New iPads and iPhone SE may hit stores next week

Citing anonymous sources from within Apple's supply chain, MacRumors reports we may see a slew of new Apple products as early as next week. The report is particularly interesting given that we previously saw rumors pointing towards a new iPad rollout sometime in March. Curiously, though, the iPad rumor mill has been unusually quiet up until now.The report reads in part: Apple is expected to announce new products later this month, most likely between Monday, March 20, and Friday, March 24, according to reputable supply chain analysts we spoke to who wish to remain anonymous. The analysts said the information is from its own sources and not based on other reports.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Technology health check: 10 early-warning signs of a failing vendor or product

It’s a fact of business life that technology vendors sometimes go out of business or sunset their products. This happens less than most customers fear, but when it does, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent enterprise will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems.At Real Story Group, a lot of our research goes into reviewing “vendor intangibles” to help guide customer decision making early on. Over the years, we've found a failing vendor or open-source project will exhibit telltale signs. By identifying these signs, you the customer can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly.10 warning signs a vendor is failing 1. Significant fall-off in new customers When a vendor fails to attract new customers at historically meaningful levels, it can indicate something is wrong with the offering—usually that it has fallen behind its peers with respect to intrinsic functionality or its core value proposition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

55% off Gears of War 4 for Xbox One – Deal Alert

A new saga begins for one of the most acclaimed video game franchises in history. After narrowly escaping an attack on their village, JD Fenix and his friends, Kait and Del, must rescue the ones they love and discover the source of a monstrous new enemy. In Gears of War 4 for Xbox One, enjoy two-player co-op with friends locally via split-screen or over Xbox Live. Player 2 can select either Kait or Del. Team up with four others and battle wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemies by choosing your combat class, leveling up your skills and deploying fortifications anywhere on the map. Compete online in new and favorite game types, all at 60fps on dedicated servers. A new visible ranking system means fairer matchmaking for social, competitive and professional players alike. The typical list price has been reduced significantly on Amazon to just $27.29, for now. See this deal on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Top Tech Companies With Billions of Dollars Held Offshore

The list includes Cisco, HPE, and Oracle.

IDG Contributor Network: Public cloud services sneak in through IT’s back door

“I’m a back door man, I’m a back door manThe CIO don’t know, but the users understand.”Well, maybe those aren’t the exact lyrics sung by Jim Morrison (or Howlin’ Wolf). Yet much of the information technology used by enterprises is first snuck in the back door by users rather than invited in the front door by the CIO.The personal computer was a prime example of back door technology. Back in the 1980s, while the IT department ran their mainframes and minicomputers, department managers were stuck tracking budgets and forecasts with adding machines and pads of paper. But a PC with spreadsheet software made those tasks much simpler and quicker. (By the way, you can still download and run original VisiCalc. Only 27,520 bytes!) A departmental budget could absorb the cost of several thousand dollars, and getting started was simple enough. Soon PCs were showing up everywhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s $15B Mobileye Purchase Pushes Company’s Autonomous Car Focus

Mobileye's platform is being integrated into cars from more than 25 automakers.

Too lazy to fill out a March Madness bracket? Technology has you covered

Let’s say you can’t be bothered to fill out one of those basketball forms you’ll see floating around the office this week. You couldn’t care less but want to look like you care. Well, ESPN the website has just the feature for you: “Autofill a bracket.”Just don’t expect to win anything.Autofill comes in four different flavors, each guaranteed to produce a filled-in bracket form with one click, and each guaranteed to look nothing like the form filled out by your future office pool winner.The first option is called “chalk,” which is sports slang for picking the higher-seeded team. You don’t really need any technology to fill out a chalk bracket; just go with the higher seeded team in every single game until you’re done. You could do that with a pen, or pencil if pen seems intimidating. But we’ve already established that you’re lazy, so click chalk. (Spoiler alert: Villanova will be your winner because Villanova is the tournament’s top-seeded team.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Web Titans Have Big Influence on Data Center Networking Efforts

They all meet the requirements in processing, networking, and storage capacity.

Jonathan Davidson Joins Cisco’s Service Provider Business

He recently departed from Juniper Networks.

Sonera Selects Nuage for Enterprise SD-WAN in Europe

Nuage’s VNS is more about the endpoints than the WAN connectivity itself.

History!

The audio is a bit low on this video; it actually recorded a bit lower than this, and the process of amplifying made it poor quality. I’ve already separated the audio recorder from the camera; now I’m upgrading the mic, and playing with the settings on the recorder to make the audio better quality. I’m also playing with putting text and drawings on the side of the video, a concept I intend to use more often in the future.

So this is a bit of a play video, but with a somewhat serious topic: the importance of learning the history of network engineering. Some resources are included below.

A bit history of the Internet
Net Heads versus Bell Heads
On the History of the Shortest Path Problem
The Elements of Networking Style
Software Defined Networks has a great introductory section with a good bit of history

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BrandPost: How to develop mature DevOps practices

Every company must act like a software company these days. That's why DevOps is so critical to your success: DevOps methodologies help you get better software to your users, and build tighter feedback loops for more effective learning.If you’ve already undergone a DevOps transformation, you’re likely already seeing better cross-functional alignment and shared responsibility.  Hopefully you’re deploying software more frequently, recovering from failures faster, and dealing with far fewer security issues.Now it’s time to take your DevOps initiative to the next level to achieve greater control, predictability and flexibility. By continually improving, you make room for more experimentation and innovation, and can even retain top talent. (See the proof in Puppet’s annual State of DevOps Report.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here’s why Google Cloud support is now priced per person

One of the key messages out of Google Cloud Next last week: The company has gotten serious about serving enterprise customers in a way that meets their needs. A key component of that is a new set of support plans for customers of its cloud platform.Instead of paying one big support fee, businesses will pay per user for support privileges, based on how quickly they will get a response. The new plan replaces a set of monolithic tiers that required businesses to pay a flat fee per month plus a percentage of their monthly product usage. In the past, Google wasn't exactly known for its support capabilities, but that's something the company has changed in recent years. Google engineers originally believed they could create great technology that was self-service and easy to use, and that would be enough for business customers, said Dave Rensin, the company’s director of customer reliability engineering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: Comments on the Wikileaks CIA Vault #7

The CIA didn’t remotely hack a TV. The docs are clear that they can update the software running on the TV using a USB drive. There’s no evidence of them doing so remotely over the Internet. If you aren’t afraid of the CIA breaking in an installing a listening device, then you should’t be afraid of the CIA installing listening software. —Errata Security

The post Worth Reading: Comments on the Wikileaks CIA Vault #7 appeared first on 'net work.

IDG Contributor Network: Get the data your business needs without paying high fees

The volume of data available to businesses is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by the year 2020. That’s a mind-boggling huge body of information, one that businesses can use to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives, to use as barometers for better performance, and to identify new optimization opportunities in all areas of operation.To make use of all that data, though, you need the right tools in place. And with the average salary for an experienced data analytics professional starting at $65,000 annually, smaller businesses may be at a disadvantage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WikiLeaks dump brings CIA spying powers into the spotlight

Has the CIA ever spied on you? That’s a key question swirling around the WikiLeaks document dump that allegedly details the U.S. agency's secret hacking tools. The documents themselves don't reveal much about who the CIA might have snooped on. But the agency certainly has the power to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., said Paul Pillar, a former deputy counterterrorism chief with the CIA. That's its job after all: to collect foreign intelligence. But even so, the CIA is pretty selective with its targets.   To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

WikiLeaks dump brings CIA spying powers into the spotlight

Has the CIA ever spied on you? That’s a key question swirling around the WikiLeaks document dump that allegedly details the U.S. agency's secret hacking tools. The documents themselves don't reveal much about who the CIA might have snooped on. But the agency certainly has the power to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., said Paul Pillar, a former deputy counterterrorism chief with the CIA. That's its job after all: to collect foreign intelligence. But even so, the CIA is pretty selective with its targets.   To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Mirantis shifts again, will offer managed solutions based on open-source technologies

Mirantis is (or, as we will see, was) known as the pure play OpenStack vendor. The company focused on offering large organizations products and services that helped them leverage the open-source, OpenStack cloud computing platform to build their own clouds for internal or external use.Over time, however, there has been some doubt cast upon how much of a market opportunity there is for these sort of OpenStack service providers. The OpenStack ecosystem has been the source of much angst as consolidation, rationalization and unrealized hopes and dreams too their toll.Mirantis' 'evolution' Mirantis was not immune from these impacts and last year announced its intention to move away from a pure-play OpenStack strategy and become an organization that helped its customers build infrastructure solutions based on a number of different platforms, OpenStack included. At the time, there were rumors that Mirantis wasn’t seeing the return customers it had hoped for and that most of its deals were one-time gigs that didn’t really allow it to build a recurring, sustainable business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Native apps vs. mobile websites: A new battlefront opens

It’s one of the most challenging ongoing conflicts in mobile technology: native apps vs. mobile websites. Is it better to develop apps for specific mobile operating systems like Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android or instead turn to websites that are optimized for mobile browsing. Performance vs. flexibility Traditionally, the tradeoff has been that native apps can do more and perform faster because they can be tied more directly to the mobile operating system and the device hardware. Mobile web apps, on the other hand, are typically easier to develop and more flexible. You can build an app once, and it runs reasonably well everywhere—rather than have to develop multiple versions for every mobile OS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GOP senator alleges password-hijack attempts after blasting WikiLeaks founder

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) Saturday claimed that hackers were trying to gain access to his personal and government-issued devices through bogus password-reset notifications.In a short flurry of Twitter messages, Sasse blamed the hacking attempts on his criticism of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, earlier in the week."Heads-up...I've been critical of Assange & WikiLeaks this week. So...big surprise: Am having multiple 'password reset' attempts right now," Sasse tweeted Saturday. The probing was hitting "basically every device, every platform, personal and govt," he added in a follow-up tweet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here