Sexting among today’s teenagers was the subject of an email string this morning that eventually took a turn down memory lane, courtesy of a long-time friend who wouldn’t make up stuff like this:
“Which reminds me of a story from 9th grade (1969 or ‘70). I was outside the high school with a couple of friends one morning before homeroom when we noticed some kind of small piece of paper falling from a second-story window. We went over and picked it up, and it wasn’t a piece of paper after all! Rather, it was a still-developing Polaroid of a kid’s (penis) with the handwritten caption, ‘(Not-to-be-named-here kid’s penis.)’ Technology really has come a long way.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you know enough about Steve Jobs, watching the new biopic Steve Jobs without bias is almost impossible. You can’t help think about Apple event keynotes, anecdotes from books about the late Apple CEO, the devices you use or have used that were guided by his vision.But try to leave all of that aside and appreciate Steve Jobs for what it is: entertainment. That’s where the movie succeeds, even as facts are fudged.Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (of The Social Network fame) constructed Steve Jobs around three major product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, the 1988 introduction of NeXT’s computer, and Jobs’s triumphant return to Apple with the iMac in 1998. Those three acts take place over 15 years of personal and professional strife in Jobs’s life, and that limited timeline by nature omits the growth he experienced both as a leader and as a person. This is a movie about Steve Jobs that doesn’t include the launch of the iPhone, what some might consider his greatest achievement, or even a mention of his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, and their three children together.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hewlett-Packard and SanDisk today announced an agreement to jointly develop "Storage Class Memory" (SCM) that could replace DRAM and would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash.The two companies will market their SCM products for use in enterprise cloud infrastructures based on HP's memristor (a revolutionary form of resistor), which it has been developing for at least five years, and SanDisk's ReRAM memory technology.The resulting non-volatile memory technology is expected to be up to 1,000 times faster while offering up to 1,000 times more endurance than flash storage, the companies said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Continuing the expansion of its AliCloud cloud computing business, Alibaba Group is setting up a second data center in Silicon Valley.The Chinese company said customers could apply from Monday for services from the data center, which will span over 10 cloud services including Elastic Compute Service, offering scalable computing services, an Analytic Database Service that provides real-time, high-concurrency online analytical processing, and a Cloud Monitor System using an open platform for the real-time monitoring of sites and servers.Alibaba did not respond to a request for more information on the new data center.The company said earlier this year that it was investing US$1 billion in its cloud computing business. It launched its first data center in Silicon Valley in March, confirming its ambitions to enter the U.S. market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell is reportedly in talks to buy all or part of enterprise storage powerhouse EMC, which would mark a bold and unexpected new chapter in the PC maker's history.A total merger would be one of the biggest deals ever in the technology industry, with EMC holding a market value of about US$50 billion. It would also bring together two of the most important vendors to enterprise IT departments. MORE ON MERGERS: 2015 Networking & IT M&A Tracker
The report about the deal Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal cited unnamed sources, and cautioned that the the companies might not finalize any agreement. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week reportedly agreed to consider the validity of two Cisco patents at issue in litigation with data center switching rival Arista Networks.The development boosted Arista stock by over 5% on Tuesday, Oct. 6, according to Bloomberg. Cisco is suing Arista for copyright and patent infringement, and is seeking an injunction on the sale of Arista products that allegedly infringe on the Cisco patents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ORLANDO --It’s not a surprise to most in IT that the info/tech world is fraught with risk, change, and disruption but most of the time all of those issues aren’t laid out in front of them in nice, neat fashion like they are at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo.There are a number of key themes echoing around the Symposium this week many having to do the smart algorithms and how that kind of technology is going to change the world forever. Another is the move to an all-digital world – a trend well underway and mostly understood by most large companies.+More on Network World: Gartner: Top 10 strategic predictions that could shake up IT+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Five years ago, almost all of the traffic in a data center moved in a North-South direction. Traffic moved from one server through the different tiers of a network, passed through the core, and then up to another server. Enabling security and application optimization services with this model was fairly simple. Put a big, honking firewall or ADC in the core of the network and all traffic would pass through these devices.However, the past few years have seen an explosion in East-West traffic, primarily driven by servers and virtual machines (VMs) talking to each other and to database systems, storage systems, and other applications in the data center. Typically, East-West traffic never passes through the core of the network, where it can have the benefit of security inspection. Also, the volume of East-West traffic is rapidly becoming a much higher percentage relative to North-South. This makes it easier for a piece of malware that may have breached an unpatched server to spread laterally. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ORLANDO – Technology is shifting to intelligent machines with a capability to reason, said IBM Chairman and CEO Virginia Rometty. These machines won't replace humans, but will augment them. It is a technology that will transform business, she said.This technology is the basis of IBM's work on Watson, its cognitive or thinking system.Rometty, interviewed Tuesday by Gartner analysts at the research firm's Symposium ITxpo, said cognitive systems understand not only data, but unstructured data, which includes images, songs, video, and then goes a step further: "They reason and they learn."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ORLANDO -- The No. 1 problem, or trend, facing IT departments today is nonstop demand, according to Gartner. As more devices connect to the Internet, the need for more computing capability, storage and networking is increasing at a rapid rate.For instance, 39 million terabytes of storage is currently deployed globally; by 2019, that figure will more than double to 89 million terabytes.The demand for data center capacity is "relentless," said David Cappuccio, and is creating problems for IT. "It's not about how many systems I have, it's how efficiently I use that resource."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As the pace of technological change in cloud data centers speeds up, the list of endeavors in cloud data centers grows longer. A sampling of that list includes Internet of Things, innovation, big data, mobile and social access, and SDN/NFV.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
HP is spearheading multivendor development of an open source network operating system for data centers in an effort to address scale, dynamic operation and vendor independence.HP is banding together with three other hardware companies and a hypervisor vendor to launch the OpenSwitch Community, which will seek community-like participation in the development of a Linux-based OpenSwitch NOS. The other participants are Intel, Broadcom, Accton and VMware.Though the community lacks a pure operating system vendor, HP says it has plenty of OS and NOS expertise to lend OpenSwitch credibility in that regard. VMware also provides software-based network virtualization and control experience through its NSX product line and developers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco pedigreesNumerous tech companies have been founded over the years by former Cisco big shots and lower-level employees, with many a venture capitalist no doubt attracted by these entrepreneurs’ Cisco pedigrees. Some of the companies have gone on to be successful on their own, others were acquired, and others just failed. Here’s a look at some of these companies (listed alphabetically).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.App 360 Appliance PLUSKey features: App 360 Appliance Plus is a turnkey solution for enterprises seeking high reliable and future-proof migration of their mission-critcal apps and servers to public and/or private clouds, with built-in data protection. App360 Appliance PLUS eliminates struggles with hardware, virtualization and cloud setup. More info.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The start of something gloriousImage by SWNS TVThere’s a common refrain in some corners of the PC enthusiast community: “May our frame rates be high and our temperatures low.” More than a mere utterance, it’s a simple, straightforward embrace of the very best that the PC has to offer. There’s a lot of power in those words—and some people truly take them to heart.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you've ever wondered just where the fiber conduits that carry our Internet traffic run, wonder no more. Researchers have created a map.Four years in the making, the map, sourced in part from public records, shows the long-haul fiber that carries Internet data around the country. Additionally, locations where multiple cables connect are shown.This kind of map has never existed before.Internet infrastructure
Not much is known about "today's physical Internet infrastructure," the researchers say.So they delved in and, through a collection of Tier-1 ISP and cable company maps combined with public records, started to construct a map of the long-haul fiber network (PDF).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking back after spending more than 30 years as a Unix systems administrator, I have to say that's it's been quite a ride.It certainly wasn't 30+ years of doing the same thing. Instead, the technology and the job have gone through incredible changes along the way. There were dramatic improvements in the hardware that I managed and always plenty of new tools to learn and use.[See also: 18 cardinal rules of systems administration ]Over the years, I went from reveling in how much work I could get done on the command line to grappling with some big issues -- troubleshooting some very complicated problems and figuring out how to best protect my employers' information assets. Along the way, I worked with some amazing individuals, got laid off (once), and learned a lot about what works and doesn't work both from a technical and a career perspective.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Making good on the promise he made earlier this year, former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch on Thursday filed a $150 million lawsuit against HP over what he called a public smear campaign against him and other Autonomy executives.“Over the past three years, HP has made many statements that were highly damaging to me and misleading to the stock market," Lynch said. "HP knew, or should have known, these statements were false."HP's ill-fated 2011 acquisition of the British software maker for $11.7 billion -- which later resulted in an $8.8 billion impairment charge -- was "doomed from the very beginning," Lynch said. "HP’s own documents, which the court will see, make clear that HP was simply incompetent in its operation of Autonomy."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
San Francisco-based startup NodePrime wants to be the proverbial single pane of glass that you use to manage your complicated, heavily virtualized data center, the company announced as it exited stealth today with a $7 million seed funding round in the books.The idea is to provide the type of infrastructure management that Google and Facebook use to manage their outsized data centers. But where Google and Facebook have to spend big on custom hardware and elite engineering talent, NodePrime wants to offer the same capabilities as a commodity.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Hottest Enterprise Network & Computing Startups of 2015To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
He said itImage by Mark GibbsThe world of computers and programming isn’t just a world of algorithms, bits, and coding; it’s also a world of dark, sarcastic and or sardonic humor about the world of computers and programming, by which I mean it’s also recursive (see recursive). Here are arguably (and I’m sure you will argue) 21 of the greatest computer quotes ever. Let the wit begin!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here