Virtual Reality and Skeuomorphism

Remember skeuomorphism? It’s the idea that the user interface of a program needs to resemble a physical a physical device to help people understand how to use it. Skeuomorphism is not just a software thing, however. Things like faux wooden panels on cars and molded clay rivets on pottery are great examples of physical skeuomorphism. However, most people will recall the way that Apple used skeuomorphism in the iOS when they hear the term.

Scott Forrestal was the genius behind the skeuomorphism in iOS for many years. Things like adding a fake leather header to the Contacts app, the wooden shelves in the iBooks library, and the green felt background in the Game Center app are the examples that stand out the most. Forrestal used skeuomorphism to help users understand how to use apps on the new platform. Users needed to be “trained” to touch the right tap targets or to feel more familiar with an app on sight.

Skeuomorphism worked quite well in iOS for many years. However, when Jonny Ive took over as the lead iOS developer, he started phasing out skeuomorphism starting in iOS 7. With the advent of flat design, people didn’t want fake leather and Continue reading

Worth Reading: Deep dive into Sky Lake

The architecture of Skylake is very different from that of the prior “Haswell” and “Broadwell” Xeon chips, and will be carried forward with the next-generation “Cascade Lake” processors that will very likely be implemented in a highly tuned 14 nanometer process – what Intel calls 14++ nanometer in its chip manufacturing presentations. (We had not heard of Cascade Lake before, and assumed future Xeons would be based on the “Kaby Lake” design already implemented in the Xeon E3 chips for single-socket servers.) The point is, the Socket P form factor for Xeon SP processors will be used for at least two generations of server chips, and possibly more. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets

In a properly working capitalist economy, innovative companies make big bets, help create new markets, vanquish competition or at least hold it at bay, and profit from all of the hard work, cleverness, luck, and deal making that comes with supplying a good or service to demanding customers.

There is no question that Nvidia has become a textbook example of this as it helped create and is now benefitting from the wave of accelerated computing that is crashing into the datacenters of the world. The company is on a roll, and is on the very laser-sharp cutting edge of its …

Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

One Small Step Toward Supercomputers in Space

While it is not likely we will see large supercomputers on the International Space Station (ISS) anytime soon, HPE is getting a head start on providing more advanced on-board computing capabilities via a pair of its aptly-named “Apollo” water-cooled servers in orbit.

The two-socket machines, connected with Infiniband will put Broadwell computing capabilities on the ISS, mostly running benchmarks, including High Performance Linpack (HPL), the metric that determines the Top 500 supercomputer rankings. These tests, in addition to the more data movement-centric HPCG benchmark and NASA’s own NAS parallel benchmark will determine what performance changes, if any, are to be …

One Small Step Toward Supercomputers in Space was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Recap: How to make a Cloudflare App workshop in Austin

Cloudflare hosted a developer preview workshop in Austin for Cloudflare Apps, taught by Zack Bloom, tech lead of Cloudflare Apps. Due to popular request, we are making available the video from the workshop.


Want some ideas on what to start with? Check out the idea suggestion list on our Cloudflare Community page. It's a great idea to review our Apps documentation available here.

Want to request a Cloudflare Apps workshop in your city? Please drop a line to [email protected]

Share your works in progress and compare notes with other developers on the community forum.

Worth Reading: Ops is everyone’s job now

Distributed systems are never “up”; they exist in a constant state of partially degraded service. Accept failure, design for resiliency, protect and shrink the critical path. You can’t hold the entire system in your head or reason about it; you will live or die by the thoroughness of your instrumentation and observability tooling. You need robust service registration and discovery, load balancing, and backpressure between every combination of components. You need to learn to integrate third-party services; many core functions will be outsourced to teams or companies that you have no direct visibility into or influence upon You have to test in production, and you have to do so safely; you cannot spin up a staging copy of a large distributed system. —Charity Majors @ opensource

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Five Questions: Testing Ansible Playbooks & Roles

Next up in our #AskAnsible posts is Chris Meyers, our Senior Software Engineer.

Learn his take on five key questions we often get regarding testing Ansible Playbooks and roles.

1. Why should I test my Playbooks and roles?

Chris: Ansible Playbooks and roles should be treated like production code. Production code usually has unit tests, functional tests, and integration tests.

  • Unit testing Ansible is equivalent to unit testing SQL queries, you just normally don’t do it. Ansible unit testing belongs at the Python module level.
  • Function testing with Ansible would require a large amount of system state setup or mocking, and it just isn't realistic. 
  • Integration testing is the most useful. It ensures that your intent, expressed in English, is translated correctly to Ansible’s declarative language.
    • Ex: you want to set up a LAMP or MEAN stack. A simple integration test would be to issue an http request that you know exercises the database. The integration test would ensure that your setup is correct from end to end.
2. When should I start testing my Playbooks and roles?

Chris: You can start at any time! Tests can be added for new Playbooks or to existing Playbooks. Testing Continue reading

BFD is not a Fast Convergence mechanism !

BFD is not a fast convergence mechanism. BFD stands for Bidirectional Forwarding Detection. It is an important tool for the IP layer but there is a confusion in the network community about it.   BFD is a failure detection mechanism. Link and  node failures can be detected with it.   Without BFD, detection can be done at Layer […]

The post BFD is not a Fast Convergence mechanism ! appeared first on Cisco Network Design and Architecture | CCDE Bootcamp | orhanergun.net.

Technology Short Take #85

Welcome to Technology Short Take #85! This is my irregularly-published collection of links and articles from around the Internet related to the major data center technologies: networking, hardware, security, cloud computing, applications/OSes, storage, and virtualization. Plus, just for fun, I usually try to include a couple career-related links as well. Enjoy!

Networking

Feedback: Open Networking for Large-Scale Networks

Got this feedback from a network architect attending the Open Networking for Large-Scale Networks webinar:

I used the webinar when preparing for a meeting/discussion with a NOS SW-vendor. In the meeting, my knowledge was completely up-to-speed & I was on the level with the vendor in the discussion! :-)

Obviously, Russ White and Shawn Zandi did a great job based on their real-life hands-on experience (they use whitebox switches @ LinkedIn).

The search for the killer app of unikernels

When a radically different technology comes along it usually takes time before we figure out how to apply it. When we had steam engines running factories there was one engine in each factory with a giant driveshaft running through the whole factory. When the electric engine came along people started replacing the giant steam engine with a giant electric motor. It took time before people understood that they could deploy several small motors in different parts of the factory and connect electric cables rather than having a common driveshaft. It takes time to understand the technology and its applicability.

Steam engine

The situation with unikernels is similar. We have this new thing and to some extent we’re using it to replace some general purpose operating system workloads. But we’re still very much limited by how we think about operating systems and computers.

Unikernels are radically different. Naturally the question of the killer app has come up on a number of occasions. As unikernels are quite different from the dominant operating systems of today it isn’t as easy to spot what it will be. Here I’ll try to answer why it’s hard to spot the killer app.

Defining characteristics of unikernels

Let’s start Continue reading

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