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

Indiana University Uses Docker Datacenter for Production-Ready Orchestration

Founded in 1820, Indiana University has over 115,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 20,000 faculty members and eight campuses located throughout the State of Indiana. The University’s vision is to provide their students with the best possible education experience via a world-class IT team.

For almost a decade the university was building custom scripts and deploying their applications onto VMs running on RHEL 6. A process that involved lots of manual work. In addition to this, their environment was optimized for their legacy Java-based applications.

In order to give their students the best experience possible, the University needed to not only modernize their 150 applications that span across both administrative and student lines and include everything from human resources based applications, course selection, finances and other student-facing applications. They also needed the ability to deploy their applications across their multi-host datacenter environment. They required a production-ready solution. A tool that would enable them to build new process around packaging, deployment, management, and scale for both centralized and de-centralized environments at the same time.

For this, Indiana University turned to the Docker Datacenter (DDC) solution. DDC is our commercial solution that delivers a Containers as a Service platform and includes: Universal Control Continue reading

Brake pedal data can fingerprint drivers with 87% accuracy in 15 minutes

Have you opted for lower car insurance premiums via installing an insurance-supplied dongle? If so, then did you realize that dongle could narc you out when brake pedal usage is used a biometric identifier? Kiki der Gecko If you are thinking surely not, then think again as researchers had nearly a 90% accuracy in identifying drivers via brake pedal sensor data after only 15 minutes of driving.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Brake pedal data can fingerprint drivers with 87% accuracy in 15 minutes

Have you opted for lower car insurance premiums via installing an insurance-supplied dongle? If so, then did you realize that dongle could narc you out when brake pedal usage is used a biometric identifier? Kiki der Gecko If you are thinking surely not, then think again as researchers had nearly a 90% accuracy in identifying drivers via brake pedal sensor data after only 15 minutes of driving.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest leap second plan poses a dilemma for conscientious sysadmins

Conscientious sysadmins face a dilemma on December 31, when a new leap second will threaten the stability of computer systems and networks.Scientists occasionally add a leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the time reference most clocks are set by, so as to keep it in step with the earth's gradually slowing rotation. If they didn't, then clocks would be off by about a minute at midday by 2100.Computer systems don't like leap seconds as they are programmed to expect the same number of seconds in every minute of every hour of every day. The various ways of tricking them into accepting the extra second -- stretching out all the other seconds in the preceding minute, hour or day, repeating the same second twice, or creating a 61st second in a minute, can cause chaos as they affect different computers in different ways.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest leap second plan poses a dilemma for conscientious sysadmins

Conscientious sysadmins face a dilemma on December 31, when a new leap second will threaten the stability of computer systems and networks.Scientists occasionally add a leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the time reference most clocks are set by, so as to keep it in step with the earth's gradually slowing rotation. If they didn't, then clocks would be off by about a minute at midday by 2100.Computer systems don't like leap seconds as they are programmed to expect the same number of seconds in every minute of every hour of every day. The various ways of tricking them into accepting the extra second -- stretching out all the other seconds in the preceding minute, hour or day, repeating the same second twice, or creating a 61st second in a minute, can cause chaos as they affect different computers in different ways.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Latest leap second plan poses a dilemma for conscientious sysadmins

Conscientious sysadmins face a dilemma on December 31, when a new leap second will threaten the stability of computer systems and networks.Scientists occasionally add a leap second to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the time reference most clocks are set by, so as to keep it in step with the earth's gradually slowing rotation. If they didn't, then clocks would be off by about a minute at midday by 2100.Computer systems don't like leap seconds as they are programmed to expect the same number of seconds in every minute of every hour of every day. The various ways of tricking them into accepting the extra second -- stretching out all the other seconds in the preceding minute, hour or day, repeating the same second twice, or creating a 61st second in a minute, can cause chaos as they affect different computers in different ways.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plea to Cisco: ‘CCIE routing and switching written exam needs to be fixed’

Tom Hollingsworth, a CCIE and author of a popular blog called “The Networking Nerd,” used that forum last week  – smack in the middle of Cisco’s annual user conference -- to issue a blistering critique of the CCIE routing and switching written exam. “The discontent is palpable,” according to Hollingsworth. “From what I’ve heard around Las Vegas this week, it’s time to fix the CCIE Written Exam.”That contention has received broad though not unanimous support on Twitter and comments on the post itself. As for Cisco, it tells me they’re always open to suggestions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plea to Cisco: ‘CCIE routing and switching written exam needs to be fixed’

Tom Hollingsworth, a CCIE and author of a popular blog called “The Networking Nerd,” used that forum last week  – smack in the middle of Cisco’s annual user conference -- to issue a blistering critique of the CCIE routing and switching written exam.  “The discontent is palpable,” according to Hollingsworth. “From what I’ve heard around Las Vegas this week, it’s time to fix the CCIE Written Exam.” That contention has received broad though not unanimous support on Twitter and comments on the post itself. As for Cisco, it tells me they’re always open to suggestions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Introducing Ansible Tower 3

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The Best Way To Run Ansible In Your Organization Just Got Better

We’ve been hard at work since the last release of Tower, listening to community feedback and working to create the best possible experience for Tower users. We are pleased to introduce Ansible Tower 3, evolving from Ansible’s simple, powerful and agentless automation and extending that power to your team and organization.

Tower 3 boasts an entirely reworked UI that makes it simpler and easier to use Tower to automate your environments and share your automation. On top of that, we’ve equipped this newest edition of Tower with a host of new features to speed productivity and visibility within your Tower workflows, managing complex deployments and scaling the power of automation.

These features include: 

Expanded and Simplified Permissions

In prior releases of Tower, we operated on an implicit permissions system. For a user to be able to see, and run, a job, they needed permissions on not only the project that housed the Playbook, but also the inventory, and the credential used.

Now, with Tower 3, we’ve made things much simpler… if you have a job that you want a user or team to run, just give them Continue reading

Fixing The CCIE Written – A Follow Up

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I stirred up quite the hornet’s nest last week, didn’t I? I posted about how I thought the CCIE Routing and Switching Written Exam needed to be fixed. I got 75 favorites on Twitter and 40 retweets of my post, not to mention the countless people that shared it on a variety of forums and other sites. Since I was at Cisco Live, I had a lot of people coming up to me saying that they agreed with my views. I also had quite a few people that weren’t thrilled with my perspective. Thankfully, I had the chance to sit down with Yusuf Bhaiji, head of the CCIE program, and chat about things. I wanted to share some thoughts here.

Clarity Of Purpose

One of the biggest complaints that I’ve heard is that I was being “malicious” in my post with regards to the CCIE. I was also told that it was a case of “sour grapes” and even that the exam was as hard as it was on purpose because the CCIE is supposed to be hard. Mostly, I felt upset that people were under the impression that my post was designed to destroy, harm, or otherwise defame the Continue reading

Oracle issues largest patch bundle ever, fixing 276 security flaws

Oracle has released a new quarterly batch of security updates for more than 80 products from its software portfolio, fixing 276 vulnerabilities.This is the largest Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) to date. The average number of flaws fixed per Oracle update last year was 161, according to security vendor Qualys. Furthermore, out of the 276 security flaws fixed in this update, 159 can be exploited remotely without authentication.At the top of the priority list should be the Java patches, which address 13 new vulnerabilities. That's because Java is used in a lot of applications and is installed on a large number of systems."Customers really do need to apply these Java CPU patches as soon as possible,"  said John Matthew Holt, the CTO of application security firm Waratek, via email. Among the patches that require urgent attention are those for the HotSpot Java virtual machine for desktops and servers, which received high CVSS (Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System) scores, Holt noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Oracle issues largest patch bundle ever, fixing 276 security flaws

Oracle has released a new quarterly batch of security updates for more than 80 products from its software portfolio, fixing 276 vulnerabilities.This is the largest Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) to date. The average number of flaws fixed per Oracle update last year was 161, according to security vendor Qualys. Furthermore, out of the 276 security flaws fixed in this update, 159 can be exploited remotely without authentication.At the top of the priority list should be the Java patches, which address 13 new vulnerabilities. That's because Java is used in a lot of applications and is installed on a large number of systems."Customers really do need to apply these Java CPU patches as soon as possible,"  said John Matthew Holt, the CTO of application security firm Waratek, via email. Among the patches that require urgent attention are those for the HotSpot Java virtual machine for desktops and servers, which received high CVSS (Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System) scores, Holt noted.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 tips to avoid summer’s plummeting productivity

Avoid summer's plummeting productivityImage by Thinkstock Investment in employee education and learning increases engagement and makes employees more productive. If you find your workload is a bit light during the summer months, consider sitting down with your manager to identify existing professional development programs or courses to add to your skill set, Battles says. If you can't physically attend courses, take advantage of virtual training tools and online massive open online courses. 1. The more you knowImage by Thinkstock To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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