Microsoft employees donate $650 million in cash, services and software

Microsoft formed Microsoft Philanthropies a little over a year ago with a plan to donate money, time, cloud computing services and software around the globe. In its first year, it has done a lot of that. Mary Snapp, corporate vice president of Microsoft Philanthropies, provided an update to the program's progress after its first year, and it's impressive. The company's contributions to various nonprofits and schools include donations worth $465 million to 71,000 organizations and more than $30 million in technology and cash donations to organizations serving refugees and displaced people. Plus, company employees raised $142 million for 19,000 nonprofits and schools. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Half of the top 100 retail sites had slow load times during AWS’s S3 outage, vendor finds

Yesterday Amazon Web Services had a bad day. And when AWS has a bad day, so do a lot of other sites.Vendor Apica is a website monitoring services that keeps a close eye on some of the top retail websites around the country. All in all, the retail website Apica tracks had trouble dealing with the elevated errors rates AWS reported in S3 starting around mid-day Eastern Time.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 5 Lessons from Amazon's S3 cloud blunder, and how to protect yourself from the next outage +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fave Raves 2017 call for submissions

Fave Raves is Network World’s annual roundup of the best products, as chosen by IT pros. Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ([email protected]) by Friday, March 17. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.Items to address:1. Please provide your name, title and employer.2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)3. Why do you like it?4. How has it helped you and/or your company?5. How many years have you worked in IT?6. What upcoming IT projects are you most excited about and why?7. Please include a picture of yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fave Raves 2017 call for submissions

Fave Raves is Network World’s annual roundup of the best products, as chosen by IT pros. Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ([email protected]) by Friday, March 17. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.Items to address:1. Please provide your name, title and employer.2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)3. Why do you like it?4. How has it helped you and/or your company?5. How many years have you worked in IT?6. What upcoming IT projects are you most excited about and why?7. Please include a picture of yourself.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US surveillance law may see no new protections for foreign targets

Any reform of a controversial U.S. law allowing the National Security Agency to spy on people overseas will likely focus on its impact on U.S. residents, without curbing its use elsewhere.Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on Dec. 31, and some digital rights groups are calling on Congress to overhaul the law to protect the privacy of residents of both the U.S. and other countries. Congress will almost certainly extend the provision in some form. But a congressional hearing on Wednesday focused largely on the NSA's "inadvertent" collection of U.S. residents' data, with little time given to the privacy concerns of people overseas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US surveillance law may see no new protections for foreign targets

Any reform of a controversial U.S. law allowing the National Security Agency to spy on people overseas will likely focus on its impact on U.S. residents, without curbing its use elsewhere.Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expires on Dec. 31, and some digital rights groups are calling on Congress to overhaul the law to protect the privacy of residents of both the U.S. and other countries. Congress will almost certainly extend the provision in some form. But a congressional hearing on Wednesday focused largely on the NSA's "inadvertent" collection of U.S. residents' data, with little time given to the privacy concerns of people overseas.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to end its paid Wi-Fi service for Skype

Microsoft is pulling the plug on its Wi-Fi service for Skype users, which let users buy Wi-Fi access in paid public hotspots for a reduced fee over what the hotspot owner would charge. The company has sent notice to its subscribers that the service will be discontinued at the end of this month and they should use up whatever credits they have.Originally called Skype WiFi and later rebranded as Microsoft WiFi, the service dates back to 2009 when Skype was still an independent company. Following the purchase by Microsoft, the service was restructured and rebranded several times before being integrated into Windows 10. However, a promised integration with Office 365 never happened. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 killer Raspberry Pi projects (Collection 1)

Pi-ning for more air timeImage by NASA / Mark GibbsOne of the most remarkable things about the Raspberry Pi family of single board computers (other than the devices themselves) is the incredible creativity they’ve stimulated. School kids, makers, scientists, engineers, you name it, are building the most amazing digital machines and in this first round up I’ve collected some of notable and exciting examples of what people are making. If you know of a project that should be included in my next round up, drop me a line, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook and sign up for my newsletter!To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 reasons why YouTube beat Apple to a skinny TV bundle deal with the networks

Yesterday, Google debuted YouTube TV, giving wannabe cord-cutters a reason to finally do so.The obstacle for over-the-top television (OTT) has been the lack of news, sports and live TV.  Now, with YouTube TV, subscribers get live TV streaming of 44 channels, including ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, plus two add-on channels.YouTube beat Apple to the streaming TV punch, delivering a cable TV-like skinny bundle at a lower price of  $35 per month. Apple has long been rumored to be interested in the disrupting the TV market, though it was reported that Apple walked away from negations about a year ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Award program: Searching for Enterprise All Stars

Network World is proud to announce the 2017 Enterprise All Star Awards, a competition that will celebrate five companies that have used technology to radically improve their competitive standing or the efficiency of their operations. Entry requirements: Enterprise shops only (no vendor submissions) Employees: 500+ Open to all vertical markets, including industry, government and education sectors The technology in question has to be operational and has to have been implemented after Jan 1, 2016 Entries due by April 17, 2017 Judging will be done in two rounds:  A panel of Network World editors and contributors will evaluate qualified entries based on three criteria:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Award program: Searching for Enterprise All Stars

Network World is proud to announce the 2017 Enterprise All Star Awards, a competition that will celebrate five companies that have used technology to radically improve their competitive standing or the efficiency of their operations.Entry requirements: Enterprise shops only (no vendor submissions) Employees: 500+ Open to all vertical markets, including industry, government and education sectors The technology in question has to be operational and has to have been implemented after Jan 1, 2016 Entries due by April 17, 2017 Judging will be done in two rounds:  A panel of Network World editors and contributors will evaluate qualified entries based on three criteria:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Telefónica Works on Private LTE Using MEC Technology

Local breakout is an early use case for mobile edge computing.

Windows 7 share decline stalls, hinting at tough transition to 10

Windows 7's decline in user share, driven for a year by desertions to Windows 10, has stalled for the last eight months, data published today showed.According to analytics vendor Net Applications, the user share of Windows 7 -- an estimate of the proportion of the world's personal computer owners who ran that operating system -- climbed by 1.2 percentage points last month to 48.4%, the highest mark since June 2016.And Windows 7 ran more Windows machines than any other edition, accounting for 52.8% of the personal computers powered by Microsoft's OS. The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows stemmed from the fact that Windows ran on 91.8% of all personal computers, not 100%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Palo Alto Networks Acquires LightCyber for $105M

Palo Alto will sell LightCyber products until its tech is integrated into its security platform.

Why no YANG??

I was at Cisco Live in Berlin last week, and I came away with a question: why no YANG?

Here is a YANG model represented in YIN—this one describes an interface in Quagga, and is easy to read:

YANG can be expressed in many ways, such as YIN, or in a model format (which is still easy to read), or in json format. This is an example of HTML, taken from the Vimeo site:

The YIN representation of YANG is XML, and XML is also a superset of HTML.

The post Why no YANG?? appeared first on 'net work.

Microsoft’s budget Windows VR headsets roll out to developers soon

A lucky few developers will be able to get their hands on a low-cost Windows virtual reality headset starting this month. Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset will start rolling out to a handpicked batch of software makers starting the end of March, with more coming later.This marks the first release of a Windows Mixed Reality headset, which Microsoft first previewed last year. The headsets are supposed to stand out from the crowd because of a lower price and their support for "inside-out" tracking that uses sensors on the device to determine a user's position, rather than relying on external trackers to gather that information. That's why Microsoft is calling them mixed reality headsets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Acer’s Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish

Microsoft unveiled the first Windows Mixed Reality headset Wednesday, and an early look at a prototype version of the hardware shows promise, along with room for improvement.The Acer Mixed Reality Development Edition headset will start rolling out to developers later this month, but Microsoft offered a demo of a pre-release prototype during the Game Developers Conference this week.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows VR headset shows promise, needs polish

The first Windows Mixed Reality headsets will start shipping to developers later this month, as Microsoft works to distribute the Acer Mixed Reality Developer Edition headset to a handpicked group of software makers.Microsoft offered me an early look at one of its internal prototypes, which shared a number of similarities with Acer’s hardware in terms of design and overall feature set. It wasn’t identical to the final hardware, but was built to roughly illustrate some of the capabilities users should expect. Here are my first impressions.I wasn't allowed to photograph the device, but it looked like an almost entirely black and less branded version of the headset illustration that Microsoft provided. The display portion of the headset felt slightly smaller than the full-sized Rift and Vive headsets that I'm used to, but I didn't have any handy for a comparison. It was certainly lighter than those other devices. For a prototype, it felt solid.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Response: IETF RFC 8033 Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE)

Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE) is another active queue management algorithm for dropping packets.

Similar to RED, PIE randomly drops an
incoming packet at the onset of congestion. Congestion detection,
however, is based on the queuing latency instead of the queue length
(as with RED). Furthermore, PIE also uses the derivative (rate of
change) of the queuing latency to help determine congestion levels
and an appropriate response. The design parameters of PIE are chosen
via control theory stability analysis. While these parameters can be
fixed to work in various traffic conditions, they could be made
self-tuning to optimize system performance.

We know that Bufferbloat is problem, and there are many algorithms proposed. PIE might be suitable for existing network hardware since its approximates Random Early Discard. BBR Congestion Control has been suggested and implemented by Google (related to QUIC/HTTP2) and possibly has the momentum, so I’m not sure if PIE

Link:https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8033.txt

Link: BBR: Congestion-Based Congestion Control – ACM Queue – http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3022184

The post Response: IETF RFC 8033 Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE) appeared first on EtherealMind.

5 lessons from Amazon’s S3 cloud blunder – and how to prepare for the next one

According to internet monitoring platform Catchpoint, Amazon Web Service’s Simple Storage Service (S3) experienced a three hour and 39 minute disruption on Tuesday that had cascading effects across other Amazon cloud services and many internet sites that rely on the popular cloud platform.“S3 is like air in the cloud,” says Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti; when it goes down many websites can’t breathe. But disruptions, errors and outages are a fact of life in the cloud. Bartoletti says there’s no reason to panic: “This is not a trend,” he notes. “S3 has been so reliable, so secure, it’s been the sort of crown jewel of Amazon’s cloud.“To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here