IDG Contributor Network: Holy Batman! Look at how IoT has transformed police cars

The Batmobile is the ultimate crime-fighting vehicle. Today’s police cars aren’t far behind, thanks to IoT and new connectivity solutions.Meeting the needs of both public safety and law enforcement on a tight budget is challenging. Four major requirements first have to be met. How do you respond quickly to a wide range of incidents that might occur over a large area at any time with limited police resources? How can information (such as car license plates) be collected and referenced against online databases while traveling at high speeds? How can sensors capture and process information in order to give police officers more time? How can encounters between the police and public be easily recorded in detail? Multi-WAN routers, IoT systems, vehicle scanners, body cameras and a crime database all come together to make this possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

10 Gameday Failure Testing Scenarios from Obama for America

I have dozens if not hundreds of half finished articles and snippets of ideas in the haunted house that is my Google Docs. Walking the house around midnight, with the lights turned off course, I stumbled upon one ghost that has been haunting me since 2012. It is time to perform the ritual of exorcism by just publishing something.

You may or may not remember Obama for America, which in 2012 had a staff of 120 people that built and maintained the infrastructure that helped get out the vote for Obama. 

Harper Reed and Dylan Richard headed up the effort. Around that time they were getting a lot of press. One of the things that interested me was how they held Gameday test events, where they would simulate failure modes in their testing environments. Google calls these DiRT (Disaster Recovery Testing event) exercises. 

So I asked Harper and Dylan what these exercises actually were and they were kind enough to reply. And I apparently forgot all about it. My apologies. Better late than never? Yah, let's go with that.

Here are some of the failure testing scenarios carried out by the Obama for America team:

  1. Flush memcache
  2. Continue reading

Setting up vSRX and Space in VMware Fusion

I’m going to be travelling a bit in the near future and wanted an easy, laptop-based Juniper device and Junos Space instance to mess with. I’ve recently made some headway with CLI configlets and wanted to build on what I’ve got working.

I already run VMware Fusion on the Mac in order to run Ubuntu and Windows, so I figured that was the best thing to use. What I wanted was two VMs that could see each other and be accessed from the host machine, but without them being dependent on the host’s interfaces being up. Wifi access would be chargeable, and wired impossible – without making an ethernet loopback plug to bring the Mac’s interface up artifically, that is. So that ruled out both bridged and NAT type connections. What I needed was some kind of internal network within the host – Fusion seems to call this a ‘Private to my Mac’ connection.

My version of Fusion is 7.1.2 – it doesn’t seem to be the ‘Pro’ version, but I can’t confirm this. For some reason, the help isn’t vey helpful. You do some Googling and VMware Workstation information comes up, or help pages about what appear to be Continue reading

A Corner to Landing Leap: Xeon Phi Generations Put to Test

A first wave of benchmarks and real-world application runs on Intel’s Knights Landing has hit the shores and while not all the codes will be familiar or widely used, the takeaway of significant performance gains between the new generation and its Xeon Phi predecessor are clear.

As we described earlier this summer, the performance projections Intel released about Knights Landing were spot on and now that researchers are getting devices in their hands, these results will be put to further test. And as detailed previously, there are stark differences between Knights Corner and its bigger, badder successor, Knights Landing.

Take …

A Corner to Landing Leap: Xeon Phi Generations Put to Test was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

7 top apps for sharing large files

These days, it's common for people to get work done using more than one device -- whether you're sending out an email on your smartphone, checking Slack on your tablet or crafting spreadsheets on your PC. And it's created a demand for storage options that let you easily access files -- especially oversized files -- across numerous devices and operating systems, no matter where you are. The good news is that just one quick Google search will uncover an overwhelming number of companies that want to help you painlessly share large files.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 Free Cloud Storage options But with so many options, it can be hard to figure out which ones offer the best features at a reasonable price for your specific needs. If you just need a way to store and share your smartphone pics, then you're going to need different storage options than a freelancer, small business or large corporation. Luckily, there is an option for everyone. Here are seven of the best apps to share, store and edit large files no matter what device you're on.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Micron’s super-fast 3D Xpoint SSDs will ship through storage partners

Intel won't be the only company gearing up to sell super-fast SSDs based on the new 3D Xpoint storage and memory technology; other storage companies will also offer them with technology provided by Micron. Micron detailed its 3DXpoint plans Tuesday at the Flash Memory Summit conference in Santa Clara, California. Intel and Micron are taking divergent paths to bring 3D Xpoint to customers. Intel will sell its own 3D Xpoint SSDs and memory DIMMs, while Micron is partnering with well-established storage companies to sell 3D Xpoint SSDs. SSDs and DRAM will run much faster with 3D Xpoint, which essentially unifies storage and memory. Intel claims 3D Xpoint will be 10 times denser than DRAM, and it has shown the technology being 10 times faster than current SSDs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

An engineer uses IoT to tackle illness

Daniel Strabley's day job is helping to protect the U.S. from weapons of mass destruction. He works on a software suit that interacts with sensors to detect chemical and radiation threats. The sensor information, as you may imagine, is complicated, and one of his tasks is to make it understandable to users.This means that anyone, from an Army private not long out of high school to a Ph.D.-holding nuclear physicist, needs an interface that is meaningful to their knowledge level.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 12 most powerful Internet of Things companies The work on detecting weapons of mass destruction is similar in concept to what Strabley is doing to help his wife's grandfather, who is suffering from dementia. He has written software that can help people with varying degrees of cognitive issues, and is using sensors such as Amazon's new IOT buttons, to improve communication.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Global IT challenges: Privacy, standardization, transformation top the list

It's one of an IT leader's biggest nightmares: Imagine you've got a division in Russia, which has very strict privacy laws regarding employees' rights to control their information, and there are 12 employees who refuse to allow their information to leave company walls.Whether it's introducing new UPS products or services such as My Choice to the marketplace, or implementing large-scale integrated capabilities like World Wide Express Saver Freight -- which rely on multiple systems -- "we choreograph the deployments across our teams and systems. We would first beta-test the releases in the individual markets such as the U.S., Europe and Asia, prior to executing the global deployment, testing all facets of the solution including the installation and functionality," Costides says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IT managers critique enterprise flash-storage products

The market for enterprise flash array storage is highly competitive, with traditional storage vendors battling against innovative startups. Tech buyers are typically looking at factors such as ease of use, improved data management, performance, deduplication algorithms, a small footprint and low power usage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

IT managers critique enterprise flash-storage products

The market for enterprise flash array storage is highly competitive, with traditional storage vendors battling against innovative startups. Tech buyers are typically looking at factors such as ease of use, improved data management, performance, deduplication algorithms, a small footprint and low power usage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

White House software code sharing policy gains steam

The White House has released its Federal Source Code policy that promotes reuse of new source code developed by government agencies across the federal government.The new policy also sets up a pilot program “that requires agencies, when commissioning new custom software, to release at least 20 percent of new custom-developed code as Open Source Software (OSS) for three years,” Tony Scott, U.S. CIO and Anne E. Rung, chief acquisition officer, wrote in a memorandum to heads of departments and agencies on Monday.The federal government spends every year over US$6 billion on software through more than 42,000 transactions, but agencies that procure custom-developed source code do not necessarily make their new code broadly available for reuse by the federal government.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

George Washington didn’t tweet here, but you may get 5G

Some people frown on Pokémon Go hunts in historic areas, but a new FCC ruling could make it even more tempting to risk a glare and a wagging finger.On Monday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced a deal to made it easier for mobile operators and building owners to install cellular gear on many old buildings, including some in historic districts. Just because those structures may evoke the past doesn’t mean they can’t have the screaming 5G wireless speeds of the future.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

CS101: Algorithms

First in this series is the subject of Algorithms. This topic is very interesting to me because when I first strived to understand what exactly they were, I was expecting something a lot more complicated than what they turned out to be. I think, shamefully, that Hollywood may have had an influence on this, as the term “algorithm” is one of many terms abused by “cyber” movies and the like, portrayed to be some sort of ultimate cyber weapon in the war against Ellingson Mineral Company.

The reality is much simpler. “Algorithm” is defined as “a set of steps that are followed in order to solve a mathematical problem or to complete a computer process”. It really is that simple. Think of a mathematical problem that you’d need to solve yourself (ignoring for the moment that there’s likely a 3rd party library that has already done this).

A common example is the calculation of the Fibonacci sequence. Forget about writing code for a minute, and think about the problem in plain English. Given a starting sequence (1, 1), how do you continue calculating and adding numbers to this sequence, to produce N number of Fibonacci numbers?

New Series: CS 101

Historically, my background is far closer to the systems side of things, but as I’ve picked up software development experience over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate the fundamentals of computer science that others in my shoes may not have been exposed to. That said, I have been working on a pseudo-formal blog series on computer science fundamentals. These fundamentals have a wide variety of applications. Those with more of an IT-focused background will learn that even if you don’t use graph theory, or optimize algorithms in your day job, many of these concepts are at the crux of many of the technologies that we use every day.

CS101: Algorithms

First in this series is the subject of Algorithms. This topic is very interesting to me because when I first strived to understand what exactly they were, I was expecting something a lot more complicated than what they turned out to be. I think, shamefully, that Hollywood may have had an influence on this, as the term “algorithm” is one of many terms abused by “cyber” movies and the like, portrayed to be some sort of ultimate cyber weapon in the war against Ellingson Mineral Company.
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