7 ways to save money when you build a PC

For many enthusiasts, part of the fun of building a PC lies in not spending a penny more than necessary. Whether you’re building a basic everyday computer or trying to eke out a $500 gaming rig, shopping smart lets you do more with your money or, well, just plain save some cash on a purchase that’s already pricey enough.Good news: Costs savings abound, especially if you’re not in a rush. You just have to know where—and how—to look. These tips and tricks will help you save money on your next PC build. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Montreal sees its future in smart sensors, artificial intelligence (with video)

The Quebecois city of Montreal has long been known as a hotbed of creativity -- home of Cirque du Soleil and a hub for companies in the online gaming and special effects industries, not to mention its place as a financial and trade capital.Creativity played a key role when the city of 2 million (with 4 million regionally) competed against other municipalities globally to win the 2016 title of Intelligent Community of the Year.And now that commitment to creativity is spurring the city to explore a range of unique new smartphone apps and other startup-generated initiatives that leverage sensors, data collection and analysis, and machine learning to deal with snow removal, ever-increasing traffic and other municipal challenges.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Friends or enemies? Security vendors tiptoe towards collaboration

There are hundreds of security vendors across the security stack. You have providers for cloud, email, network and endpoint security, as well as threat, malware and DDoS protection, among phishing and whaling protection, insider threat detection and a whole lot more.The trouble is, a huge number of these solutions don’t ‘play’ well with one another, with this often making life difficult for security teams adopting these technologies. At the same time, these same teams are expected to keep up with an ever-changing landscape and criminals who innovate faster than most Fortune 500 companies.Magnum Consulting analyst Frank J. Ohlhorst captured this collaboration issue perfectly in an opinion piece last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Friends or enemies? Security vendors tiptoe towards collaboration

There are hundreds of security vendors across the security stack. You have providers for cloud, email, network and endpoint security, as well as threat, malware and DDoS protection, among phishing and whaling protection, insider threat detection and a whole lot more.The trouble is, a huge number of these solutions don’t ‘play’ well with one another, with this often making life difficult for security teams adopting these technologies. At the same time, these same teams are expected to keep up with an ever-changing landscape and criminals who innovate faster than most Fortune 500 companies.Magnum Consulting analyst Frank J. Ohlhorst captured this collaboration issue perfectly in an opinion piece last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The cloud continues to rise—and fast

Now that the big three cloud vendors—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—have released their financial results for the fourth quarter of 2016, it’s time once again to take stock of how fast the cloud is growing. The short answer remains: very, very fast. That conclusion comes in spite of some carping from analysts about the latest numbers from Amazon Web Services (AWS), but I don’t think those complaints add up to much when comes to the health of the cloud computing industry. But let’s take a closer look, and you can decide for yourself. AWS posted strong growth  AWS revenue grew 47 percent in the quarter to $3.5 billion. The business earned $926 million in the quarter, up from $540 million in Q4 2015. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What those IP ratings like IP68 or IP53 really mean

Waterproof phones are exciting. Instead of dropping your phone in a bowl of rice when you accidentally knock it off the counter and into the sink, you can just dry it off and keep on truckin’. And many of today’s waterproof phones are as waterproof as they can possibly get—they’ve got an IPX8 rating, where 8 is the highest (barring extreme products that aren’t made for consumers) “waterproofness” a consumer device can possibly qualify for.Right?Well…maybe not. The Samsung Galaxy S7 has an IP68 rating—the highest rating a consumer device can get on the IP scale—but that still doesn’t mean you should take it surfing or white-water rafting. Here’s what those IP ratings really mean.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft overhauls Azure Marketplace for easier app shopping

Microsoft´s Azure Marketplace is to Azure what the Windows Store is to the client operating system: an online software marketplace, only the Azure version is for buying and selling cloud apps and services from independent software vendors (ISVs) that have been certified by Microsoft to run on Azure. Over the years, the Marketplac has grown along with the popularity of Azure, and customers got frustrated with its interface due to an increasing number of categories, app types and providers. Finding the apps they wanted became a chore.So, Microsoft introduced a whole new Azure Marketplace interface designed to make things easier. For starters, the search form now provides search suggestions as you type, just like a search engine would. Results are sorted by relevance and popularity. You can do searches on basic terms and then narrow it down to more specific categories, applications and functions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Solving the Challenges of Scientific Clouds

In distributed computing, there are two choices: move the data to the computation or move the computation to the data. Public and off-site private clouds present a third option: move them both. In any case, something is moving somewhere. The “right” choice depends on a variety of factors –  including performance, quantity, and cost – but data seems to have more intertia in many cases, especially when the volume approaches the scale of terabytes.

For the modern cloud, adding additional compute power is trivial. Moving the data to that compute power is less so. With a 10 gigabit connection, the …

Solving the Challenges of Scientific Clouds was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

Cloud service provider Stratoscale has snapped up database-as-a-service vendor Tesora to beef up its hybrid cloud offering.Stratoscale's key product, Symphony, is built on OpenStack and allows businesses to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) "region" in their own data center, so they can easily move workloads between private and public cloud servers or scale up capacity without having to migrate to a different service.Tesora's database as a service, also built on OpenStack, runs in public, private or hybrid clouds. Stratoscale plans to use it to expand its existing managed database support, which includes AWS Relational Database Service and the AWS NoSQL database, DynamoDB. Tesora will bring Stratoscale self-service provisioning capabilities for Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis, DataStax Enterprise, Persona and DB2 Express databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stratoscale buys Tesora to bolster hybrid cloud database capability

Cloud service provider Stratoscale has snapped up database-as-a-service vendor Tesora to beef up its hybrid cloud offering.Stratoscale's key product, Symphony, is built on OpenStack and allows businesses to set up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) "region" in their own data center, so they can easily move workloads between private and public cloud servers or scale up capacity without having to migrate to a different service.Tesora's database as a service, also built on OpenStack, runs in public, private or hybrid clouds. Stratoscale plans to use it to expand its existing managed database support, which includes AWS Relational Database Service and the AWS NoSQL database, DynamoDB. Tesora will bring Stratoscale self-service provisioning capabilities for Oracle, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis, DataStax Enterprise, Persona and DB2 Express databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fighting CLI cowboys with Napalm – An Introduction

A lot of people who aren’t familiar with Napalm tend to laugh nervously when you suggest they use it in their network. The name Napalm is partly based on getting that perfect acronym and partly a desire to incinerate the old way of doing things and move to network automation. This article is about explaining what Napalm is and what lies behind the acronym.
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BrandPost: To What Extent Can IT Future-Proof Storage?

Digital transformation is making a significant impact on the enterprise. Organizations in all industries are realizing the need to enhance the customer experience through IoT, social media, big data, and mobility. Not only are each of these opportunities transforming IT’s role within the enterprise, they are ultimately changing how organizations operate.To keep pace, numerous organizations are integrating flash storage into their infrastructure for many of their newest applications. But while flash is easy to deploy in satellite applications, integrating this valuable data back into the legacy storage infrastructure can be harder than expected. Aggressive deployment can be problematic, and enterprise networks often struggle to keep up with the higher performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

97 companies file brief against Trump’s immigration ban

Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, PayPal and the Wikimedia Foundation were among 97 companies that filed an amicus brief late Sunday opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it harms competitiveness and is discriminatory.The brief was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late last night, a bump up in the timetable, as Bloomberg reported the companies had originally planned to file later this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

97 companies file brief against Trump’s immigration ban

Apple, Facebook, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, PayPal and the Wikimedia Foundation were among 97 companies which filed an amicus brief late Sunday opposing President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration on the grounds that it harms competitiveness and is discriminatory.The brief was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals late last night, a bump up in the timetable as Bloomberg reported the companies had originally planned to file later this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thought: Latest Apple Mac Customers Are Switching from Windows

Tim Cook in the latest earnings calls.

The Mac not only returned to growth but generated its highest quarterly revenue ever. Our latest data shows that most Mac customers are buying their first Mac, with the vast majority of them coming from a Windows PC.

(My emphasis).

Thinking

1. The latest Mac is a technical lemon – CPU is old, memory capacity is limited, touch bar not relevant to prosumers
2. Normal people are still switching away from Windows. And who could blame them ?
3. Mac OS X is the platform for choice for those wanting an alternative to Microsoft Windows.

I forget these things.

Link: Apple (AAPL) Q1 2017 Results – Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha – http://seekingalpha.com/article/4041266-apple-aapl-q1-2017-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

The post Thought: Latest Apple Mac Customers Are Switching from Windows appeared first on EtherealMind.

Security Sessions: The CSO’s role in active shooter planning

In the latest episode of Security Sessions, CSO Editor-in-chief Joan Goodchild speaks with Imad Mouline, CTO at Everbridge, about how involved CSOs need to be with planning for an active shooter or other emergency at their company. While many leave physical security to others in the company, the CSO can be key to determining communications plans for alerting employees.

Musing: Open Network Linux Expansion | Big Switch Networks, Inc.

Progress towards standardised switching hardware is moving along nicely. Big Switch is support 14 MORE platforms with its OpenNetworkLinux NOS and applications.

Support for 12 New Platforms

In addition to the Facebook boxes above, we’ve added support for the following new 1G, 10G, and 100G switch platforms:

1. Celestica Redstone XP, Redstone XL, and Seastone
2. Agema AGC7648
3. Alpha Networks SNX-60×0-486F
4. Dell S6100-ON, S6010-ON, S4048t-ON, Z9100-ON
5. Accton AS4610 (ARM), AS5512 (Nephos), AS7512 (Cavium), AS7716 (Xeon)

Open Network Linux Expansion | Big Switch Networks, Inc. : http://www.bigswitch.com/blog/2016/11/21/open-network-linux-expansion

The post Musing: Open Network Linux Expansion | Big Switch Networks, Inc. appeared first on EtherealMind.

Troubleshooting: Devising A Testing Methodology

How to prevent a bad case of cloud buyer’s remorse

The trend is clear: The percentage of IT infrastructure and application workloads residing in enterprise data centers is expected to shrink from 59% today to 47% in two years, primarily the result of companies shifting resources to the public cloud, according to a survey recently released by data center provider Datalink.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

RSAC Innovation Sandbox winners: One year later

With the annual RSA security conference just around the corner, we decided to touch base with the 10 companies selected as finalists in last year’s Innovation Sandbox competition and see how they’re making out. The RSA Conference had 88 submissions for Innovation Sandbox slots last year and the field was whittled down to Bastille Networks, Illusive Networks, Menlo Security, Phantom Cyber, Prevoty, ProtectWise, SafeBreach, Skyport, Vera and Versa Networks. In last year’s competition, each vendor pitched their product to a panel of judges, as well as a packed house of attendees at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Phantom Networks was selected as the overall winner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)