I love roller coasters, so how about a virtual reality coaster?

I’ve been on a good number of roller coasters in my day and generally love riding on them. So when Network World Cool Tools Editor Keith Shaw and I were researching the story of Six Flags New England introducing virtual reality headsets on their star Superman ride, I knew I wanted to experience it for myself.The ride is incredible, even without the VR headset: It’s got a 220-foot drop, 5,000+ feet of track and it goes 77 miles per hour. It’s a trill-lovers paradise.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Virtual Flying with Superman: How Six Flags added even more thrills to its top roller coaster | Superman the Virtual Reality Ride, in pictures | First-person reaciton to Superman VR Ride +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Superman VR roller coaster in pictures

Superman battles Lex Luthor in virtual MetropolisImage by Six FlagsAt the Six Flags New England amusement park in Agawam, Mass., visitors can now experience virtual reality on one of the park's most popular roller coasters - Superman The Ride.The first drop is a doozyImage by Six FlagsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Virtual flying with Superman: How Six Flags New England added more thrills to its top coaster

You take your seat on the roller coaster and a large belt is locked into place. A Six Flags ride attendant places a virtual reality headset over your eyes. A chin strap is tightened, and you look forward in the headset.Suddenly, you’re inside Superman’s Metropolis in an immersive experience. You can’t see the coaster, the ride attendants or even the person next to you. You only see the virtual Sky Tours seat, which looks like the pod of a large Ferris wheel. As the ride begins, you see the simulated urban landscape, but then Lex Luthor, Superman’s nemesis, comes into view. The physical coaster is climbing up the track, but you have no idea how high you are. Luther has an electricity gun, which he fires at the train, along with some LexBots that also grab the train, detaching you from the track.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

First-person: How the roller coaster experience changes with VR and why I love it

Over the years, I’ve ridden lots of roller coasters - everything from the “kid coaster” at the local carnival, to Space Mountain and other Disney coasters, to the mega-monstrous coasters at Six Flags and other amusement parks. There is something very exciting about the first drop, a corkscrew loop or the speeds that you attain when riding a coaster. That said, as I’ve gotten older I find myself riding them less. Depending on the coaster, the shaking and head bumping that sometimes occurs gives me a sense of nausea or dizziness following the ride, and the recuperation time takes longer than when I was in my 20s. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open19: A New Vision for the Data Center

This is coming out of the architecture team at LinkedIn—it’s really interesting for mid-tier scalers, large financials, and the like, so I thought I’d share it here as well.

This week at the DatacenterDynamics Webscale conference, I have the privilege of announcing the first step in a long journey, an initiative that we hope will further the state of hardware in the data center. Called Open19, this new project aims to establish a new open standard for servers based on a common form factor. The goals of Open19 are to provide lower cost per rack, lower cost per server, optimized power utilization, and (eventually) an open standard that everyone can contribute to and participate in.

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Microsoft, IBM tout cloud services as key drivers of earnings strength

It’s earnings season, which for publicly-traded technology vendors in the cloud market means it’s time to update investors on the momentum of emerging products helping to displace eroding revenue from legacy offerings.For two technology vendor stalwarts – Microsoft and IBM - cloud computing has played a significant role in their earnings this quarter.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 4 Numbers that stood out in VMware’s earnings| Who’s right behind Amazon in IaaS revenue? Not Microsoft +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft, IBM tout cloud services as key drivers of earnings strength

It’s earnings season, which for publicly-traded technology vendors in the cloud market means it’s time to update investors on the momentum of emerging products helping to displace eroding revenue from legacy offerings.For two technology vendor stalwarts – Microsoft and IBM - cloud computing has played a significant role in their earnings this quarter.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: 4 Numbers that stood out in VMware’s earnings| Who’s right behind Amazon in IaaS revenue? Not Microsoft +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Auto parts supplier has big plans for its nascent IoT effort

Hirotec America recently embarked on its first IoT effort and, as new as it is, the effort is already paying dividends, says Justin Hester, Research & Development Project Manager.  Hirotec is a $1.4 billion tier one parts and tooling supplier to automakers, specializing in closures (such as doors and hoods) and exhaust systems.  Hester was instrumental in getting the IoT effort off the ground at the company’s US headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, but has since moved to Japan to work on Hirotec’s global IoT efforts from the company’s global headquarters in Hiroshima. Justin Hester, Research & Development Project Manager, HirotecTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel meets the needs of a digital world

In the late 1800s, Mark Twain was rumored to have said, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” If Mark Twain were a technology, he would be Fibre Channel.It seems every year some smart industry prognosticator predicts that Ethernet will obviate the need for Fibre Channel, and it will go the way of the dinosaur or the mainframe. But that hasn’t been the case at all. In fact, Fibre Channel is still around and very much alive. Why? Because it’s the best, most cost-effective technology for storage networks. And for most organizations, storage is everything. The Fibre Channel fabric connects business applications and users to the mission-critical data that drives the company. This is why almost every large organization that is dependent on data, such as financial services firms, healthcare institutions and retailers, depend on Fibre Channel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Building Highly Scalable V6 Only Cloud Hosting

This is a guest repost by Donatas Abraitis, Lead Systems Engineer at at Hostinger International.

This article is about how we built the new high scalable cloud hosting solution using IPv6-only communication between commodity servers, what problems we faced with IPv6 protocol and how we tackled them for handling more than ten millions active users.

Why did we decide to run IPv6-only network?

At Hostinger we care much about innovation technologies, thus we decided to run a new project named Awex that is based on this protocol. If we can, so why not start since today? Only frontend (user facing) services are running in dual-stack environment, everything else is IPv6-only for west-east traffic.

Architecture

What CIOs need to know about SQL Server 2016

With SQL Server 2005 now out of support, if you haven’t already started migrating your older databases onto a newer, supported release to stay in compliance with regulations like PCI DSS, that’s now urgent. But even if you don’t have an urgent need to migrate, there are several reasons why you may want to consider SQL Server 2016. The new security options will be significant for many businesses. Integration with Azure gives businesses a new approach for both availability and bursting performance to the cloud. And Power BI is an option today that will become a key part of SQL Server reporting in the future. Plus, this is the version that Microsoft will be bringing to Linux, giving you a new option for moving off Oracle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Systems Are The Table Stakes For IBM’s Evolution

Big Blue does not participate in any meaningful sense in the booming market for infrastructure for the massive hyperscale and public cloud buildout that is transforming the face of the IT business. But the company is still a bellwether for computing at large enterprises, and its efforts to – once again – transform itself to address the very different needs that companies have compared to a decade or two ago are fascinating to contemplate.

In a very real way, the manner that IBM talks about its own business these days, which is very different from how it described the rising …

Systems Are The Table Stakes For IBM’s Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IDG Contributor Network: Data centers will fit in a laptop form factor eventually

Storing all of the books ever written on media the size of a postage stamp is possible with atom-based memory, say scientists.Five hundred terabits per square inch is doable, in fact. That would be 500 times more efficient than current state-of-the-art commercial hard drives, say the researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.To prove the feat could be accomplished, the scientists created an 8,000 bit memory “where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom,” the university says in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Data centers will fit in a laptop form factor eventually

Storing all of the books ever written on media the size of a postage stamp is possible with atom-based memory, say scientists.Five hundred terabits per square inch is doable, in fact. That would be 500 times more efficient than current state-of-the-art commercial hard drives, say the researchers from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.To prove the feat could be accomplished, the scientists created an 8,000 bit memory “where each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom,” the university says in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

It’s official (sorta): Windows 10 kneecapped PC sales

There has been anecdotal talk that Microsoft's aggressive Windows 10 upgrade/giveaway harmed PC sales, since it's known most people upgrade to a new OS via a new PC purchase rather than doing a software upgrade. Now Gartner has confirmed this theory.In an interview with The Register (and confirmed with the analyst by me), Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal told the publication, "People with older PCs upgraded to Windows 10 and held onto them. Microsoft didn’t expect that number to be so high."+ Also on Network World: Credibility and trust: Microsoft blows it +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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