Is it acceptable for someone to run over peaceful protesters? When new regulations being proposed say it is, perhaps it’s time for technologists to see how they can help.Given recent tragedies, how can peaceful protesters be protected? How can technology help protect lives? Could a portable, IoT system help safeguard freedom of speech?Background
The First Amendment is clear. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This easy to install wall outlet features two high speed USB charging ports for smartphones, tablets and other USB devices, and a child-safe tamper-resistant power receptacle. Currently discounted 55% off its list price to just $15.29. See this deal on Amazon. Bundles of 2, 5 and 10 outlets are also discounted as well.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The amount of data being created today is expected to increase ten-fold in less than a decade, it’s also anticipated that enterprises will produce around 60% of global data by 2025[1]. However, while the amount of data may be growing exponentially, the intelligence gleaned from it is not. Instead, companies can be subject to a barrage of unstructured data delivered at high velocity from a variety of different sources with limited ability to convert it into actionable insight. As a result, enterprises risk useful information getting lost amidst the sheer volume of noise.This is set to be further compounded by the widespread adoption of IoT technologies in both consumer and enterprise markets. The proliferation of IoT sensors, mobile devices and digital services, combined with advent in big data technologies and broadband networks increase the volume, velocity and variety of data traversing the connected world. This means that businesses that collect relevant data that flows through their corporate networks and the connected world are sitting on an abundance of data, which will only increase. Mission contextual analysis of this data can provide invaluable insight to corporations in a variety of areas and improve business outcomes. For example, gleaning insight Continue reading
If there’s one problem just about every IT professional can relate to, it is the pain of a storage migration. Aging is part of life not only for us IT veterans, but also the storage systems we manage. Despite the fact that we’ve been having to move data off old storage for decades, the challenge of moving data from one storage resource to another, without disrupting business, remains one of the most time consuming and stressful projects for an IT team.Many of the IT professionals I speak with tell me that their migrations are scheduled over months, and can even take a year to plan and execute. It’s no surprise then that IT professionals named migrations as the number two issue facing their departments in a recent survey. Only performance presents a bigger challenge for today’s IT professionals.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The internet is a smaller place than it seems. Despite the gigantic weight of the industries built on it, the near ubiquity of the internet in our lives, and the complexity and scale of modern online applications, at its core the internet operates atop a relatively small set of systems.Pockets of deep knowledge and operational expertise around these key systems have developed over the years. There are tight-knit and cooperative communities focused on network operations, infosec, email and HTTP, to name just a few.DNS—the entry point to nearly every online application and a key anchor of the internet —is no different. A relatively small community of deep experts and operators drives the protocol and its key operational aspects. Homes for this community include DNS-OARC, IETF/ICANN, email lists and regular small meetings of key operators.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Two years ago, Intel spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA chip vendor Altera. So, what’s it going to do with that big purchase? The company is finally ready to say. A field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, is an integrated circuit that can be customized to perform specific functions. Whereas the x86 executes only the x86 instruction sets, an FPGA can be reprogrammed on the fly to perform specified tasks. That’s why x86s are considered general compute processors and FPGAs are viewed as customizable. Also on Network World: What you need when the big breakout for the Internet of Things arrives
The company’s strategy is interesting in that it effectively puts Intel in competition with itself. If you want to do massive floating-point computation, Intel has the Xeon Phi line of add-in cards that compete with Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Now the FPGAs are also targeting those use cases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Retail hasn’t lost its “cool.” [aaaayyyyy]It’s just reinventing it. We know this but Amazon’s recent purchase of Whole Foods sure gave everyone a wake-up call to “innovate or get left-in-the-dust.”I know, you’re in charge of IT, not corporate strategy… but bear with me. This ends up being an IT thing.As Forbes recently detailed, while Amazon unveiled its plans for Whole Foods (which includes decreased prices and the addition of industry-disrupting in-store technology), the market reacted. That same afternoon, stocks of several major brick-and-mortar retailers and grocery stores experienced significant drops in stock price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the world of ever-more complex systems, there is nothing more fragile than an attempt to make nothing fail. A system that assumes that everything must work is a system designed to fail. The reality of the world is that things will fail, and those cannot bring down the whole business. As British Airways has amply demonstrated, a fragile system where everything fails is not good for business.Many years ago I wrote some posts on the challenges of five nines in a distributed world, and as systems become ever more about delivering functionality through a combination of services, micro-services and networks so the importance of designing for failure becomes ever more important, and the foundation of designing for failure is assuming it will happen.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) sometimes has the feel of a trend that’s forever going to be on the cusp of a huge breakout. Figures fly around about the projected size of the IoT and they’re always massive (such as the 50 billion devices Cisco predicted by 2020). But the number of things in the IoT is already counted in the 8 billion to 15 billion range. So, shouldn’t we be seeing more from the IoT by now? Based on what leaders are saying in a survey commissioned by Verizon, we soon will.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Internet of Things (IoT) sometimes has the feel of a trend that’s forever going to be on the cusp of a huge breakout. Figures fly around about the projected size of the IoT and they’re always massive (such as the 50 billion devices Cisco predicted by 2020). But the number of things in the IoT is already counted in the 8 billion to 15 billion range. So, shouldn’t we be seeing more from the IoT by now? Based on what leaders are saying in a survey commissioned by Verizon, we soon will.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Optical data can be too fast for its own good. While the speeds obtained are great for carrying information over distances and into chips, when the light-carried data lands there it’s often moving too fast to be thoroughly processed and analyzed. Data can need slowing down for intense number-crunching and routing.Solutions to this apparent dichotomy have been attempted. They include the obvious one — speeding up microprocessors themselves. However, there’s a problem with that: Faster chips using electronics create more heat, generate interference and use more energy. All bad for data centers.Using sound waves to speed up networks
Scientists say sound waves, though, could present a solution. They say one should convert the light zooming into the chip to sound — creating a kind of acoustic buffer (sound waves travel slower than light waves) — then processes the data and turn it back into zippy light again, to be sent on its way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
America’s insatiable appetite for snazzy new gadgets and the powerful networks required to run them seems ever growing. It’s only natural, then, that demand for a 5G network capable of keeping pace with tomorrow’s dizzying innovations grows, too. So how prepared is the U.S. for a 5G rollout, and what steps are today's top companies taking now to profit from the network of the future?A brief look into the early plans for a nationwide adoption of 5G shows just how much is on the plate when it comes to delivering the next generation of wireless networks. All is not lost, however; handled skillfully, the US can successfully redefine wireless network infrastructure like it has so many times before.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini died in his sleep on Monday at the age of 66. His tenure was marked by a significant comeback for the company, dealing with a number of business and technological issues, making the company a massive player in the data center but a fumbled opportunity for the mobile market. Unlike his predecessors, Otellini was not an engineer but had a MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Intel in 1974 right out of Berkeley and spent his entire career at Intel, eventually becoming chief operating officer in 2002 and CEO in 2005, a position he held until his retirement in 2012. "We are deeply saddened by Paul’s passing,” CEO Brian Krzanich said in a statement. “He was the relentless voice of the customer in a sea of engineers, and he taught us that we only win when we put the customer first." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The massive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices over the next one to three years should give us pause. As companies rush to get to market first, are we seeing a “dumbing down” of basic device principals that we have been working with for years, particularly enhanced security and privacy. With so many distinct applications, device scope and diversity represent a unique security challenge that so far has not been met.I estimate that 85 percent or more of current IoT devices deployed in the real world do not have adequate security installed, and it’s likely that the vast majority of those will never be upgraded (or are not even capable of being upgraded). That means not only do current devices being installed pose a risk, but over the next one to two years, the vast majority of devices that will be deployed also pose a risk.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Intent-based systems have been all the rage since Cisco announced its “Network Intuitive” solution earlier this year. For Cisco customers, its solution is certainly interesting. But what about businesses that want an alternative to Cisco? Or companies that want to run a multi-vendor environment?Over a year before Cisco’s launch, a start-up called Apstra shipped the closed-loop, intent-based solution. It was designed to be multi-vendor in nature with support for Cisco but also Arista, Juniper, HP and others, including white box. Apstra operates as an overlay to networks built on any of the leading vendors to deliver intent-based networking in heterogeneous environments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) have spent the last several years in a sort of maximum-acceleration race where they’ve lapped the other players several times over and have only one another to measure against.IOT Expansion and Cloud Capacity
Neither is slowing down, particularly the IoT. According to analysis firm Gartner, the number of IoT devices will hit 20.8 billion by 2020. The world population is expected to reach 8 billion in 2020, meaning there will be 2.5 IoT devices per person on the entire planet. In 2016, the IoT was growing at the rate of 5.5 million new things getting connected every day.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The next step up in supercomputer performance is exaflops, and there is something of an arms race between nations to get there first — although it’s much more benign than the nuclear arms race of the last century. If anything, it’s beneficial because these monster machines will allow all kinds of advanced scientific research. An exascale computer is capable of processing one exaflop, one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations of floating point operations per second. That’s about a trillion times more powerful than a consumer laptop. + Also on Network World: Texas goes big with 18-petaflop supercomputer +
China has said it will have an exascale computer by 2020, one year sooner than the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Expect to see a huge uptick in demand for people who have technology and business skills related to the Internet of Things (IoT), as organizations continue to ramp up their IoT projects in a big way.A new report by 451 Research notes that finding IoT-skilled workers is a big challenge. Nearly half of the 575 IT and IoT decision makers the firm surveyed, primarily in North America and Europe, said they face a skills shortage for IoT-related tasks.The skills companies need to acquire include expertise in areas such as cyber security, networking, device hardware, applications, and overall management of IoT strategy. But perhaps nowhere will demand be greater in the coming years than in areas related to data analytics. As companies seek to use IoT data to predict outcomes, prevent failures, optimize operations and develop new products, advanced analytics competency—including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—will be critical to their success.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you're reading this, you have internet access.You probably have it either through a local cable or fibre ISP or through your cell phone provider. We all have one (usually both) of these.Speedy. Reliable (mostly). Boring.What happens when that infrastructure goes down? Maybe the power goes out somewhere along the network. Maybe a cell tower gets attacked by Godzilla. Who knows? Dangers lurk around every corner. + Also on Network World: When disasters strike, edge computing must kick in +
In those cases, when your traditional network connection fails you, you're going to need a backup. Something to get you back up, online and moving data around. And, what the heck, we might as well do it all with as much flair and pizzazz as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today’s tech-hungry consumers and innovative producers wouldn’t be able to enjoy the IoT without all the rugged testing necessary to ensure products can handle the stress they’ll endure daily. Yet while many companies and consumers alike pride themselves on the vitality of their equipment, however, many egregious myths about rugged IoT testing still endure.So, what are the five common myths that most-often surround rugged IoT testing, and who’s responsible for creating and proliferating these rumors? A quick review below shows some of the nastiest of these myths, and why they should be avoided.1. Going beyond specification limits if a waste of time
In many test labs, the mainstream logic is that IoT products don’t need to be tested past their specification limits. Consumers won’t really care, the faux-logic insist, and it would be a waste of time and resources to try and push devices past their commercial limits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here