This full-fledged, easy-to-tote first aid softpack is designed to save time and frustration in the midst of an emergency. It's compact and portable, but contains 299 physician-recommended supplies. Among the items neatly organized inside the zippered kit is a first aid guide, vinyl gloves, bandages, cold compress, gauze pads, trauma pad, cotton-tipped applicators, first aid tape roll, antiseptics and all three common OTC pain medications. The kit is currently a #1 best seller on Amazon, averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 280 customers, and its typical list price of $26.74 has been reduced 52% to just $12.80. Click over to Amazon to see this deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You can pick up Amazon Echo for VERY far below list price, if you're comfortable buying refurbished. Which you can be -- certified refurbished products are tested and certified to look and work like new, and come with warranties. Echo typically lists for $180, or $165 refurbished, but right now it looks like Amazon's letting them go for just $80. Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker you control with your voice. Echo connects to the Alexa Voice Service to play music, provide information, news, sports scores, weather, and more—instantly. All you have to do is ask. Echo has seven microphones and beam forming technology so it can hear you from across the room—even while music is playing. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with 360° immersive sound. When you want to use Echo, just say the wake word “Alexa” and Echo responds instantly. If you have more than one Echo or Echo Dot, Alexa responds intelligently from the Echo you're closest to with ESP (Echo Spatial Perception). See the certified refurbished Amazon Echo on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hurricane Harvey has dumped over 50 inches of water across Texas. Thousands of people displaced. Roads flooded. Communication channels disrupted.How are relief efforts coordinated? How are emergency personnel given the information they need? How can data be collected with broken communication channels and little cellular coverage? How can information from multiple sources be aggregated and presented in an actionable form?Here’s how Esri Disaster Response Program is helping first responders and the Texas Division of Emergency Management. Information on local conditions such as water levels, flood gauges, road closures and traffic conditions are essential to coordinate relief efforts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As today’s market continues to churn out new technologies which revolutionize entire industries overnight, many business leaders are scrambling to prepare themselves for the next disruptive innovation. Increasingly, astute corporations and bold startups alike are coming to realize that 5G is the next big thing which will reshape how they operate, and they’re taking steps to prepare for it.So how exactly are today’s leading brands and companies preparing themselves for 5G’s arrival? What common pitfalls have these preppers encountered, and how can a savvy businessman avoid making them himself? Is 5G really worth all of the sound and fury?A new type of telecom industry
While a market where 5G is ubiquitous will see a plethora of changes, few stand to be revolutionized more than the telecom industry. In the past few years alone, consumers all around the globe have flocked to digital devices like smartphones, tablets, and personal computers en masse, forcing businesses to up their wireless systems and the standards they follow. When 5G inevitably arrives, these same businesses will have an even greater hurdle set before them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Whether you are streaming the latest boxing match or watching the most recent Game of Thrones episode, during its first run, the network is going to play a major role in determining your quality of experience like never before. There is unprecedented demand for content, and with the proliferation of smart devices capable of displaying video, every pair of eyeballs on the internet is a potential consumer.The widespread availability of video combined with streaming technology means our viewing expectations are now much more demanding on the infrastructure. We expect content to be there, wherever and whenever we want it. We want to watch it, pause it, play it in slow motion, watch it again, analyze it, save it for later, share it with friends. We want to watch it at home, on the train or at work – because there’s always the underlying risk of spoilers, or missing out on the next-day office discussion should we be unable to view it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
On Linux systems, run levels are operational levels that describe the state of the system with respect to what services are available. One run level is restrictive and only used for maintenance; network connections will not be operational, but admins can log in through a console connection. Others allow anyone to log in and work, but maybe with some differences in the available services. This post examines how run levels are configured and how you can change the run level interactively or modify what services are available.The default run state on Linux systems -- the one that will be used when the system starts up (unless instructed otherwise) -- is usually configured in the /etc/inittab file which generally looks something like this:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ubuntu is one of the most popular versions of Linux, with a very substantial market base, especially in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
This blog post is going a bit outside my usual “make sense to the C-Level” slant. I wanted to get in the weeds about reviewing SD-WAN products. We all know that’s where the fun really is!I have been doing a bit of evaluation on SD-WAN products and their configurations from the network engineer’s perspective. I have looked at numerous vendors’ products, poured over install guides, and dusted off the CLI.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This blog post is going a bit outside my usual “make sense to the C-Level” slant. I wanted to get in the weeds about reviewing SD-WAN products. We all know that’s where the fun really is!I have been doing a bit of evaluation on SD-WAN products and their configurations from the network engineer’s perspective. I have looked at numerous vendors’ products, poured over install guides, and dusted off the CLI.Everyone who knows me can tell you I am a Cisco fanatic. Hands down, I would rather implement a Cisco technology rather than any other vendor by a 1000:1 ratio. I have spent a majority of my career as a network engineer, and the best network devices to configure and troubleshoot have been Cisco.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Maybe it’s because I’ve been married 16 years. Maybe it’s because we have 4 young children. Whatever the reason, at 42 years old, I’m slowly learning something about myself.I’m sometimes… wrong. [gasp]And when I notice it, it’s much better to admit it than make up an excuse. Can you relate?So, here is how this matters to you… I was wrong about Disaster Recovery as a Service (a.k.a. DRaaS). [bigger gasp]As the CEO of a business cloud and telecom brokerage, DRaaS is something I’ve heard about for a long time. But for a couple of years, I dismissed it. I didn’t think it was a fit for the majority of our clients (i.e. small- and medium-sized companies).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco made a big splash earlier this year when it revealed its vision for the future of networking: An intent-based networking system that allows users to specify what they want the network to do and management software that automatically orchestrates it.Since Cisco’s announcement, intent-based networking (IBN) has caught the networking industry’s attention and has seemingly become the buzzword-du-jour. Some see it as a logical evolution of advanced network automation. Others believe it’s a fundamental shift in how enterprises use machine learning to autonomously manage networks. Meanwhile, all types of vendors, from stalwarts of the industry to myriad startups are jumping on to the IBN bandwagon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
We are excited to announce today that Silver Peak has joined MEF. With 130+ members, MEF’s new SD-WAN initiatives are intended to address implementation challenges and help service providers to accelerate managed SD-WAN service deployments. Some of this work involves defining SD-WAN use cases, and a key use case revolves around connecting distributed enterprises and users to cloud-hosted SaaS applications and IaaS.Enterprise CIOs continue to accelerate the pace of corporate digital transformation initiatives, often including plans to migrate enterprise applications to the cloud. Cloud-first is often the preferable choice for hosting new applications, enabling enterprises to securely connect users to applications from anywhere and across any type of WAN service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you had to take a guess, what would you name as the two most prominent trends in technology right now? Like most people, I feel pretty confident in choosing artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), not necessarily in that order.But in a rare convergence, in turns out these two trends are even hotter together. In fact, the new hotness is the combination of AI and IoT, manifesting itself in a wide variety of form and implementations in locations around the world.IBM’s Watson wants to bring ‘cognitive computing’ to IoT
At IBM, for example, the company opened a Watson Internet of Things headquarters in Munich, Germany, earlier this year. The lab pairs IBM with partners such as BMW, Bosch and Ricoh. The goal, per the company’s Watson IoT website, is to marry cognitive computing (the Watson AI platform) to vast arrays of IoT sensors. The company quotes an IDC report that claims IBM and Watson “can demonstrate the power of cognitive analytics in the IoT."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Almost two-thirds of organizations surveyed say recruiting for jobs in data center and server management is becoming increasingly difficult because of the skills needed, both in traditional servers and converged infrastructure.The findings come from a worldwide survey by 451 Research for its Voice of the Enterprise: Servers and Converged Infrastructure, Organizational Dynamics study (registration required). It found that IT shops have concerns about the long-term costs of using public cloud, and that is causing many IT shops to pull back on their cloud movement and even expand on their on-premises infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It seems only decades ago that I was commonly sending out notices to my users by editing the /etc/motd file on the servers I managed. I would tell them about planned outages, system upgrades, new tools and who would be covering for me during my very rare vacations.Somewhere along the stretch of time since, message of the day files seem to have faded from common usage — maybe overwhelmed by an excess of system messages, emailed alerts, texts, and other notices that have taken over, the /etc/motd file has. Or maybe not.+ Also on Network World: Half a dozen clever Linux command line tricks +
The truth is the /etc/motd file on quite a number of Linux systems has simply become part of a larger configuration of messages that are fed to users when they log in. And even if your /etc/motd file is empty or doesn’t exist at all, login messages are being delivered when someone logs into a server via a terminal window — and you have more control over what those messages are telling your users than you might realize.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
VMworld 2017Image by Thinkstock/VMwareVMworld 2017 is underway in Las Vegas, where IT pros are converging to learn about the latest in enterprise cloud, virtualization, security, and software-defined data center technologies. Here are some of the product highlights on display at the show.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
(In the run-up to VMWorld this week, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke to IDG Enterprise Editor-in-Chief Eric Knorr about announcements at the conference, the future of the company and his five-year tenure at the helm. This is a summary of some of the highlights of that interview.)As VMware opens up its user conference this week in Las Vegas, the company’s CEO Pat Gelsinger says it is making significant announcements about cloud integration and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The hazard of unsophisticated and poorly secured Internet of Things (IoT) devices came to the front last year with the Mirai DDoS attack that involved nearly a million bots. Many of these devices remain a threat.Researchers have posed an original solution to the problem: Use the vulnerability of these devices to inject a white worm that secures the devices. It is an epidemiological approach that creates immunity with a vaccine by exposing the immune system to a weakened form of the disease.+ Also on Network World: How to improve IoT security +
These devices are still a threat because some cannot be fixed because they have hard-coded back doors. Other insecure devices have software or firmware vulnerabilities that cannot be fixed because product designers did not include a software updates mechanism.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your organization is planning to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to gather data from products and systems, see how goods are performing in the field, enhance factory production, or any other reason, it needs to become familiar with the concept of the “digital twin.”A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical asset, process, or system that can be used for a variety of purposes. The digital representation of an object provides both the elements and the dynamics of how the object operates throughout its life cycle.The digital twin is intended to be an up-to-date and accurate replica of all elements of a physical object for which sensor data is available. Digital twins integrate technologies including artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive analytics, and sensor telemetry to create digital clones of live and historical performance of physical machines and idealized digital simulation models that evolve based on the data collected from real-world instances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The fastest of the fastImage by ThinkstockYes, your new gaming PC that supports VR headsets is impressively fast. But can it simulate the entire universe over millions of years? Shed light on the forces that cause destructive summer storms in Europe? Ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons? We didn’t think so; those are jobs for supercomputers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here