The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)

Wacky storiesImage by Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Beck Diefenbach/Stephen LamYes it's that time again…Time to search the old news-feed and find some of the most interesting and sometimes weird and wacky high-tech stories of the year. This time out we feature a look at everything from fireworks displays in space to Starship Enterprise remakes and mermaid robots – just to name a few cool stories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The weirdest, wackiest and coolest sci/tech stories of 2016 (so far!)

Wacky storiesImage by Reuters/Kevin Lamarque/Beck Diefenbach/Stephen LamYes it's that time again…Time to search the old news-feed and find some of the most interesting and sometimes weird and wacky high-tech stories of the year. This time out we feature a look at everything from fireworks displays in space to Starship Enterprise remakes and mermaid robots – just to name a few cool stories.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

General – The Future of Networking – Russ White

Hello my friends,

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the future of networking and the career paths in this domain. As you probably know I like to guide and mentor people and with everything going on in the industry it can be confusing to find your way and to know what skills to work on to stay ahead of the curve.

I decided to reach out to some of my friends to ask them of their vision of the role of the future networking engineer and how to prepare for the changes that we are now seeing. First out is my friend Russ White who is also the co-author of the book Unintended Features that we wrote together.

Daniel: What are the major skills that people in networking need to learn to stay ahead of the curve?

Russ: Some of these have never changed — for instance, communication and abstraction. Some skills have been more important forever, such as people skills and project manage, but they never seem to really rise to the top in terms of actual demand. I don’t think this is going to change much; companies say they want people skills, and then recruit based Continue reading

Smartphone market inches back to growth with Samsung holding lead

The smartphone market is showing signs of growth again, but barely, with shipments up nearly 1 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. The research firm, which had reported a 3 percent drop in the market in the last quarter, said Wednesday that there are indications that the market had bottomed out in the first half of this year. Multiple new product launches from vendors including Samsung Electronics and Apple could see an improving  growth outlook for the second half of the year. Another research firm Canalys reported Tuesday that smartphone shipments had returned to modest growth in the second quarter after a disappointing first quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First, Kill All The Servers

Cannibalize your own products or someone else will do it for you, as the old adage goes.

And so it is that Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of infrastructure services available on the public cloud, has been methodically building up a set of data and processing services that will allow customers to run functions against streams or lakes of data without ever setting up a server as we know it.

Just saying the words makes us a little woozy, with systems being the very foundation of the computing platforms that everyone deploys today to do the data processing that …

First, Kill All The Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Making Networking Great Again: Leveraging ifupdown2 in the Data Center

I love election season, mainly for all the great slogans. Every candidate is trying to find a way to catch the attention of the electorate in order to get their ideas across. If people don’t know the benefits of a new solution, they’ll be hard pressed to understand how much better life can be.

The same can be said for Linux networking when ifupdown2 came along. This article describes the improvements made to ifupdown2, but it doesn’t describe the excruciating pain of having to run the classic ifupdown. I feel obliged to join this campaign cycle to wholeheartedly endorse ifupdown2 and tell you about how it’s making networking great again.

I was recently simulating a data center environment with Vagrant to test scalable architectures. I was trying to leverage ECMP via the new Routing on the Host feature on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS server over a Cumulus Linux spine/leaf Clos network. One requirement for this feature to work is peering BGP between the Ubuntu server and the first-hop leaf. Sounds simple, right? I had already peered BGP throughout my entire Cumulus Linux switch network, and since Ubuntu is also a Debian-based distribution, it should have been a trivial task.

Leveraging-ifupdown2-in-the-Datacenter-to-Make-Networking-Great-Again

Read Continue reading

50% off Prime Membership After Free 6 Month Trial, For Students – Deal Alert

If you know somebody headed off to college soon, or maybe you'll be attending yourself, you should know that Amazon is giving away 6 free months of Amazon Prime, followed by a 50% discount on a Prime Membership ($49 vs. $99). Just sign up, or have them sign up with an .edu email address and start accessing free two-day shipping, exclusive deals and promotions, unlimited photo storage, and unlimited TV & movie streaming through Prime Video. And students get $5 Amazon credit for every friend they get to sign up. Click through to take advantage of this deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft makes Windows 10 hardware change for PC security

Microsoft is rolling out a change in minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices, and expects hardware makers to comply in order to make their devices more secure.Starting Thursday, PC makers should include a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 in Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets.The TPM 2.0 feature will be beneficial for users as it will do a better job of protecting sensitive information on a PC. A TPM 2.0 security layer -- which can be in the form of a chip or firmware -- can safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft makes Windows 10 hardware change for PC security

Microsoft is rolling out a change in minimum hardware requirements for Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices, and expects hardware makers to comply in order to make their devices more secure.Starting Thursday, PC makers should include a hardware-based security feature called TPM (Trusted Platform Module) 2.0 in Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets.The TPM 2.0 feature will be beneficial for users as it will do a better job of protecting sensitive information on a PC. A TPM 2.0 security layer -- which can be in the form of a chip or firmware -- can safeguard user data by managing and storing cryptographic keys in a trusted container.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix & LogMeIn complete complicated, tax-free sort-of merger

LogMeIn, the makers of the popular remote desktop software as well as IT security and conferencing offerings, will become part of a Citrix subsidiary in the wake of a complicated, $1.8 billion transaction announced Tuesday by the two companies.The transaction is what’s called a Reverse Morris Trust, which apparently allows the untaxed transfer of a subsidiary to new ownership by spinning off a new company and completing a merger. In this case, Citrix has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called GetGo, which owns its GoToMeeting products.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features | Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Citrix & LogMeIn complete complicated, tax-free sort-of merger

LogMeIn, the makers of the popular remote desktop software as well as IT security and conferencing offerings, will become part of a Citrix subsidiary in the wake of a complicated, $1.8 billion transaction announced Tuesday by the two companies.The transaction is what’s called a Reverse Morris Trust, which apparently allows the untaxed transfer of a subsidiary to new ownership by spinning off a new company and completing a merger. In this case, Citrix has created a wholly-owned subsidiary called GetGo, which owns its GoToMeeting products.+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Dropbox aims for enterprise with new team and IT admin features | Cisco: Potent ransomware is targeting the enterprise at a scary rate +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Wondering where common actions got moved in Modern Document Libraries? Use this handy guide!

One of the best things about SharePoint on Office 365 is that you are able to take advantage of all of the great new features that Microsoft is developing as part of the future of SharePoint as they become available. While some updates have only minimal impact on end user experiences, modern document libraries introduce some pretty significant differences that might make users uncomfortable for a little while. After all, all change is disruptive when it’s unfamiliar! To help both me and my clients quickly find where common document library actions have moved, I created a feature comparison table that I’m sharing in this post. This is my “dude, where’s my car?” or “where did my cheese go?” summary.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

94% off the Complete Machine Learning Course Bundle – Deal Alert

Machine learning is hot, and with good reason. For the uninitiated: it’s the use of pattern recognition and prediction that underlies important technologies like self-driving cars and speech recognition.Want to dive into the field? From learning to build financial models and utilizing Big Data, to coding Java and Python--the 10 courses in The Complete Machine Learning Bundle will get you up to speed on all things machine learning.Here are the courses included in your bundle:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw with password manager LastPass could hand over control to hackers

Even password manager LastPass can be fooled. A Google security researcher has found a way to remotely hijack the software.It works by first luring the user to a malicious site. The site will then exploit a flaw in a LastPass add-on for the Firefox browser, giving it control over the password management software.LastPass wrote about the vulnerability on Wednesday and said that a fix is already out for Firefox users.Google security research Tavis Ormandy first discovered the issue. When examining the password manager, he tweeted on Tuesday, "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flaw with password manager LastPass could hand over control to hackers

Even password manager LastPass can be fooled. A Google security researcher has found a way to remotely hijack the software.It works by first luring the user to a malicious site. The site will then exploit a flaw in a LastPass add-on for the Firefox browser, giving it control over the password management software.LastPass wrote about the vulnerability on Wednesday and said that a fix is already out for Firefox users.Google security research Tavis Ormandy first discovered the issue. When examining the password manager, he tweeted on Tuesday, "Are people really using this lastpass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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