A series of tubes: What’s next for home automation

"A series of tubes" is one of the most famous explanations of what makes the internet work, but it's also what many Europeans use to heat their homes. That's made room-by-room heating automation difficult -- until now.Heating systems in Europe typically circulate hot water from a boiler to radiators around the home, with the pump and boiler controlled by a central thermostat. Programmable timers can boost the temperature on winter evenings or lower it at night.Generally, though, such control is an all-or-nothing, whole-home affair, making it impossible to heat the living room only in the evening but warm the bathroom for a morning shower. Smart controllers like Nest and its European competitors Tado and Netatmo can't change that, as the series of tubes in most homes doesn't allow for independent control of different heating zones.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft fixes freezing problems in Anniversary Update

Microsoft has issued fixes to the problem plaguing its Anniversary Update, aka Redstone, a major update to Windows 10 issued this past August. The fixes are available via the Windows Update utility.The Anniversary Update was an ambitious update, far more than a mere patch, so problems are not too big of a surprise. However, issues quickly piled up in this instance. Almost immediately there were reports of login issues, a bug causing webcams to fail, and Kindle's causing the PC to crash when the Kindle was plugged into the PC via USB.The big one, though, was freezing and slowdowns on the PC after installing the Anniversary Update. It took Microsoft roughly a month to figure out the problem, but users can now apply a Windows Update, which was released Aug. 31, to alleviate the problem. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Weekly Roundup | August 28, 2016

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The last week of August 2016 is over and you know what that means; another Docker news roundup. Highlights include, Docker comes to Raspberry Pi, a cheat sheet for Windows 10 and a presentation by Mike Coleman at Tech Field Day at VMWorld 2016.


Weekly Roundup: Top 5 #Docker stories of the week via Continue reading

Hybrid tablets will continue to grow in popularity

The tablet market has declined over the past year, and trend will continue through the end of the year, according to recent data from IDC.Sales of tablets and hybrids fell 11.5 percent, with an all-time year-over-year low of just 183.4 million units sold. But IDC is optimistic about the future, predicting "positive growth" in 2018 that will continue to rise over the following two years, potentially reaching 194.2 million units sold by 2020.The future is hybrid Hybrid devices like the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4 are shaping the market, and pushing innovation from other tech companies as they try to keep pace. The market has already seen a slew of enterprise-ready hybrids, and if IDC's data suggests that the popularity of these devices will only grow in the coming years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMworld: My Cybersecurity-Centric Impressions

In my last blog, I wrote about what I was anticipating as far as cybersecurity for VMworld.  Now that I’m back from Vegas, it’s time for me to report on how reality aligned with my expectations.1.      NSX penetration.  It seems like VMware has made progress in terms of NSX market penetration over the past year.  At VMworld 2015, VMware talked about around 1,000 production environments for NSX while at VMworld 2016, VMware mentioned somewhere between 1,700 to 2,000 production NSX customers.  Still a small percentage of the total VMware installed base but at least 70% growth year-over-year.  Yes, some of these customers are likely just getting started or are using NSX on an extremely limited basis, but I still see good progress happening as more and more organizations begin playing with and using NSX.  VMware describes three primary uses for NSX:  Disaster recovery, security, and network operations automation.  It is worth noting that around 60% to 70% of NSX deployment is skewed toward security use cases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMworld: My Cybersecurity-Centric Impressions

In my last blog, I wrote about what I was anticipating as far as cybersecurity for VMworld.  Now that I’m back from Vegas, it’s time for me to report on how reality aligned with my expectations.1.      NSX penetration.  It seems like VMware has made progress in terms of NSX market penetration over the past year.  At VMworld 2015, VMware talked about around 1,000 production environments for NSX while at VMworld 2016, VMware mentioned somewhere between 1,700 to 2,000 production NSX customers.  Still a small percentage of the total VMware installed base but at least 70% growth year-over-year.  Yes, some of these customers are likely just getting started or are using NSX on an extremely limited basis, but I still see good progress happening as more and more organizations begin playing with and using NSX.  VMware describes three primary uses for NSX:  Disaster recovery, security, and network operations automation.  It is worth noting that around 60% to 70% of NSX deployment is skewed toward security use cases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell believes VR will be as important as gaming to PCs

Twenty years ago, Frank Azor and three other Alienware founders built and sold their first gaming PCs. Gaming was a niche market at the time, but two decades later, it's booming.Virtual reality occupies a similar space as gaming for Azor, who is general manager for Alienware and XPS products at Dell. For him, VR is the future of PCs and will be as hot as gaming. Though full of promise, VR is still raw, however.VR is important for Dell, but Azor doesn't want to rush in and then regret it. He's taking a measured approach to evaluating VR because problems with headsets and user experiences have yet to be resolved."There's so much to learn still. We don't want to be haphazard about jumping in and doing something careless and making some mistake," Azor said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For September 2nd, 2016

Hey, it's HighScalability time:

 

Spectacular iconic drawing of Aurora Borealis as observed in 1872. (Drawings vs. NASA Images)
  • 4,000 GB: projected bandwidth used per autonomous vehicle per day; 100K: photos of US national parks; 14 terabytes: code on Github in 1 billion files held in 400K repositories; 25: age of Linux; $5 billion: cost of labor for building Linux; $3800: total maintenance + repairs after 100K miles and 5 years of Tesla ownership; 2%: reduction in Arizona's economy by deporting all illegal immigrants; 15.49TB: available research data; 6%: book readers who are "digital only";

  • Quotable Quotes
    • @jennyschuessler: "Destroy the printing press, I beg you, or these evil men will triumph": Venice, 1473
    • @Carnage4Life: Biggest surprise in this "Uber for laundry" app shutting down is that there are still 3 funded startups in the space
    • @tlipcon: "backpressure" is right up there with "naming things" on the top 10 list of hardest parts of programming
    • cmcluck: Please consider K8s [kubernetes] a legitimate attempt to find a better way to build both internal Google systems and the next wave of cloud products in the open with the community. We Continue reading

Worth Reading: Cisco, Arista, and shades of grey

Cisco has effectively designated Arista as their number one competitor by way of this lawsuit. Arista represents a larger threat that HPE, Brocade, or Juniper. Yes, I agree that it is easy to argue that the infringement constituted a material problem to their business. But at the same time, Cisco very publicly just said that Arista is causing a problem for Cisco. Enough of a problem that Cisco is going to take them to court. Not make Arista license the patent. That’s telling. —Networking Nerd

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The post Worth Reading: Cisco, Arista, and shades of grey appeared first on 'net work.

Suspect arrested in 5-year-old kernel.org breach

Five years after a security breach forced the Linux Foundation to take kernel.org offline and to rebuild several of its servers, police have arrested a suspect in the case.Donald Ryan Austin, a 27-year-old computer programmer from El Portal, Florida, was arrested during a traffic stop on Aug. 28 based on a sealed indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California in June.Austin is charged with intentionally damaging four protected servers operated by the Linux Foundation and one of its members in 2011. More specifically, the programmer is accused to have installed rootkit and trojan software on the servers in order to steal the credentials of authorized users connecting to them via SSH (Secure Shell).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Suspect arrested in 5-year-old kernel.org breach

Five years after a security breach forced the Linux Foundation to take kernel.org offline and to rebuild several of its servers, police have arrested a suspect in the case.Donald Ryan Austin, a 27-year-old computer programmer from El Portal, Florida, was arrested during a traffic stop on Aug. 28 based on a sealed indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California in June.Austin is charged with intentionally damaging four protected servers operated by the Linux Foundation and one of its members in 2011. More specifically, the programmer is accused to have installed rootkit and trojan software on the servers in order to steal the credentials of authorized users connecting to them via SSH (Secure Shell).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 important reasons you should learn scripting

scripting-blurToday’s IT landscape if full of software defined marketecture, and lore of a dystopian future full of network engineers that do nothing but write code. But in reality, there are plenty of actual reasons you should be learning programming, or at least some basic scripting.  For many network engineers programming is not new, we have all been hacking together shell, Perl and Python for a VERY long time. While the requirements in the future may change, today it is not necessary to become half network engineer half software engineer, but learning the basics now will keep you in the know. Learning the basics of logic and loop statements will not only help you speed up day to day tasks, but it will help you understand other languages as you expand your knowledge in the future. So, here are my top 10 reasons I think you need to learn scripting.

1: Automation can save you time

Writing a script for common / repetitive tasks can save you a staggering amount of time. Over the years I have written hundreds of scripts to aide in everything from Data Center VLAN/SVI management to banning/unbanning MAC addresses from multiple wireless lan controllers.

2: Continue reading

Arista And Streaming Telemetry

On todays Weekly Show, we talk network telemetry with our sponsor, Arista Networks. Telemetry gives you deeper visibility into the network in near real time, and when combined with analytics can provide useful insights for operators. The post Show 304: Arista And The Brave New World Of Streaming Telemetry (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Best practices for incident response in the age of cloud

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.Most CISOs receive a rude awakening when they encounter their first major security issue in the cloud. If they identify a critical vulnerability that requires a patch, they may not have the authorization to tweak the cloud provider's pre-packaged stack. And if the customer does not own the network, there may not be a way to access details that are critical to investigating an incident.In order to avoid a major security issue in the cloud, CISO’s must  have an incident response plan.  Here is how to build one:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Best practices for incident response in the age of cloud

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter’s approach.

Most CISOs receive a rude awakening when they encounter their first major security issue in the cloud. If they identify a critical vulnerability that requires a patch, they may not have the authorization to tweak the cloud provider's pre-packaged stack. And if the customer does not own the network, there may not be a way to access details that are critical to investigating an incident.

In order to avoid a major security issue in the cloud, CISO’s must  have an incident response plan.  Here is how to build one:

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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