IDG Contributor Network: Survey: Kids now online at age 3

The Internet has changed young children’s lives and they now are as comfortable picking up an iPad as they are a coloring book.Kids now spend twice as much time on the Internet as they did 10 years ago, and it’s escalating, research from an age-verification software developer has discovered.UK-based Agechecked says that over a quarter of kids there (28 percent) are using the Internet before they attend their first school. The statutory school age there is from five years old.And “one in six children, or 16 percent, begin their online experience at age three or under” the report (PDF) claims. Parents need to get aware, the company believes, and they should be acquainting themselves with their kids’ habits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

12 most powerful hyperconverged infrastructure vendors

For organizations that want the agility of public cloud infrastructure but want the security and peace of mind of hosting the hardware on their own premises, hyperconverged infrastructure has emerged as a dominant hardware platform for hosting private clouds, virtual desktops and new application development environments. Over the past five years the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market has evolved out of its preceding converged infrastructure (CI). Like CI, HCI’s foundational elements include an integrated compute, network and storage infrastructure offering. Unlike CI, HCI goes a step further with a software that sits atop the virtualized components that control the entire system. This creates software-defined storage, networking and compute, allowing resources to be spun up and down rapidly and through API calls. Research firm Forrester predicts that HCI systems will “become ubiquitous” as a common platform for deploying on-premises infrastructure.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why cloud architecture matters: The advantages of multi-instance vs. multi-tenant

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.

The first public cloud services went live in the late 1990s using a legacy construct called a multi-tenant architecture, and while features and capabilities have evolved, many cloud services are still based on this 20th century architecture. That raises serious questions about how legacy clouds prepare for calamity. While all architectures are susceptible to hardware failures and other issues that cause outages, the clouds that use a  multi-instance architecture can better minimize the impact of an outage. 

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

Why cloud architecture matters: The advantages of multi-instance vs. multi-tenant

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.The first public cloud services went live in the late 1990s using a legacy construct called a multi-tenant architecture, and while features and capabilities have evolved, many cloud services are still based on this 20th century architecture. That raises serious questions about how legacy clouds prepare for calamity. While all architectures are susceptible to hardware failures and other issues that cause outages, the clouds that use a  multi-instance architecture can better minimize the impact of an outage. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How CloudHealth Technologies keeps your clouds healthy

The world of cloud management is a fractured and busy one. There are cloud managers that help you control costs, ones that help you track usage, ones that monitor performance and others that provide infrastructure provisioning.Cloud Health Technologies Founder and CTO Joe Kinsella saw an opportunity in the market four years ago for another type of cloud management product: One that integrates all of those disparate cloud management tools together and provides centralized visibility into them. CloudHealth Technologies was born.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 4 Tips for buying cloud management software +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

50% off Sennheiser PC 363D High Performance Surround Sound Gaming Headset – Deal Alert

Combining Sennheiser headphone and microphone engineering with Dolby Laboratory 7.1 surround sound techhologies takes gaming to another dimension. Sennheiser's technology angles the drivers in the ear cups channeling the sound directly into your ears. This improves sonic detail, definition and dynamics. Dolby's 7.1 technology comes via a USB sound card providing headphone control and remarkable spacial effects letting you accurately pin point sounds with 3D like dimensionality. Averaging 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon (read reviews), the list price of $299.95 has been reduced a significant 50% to just $149.95.  See the discounted Sennheiser PC 363D surround sound gaming headset now on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

STP/RSTP election process

Just a quick reminder on STP election process (thanks to Dmitry Figol): Choose Root bridge: lowest Bridge ID (priority + system mac) all ports on a Root bridge are designated Choose Root port on each non-root bridge: lowest path cost to the root lowest neighbor Bridge ID lowest neighbor’s Port ID (port priority + internal port number)

Reaction: Forced Updates

The controversy over Microsoft forcing upgrades on users is in the news again, as the EFF has posted an article once again about the forced upgrades to Windows 10, and the various data collection schemes Microsoft has put in place. I understand the concern, but… A couple of points to consider, starting with forced upgrades—

When I worked in customer support I sometimes wished we had forced upgrades (rather than paid ones, in fact). There are so many times someone doesn’t upgrade past an obvious bug. We would spend hours working around the bug because they didn’t want to upgrade. It probably cost the company I worked for millions of dollars in support a year so we could refrain from saying, “take two upgrades and call me in the morning.”

As an operator, I see the other side of this story—if I don’t need the upgrade, or I’m not hitting the bug, I shouldn’t need to upgrade.

The world of IoT—in fact, the world in which we live, where millions of machines are used as botnets without the knowledge of their owners—is pretty frightening without forced upgrades. I wonder how many millions of dollars a year machines with Continue reading

Intel spreads 3D NAND to inexpensive consumer and enterprise SSDs

Intel is expanding its lineup of SSDs with its 3D NAND chips with more affordable consumer and enterprise drives.The 3D NAND chips have a structure that makes SSDs durable and fast but was only available in a handful of drives. The new SSDs support the NVMe protocol, which offers faster throughput than the SATA controller originally designed for hard drives.The new SSDs include entry-level consumer drives starting under US$100. Gamers may want to wait, however, until Intel releases its crazy-fast Optane SSDs, which the chip maker claims will be up to 10 times faster than regular SSDs.The consumer SSD 600p series for PCs starts at $69 for a 128GB drive and ranges to $359 for a 1TB drive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel spreads 3D NAND to inexpensive consumer and enterprise SSDs

Intel is expanding its lineup of SSDs with its 3D NAND chips with more affordable consumer and enterprise drives.The 3D NAND chips have a structure that makes SSDs durable and fast but was only available in a handful of drives. The new SSDs support the NVMe protocol, which offers faster throughput than the SATA controller originally designed for hard drives.The new SSDs include entry-level consumer drives starting under US$100. Gamers may want to wait, however, until Intel releases its crazy-fast Optane SSDs, which the chip maker claims will be up to 10 times faster than regular SSDs.The consumer SSD 600p series for PCs starts at $69 for a 128GB drive and ranges to $359 for a 1TB drive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Fraud follows mobile banking adoption

Since 2011, the Federal Reserve Board has conducted an annual survey that asks consumers how they use their mobile phones to interact with financial institutions, make payments, and manage their personal finances.Here are some of the key takeaways from the 2016 survey: In 2015, 67% of Millennials used mobile banking. This compares to 18% for those consumers aged 60 or over. And the usage gap is widening. 40% of the unbanked had access to a smartphone. 70% of the underbanked were smartphone owners. Driven by lower requirements for account creation, lower cost of banking, and ease of use of mobile banking solutions, consumers who have traditionally been excluded from the banking system and consumers who are coming of age for banking solutions are adopting mobile banking rather than opting for traditional banking solutions like ATMs or branch tellers. The accelerated adoption of mobile banking by Millennials, the underbanked and the unbanked is even more obvious in developing markets which (a) have a lot more underbanked and unbanked consumers and which (b) are leapfrogging desktop Internet to move directly to mobile Internet.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

You Can Finally Get More Page Rules For 5 For $5

Since CloudFlare launched Page Rules in 2012, our Free, Pro and Business users have been asking for a way to get more Page Rules without committing to the next plan up. Starting today, anyone on CloudFlare can add 5 additional Page Rules for just $5/month.

Page Rules allows you to fine tune your site speed and to apply CloudFlare’s wide range of features to specific parts of your site. Page Rules are also accessible over our API, so you can integrate them into your build process or sync them across your domains.

To help you get the most out of Page Rules, we’re also launching a tutorial site that features videos to help you setup Page Rules for specific content management systems like WordPress, Magento and Drupal, and for specific goals like optimizing your website's speed, increasing security, and saving on your bandwidth costs.

Key Success factors for adopting Node.js

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.Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment for server-side and network applications. Since its inception, it’s also become widely used for front-end tooling, APIs, desktop applications, and even controlling IoT hardware like drones. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript. The growing popularity and adoption of Node.js is the result of a confluence of several factors.First, there is an increasing need by companies of all sizes to quickly build scalable, fast, distributed web applications. Second, large enterprises are finding there is inherent risk associated with running large, complex monolithic applications due to the difficulty and cost of tuning, maintaining, patching, and debugging them — and the challenges this poses to business responsiveness. Third, software developers are looking to develop a skillset that prepares them for the new market reality of agile practices, continuous integration and delivery, cloud-scale application design and a highly mobile and demanding user base.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Key Success factors for adopting Node.js

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.

Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment for server-side and network applications. Since its inception, it’s also become widely used for front-end tooling, APIs, desktop applications, and even controlling IoT hardware like drones. Node.js applications are written in JavaScript. The growing popularity and adoption of Node.js is the result of a confluence of several factors.

First, there is an increasing need by companies of all sizes to quickly build scalable, fast, distributed web applications. Second, large enterprises are finding there is inherent risk associated with running large, complex monolithic applications due to the difficulty and cost of tuning, maintaining, patching, and debugging them — and the challenges this poses to business responsiveness. Third, software developers are looking to develop a skillset that prepares them for the new market reality of agile practices, continuous integration and delivery, cloud-scale application design and a highly mobile and demanding user base.

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

Cisco: US Trade Rep. backing Arista product import ban

The knives are out again between Cisco and Arista over their patent clash. Cisco this week said the US Trade Representative has begun the import ban as well as the cease and desist order covering Arista products imposed by the International Trade Commission in June.+More on Network World: Arista infringes on Cisco networking patents, trade agency says+According to a blog post from Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Cisco, the current action which took effect Aug. 23 has serious consequences for its rival. He wrote:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco: US Trade Rep. backing Arista product import ban

The knives are out again between Cisco and Arista over their patent clash. Cisco this week said the US Trade Representative has begun the import ban as well as the cease and desist order covering Arista products imposed by the International Trade Commission in June.+More on Network World: Arista infringes on Cisco networking patents, trade agency says+According to a blog post from Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Cisco, the current action which took effect Aug. 23 has serious consequences for its rival. He wrote:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

31% off Logitech Harmony Smart Control with Smartphone App and Simple All In One Remote – Deal Alert

The Logitech Harmony Smart Control systems turns you smartphone or tablet into a one-touch universal remote. Now you can control your entire entertainment system with the smartphone or tablet you already own. The Harmony Hub combined with a powerful app give you personalized control of up to 8 devices and works with over 270,000 devices including cable TV boxes, Apple TV, Roku, Sonos, Amazon Fire TV, Phillips Hue, Xbox One, PS3, and TV-connected PC or Mac—even through closed cabinets and walls. Plus, you get a simple Harmony remote for everyone in the house to use when your smartphone isn’t handy.  This system currently averages 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from 1,900+ people (read reviews) and its list price of $129.99 has been reduced to $89.99.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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