What’s next for open-source Spark?

Boston -- A conference focused on a single open source project sounds like the sort of event that will feature a lone keynote speaker speaking to maybe 100 interested parties in a lecture hall at a local college. Spark Summit East was very much the opposite.A total of 1,503 people watched the five keynote speakers in a cavernous ballroom at the Hynes Convention Center lay out the future of Spark, the big data processing engine originally developed at the University of California – Berkeley by Matei Zaharia. Spark underlies huge data-driven applications being used by major players like Salesforce, Facebook, IBM and many others, helping organize, analyze, and surface specific grains of sand from beach-sized databases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Installing Sublime Text 3 on Fedora 25

Sublime Text is my current text editor of choice. I won’t go into why I chose it over other tools; instead, I encourage you to have a look for yourself. Installing Sublime Text 3 (ST3) on Fedora 25, though, isn’t as simple as running a dnf install. Fortunately, it’s not a difficult process, but it is a process I wanted to document here for the sake of others.

Here’s the process I followed:

1. Download the latest tarball of ST3. As of this writing, it was build 3126, so this cURL command accomplishes what you need:

    curl -LO https://download.sublimetext.com/sublime_text_3_build_3126_x64.tar.bz2
   

   As build numbers change, though, you’ll want to verify the correct URL for the latest build. (A lot of sites I saw provide hard-coded scripts that help perform this process for you, but don’t account for changes in the download URL.)

2. Extract the contents of the tarball with tar xvjf sublime_text_3_build_3126_x64.tar.bz2. This will create a directory called “sublime_text_3” with the contents of the tarball.

3. Install the desktop launcher for ST3 by copying over the .desktop file in the tarball:

    sudo cp -rf sublime_text_3/sublime_text.desktop /usr/share/applications/sublime_text.desktop
   

4. Edit the desktop launcher to specify the full path Continue reading

US idea to collect travelers’ passwords alarms privacy experts

To better vet foreign travelers, the U.S. might demand that some visa applicants hand over the passwords to their social media accounts, a proposal that’s alarming privacy experts.“If they don’t want to give us the information, then they don’t come,” said John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday.Kelly mentioned the proposal in a congressional hearing when he was asked what his department was doing to look at visa applicants’ social media activity.He said it was “very hard to truly vet” the visa applicants from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the Trump administration's travel ban, which is now in legal limbo. Many of the countries are failed states with little internal infrastructure, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

US idea to collect travelers’ passwords alarms privacy experts

To better vet foreign travelers, the U.S. might demand that some visa applicants hand over the passwords to their social media accounts, a proposal that’s alarming privacy experts.“If they don’t want to give us the information, then they don’t come,” said John Kelly, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, on Tuesday.Kelly mentioned the proposal in a congressional hearing when he was asked what his department was doing to look at visa applicants’ social media activity.He said it was “very hard to truly vet” the visa applicants from the seven Muslim-majority countries covered by the Trump administration's travel ban, which is now in legal limbo. Many of the countries are failed states with little internal infrastructure, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Inside That Big Silicon Valley Hyperscale Supermicro Deal

Among the major companies that design and sell servers with their own brands, which are called original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, and those that co-design machines with customers and then make them, which are called original design manufacturers or ODMs, Supermicro stands apart. It does not fall precisely into either category. The company makes system components, like motherboards and enclosures, for those who want to build their own systems or those who want to sell systems to others, and it also makes complete systems, sold in onesies or twosies or sold by the hundreds of racks.

Supermicro is also a …

Inside That Big Silicon Valley Hyperscale Supermicro Deal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Speaking at Red Hat Summit 2017

Hi Folks, I know it’s been a few weeks but I assure you I’ve been heads down on good stuff. You’ll get to see much of it on the blog, but also at Red Hat Summit 2017 in Boston, MA if you’re so inclined.

So what will I (and my colleagues) be talking about at “Summit” this year?Well, there are several RHV & KVM specific activities at Summit that I’ll have something to do with, 2 directly and multiple indirectly:

Breakout Session – High Availability for Red Hat Virtualization Manager 
This will be my primary presentation on RHV, where I talk about and provide demo’s on RHV Hosted Engine, mostly in the context of HA (why and how), but also in the context of how it’s used in a new Red Hat product… (cue dramatic music..)

Breakout Session – Red Hat Virtualization and KVM Roadmaps
This is my colleagues’ session, and typically standing room only. I may help organize, but the Product Managers (Moran & Yaniv) will knock this out. It lays out the future of both Red Hat Virtualization and the core technology, KVM.

Lightning Talk – Reporting and Metrics Update
Again, my colleague’s session (Yaniv), but Continue reading

Rackspace is cuting 6% of its workforce

Via a blog post by CEO Taylor Rhodes, Texas-based cloud computing company Rackspace announced that it is cutting about 6% of its workforce in areas that have seen slowed growth in recent years.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: How Rackspace will stay alive in cloud: Stop competing with Amazon, start partnering +Rhodes says the cuts will primarily be focused on the company’s corporate administrative expenses and management, and that the company’s “front-line” support staff and product teams will be least impacted by the layoffs. Rackspace did not provide additional details about where the cuts will come from, saying only they are in areas “where the workforce has grown more rapidly than the revenue.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In the Labs: Connected vehicles in Ohio, artificial intelligence in Illinois and Massachusetts

Activity on the tech labs front is happening faster than we can get to it these days, so here are a few "in case you missed it" items...$45M for Transportation Research Center The state of Ohio, JobsOhio and the Ohio State University are putting $45 million into an expansion of the Transportation Research Center's (TRC) 540-acre Smart Mobility Advanced Research and Test (SMART) Center in the Columbus area. Research will focus both on connected and driverless vehicles within this section of the 4,500-acre TRC expanse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista Founder: Networking Standards Move Too Slowly for Cloud Giants

Arista is trying to start a grass-roots standards effort for 800 Gb/s optics.

Networking Pros Grapple With “Clockgate”

After Ryzen, AMD has no immediate plan to purge its other PC chips

An AMD Athlon or Sempron chip may not drum as much excitement as Ryzen, but loyalty has helped those brands stick around for more than a decade.So what happens to those and other PC processors, like the A-series and FX, when AMD's new Ryzen chips start flooding the market in March? AMD has said the first high-end desktop Ryzen chips will ship in March.For now, AMD plans to make no changes to its lineup of existing chips, a company spokesman said.Instead, the chips will be regrouped to focus on price-sensitive PC buyers.Ryzen-based PCs are expected to be priced at a premium, competing with Intel's top gaming CPUs. The FX chips will not go away once Ryzen arrives, and will be targeted toward budget gamers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T, IBM, Nokia join to make IoT systems safer

Some big players in security and the internet of things, including AT&T and Nokia, are joining forces to solve problems that they say make IoT vulnerable in many areas.The IoT Cybersecurity Alliance, formed Wednesday, also includes IBM, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and mobile security company Trustonic. The group said it won’t set standards but will conduct research, educate consumers and businesses, and influence standards and policies.As IoT technologies take shape, there’s a danger of new vulnerabilities being created in several areas. Consumer devices have been in the security spotlight thanks to incidents like the DDoS attacks last year that turned poorly secured set-top boxes and DVRs into botnets. But the potential weaknesses are much broader, spanning the network, cloud, and application layers, the new group said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T, IBM, Nokia join to make IoT systems safer

Some big players in security and the internet of things, including AT&T and Nokia, are joining forces to solve problems that they say make IoT vulnerable in many areas.The IoT Cybersecurity Alliance, formed Wednesday, also includes IBM, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks, and mobile security company Trustonic. The group said it won’t set standards but will conduct research, educate consumers and businesses, and influence standards and policies.As IoT technologies take shape, there’s a danger of new vulnerabilities being created in several areas. Consumer devices have been in the security spotlight thanks to incidents like the DDoS attacks last year that turned poorly secured set-top boxes and DVRs into botnets. But the potential weaknesses are much broader, spanning the network, cloud, and application layers, the new group said in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Is your IT infrastructure healthy?

From my experience, if you look at 200 or so companies, you’ll find approximately 10 with enterprise tool sets for infrastructure management, six with middle-of-the-road packages, and four with home-grown solutions. That’s 20 total, just 10 percent. To make matters worse, the enterprise tool sets tend to be difficult to install and use, so system admins fail to use them as much as they should.Based on my observations, most businesses do not have a good read on the health of their IT infrastructure. They need a cost-effective, practical solution to monitor their IT environment so they can manage it more efficiently.Preventing Murphy’s Law IT infrastructure management tools can help to prevent slowdowns and downtime, thus help you to avoid the firefights that occur when Murphy’s Law strikes. That, of course, should be a priority. After all, when you have three people hunting down a problem for a week, each spending perhaps 10 hours on the problem, you waste 30 working hours.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: Algorithm-based technology patents are raging

Algorithms are hot – so hot that Gartner is saying that by 2019, 250,000 patent applications will be filed that include claims for algorithms, a tenfold increase from five years ago.Gartner wrote that according to a worldwide search on analytics vendor Aulive, nearly 17,000 patents applied for in 2015 mentioned "algorithm" in the title or description, versus 570 in 2000. Including those mentioning "algorithm" anywhere in the document, there were more than 100,000 applications last year versus 28,000 five years ago.At this pace, and considering the rising interest in protecting algorithmic intellectual property, by 2020 there could be nearly half a million patent applications mentioning "algorithm," and more than 25,000 patent applications for algorithms themselves, Gartner stated. Of the top 40 organizations patenting the most algorithms the past five years, 33 are Chinese businesses and universities – IBM is the only western tech company on the list at No. 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: Algorithm-based technology patents are raging

Algorithms are hot – so hot that Gartner is saying that by 2019, 250,000 patent applications will be filed that include claims for algorithms, a tenfold increase from five years ago.Gartner wrote that according to a worldwide search on analytics vendor Aulive, nearly 17,000 patents applied for in 2015 mentioned "algorithm" in the title or description, versus 570 in 2000. Including those mentioning "algorithm" anywhere in the document, there were more than 100,000 applications last year versus 28,000 five years ago.At this pace, and considering the rising interest in protecting algorithmic intellectual property, by 2020 there could be nearly half a million patent applications mentioning "algorithm," and more than 25,000 patent applications for algorithms themselves, Gartner stated. Of the top 40 organizations patenting the most algorithms the past five years, 33 are Chinese businesses and universities – IBM is the only western tech company on the list at No. 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Gartner: Algorithm-based technology patents are raging

Algorithms are hot – so hot that Gartner is saying that by 2019, 250,000 patent applications will be filed that include claims for algorithms, a tenfold increase from five years ago.Gartner wrote that according to a worldwide search on analytics vendor Aulive, nearly 17,000 patents applied for in 2015 mentioned "algorithm" in the title or description, versus 570 in 2000. Including those mentioning "algorithm" anywhere in the document, there were more than 100,000 applications last year versus 28,000 five years ago.At this pace, and considering the rising interest in protecting algorithmic intellectual property, by 2020 there could be nearly half a million patent applications mentioning "algorithm," and more than 25,000 patent applications for algorithms themselves, Gartner stated. Of the top 40 organizations patenting the most algorithms the past five years, 33 are Chinese businesses and universities – IBM is the only western tech company on the list at No. 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft Helps Cloud Customers Thwart Patent Trolls

Azure customers get a bit of indemnity.

Microsoft launches new Azure intellectual property protections

Microsoft wants to help its cloud customers feel better protected from intellectual property lawsuit threats. To that end, the company is launching a new feature that’s designed to give them additional shielding.The Azure IP Advantage program (the IP stands for intellectual property) provides a trio of benefits. First, Microsoft will indemnify all Azure customers from intellectual property infringement claims resulting from their use of Azure products, including open source components.Second, the company will allow customers that meet a set of criteria access to a "patent pick" program, which will allow them to transfer one Microsoft patent from a list of 10,000 to help them with defending against an infringement suit.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: IPv6 for the Home Network Nerd

For the more tech savvy, IPv6 does indeed bring fifteen bajillion addresses, so to speak. And while that doesn’t seem like a big deal, it is. For example, most of us at home have gear obscured by NAT. This makes us feel more secure — all these addresses hidden behind a single address feels like a bit of anonymity, and we like that. But private address space and network address translation are features that were created because the Internet was quickly running out of address space. Not because the powers that were felt that a layer of indirection was required to make us more secure. —Ethan Banks

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