Virgin Galactic, start-up Boom tout supersonic passenger jet

Supersonic travel may indeed become a reality (again) if Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin group and start-up Boom Supersonic have their way.Boom this week showed off its XB-1 Supersonic Demonstrator, or Baby Boom, a subscale prototype of what is to be the Boom supersonic passenger airliner which Boom says will be “the world’s first independently developed supersonic jet and the fastest civil aircraft ever made.” The two-seat prototype aircraft is expected to make its first flight in late 2017 with a commercial passenger plane perhaps coming in few years, the company said.+More on Network World: TSA: Keep grandma’s gravy at home but the turducken can fly+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sigfox Raises $159M in Funding to Expand IoT Network

SigFox says there are 10 million objects registered on its network, spanning 26 countries.

SDxCentral Weekly News Roundup — November 18, 2016

AWS customers can now subscribe to SaaS applications directly through AWS Marketplace.

Visibility In Networking – Quick Thoughts from Networking Field Day

I’m at Networking Field Day 13 this week. You can imagine how much fun I’m having with my friends! I wanted to drop some quick thoughts on visibility for this week on you all about what we’re hearing and raise some interesting questions.

I Can See Clearly Now

Visibility is a huge issue for companies. Seeing what’s going on is hard for people. Companies like Ixia talk about the need to avoid dropping any packets to make sure we have complete knowledge of the network. But that requires a huge amount of hardware and design. You’re always going to need traditional monitoring even when everything is using telemetry and other data models. Make sure you size things right.

Forward Networks told us that there is an increasing call for finding a way to monitor both the underlay network and the overlay network. Most overlay companies give you a way to tie into their system via API or other telemetry. However, there is no visibility into the underlay because of the event horizon. Likewise, companies like Forward Networks are focusing on the underlay with mapping technologies and modeling software but they can’t pass back through the event horizon to see into Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For November 18th, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

• 50%: drop in latency and CPU load after adopting PHP7 at Tumblr; 4,425: satellites for Skynet; 13%: brain connectome shared by identical twins; 20: weird & wonderful datasets for machine learning; 200 Gb/sec: InfiniBand data rate; 15 TB: data generated nightly by Large Synoptic Survey Telescope; 17.24%: top comments that were also first comments on reddit; $120 million: estimated cost of developing Kubernetes; 3-4k: proteins involved in the intracellular communication network;


• Quotable Quotes:
  • Westworld: Survival is just another loop.
  • Leo Laporte: All bits should be treated equally. 
  • Paul Horner: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore
  • @WSJ: "A conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect" NSA chief on WikiLeaks 
  • encoderer: For the saas business I run, Cronitor, aws costs have consistently stayed around 10% total MRR. I think there are a lot Continue reading

UK mobile operator loses phones following data breach

In a twist, thieves in the U.K. hacked personal data to steal high-end smartphones, rather than hacking phones to steal personal data.The thefts came to light after mobile network operator Three noticed a recent increase in levels of handset fraud, the company said Friday.By accessing the system Three uses to manage handset upgrades, the perpetrators were able to intercept new high-end handsets on the way to the operator's customers.Three, however, said only eight devices have been illegally obtained through the upgrade activity -- compared to 400 stolen from its retail stores over the past four weeks.The company sought to reassure customers concerned that their personal information may have been accessed in the attempt to steal the upgrade phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

UK mobile operator loses phones following data breach

In a twist, thieves in the U.K. hacked personal data to steal high-end smartphones, rather than hacking phones to steal personal data.The thefts came to light after mobile network operator Three noticed a recent increase in levels of handset fraud, the company said Friday.By accessing the system Three uses to manage handset upgrades, the perpetrators were able to intercept new high-end handsets on the way to the operator's customers.Three, however, said only eight devices have been illegally obtained through the upgrade activity -- compared to 400 stolen from its retail stores over the past four weeks.The company sought to reassure customers concerned that their personal information may have been accessed in the attempt to steal the upgrade phones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wringing Cost and Complexity Out of HPC

The race toward exascale supercomputing gets a lot of attention, as it should. Driving up top-end performance levels in high performance computing (HPC) is essential to generate new insights into the fundamental laws of physics, the origins of the universe, global climate systems, and more. The wow factor is huge.

There is another area of growth in HPC that is less glamorous, but arguably even more important. It is the increasing use of small to mid-sized clusters by individuals and small groups that have long been reliant on workstations to handle their most compute-intensive tasks. Instead of a small number …

Wringing Cost and Complexity Out of HPC was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

45% off Bestrix Universal Tablet Car Headrest Cradle – Deal Alert

Road trip this holiday season? The Bestrix universal headrest tablet mount provides an easy solution for using your tablet while mobile. It's designed for easy installation and removal, and instantly turn your car’s backseat into an entertainment center without blocking any of your tablet’s buttons or jacks. The mount can hold all tablets including all versions of Apple iPads, Samsung Tab and all tablets up to 11’’. Its 360 degree rotation feature allows all users to have a perfect view of the tablet from various or changing positions in the car. It currently averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from nearly 200 people on Amazon (see reviews) where its typical list price of $36 has been reduced 45% to $20. See the discounted Bestrix headrest tablet mount on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM opens ‘cyber-range’ to practice security battles

IBM Security has launched a network-emulation environment where corporate teams can play out attack scenarios so they are better prepared for incidents they might face in the real world.

Worth Reading: Regulating IoT

Your security on the Internet depends on the security of millions of Internet-enabled devices, designed and sold by companies you’ve never heard of to consumers who don’t care about your security. The technical reason these devices are insecure is complicated, but there is a market failure at work. The Internet of Things is bringing computerization and connectivity to many tens of millions of devices worldwide. —Schneier on Security

The post Worth Reading: Regulating IoT appeared first on 'net work.

Hyper convergence leads to humanless datacenters: Nutanix CEO Pandey

An enterprise cloud platform company, Nutanix helps companies thread the path of hyper converged infra. ComputerWorld India had an extensive chat with Dheeraj Pandey, Co-founder & CEO, Nutanix on hyper convergence, IPO debut, and competitive landscape. "Hyper convergence is a pit stop in the true journey towards an invisible infrastructure for companies. One can spin up a firewall or storage array through a written code than buy the hardware for the humans to rack and stack it," said Pandey during his recent India visit.Edited Excerpts:Tech OEMs, big or small, end-to-end or niche, are all hitching a ride on the hyper converged Infra bandwagon. How do you demystify `hyper converged' for enterprises?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hyper convergence leads to humanless datacenters: Nutanix CEO Pandey

An enterprise cloud platform company, Nutanix helps companies thread the path of hyper converged infra. ComputerWorld India had an extensive chat with Dheeraj Pandey, Co-founder & CEO, Nutanix on hyper convergence, IPO debut, and competitive landscape. "Hyper convergence is a pit stop in the true journey towards an invisible infrastructure for companies. One can spin up a firewall or storage array through a written code than buy the hardware for the humans to rack and stack it," said Pandey during his recent India visit.Edited Excerpts:Tech OEMs, big or small, end-to-end or niche, are all hitching a ride on the hyper converged Infra bandwagon. How do you demystify `hyper converged' for enterprises?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Three Leading Causes & Fixes for Poor Application Performance

No application is immune to poor performance.

Three Considerations for Planning your Docker Datacenter Deployment

Congratulations! You’ve decided to make the change your application environment with Docker Datacenter. You’re now on your way to greater agility, portability and control within your environment. But what do you need to get started? In this blog, we will cover things you need to consider (strategy, infrastructure, migration) to ensure a smooth POC and migration to production.

1. Strategy

Strategy involves doing a little work up-front to get everyone on the same page. This stage is critical to align expectations and set clear success criteria for exiting the project. The key focus areas are to determining your objective, plan out how to achieve it and know who should be involved.

Set the objective – This is a critical step as it helps to set clear expectations, define a use case and outline the success criteria for exiting a POC. A common objective is to enable developer productivity by implementing a Continuous Integration environment with Docker Datacenter.

Plan how to achieve it – With a clear use case and outcome identified, the next step is to look at what is required to complete this project. For a CI pipeline, Docker is able to standardize the development environment, provide isolation of the applications and their dependencies Continue reading

‘Wireless security at its finest’

The person who submitted the above photo to Reddit’s section devoted to IT rants presumably does not believe it depicts wireless security at its finest. In fact, the sarcasm oozes.However, not everyone in the forum held such a dim view.“There is nothing wrong with this,” writes another user. “It is public wi-fi. It has a slight security advantage over an open network in that it makes it more difficult to eavesdrop. The (would-be) attacker also has to capture the handshake when a client associates.”There were supportive variations on that theme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

‘Wireless security at its finest’

The person who submitted the above photo to Reddit’s section devoted to IT rants presumably does not believe it depicts wireless security at its finest. In fact, the sarcasm oozes.However, not everyone in the forum held such a dim view.“There is nothing wrong with this,” writes another user. “It is public wi-fi. It has a slight security advantage over an open network in that it makes it more difficult to eavesdrop. The (would-be) attacker also has to capture the handshake when a client associates.”There were supportive variations on that theme.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel’s Deep Learning Chips Will Arrive in 2017

Nervana approaches consciousness.

In Search of… NV Standards

The industry seeks to address interoperability among network virtualization (NV) implementations, but getting networking vendors to work together remains a challenge.

Research chip modeled after the brain aims to bring smarts to computers

The dream of creating intelligent computers has inspired the development of exotic chips based on the structure of the brain, which operates in mysterious ways. Some researchers are making such chips from components found in today's computers.Using components pulled off store shelves, researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have made a chip for intelligent computers that can learn. The chips are structured to discover patterns through probabilities and association, helping with decision making.The researchers are using off-the-shelf, reprogrammable circuits called FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to simulate the way neurons and synapses in a brain operate. The chip was made as part of the university's DANNA neuromorphic software project.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here