43% off TP-Link Smart LED Wi-Fi Light Bulb, 50W Dimmable and Alexa Compatible – Deal Alert

TP-Link has discounted its 50W smart bulb 43% to just $19.99. Use the Kasa app to turn on/off or dim from anywhere in the world. Set up a schedule, set the mood, and even control with your voice via an Alexa-enabled device such as Echo or Dot. Reviewers rate 4 out of 5 stars (see reviews) on Amazon, where you can get yourself one (or more) for just $20, a good deal considering it typically lists north of $20 and sometimes $30 with various online retailers. See the discounted TP-Link smart LED bulb on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Rising Tide of CCIE Written Costs

In CCIE news this week, Cisco has raised the price of their exams across the board. The CCNA has moved up to $325, and the CCIE Written moves from $400 to $450. It goes without saying that there is quite a bit of outcry in the community. Why is the price of the CCIE Written exam surging so high?

No Such Thing As A Free Test

The most obvious answer is that the amount of work going in to development of the exam has increased. The number of people working behind the scenes to create a better exam has caused the amount of outlay to go up, hence the need to recover those costs. This is the simplest explanation of all the cost increases.

As Cisco pours more and more technology into the tests, the amount of hands and fingers touching them has gone down. At the same time, the quality of the eyeballs that do look at the exam has gone up. It’s a lot like going to a specialist doctor. The quality of the care you receive for your condition is high, but the costs associated with that doctor are higher than a regular general practice doctor. Cisco’s Continue reading

Python – Kirk Byers Course Week 2 Part 4

This post will describe the exercises and solutions for week two of Kirk Byers Python for Network Engineers.

The final assignment in week 2 is the following:

IV. You have the following string from "show version" on a Cisco router

cisco_ios = "Cisco IOS Software, C880 Software (C880DATA-UNIVERSALK9-M), Version 15.0(1)M4, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)"

Note, the string is a single line; there is no newline in the string.

How would you process this string to retrieve only the IOS version:

   ios_version = "15.0(1)M4"


Try to make it generic (i.e. assume that the IOS version can change). 

You can assume that the commas divide this string into four sections and that the string will always have 'Cisco IOS Software', 'Version', and 'RELEASE SOFTWARE' in it.

The first thing we want to do is to split the string into several parts and put them in a list. We were told that we could use the comma as a separator. We’ll print the list and show the type to show what is going on.

cisco_ios_list = cisco_ios.split(",")
print(cisco_ios_list)
print(type(cisco_ios_list))

This gives us the following output:

daniel@daniel-iperf3:~/python/Week2$ python3 ios_version.py 
['Cisco IOS Software', ' C880 Software (C880DATA-UNIVERSALK9-M)', '\n Version 15.0(1)M4',  Continue reading

Why is Apple hyping augmented reality?

Augmented reality has a powerful ally, and apparently ardent supporter, in Apple CEO Tim Cook. The leader of the most valuable publicly traded company in the world reiterated his optimistic outlook for the future of augmented reality (AR) and highlighted the technology’s capability to layer improvements in the physical world.“I’m excited about augmented reality because unlike virtual reality, which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but allows an improvement on what’s happening presently,” he told The Independent in a recent interview. “Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world for a long period of time and today you can’t do that because you get sick from it. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Q&A: Oracle’s future lies in cloud, APIs, and microservices

In addition to Java, Oracle has been focusing lately on cloud, chatbots, and APIs. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill met with Oracle's Amit Zavery, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud, at this week's DeveloperWeek conference in San Francisco to talk about the company's technology directions.[ Docker, Amazon, TensorFlow, Windows 10, and more: See InfoWorld's 2017 Technology of the Year Award winners. | Cut to the key news in technology trends and IT breakthroughs with the InfoWorld Daily newsletter, our summary of the top tech happenings. ] InfoWorld: How are microservices and chatbots driving enterprises to an API-first strategy, the notion of which was posed in a description of your upcoming presentation?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

RSA: Eric Schmidt shares deep learning on AI

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt says artificial intelligence is key to advances in diverse areas such as healthcare and datacenter design and that security concerns related to it are somewhat misguided. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google).In a wide-ranging on-stage conversation here at the RSA Security conference with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of The Great A.I. Awakening, Schmidt shared his insights from decades of work related to AI (he studied AI as a PhD student 40 years ago) and why the technology seems to finally be hitting its stride.In fact, last year Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI is what helps the search giant build better products over time. "We will move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The high price of security shaming [Infographic]

Bad press following a security breach hits companies hard. In fact, it can be so damaging that “two-thirds of companies would pay an average of $124k to avoid public shaming scandals,” according to a recent Bitdefender survey of 250 IT security professionals. What’s more, “some 14 percent would pay more than $500k.” If you think that’s a high price to pay, consider this: 34 percent of companies were breached in the past 12 months, according to the report, and “74 percent of IT decision makers don’t know how the company was breached.” Among the survey’s other notable findings is that while 64 percent of respondents said they think their current security budget is sufficient, they also admitted that “only 64 percent of cyberattacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with the current resources.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

The high price of security shaming [Infographic]

Bad press following a security breach hits companies hard. In fact, it can be so damaging that “two-thirds of companies would pay an average of $124k to avoid public shaming scandals,” according to a recent Bitdefender survey of 250 IT security professionals. What’s more, “some 14 percent would pay more than $500k.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

RSA: Eric Schmidt shares deep learning on AI

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt says artificial intelligence is key to advances in diverse areas such as healthcare and datacenter design and that security concerns related to it are somewhat misguided. (Alphabet is the parent company of Google).In a wide-ranging on-stage conversation here at the RSA Security conference with Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of The Great A.I. Awakening, Schmidt shared his insights from decades of work related to AI (he studied AI as a PhD student 40 years ago) and why the technology seems to finally be hitting its stride.In fact, last year Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI is what helps the search giant build better products over time. "We will move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world,” he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle preps developers for Java 9 upgrade

In preparation for the planned July release of Java 9, Oracle has released guidance for moving applications over to the forthcoming upgrade, which features big changes through modularization.The newly released JDK (Java Development Kit) 9 Migration Guide notes that every update brings with it binary, source, and behavioral incompatibilities with previous versions. "The modularization of the Java SE Platform brings many benefits but also many changes," Oracle said. "Code that uses only official Java SE Platform APIs and supported JDK-specific APIs should continue to work without change." But code that uses certain features or JDK-internal APIs may not run or may give different results, the company cautioned.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

H-1B advocate Sen. Orrin Hatch sets stage for new visa battle

The U.S. Senate's leading proponent for increasing the H-1B visa cap is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). His previous legislative efforts have infuriated critics of the visa program. Hatch's 2015 visa cap-increasing bill, I-Squared, was so awful, said the IEEE-USA, that it would "help destroy" the U.S. tech workforce.Hatch is updating his I-Squared bill with reforms he hopes buy leeway with his critics. That doesn't seem likely.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Raspberry Pi roundup: Hi, my breath is fresh, remote access, and a darker shade of Pi

Sticking Raspberry Pis in cute little packages is, after all, part of the point of the Raspberry Pi. It’s a small computer, so let’s put it places you can’t fit laptops or desktops. We’ve seen them behind picture frames, inside Nintendo Game Boy-ish shells, and in so many other places.Step forward, PiMiniMint creator Matt Wagner, who has managed to stuff a Raspberry Pi Zero – along with a screen, a battery, an SD card reader and much more – into a tin of Altoids. Curious.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Cisco reserves $125 million to pay for faulty clock component in switches, routers + Microsoft's monthlong delay of patches may pose risksTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Industrial IoT: Removing Roadblocks

Startup Nyansa helps companies quantify the impact of application performance

Understanding the impact of an IT outage is a fairly standardized process. Take how much revenue the company generates, break it down to an hourly amount and, as they say in the UK, “Bob’s your Uncle”. However, IT outages aren’t nearly as common as they used to be a decade or more ago. Businesses build their infrastructure with so much redundancy that the concept of an outage is rare. I believe most companies could go into their data center and flick any piece of equipment off and not one user would notice.The bigger problems today are related to “brown out” situations, where things are working but not quite right. A user tries to make a call from a VoIP phone and the call is choppy or attempts to input some information into a CRM system and the interface is slow. These are much more difficult problems to quantify the impact of. Last year I asked a number of IT leaders if they were aware of how much productivity was lost due to poor application performance and most either took a shot in the dark or admitted they had no idea. As best as I can tell, the number is Continue reading

Startup Nyansa helps companies quantify the impact of application performance

Understanding the impact of an IT outage is a fairly standardized process. Take how much revenue the company generates, break it down to an hourly amount and, as they say in the UK, “Bob’s your Uncle”. However, IT outages aren’t nearly as common as they used to be a decade or more ago. Businesses build their infrastructure with so much redundancy that the concept of an outage is rare. I believe most companies could go into their data center and flick any piece of equipment off and not one user would notice.The bigger problems today are related to “brown out” situations, where things are working but not quite right. A user tries to make a call from a VoIP phone and the call is choppy or attempts to input some information into a CRM system and the interface is slow. These are much more difficult problems to quantify the impact of. Last year I asked a number of IT leaders if they were aware of how much productivity was lost due to poor application performance and most either took a shot in the dark or admitted they had no idea. As best as I can tell, the number is Continue reading

Arrest of Samsung’s Lee may not affect smartphone business in short term

The arrest of Samsung Electronics’ vice chairman Lee Jae-yong on Friday in South Korea may not have a direct impact on the company’s high-profile electronics business, including its smartphones unit, according to analysts.Samsung announced in 2012 the promotion of the executive, also known as Jay. Y. Lee, to his current formal position at Samsung Electronics. But he is largely seen as the de-facto leader of the Samsung Group, running the business on behalf of his ailing father, Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee.He was arrested on charges of bribery as part of an alleged corruption scandal that led to the impeachment of South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenConfig: From Basics to Implementations

In 2013, large-scale cloud providers and ISPs decided they had enough of the glacial IETF process of generating YANG models used to describe device configuration and started OpenConfig – a customer-only initiative that quickly created data models covering typical use cases of the founding members (aka “What Does Google Need”).

Apple to unveil iOS 11 at WWDC on June 5

With so many rumors surrounding the iPhone 8, it's been easy to lose sight of the fact that we're just a few short months away from seeing the next-generation version of iOS, the mobile OS that powers Apple's iconic smartphones.Earlier today, Apple announced that WWDC 2017 will be held from June 5-9 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. The annual developer's conference is where Apple will take the wraps off of iOS 11 while also showing us what the future of macOS, tvOS and watchOS will look like."Each year during WWDC," Apple's press release reads, "millions of talented developers around the world learn about Apple's breakthrough platform technologies ranging from programming languages like Swift to breakthrough developer APIs like SiriKit, HomeKit, HealthKit and CarPlay. These Apple technologies inspire developers to continue creating incredible experiences for every aspect of customers’ lives and improve the way they manage their smart homes, cars, health and more for over one billion active Apple devices."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dockercast Interview: Docker Captain Stefan Scherer on Microsoft and Docker

In this podcast we chat with Docker Captain and newly minted Microsoft MVP Stefan Scherer. Stefan has done some fantastic work with Docker for Windows and Microservices. We also talk about how lift and shift models work really well for Docker and Windows and Stefan walks us through some of the basics of running Docker on Windows. In addition to the podcast, below is his interview on why being a Captain allows him to give back to the awesome Docker community.

Dockercast with Stephen Scherer

Interview with Stefan Scherer

How has Docker impacted what you do on a daily basis?

Docker helps me to keep my machines clean. I realize more and more that you only need a few tools on your laptop, keeping it clean and lean. And instead of writing documentation on how to build a piece of software, describe all steps in a Dockerfile. So multi GByte fat developer VM’s we maintained some years ago shrink down so a few KByte Dockerfiles for each project. No time-consuming backups needed, just keep the Dockerfile in your sources and have a backup of your Git repos.

Having practiced that on Mac and Linux now for a while, I’m happy Continue reading

Experts at RSA give their best cybersecurity advice

Come to the RSA show, and you’ll find plenty of cybersecurity technology. The top vendors from across the industry are here, showing products for fighting ransomware, preventing data breaches and more.But even the best security software is useless if users and businesses aren’t taking the right steps to protect themselves. So we asked experts at the show for their best cybersecurity tips.Joe Stewart, director of malware research at Dell SecureWorks He advises everyone to set up two-factor authentication to protect their internet accounts, especially email. It can be particularly useful when stopping hackers who are trying to steal login passwords from users, whether through malware or email phishing schemes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here