Dell EMC aims for a converged, custom fit in an off-the-rack world

It may be a cloud world, but Dell EMC is still invested in on-premises systems, in particular converged systems. At VMworld 2016 in late August, the company took the wraps off a new product line called Validated System for Virtualization, which reflects a significant shift in the company’s converged systems portfolio.The new solution, according to Dell EMC, represents what it calls “service-defined infrastructure” by incorporating a wide range of form-factors, technology choices and deployment options, all designed to fit the needs of a customer ranging from midsized to the Fortune 10.Converged systems, a recent trend in hardware, combine compute, storage, networking and the software workload all into one fully integrated system rather than piecing it together. They are designed for easy installation and use by customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What is it really like to work for Apple

What's it really like to work for Apple?The work culture at Cupertino isn't like that of other companies. Apple is famously secretive (more so, even, than most tech companies), and employees are expected to do the best work of their lives. Apple is very effective at keeping secrets, and that includes what it's like to work there.Even so, there are many sources of great information about what it's like to work for Apple. In this article we're going to look at what ex-employees, their friends and family, and people who've researched the company have to say about what it's like to be an Apple employee.Read next: How to work for Apple | How to get a job at AppleTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thoughts on the Tomahawk II

Broadcom released some information about the new Tomahawk II chip last week in a press release. For those who follow hardware, there are some interesting points worth considering here.

First, the chip supports 256x25g SERDES. Each pair of 25G SERDES can be combined into a single 50g port, allowing the switch to support 128 50g ports. Sets of four SERDES can be combined into a single 100g port, allowing the switch to support 64 100g ports.

Second, there is some question about the table sizes in this new chip. The press release notes the chip has “Increased On-Chip Forwarding Databases,” but doesn’t give any precise information. Information from vendors who wrap sheet metal around the chipset to build a complete box don’t seem to be too forthcoming in their information about this aspect of the new chip, either. The Tomahawk line has long had issues with its nominal 100,000 forwarding table entry limit, particularly in large scale data center fabrics and applications such as IX fabrics. We’ll simply have to wait to find out more about this aspect of the new chip, it seems.

Third, there is some question about the forwarding buffers available on the chip. Again, the Tomahawk Continue reading

T-Mobile to pay $48 million in settlement over throttling customers with heavy data usage

Call it the “Un-fine.” Perhaps that’s how T-Mobile, the self-described uncarrier, will spin Wednesday’s settlement with the FCC. The nation’s third-largest wireless network will pay $48 million total including customer benefits, education donations, and a fine as part of an agreement reached with the FCC. Good settlement with FCC today. @TMobile believes more info is best for customers. #themoreyouknow https://t.co/XFY6dHPfN6To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

T-Mobile to pay $48 million in settlement over throttling customers with heavy data usage

Call it the “Un-fine.” Perhaps that’s how T-Mobile, the self-described uncarrier, will spin Wednesday’s settlement with the FCC. The nation’s third-largest wireless network will pay $48 million total including customer benefits, education donations, and a fine as part of an agreement reached with the FCC. Good settlement with FCC today. @TMobile believes more info is best for customers. #themoreyouknow https://t.co/XFY6dHPfN6To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple is fed up with counterfeit cables and chargers on Amazon

Amazon is full of knockoff products, but if you’re buying genuine Apple-branded cables and chargers sold directly by Amazon and not a third party, you should be OK, right? Well, maybe not.Patently Apple dug up a lawsuit filed by Apple against Mobile Star LLC, which Amazon identified as the manufacturer of counterfeit cables and power adapters that had been sold as being made by Apple. The complaint says that Apple had purchased the items from Amazon, and tested them interally to determine they were counterfeit. The complaint also cites an Amazon.com customer review claiming one of the adapters caught fire.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Politics keeps the U.S. from securing private-sector networks, says former CIA chief Robert Gates

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A person who had access to the nation's deepest secrets, Robert Gates, the former CIA chief and U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, is lot more open in retirement.Gates had the crowd at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo laughing over his observations about IT and applauding at some of the things he believes in.On stage here, for instance, Gartner analyst Richard Hunter fired off questions, asking at one point whether Edward Snowden, the former security contract employee who in 2010 took thousands of classified documents, was a "traitor or hero?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Politics keeps the U.S. from securing private-sector networks, says former CIA chief Robert Gates

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A person who had access to the nation's deepest secrets, Robert Gates, the former CIA chief and U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, is lot more open in retirement.Gates had the crowd at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo laughing over his observations about IT and applauding at some of the things he believes in.On stage here, for instance, Gartner analyst Richard Hunter fired off questions, asking at one point whether Edward Snowden, the former security contract employee who in 2010 took thousands of classified documents, was a "traitor or hero?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Politics keeps the U.S. from securing private-sector networks, says former CIA chief Robert Gates

ORLANDO, Fla. -- A person who had access to the nation's deepest secrets, Robert Gates, the former CIA chief and U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, is lot more open in retirement.Gates had the crowd at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo laughing over his observations about IT and applauding at some of the things he believes in.On stage here, for instance, Gartner analyst Richard Hunter fired off questions, asking at one point whether Edward Snowden, the former security contract employee who in 2010 took thousands of classified documents, was a "traitor or hero?"To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

44% off First Alert Dual Photoelectric and Ionization Sensor Smoke Alarm – Deal Alert

The BRK 3120B smoke detector from First Alert contains technology that many experts are now recommending -- dual sensors. A photoelectric sensor detects slow and smoldering fires, while an ionization sensor can detect often fast moving open flames. Your current detectors may have only one or the other, so if you're due (or overdue) for new ones, it might be something to consider. This model is hardwired with a battery backup (see below for non-hardwired model), so all units interconnect. When an alarm is triggered, indicator lights let you know which detector was the initiator, so there's no guessing. If being used in a public area, the BRK 3120B also has locking features that prevent theft of the battery or the unit itself. It averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 230 people (read reviews) and you can buy it now on Amazon for $21.82.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi, LTE ambient signals to replace, augment GPS

Future self-driving cars and up-and-coming commercial drone aviation are behind a mad scramble to find a better solution for location services than the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS).Advances in Signals of Opportunity (SOP), along with software-defined radios, could be the solution.GPS isn’t ideal. Firstly, it’s a free service made available by the U.S. government out of the kindness of its heart, and the civilian element could conceivably be switched off in times of national crisis—there are no contracts with smartphone makers, for example.Secondly, GPS wasn’t really designed for non-military applications such as civilian automobile navigation—it’s a weak signal and prone to interference, including that from space weather. It’s also not secure at the civilian level. It’s completely unencrypted and open to spoofing, in fact. Further, GPS jamming could bring existing satellite-based systems to a standstill.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Wi-Fi, LTE ambient signals to replace, augment GPS

Future self-driving cars and up-and-coming commercial drone aviation are behind a mad scramble to find a better solution for location services than the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS).Advances in Signals of Opportunity (SOP), along with software-defined radios, could be the solution.GPS isn’t ideal. Firstly, it’s a free service made available by the U.S. government out of the kindness of its heart, and the civilian element could conceivably be switched off in times of national crisis—there are no contracts with smartphone makers, for example.Secondly, GPS wasn’t really designed for non-military applications such as civilian automobile navigation—it’s a weak signal and prone to interference, including that from space weather. It’s also not secure at the civilian level. It’s completely unencrypted and open to spoofing, in fact. Further, GPS jamming could bring existing satellite-based systems to a standstill.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Which is cheaper: Public or private clouds?

It’s a debate that’s raged on for years: Which is cheaper, public or private clouds?A new report from 451 Research finds that two of the most critical factors that influence the cost of a public versus a private cloud deployment are an organization’s ability to efficiently manage infrastructure and utilization of hardware resources. Generally speaking, if any organization has the expertise to manage a large number of servers at a high level of utilization then on-premises, customer-managed private clouds can have a total cost of ownership (TCO) advantage compared to public clouds. For smaller environments, or any sort of variable workload demand, public cloud is a more attractive financial option, 451 Research’s Director of Digital Economics Owen Rogers reports in “The Cloud Price Index: The great public vs private cloud debate.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google is turning spreadsheets, documents and presentations into to-do lists

Google is trying to do away with the tiring process of figuring out who's supposed to do what after a meeting wraps up. A new Action Items feature in G Suite for its Docs, Sheets and Slides apps lets users add a comment asking one of their coworkers to take care of something. Users can then see at a glance what documents, spreadsheets and presentations have action items attached that they need to take care of. Action Items is one of a handful of G Suite updates the company unveiled on Wednesday, alongside improvements to its Forms app. Slack is also integrating with Google Drive, making it easier for users of the popular chat app to collaborate on files stored in Google's service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook Wedge 100 – The Future of the Data Center?

Facebook is back in the news again. This time, it’s because of the release of their new Wedge 100 switch into the Open Compute Project (OCP). Wedge was already making headlines when Facebook announced it two years ago. A fast, open sourced 40Gig Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch was huge. Now, Facebook is letting everyone in on the fun of a faster Wedge that has been deployed into production at Facebook data centers as well as being offered for sale through Edgecore Networks, which is itself a division of Accton. Accton has been leading the way in the whitebox switching market and Wedge 100 may be one of the ways it climbs to the top.

Holy Hardware!

Wedge 100 is pretty impressive from the spec sheet. They paid special attention to making sure the modules were expandable, especially for faster CPUs and special purpose devices down the road. That’s possible because Wedge is a highly specialized micro server already. Rather than rearchitecting the guts of the whole thing, Facebook kept the CPU and the monitoring stack and just put newer, faster modules on it to ramp to 32x100Gig connectivity.

As suspected in the above image, Facebook is using Broadcom Tomahawk as Continue reading

Czech police arrest Russian hacker suspected of targeting the US

Police in the Czech Republic have arrested a Russian hacker suspected of targeting the U.S. for cyber crime.Czech police, working in collaboration with the FBI, arrested the Russian man at a hotel in central Prague. He is currently in custody and now faces possible extradition to the U.S., depending on what the local courts decide, according to a statement from the Czech police.The arrest comes as the U.S. has blamed Russian government for hacking U.S. officials and political groups in an effort to influence this year's upcoming election. However, it's unclear if the Russian hacker is in any way involved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Czech police arrest Russian hacker suspected of targeting the US

Police in the Czech Republic have arrested a Russian hacker suspected of targeting the U.S. for cyber crime.Czech police, working in collaboration with the FBI, arrested the Russian man at a hotel in central Prague. He is currently in custody and now faces possible extradition to the U.S., depending on what the local courts decide, according to a statement from the Czech police.The arrest comes as the U.S. has blamed Russian government for hacking U.S. officials and political groups in an effort to influence this year's upcoming election. However, a U.S. law enforcement official said the Russian hacker wasn't involved with the breach of the Democratic National Committee reported earlier this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Czech police arrest Russian hacker suspected of targeting the US

Police in the Czech Republic have arrested a Russian hacker suspected of targeting the U.S. for cyber crime.Czech police, working in collaboration with the FBI, arrested the Russian man at a hotel in central Prague. He is currently in custody and now faces possible extradition to the U.S., depending on what the local courts decide, according to a statement from the Czech police.The arrest comes as the U.S. has blamed Russian government for hacking U.S. officials and political groups in an effort to influence this year's upcoming election. However, a U.S. law enforcement official said the Russian hacker wasn't involved with the breach of the Democratic National Committee reported earlier this year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How BGP Flowspec Mitigates DDoS

BBC eyes worldwide expansion for tiny educational computer

A new educational foundation hopes to introduce children worldwide to coding, using a tiny single-board computer that has changed the way coding is taught in schools across the U.K.You may have already heard of the Raspberry Pi, a US $35 computer the size of a credit card that, with the addition of a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, can stand in for a desktop machine.But this isn't about that. It's about the U.K.'s other single-board educational computer, the micro:bit.The micro:bit is smaller and cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, and it has a built-in keyboard and display, albeit consisting of just two pushbuttons and 25 red LEDs arranged in a five-by-five grid. It was developed for the U.K.'s national broadcaster, the BBC, which gave a million of them to British schools.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here