IDG Contributor Network: No excuse for airline system outages

In 2016, as multiple system outages led to long check-in lines, flight cancellations and passengers camping out in airports, several airlines’ reputations made unplanned descents. What could they have done differently to prevent these crises or to recover from them more rapidly?Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.Southwest Airlines' problem in July came down to a failed network router. Delta Air Lines' nationwide system outage in August was a result of a power surge that caused an automatic transfer switch to malfunction and take down 500 servers. Unfortunately, systems and equipment did not switch over automatically to back up power. The result of these mishaps? Each airline cancelled more than 2,000 flights and suffered negative media coverage, including a tweet storm from frustrated customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

17% off SteelSeries Nimbus Gaming Controller, Play New Minecraft Apple TV Edition – Deal Alert

One of the biggest games in recent history is now even more widely available. Minecraft was just released on Apple TV (see review here on TechConnect), and no, you don't have to control it with that little silver remote. Take full control of the game with this Bluetooth gaming remote from SteelSeries, currently discounted 17% from $60 to $50 on Amazon. The SteelSeries Nimbus remote has all the control sticks, buttons and triggers you or your kids will need to control Minecraft right on your TV. A rechargeable Lithium ion battery provides up to 40 hours of gaming on a charge. This gaming controller can ultimately be used for any Apple TV game, not just Minecraft, and can be paired to your other iOS devices as well. See the discounted SteelSeries Nimbus remote on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple watcher Gene Munster & team about to get hands-on as VCs

Gene Munster, one of the most watched Apple watchers as a longtime research analyst at Piper Jaffray, has now started a venture capital fund that promises to invest in exactly the sorts of startups Apple and its competitors are likely to buy.Loup Ventures (which gets its name for a word meaning "wolf" or "to leap/pounce" depending on which language you choose), also consists of former Munster colleagues at Piper Jaffray, Doug Clinton and Andrew Murphy.MORE: Yup, Apple made our list of 2016's Sorriest Tech CompaniesTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

From Monolith to Microservices

Microservices are big in the tech world these days. The evolutionary heir to service-oriented architecture, microservice-based design is the ultimate manifestation of everything you learned about good application design.

Loosely coupled with high cohesion, microservices are the application embodiment of DevOps principles. So why isn’t everything a microservice now? At the LISA Conference, Anders Wallgren and Avantika Mathur from Electric Cloud gave some insight with their talk “The Hard Truths about Microservices and Software Delivery”.

Perhaps the biggest impediment to the adoption of microservices-based application architecture is an organizational culture that is not supportive. Microservices proponents recommend a team …

From Monolith to Microservices was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

BrandPost: The SD-WAN Journey Doesn’t Have to be Painful…if You Pick the Right Solution

In the last decade, cloud came about to address the need for agility, speed and cost savings. Along the way, several technologies came to enable the transition. This has triggered significant innovation in the network with SDxx to support the changing demands in app consumptions model, traffic patterns and automated and dynamic environments.Today, the hottest innovation in the network aimed at increasing agility to support the move to the cloud is SD-WAN for the branch office. A little more than two years ago, SD-WAN came about to address fundamental challenges in the WAN architecture. These challenges can be categorized as follows:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Millennials push for public cloud, innovation

Millennials in the workplace are increasingly taking on IT decision maker (ITDM) roles, and in pursuit of improved agility, they are pushing their organizations to embrace public cloud and adjust IT policies to better enable innovation, according to a study by Microsoft and Wakefield Research.As 2017 begins, millennials already represent a third of the workforce, and the Brookings Institute forecasts they will make up 75 percent of the workforce by 2025.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It’s time to start planning for SQL Server on Linux

Bringing SQL Server to Linux is one of the bigger steps in Microsoft’s plan to help developers build any app for (and from) any platform. And despite the fact that it was only announced in spring 2016, you shouldn’t think of SQL Server on Linux as being a subset of the full Windows offering, says Rohan Kumar, general manager of the Microsoft database systems group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Virtual assistants, chatbots poised for mass adoption in 2017

Experimentation with voice-activated assistants and text-triggered chatbots blossomed in 2016, enabling users to order from Taco Bell using Slack’s messaging interface, check the status of UPS packages and order office supplies from Staples.In 2017, some of these tools won't make the cut while others will proliferate across consumer and enterprise sectors, creating new workflows, operational efficiencies and opportunities for improved customer service. The early signs that Amazon.com's Alexa, though positioned as a home product, is poised to become the go-to platform for voice-based assistants for consumers and businesses. Wynn Hotels plans to equip nearly 5,000 rooms with Amazon.com's Echo device, which will allow people to query Alexa for room and hotel information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook gets 2017 tech industry Year in Apologies rolling

No sooner had we put our list of 2016's Sorriest Tech Companies to bed than Facebook rang in the new year with a fresh apology -- for blocking an Italian writer from using a photo of a well-known statue of nude sea god Neptune found in Bologna.As Mashable relays, a writer/historian named Elisa Barbari used a photo of the 16th-century work to highlight her Facebook page titled "Stories, curiosities and views of Bologna." Innocent enough it would seem, but the photo got snared by the social network's photo police for violations of its advertising policies, which prohibit use of images or videos of nude bodies.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Fortinet’s Michael Xie: How to secure the cloud

Last month I wrote a post highlighting the differences between a security fabric and platform. Of all the security vendors, for which there are literally hundreds, no one has evangelized the topic and value of a fabric more than Fortinet.  One of the drivers of Fortinet’s security fabric has been to secure the cloud. To get a better understanding of what the challenges are and the role of the security fabric for cloud environments, I interviewed the founder, president and chief technology officer (CTO) of Fortinet, Michael Xie. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

oVirt System Tests to the Rescue!—How to Run End-to-End oVirt Tests on Your Patch

Today, when an oVirt developer pushes a patch to review on oVirt Gerrit, various validations are triggered in CI via the 'check-patch' job, as defined by the project maintainers. Usually these jobs includes 'unit-tests', 'db tests', static analysis checks, and even an occasional 'functional test'. While it might seem that it covers alot and gives a good indication that the patch is good to be merged, unfortunately it is not always the case.

The reason it's not enough lies in oVirt's complexity and the fact it's a Virtualization project, which means the only real way to know if your patch didn't break things is to install oVirt and try running a few basic commands, like 'adding host', 'adding vm', 'creating snapshots', and other tasks you can only do if you have a full oVirt system up and running. Here is where OST comes in!

oVirt System Tests

oVirt system tests is a testing framework written in Python, using 'python-nose' and oVirt Python SDK and runs on auto-generated VMs created by Lago. It is used by the oVirt CI to run post merge end-to-end testing that runs on a fully deployed oVirt environment and has been proven to detect multiple regressions Continue reading

Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 devices get sexier designs, faster chips

The venerable ThinkPad brand will turn 25 this year, and Lenovo's new ThinkPad X1 devices will kick off celebrations with a slew of upgrades including sexier designs, faster processors, and screens with thinner borders.The new ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop (starting at US$1,349), ThinkPad X1 Tablet (starting at $949) and ThinkPad X1 Yoga 2-in-1 (starting at $1,499) are smaller, thinner and lighter than ever before. In addition, the devices have much longer battery life.Many of the advances come thanks to the upgrade to Intel's 7th Generation Core processors code-named Kaby Lake. The integrated GPUs are faster and provide the capability to support 4K video processing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lenovo primes to take on Microsoft’s next Surface tablet with Miix 720

The world is waiting for Microsoft's next Surface tablet, but when it ships, it'll have to contend with Lenovo's new Miix 720, a 12-inch Windows tablet loaded with cutting-edge features. The Miix 720 will start at US$999 and will ship in April. That's about $100 more than the starting price of the Surface Pro 4, but the Miix 720 has superior features. But the Surface could catch up with the Miix 720 soon. A new Surface Pro 5 could be out as soon as early this year and have features like faster processors and a higher resolution screen that could on par or better than the Miix 720. That's when the competition will get interesting. But for now, it's Miix 720 versus the Surface Pro 4. The Lenovo tablet runs on an Intel Core processor based on the latest Kaby Lake architecture and has an integrated graphics processor capable of supporting 4K video. Surface Pro 4 is a generation behind with Skylake chips, but the next Surface tablet will likely get Kaby Lake.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lenovo crashes gaming party with new Legion line of laptops

Gaming enthusiasts are particular. They like colorful chassis, bright keyboard lights, cool-sounding brand names and scintillating performance in PCs.Those are ideals Lenovo has embraced with its new Legion line of gaming laptops and PCs. Introduced on Tuesday, Legion will feature some of the most loaded PCs offered by Lenovo.In a way, Legion is to Lenovo what Alienware is to Dell -- a product family that will help Lenovo cash in on PC gaming and virtual reality. Beyond PCs, the Legion brand could also include gaming monitors and accessories.Lenovo isn't known as a game PC maker, but it isn't stretching outside its comfort zone with Legion. It already offers Y-series and IdeaPad gaming PCs, and has partnered with Razer to build not only desktops, but keyboards with lighting effects and other gaming accessories. Lenovo hopes Legion -- a name coined after the large units in the armies of the Roman empire -- will resonate with gamers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

My (Evolving) Multi-Platform Toolbelt

A few days ago I posted a tweet about a new tool I’d (re-)discovered called jrnl. Someone replied to that tweet, asking me to list my “multi-platform toolbelt.” While it’s still evolving (every day!), I thought it might make for a good blog post. So, here’s a list of my still-evolving multi-platform toolbelt.

  • Sublime Text: Over the last few years, I’ve moved to creating the vast majority of my content in Markdown (MultiMarkdown, to be more specific). At first I was using OS X-specific text editors (first TextMate 1.x, then BBEdit), but last year I switched to Sublime Text. Sublime Text supports OS X, Linux, and Windows. I don’t have any Windows-based systems, so I only use it on OS X and Linux.

  • Wire: My use of Wire is still a bit limited, but only because the reach of the platform is also still a bit limited (this is a classical example of network effect). I’m currently using Wire on Linux and OS X, with plans to extend to iOS and Android. (If you’re using Wire, feel free to look me up! My username is “scottslowe”).

  • IMAP/SMTP: I’ve standardized on using IMAP/SMTP for all my e-mail Continue reading

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