kernel, is so prevalent on mobile devices that it makes the longstanding desktop quest seem irrelevant. But beyond Android there are a number of places where you can find Linux that are truly odd and intriguing, and by "places" we mean both strange devices and weird geographical locations. This slideshow will show you that it's always the year of Linux pretty much everywhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An autonomous robot was unveiled this week that can make sure that when you're hankering for Doritos, there's a bag waiting for you at the market.Simbe Robotics, based in San Francisco, announced its first product, a 30-pound robot called Tally that can move up and down a store's aisles checking inventory. The robot determines what products need restocking and send reports to workers who can add more stock. Tally also is set up to work during normal store hours, alongside employees and customers."Tally performs repetitive and laborious tasks of auditing shelves for out-of-stock items, low stock items, misplaced items, and pricing errors," the company said in a release. "Tally has the ability to audit shelves cheaper, more frequently, and significantly faster than existing processes; and with near-perfect accuracy."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Big TVImage by REUTERS/Kim Hong-JiThrough the years television has been celebrated and denounced for its influence. In 1996 the United Nations designated November 21 as World Television Day “not so much a celebration of the tool, but rather the philosophy which it represents. Television represents a symbol for communication and globalization in the contemporary world,” the UN stated. While in the US and other countries TV is decidedly high-tech, other places it is not. Reuters took a look at people watching television all over the world to celebrate World Television Day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Big TVImage by REUTERS/Kim Hong-JiThrough the years television has been celebrated and denounced for its influence. In 1996 the United Nations designated November 21 as World Television Day “not so much a celebration of the tool, but rather the philosophy which it represents. Television represents a symbol for communication and globalization in the contemporary world,” the UN stated. While in the US and other countries TV is decidedly high-tech, other places it is not. Reuters took a look at people watching television all over the world to celebrate World Television Day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I have been waiting years for Cisco Systems to refresh their popular Design Associate certification, and that day has finally come!
The new exam number is 200-310. The old exam, 640-846, features a last day to test of December 14, 2015. The great news is the new exam is live right now and you can start studying for it immediately. In order to obtain the CCDA, you do need to meet an important prerequisite. You must possess a valid CCENT or a valid CCNA Routing and Switching. Of course, you can also have any CCIE certification act as a prerequisite.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft is delivering its cloud services, including Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM Online from two new datacenter regions in Germany, in a move that aims to deflect customer concerns about access to their data by U.S. surveillance.The data centers, located in Magdeburg and Frankfurt am Main, will be unusual in that control over the data will not be with Microsoft but with Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems, which will be acting as a data trustee for Microsoft's customers' data.Access to customer data stored in these new datacenters will be under the control of T-Systems and Microsoft will not be able to access the data without the permission of customers or the data trustee, Microsoft said in a statement Wednesday. If permission is granted by the data trustee, Microsoft will access the data only under its supervision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The concept of object health is present throughout ACI. When problems are detected, an object’s health score drops from 100, with lower scores indicating greater severity. This is hierarchical, so while a port that is disconnected on a single endpoint will show a health score of 0, the fabric node containing that port may show a health score of 50, and the application containing the down endpoint may show a score of 80. This can be traced visually through the Web UI by selecting the Health view on the affected application. This makes it extremely easy to pinpoint problems on a vast fabric.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
You've undoubtedly read, or at least seen the articles talking about "comatose" servers, servers in data centers that don't do any work and just sit idle. A study from Stanford University professor Jonathan Koomey and Jon Taylor, a partner at the consulting firm Athensis Group found that up to 30% of all physical servers in data centers do nothing all day long and no one notices.This is not a new discovery; it has been around for several years. In 2008, McKinsey & Co. released a similar study, finding that up to 30% of servers in data centers were as they put it "functionally dead." The Uptime Institute issued a similar report in 2012, finding around 30% of servers to be idle and not working.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AMD is in the hot seat again. This time it’s not about company earnings, but AMD’s marketing claims about the power of its Bulldozer CPU platform. In late October, one disappointed AMD buyer filed a class action lawsuit arguing that AMD’s statements about Bulldozer supporting up to eight cores were false.Tony Dickey, a resident of Alabama who brought the suit against the company, says AMD’s actions violate the consumer legal remedies act, California’s unfair competition law, false advertising, fraud, breach of express warrant, negligent misrepresentation, and unjust enrichment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Northeast blackout of 1965, which occurred 50 years ago today, was one of those “Where were you?” historical events that those who lived through it will never forget.I was at home in North Attleboro, Mass., and while only eight years old, remember the blackout vividly. About 30 million people living in Ontario, New York, New Jersey and the New England states sparing Maine were plunged into darkness for up to 13 hours.This clip from NBC News captures both the drama of evening – Cold War fears were in full force – and the primitiveness of reporting under such conditions 50 years ago.
What caused the outage? From Wikipedia:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Okta Mobility ManagementKey features: Updates include support for Android for Work, PCs, OS X, as well as private app store capabilities and a Safari iOS extension. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
They are inescapable on the Internet. Most are awful. A few are not, so we have started publishing a selection of memes that amuse me. One every week. Here’s the archive.Pool Wi-FiImage by ImgurTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
No, hell has not frozen over, but yes Microsoft and Red Hat have announced a major partnership today.In a collaboration that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, Microsoft – the purveyor of the mainstream and proprietary Windows OS – has partnered with Red Hat, the champion of an enterprise-class iteration of Linux. And analysts say the move is good for both companies.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: You built a cloud and now they want containers? | Microsoft pumps up Azure ahead of Amazon’s big cloud conference +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hailing 15Image by NASANASA and the world cosmos community this month celebrate the International Space Station’s 15th consecutive year of humans living in its celestial lab. In those 15 years, 45 crewed expeditions -- more than 220 people from 17 countries -- have visited the station, constructed over more than 115 space flights conducted on five different types of launch vehicles. The station now measures 357 feet end-to-end and provides more livable room than a conventional six-bedroom house, NASA says. Here we take a look at life onboard and what the ISS has meant to space exploration.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas -- and, for enterprise software vendor Infor, what happens in Europe, stays in Europe.At its annual customer meeting in Paris on Tuesday, the company told European Union customers to move their data to its cloud services -- just a week after German data protection authorities told companies handling Europeans' personal information to shun U.S. service providers and keep the data at home.Infor CEO Charles Phillips said that although it's not an issue for most customers, the company can provision servers in Europe on request.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett Packard split into two companies yesterday: One is Hewlett Packard Enterprise, or HPE, which will sell infrastructure to enterprises. The other is HP Inc., which is the company’s printers and PC business.But whatever you do, don’t call the infrastructure business HP Enterprise.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Vote! Which is the better strategy? HP splitting up, or Dell buying EMC? | HP Split up: How did we get here? +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here