Apple Watch: Function Over Form Otherwise It’s Just a Fad

So yet another technology company wants to put some jewelry on my wrist.  Good luck.  You know it’s not that I don’t want the Apple Watch to succeed.  It’s just that I’ve been down this path already.

This past weekend I was reading a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Thomas Lee, “Why we need Apple to fail.”  While I’m not really buying Mr. Lee’s line of thinking - my ego is not going to be bruised one way or the other should Apple fail or succeed with this product - it did start me thinking.

My father was an employee at Hewlett Packard back in the good old days.  One of the latest and greatest products of those days was the desktop calculator.  It was a time when each successive year found significantly more computational power in much smaller footprints.  Eventually someone said, “Hey, we could make a calculator as small as a watch now.”  So they did.  

I don’t know how many watches HP produced over the lifetime of the product Continue reading

Open Hardware that Just Runs

When you buy a server, you don’t worry whether or not Windows will run on the server.  You know it will. That’s because the server industry has a comprehensive solution to a hard problem: rapid, standard integration between the OS and underlying open hardware.  They’ve made it ubiquitous and totally transparent to you.

This is not the case for embedded systems, where you have to check whether an OS works on a particular hardware platform, and oftentimes you find out that it’s not supported yet. Bare metal switches are a good example of this.

It’s time to change that.  We need the same transparent model on switches that we have on servers.  

To make open networking ubiquitous — and to give customers choice among a wide variety of designs, port configurations and manufacturers — the integration between the networking OS and bare metal networking hardware must be standardized, fast, and easy to validate. We need open hardware.

The Starting Point

Today, a bare-metal networking hardware vendor supplies their hardware spec to the NOS (network OS) provider. The NOS team reads the spec, interprets it and writes drivers/scripts to manage the device components (sensors, LEDs, fans and so forth). Then Continue reading

3 big surprises from the Apple Watch event

Apple fans expected to learn more about the Apple Watch during yesterday's announcement, but to the surprise of the audience, Apple had more to talk about at its Spring Forward event on Monday.Apple bets on its retail stores to sell the Apple WatchApple's 453 retail stores give it an advantage in the smartwatch market. Apple has made its watch stand out with so many options and price points, starting at $349 with different styles, sizes, straps, finishes, and materials – even an 18-karat gold version starting at $10,000. But such a diverse product line doesn't lend itself to ecommerce sales. Given the complexity of choices, Apple's stores will be the consumers' starting point.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Top distributed computing projects still hard at work fighting the world’s worst health issues

This past fall saw the worst Ebola outbreak ever ravage western Africa, and while medical researchers are trying to find a drug to treat or prevent the disease, the process is long and complicated. That's because you don't just snap your fingers and produce a drug with a virus like Ebola. What's needed is a massive amount of trial and error to find chemical compounds that can bind with the proteins in the virus and inhibit replication. In labs, it can take years or decades.Thanks to thousands of strangers, Ebola researchers are getting the help and computing power they need to shave off the time needed to find new drugs by a few years.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 26 crazy and scary things the TSA has found on travelers Distributed computing is not a new concept, but as it is constituted today, it's an idea born of the Internet. Contributors download a small app that runs in the background and uses spare PC compute cycles to perform a certain process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP creates new server line for cloud computing

As more computing moves to cloud-based data centers, Hewlett-Packard is moving there, too.HP said today that it is creating a server family aimed specifically at building systems for cloud providers.This is being done as part of a joint venture with Foxconn, a partnership announced last year to create cloud-optimized servers. HP has been building servers with the Taipei-based electronics maker over the last year, but is now giving a name to its server line: Cloudline. It has also announced several server products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple Watch: An overpriced, out-of-date status symbol

Yesterday I was subjected to all 95 minutes, 14 seconds of the Apple Watch announcement "keynote" video stream, and I am left with one clear notion:The Apple Watch is the stupidest piece of gadgetry I have seen in a long, long time.(I should note that I am not entirely unbiased here. I am a Linux user and an Open Source advocate. And, perhaps most importantly, I like freedom. Apple and I don't tend to see eye-to-eye on that front. But that doesn't make the Apple Watch any less pointless.)Let's start with the elephant in the room – the price.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tool allows account hijacking on sites that use Facebook Login

A new tool allows hackers to generate URLs that can hijack accounts on sites that use Facebook Login, potentially enabling powerful phishing attacks.The tool, dubbed Reconnect, was released last week by Egor Homakov, a researcher with security firm Sakurity. It takes advantage of a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) issue in Facebook Login, the service that allows users to log in on third-party sites using their Facebook accounts.Homakov disclosed the issue publicly on his personal blog in January 2014, after Facebook declined to fix it because doing so would have broken compatibility with a large number of sites that used the service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Last Part of Nature to Surrender

Announcing Virtual DNS: DDoS Mitigation and Global Distribution for DNS Traffic

It’s 9am and CloudFlare has already mitigated three billion malicious requests for our customers today. Six out of every one hundred requests we see is malicious, and increasingly, more of that is targeting DNS nameservers.

DNS is the phone book of the Internet and fundamental to the usability of the web, but is also a serious weak link in Internet security. One of the ways CloudFlare is trying to make DNS more secure is by implementing DNSSEC, cryptographic authentication for DNS responses. Another way is Virtual DNS, the authoritative DNS proxy service we are introducing today.

Virtual DNS provides CloudFlare’s DDoS mitigation and global distribution to DNS nameservers. DNS operators need performant, resilient infrastructure, and we are offering ours, the fastest of any providers, to any organization’s DNS servers.

Many organizations have legacy DNS infrastructure that is difficult to change. The hosting industry is a key example of this. A host may have given thousands of clients a set of nameservers but now realize that they don't have the performance or defensibility that their clients need.

Virtual DNS means that the host can get the benefits of a global, modern DNS infrastructure without having to contact every customer Continue reading

HP embraces open hardware designs with Cloudline servers

Hewlett-Packard is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Microsoft in embracing open hardware designs with its new low-cost Cloudline servers.Cloudline servers are no-frills cloud servers that break away from proprietary technology HP uses in its popular Proliant servers. The servers are HP’s first based on industry standard specifications defined by the Open Compute Project, which was founded by Facebook in 2012, and Open Networking Foundation, which was formed in 2011.The use of low-cost, bare-bones servers is growing among Internet service providers like Google and Facebook, which are looking for a cheap and efficient ways to upgrade hardware in data centers. Cloudline gives HP a chance to pursue that customer base, said John Gromala, senior director of hyperscale product management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, March 10

Facebook’s Open Compute Project struts its stuffThe Open Compute Project kicks off its annual Silicon Valley summit on Tuesday, where vendors and customers will show their latest designs for low cost data center hardware. Facebook started the project about three years ago to wrestle some control away from the big vendors and collaborate on open designs that white-box manufacturers can compete to implement. Microsoft, Intel, Canonical and Goldman Sachs will all give updates on what they’ve been building this past year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, March 10

Facebook’s Open Compute Project struts its stuffThe Open Compute Project kicks off its annual Silicon Valley summit on Tuesday, where vendors and customers will show their latest designs for low cost data center hardware. Facebook started the project about three years ago to wrestle some control away from the big vendors and collaborate on open designs that white-box manufacturers can compete to implement. Microsoft, Intel, Canonical and Goldman Sachs will all give updates on what they’ve been building this past year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wikimedia sues NSA to stop it from spying on its users

In an effort to stop the U.S. government from spying on Wikipedia’s readers and editors, the Wikimedia Foundation will sue the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ).The lawsuit, due to be filed with a coalition of eight civili liberties organizations later Tuesday, challenges what Wikimedia calls the NSA’s unfounded, large-scale search and seizure of internet communications. Using surveillance techniques the NSA intercepts virtually all internet communications flowing across the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers that make up the internet’s backbone, which is used by Wikimedia to connect Wikipedia readers and contributors, the organization said in a blog post signed by its senior legal counsel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The website that was built for Google to destroy

When Matthew Rothenberg created a new website in early February, he let about two dozen people know about it through an unlikely medium: postcards.The unorthodox method was fitting for an unorthodox website called Unindexed. It was the latest project from Rothenberg, a 35-year-old based in Brooklyn, who has created a portfolio of interactive web installations and performance art projects around technology.Unindexed is no more. The website was coded to erase itself once Google added it to its search index. It lasted a little over three weeks, disappearing forever on Feb. 24.Rothenberg has done stints as head of product for Flickr and Bitly but for the last couple of years has focused on consulting and his art-technology side projects. His goal for Unindexed was to create a site where people could post comments safe in the knowledge that no record of those posts would ever exist again. It was also coded to prevent Google from caching it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The website that was built for Google to destroy

When Matthew Rothenberg created a new website in early February, he let about two dozen people know about it through an unlikely medium: postcards.The unorthodox method was fitting for an unorthodox website called Unindexed. It was the latest project from Rothenberg, a 35-year-old based in Brooklyn, who has created a portfolio of interactive web installations and performance art projects around technology.Unindexed is no more. The website was coded to erase itself once Google added it to its search index. It lasted a little over three weeks, disappearing forever on Feb. 24.Rothenberg has done stints as head of product for Flickr and Bitly but for the last couple of years has focused on consulting and his art-technology side projects. His goal for Unindexed was to create a site where people could post comments safe in the knowledge that no record of those posts would ever exist again. It was also coded to prevent Google from caching it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple to raise drivers’ wages, after demands to share its wealth

Apple has decided to increase hourly wages by about 25 percent and offer other perks for its contract drivers in the Bay Area, in response to demands from workers in the area for better terms.The move comes ahead of the company’s shareholder meeting on Tuesday, which civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson is attending, according to his Rainbow Push Coalition.Jackson, who has backed the demands of contract workers, is also likely to press Apple to outline its plans to employ more women, blacks and Latinos in its tech and general staff. This has been a long standing demand of the leader who has previously attended shareholder meetings of other tech companies including Hewlett-Packard.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Whitebox Switching and Open-Source Networking Are not SDN

One of my readers left this comment to the Four Paths to SDN blog post:

You didn't mention Cumulus. SDN protocols become much less important when you have an open Linux switch platform. You can compile and install your own management daemon and implement whatever protocol best suits the task (and blend local and remote control).

Here’s my usual response to this line of thinking:

Attention World: The Network Is Now Open!

Adobe extends its Marketing Cloud to IoT and beyond

Adobe’s Marketing Cloud has offered enterprises a tool for integrated online marketing and Web analytics for several years already, but on Tuesday the company announced numerous new extensions to the technology.Among the products unveiled at the Adobe Summit going on in Salt Lake City this week are new marketing tools designed with the Internet of Things in mind.A feature called Adobe Experience Manager Screens, for example, aims to help brands extend interactive content including images, 3D interactive models, video and more to physical locations such as retail stores, hotels and even devices like vending machines.A new IoT software development kit, meanwhile, lets brands measure and analyze consumer engagement across connected devices, while new Intelligent Location capabilities allow companies to tap GPS and iBeacon data to optimize their physical brand presence.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CCIE R&S – By the Numbers

When I started studying in earnest for my CCIE, I started a log of how I was spending my time studying, which books and papers I’d read, videos I’d watched, and so on. I thought it would be a neat exercise to look back afterwards at what it took to achieve this goal. I’m also somewhat self-deprecating and tend to minimize my accomplishments, so having this data is a way for me to remember that this wasn’t a small accomplishment at all.

1,041,248 bytes of digital notes taken

13,916 km traveled (8,711 mi)

1,432 total study hours

652 hours in the lab

321 hours of just reading

223 videos watched

161 hours spent watching those videos

128 PDF documents read

23 books read

5 figures worth of expenses and costs

1 completely trashed USB mouse

Beyond these numbers there’s the intangibles that went into this goal too. No vacations. Giving up free time on evenings and weekends. Not seeing friends as much. Not spending as much time with family. Maintaining focus constantly on the end goal. Constantly staying up late and getting up early.

Looking back at all of this, I realize that becoming CCIE certified isn’t just about Continue reading