2020 is a significant year for Unix. At the very start of the year, Unix turns 50.While some of the early development of Unix predates the official start of its "epoch," Jan 1, 1970 remains the zero-point in POSIX time and the recognized beginning of all things Unix. Jan 1, 2020 will mark 50 years since that moment.Unix time vs human time
In terms of human time, 50 years is a big deal. In terms of Unix time, there's nothing particularly special about 50 years. 48.7 years would be no less significant.Unix (including Linux) systems store date/time values as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC in 32 bits. To determine how many seconds have passed since that time and, thus, what right now looks like as a Unix time value, you can issue a command like this:To read this article in full, please click here
The deadline for nominating a company for Insider Pro's Best Places to Work awards program has been extended to January 17, 2020. The annual survey, which launched in 1994, identifies the 100 best places to work for IT pros.
Consumers are no doubt becoming increasingly aware about the safety and security of their online activity after many highly publicized studies have shown an uptick in online data theft. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there were 3 million reports of identity theft alone in 2018.Even though these threats — and the rash of data breaches — continue to grab headlines, consumers still are connecting to public wifi despite the threats and are joining other unsafe networks while traveling. More cautious or tech-savvy individuals know to turn to virtual private networks (VPNs) as a way to safely connect online, and as VPNs become more mainstream, some project the VPN market can grow to more than $35 billion by 2022. We’ve even seen some vendors to capitalize by creating flashy TV commercials that insinuate that they are consumers’ digital doorman. To read this article in full, please click here
Modern tech companies require more computing power than ever before, so many of them are turning to cloud services like Microsoft Azure to meet their needs. As such, becoming cloud-certified is a necessity if you want to pursue today’s highest-paying IT jobs. With this 4-course bundle, you can become an Azure master for just $29. To read this article in full, please click here
UK chip designer Kaleao has re-launched as Bamboo Systems with some pre-Series A funding and claims its Arm-based server chips will be considerably more power efficient than the competition.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Bamboo is targeting the x86 servers, which have a 95% market share, rather than Marvell with its ThunderX2 and Ampere Systems with the eMAG Arm processors. The company argues that the two Arm processors are no different than x86.To read this article in full, please click here
The key to productivity is structure, but many organizations use fragmented systems to reach people. Their donor list may be in one database while their volunteer list is on a separate Google Doc. This wastes too much time that could be spent engaging your audience. If your nonprofit, political campaign, or advocacy group is looking for a holistic solution that puts people at the center, look no further than Nationbuilder. To read this article in full, please click here
Hot trends in networking for the coming year include SD-WAN, Wi-Fi 6, multi-domain control, virtual networking and the evolving role of the network engineer into that of a network progrmmer, at least according to Cisco.They revolve around the changing shape of networking in general, that is the broadening of data-center operations into the cloud and the implications of that change, said Anand Oswal, senior vice president of engineering in Cisco’s Enterprise Networking Business.To read this article in full, please click here
If you’re not sure if you’re running a Linux command or you’re using a bash builtin, don’t stress, it isn’t all that obvious. In fact, you can get very used to commands like cd without realizing that they’re part of your shell, unlike commands like date and whoami that invoke executables (/bin/date and /usr/bin/whoami).Builtins in general are commands that are built into shell interpreters, and bash is especially rich in them, which is a good thing because built-ins by their very nature run a bit faster than commands which have to be loaded into memory when you call them into play.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco will continued to build up its internal-electronics tools with its planned purchase of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology designer Exablaze for an undisclosed amount.Exablaze, founded in 2013, specializes in low-latency FPGAs used to construct logically reconfigurable digital circuits for networking gear in high-performance environments such as data centers, high-frequency trading (HFT), big-data analytics, high-performance computing and telecommunications. Exablaze products include FPGA-based switches and network interface cards (NICs), as well as picosecond-resolution timing technology.To read this article in full, please click here
In Linux, the uniq command can help find out the individual users who are logged into a given server, but it’s not a straightforward process.Yes, using the command on its own yields a list of who’s logged in, but it can list individual users more than once depending on what they’re doing.There are ways to get around this by sorting the results of uniq so they deliver only once the names of all the users. This 2-Minute Linux Tip video by Network World’s Unix as a Second Language blogger Sandra Henry Stocker shows how to do just that. Click below.
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Certifications can add, on average, more than 7 percent to your base salary. But the question is which certifications offer the most bang for the buck. We examine that question from several angles and also identify the Top 20 certifications to focus on in the coming year.
Upcoming space commercialization will require hardened edge-computing environments in a small footprint with robust links back to Earth, says vendor OrbitsEdge, which recently announced that it had started collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise on computing-in-orbit solutions.OrbitsEdge says it’s the first to provide a commercial data-center environment for installing in orbit, and will be using HPE’s Edgeline Converged Edge System in a hardened, satellite micro-data-center platform that it’s selling called SatFrame.To read this article in full, please click here
Cisco says it wants to change the future of the Internet and has rolled out the new silicon, hardware and software it says will move toward that goal.The centerpiece of Cisco’s strategy revolves around its custom Silicon One chip technology and new Cisco 8000 Series carrier-class routers built on that silicon, which the company says has been in development for more than five years, at a cost of over $1 billion. The 8000s feature a new operating system – IOS XR7 that runs the boxes and handles security.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum
The Cisco Silicon One Q100 optical-routing silicon brings up to 10Tbps of network bandwidth in its first iteration – with a future goal of 25Tbps – and support for large non-blocking distributed routers, deep buffering with rich QoS and programmable forwarding. To read this article in full, please click here
Few areas of the enterprise face as much churn as the edge of the network. Experts say a variety of challenges drive this change – from increased SD-WAN access demand to cloud interconnected resources and IoT, the traditional perimeter of the enterprise is shifting radically and will continue to do so throughout 2020.One indicator: Gartner research that says by 2023, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud, up from less than 10% in 2019.To read this article in full, please click here
During its inception, we had the early adopters and pure SD-WAN players. Soon it became obvious that something was missing, and that missing component was “security.” However, security vendors have highlighted the importance of security from the very beginning.Today, the market seems to be moving in the direction where the security vendors are focusing on delivering SD-WAN features around pervasive security. The Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure has made a substantial prediction. It states, “By 2024, 50% of new firewall purchases in distributed enterprises will utilize SD-WAN features with the growing adoption of cloud-based services, up from less than 20% today.”To read this article in full, please click here
The concept of using passive optical LANs in enterprise campuses has been around for years, but hasn’t taken off taken off because most businesses consider all-fiber networks to be overkill for their needs. I’ve followed this market for the better part of two decades, and now I believe we’re on the cusp of seeing POL go mainstream, starting in certain verticals.The primary driver of change from copper to optical is that the demands on the network have evolved. Every company now considers its network to be business critical where just a few years ago, it was considered best effort in nature. Downtime or a congested network meant inconvenienced users, but today they mean the business is likely losing big money.To read this article in full, please click here
5G promises super-fast connections, low latency and better coverage. In the manufacturing realm, early adopter Whirlpool is deploying a private 5G network in one its Ohio factories to solve a major problem: Driverless vehicles inside the plant rely on Wi-Fi to navigate, and they stop dead when the factory environment causes the signal to degrade. The sidelined vehicles create traffic jams, slow down production, and require hands-on attention before they can resume delivering parts.To read this article in full, please click here
To hear the major mobile carriers talk about it, 5G is here. They’ve deployed it, it works, and it’s ready to start changing the world just about right away, with ultra-fast connectivity, low latency and a dramatically improved ability to handle huge numbers of different connections at once.Eventually, that will all be true – but, according to experts in the field, it isn’t yet, and most of it won’t take place within the coming calendar year. The 3GPP standards that will underpin all new-radio 5G technology are still not yet finalized, although that is expected to happen in early 2020, which means the much-touted 5G deployments in the U.S. are based partially on pre-standard technology.To read this article in full, please click here
It’s that time of year again when those of us in the press make our annual prognostications for the coming year. Some things we saw coming; the rise of the cloud and the advance of SSD. Others, like the return of many cloud migrations to on-premises or the roaring comeback of AMD, went right by us. We do our best but occasionally there are surprises.So with that, let’s take a peek into the always cloudy (no pun intended) crystal ball and make 10 data-center-oriented predictions.IoT spawns data-center growth in urban areas
This isn’t a hard prediction to make since it’s already happening. For the longest time, data centers were placed in the middle of nowhere near renewable energy (usually hydro), but need is going to force more expansion in major metro areas. IoT will be one driver but so will the increasing use of data center providers like Equinix and DRT as interconnection providers.To read this article in full, please click here