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Microsoft ships a major update to its HoloLens platform

Just as the month was about to end, Microsoft announced the release of the May 2016 Update for HoloLens, the first major software update to the virtual reality (VR) headset it's developing since it offered the developer edition.Considering it's been just two months since the Developer Kit and first wave of devices went out at the Build 2016 conference, Microsoft sure has added quite a bit to this update. The company also announced it was shipping headsets to a second wave of developer applicants.The full list of additions and changes to the May 2016 Update for HoloLens is rather lengthy, so we've boiled it down for you:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Raspberry Pi real-time network analytics

The Raspberry Pi model 3b is not much bigger than a credit card, costs $35, runs Linux, has a 1G RAM, and powerful 4 core 64 bit ARM processor. This article will demonstrate how to turn the Raspberry Pi into a Terribit/second real-time network analytics engine capable of monitoring hundreds of switches and thousands of switch ports.
The diagram shows how the sFlow-RT real-time analytics engine receives a continuous telemetry stream from industry standard sFlow instrumentation build into network, server and application infrastructure and delivers analytics through APIs and can easily be integrated with a wide variety of on-site and cloud, orchestration, DevOps and Software Defined Networking (SDN) tools.

A future article will examine how the Host sFlow agent can be used to efficiently stream measurements from large numbers of inexpensive Rasberry Pi devices ($5 for model Zero) to the sFlow-RT collector to monitor and control the "Internet of Things" (IoT).

The following instructions show how to install sFlow-RT on Raspbian Jesse (the Debian Linux based Raspberry Pi operating system).

wget http://www.inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/sflow-rt_2.0-1092.deb
sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=openjdk-7-jre-headless sflow-rt_2.0-1092.deb

We are ignoring the dependency on openjdk and will use the default Raspbian Java 1.8 version Continue reading

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IBM buys EZSource to help transform your mainframe apps for the digital world

The digital transformation train may have already left the station, but for companies with legacy mainframe applications, it's not always clear how to get on board. On Wednesday, IBM announced an acquisition that could help.The PC giant will acquire Israel-based EZSource, it said, in the hopes of helping developers "quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code."EZSource offers a visual dashboard that's designed to ease the process of modernizing applications. Essentially, it exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) so that developers can focus their efforts accordingly.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Response: OpenSwitch now a Linux Foundation

Openswitch has transioned from HPE to Linux Foundation project.

The post Response: OpenSwitch now a Linux Foundation appeared first on EtherealMind.

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Strong Scaling Key to Redrawing Neuroscience Borders

Computing for neuroscience, which has aided in our understanding of the structure and function of the brain, has been around for decades already. More recently, however, there has been neuroscience for computing, or the use of computational principles of the brain for generic data processing. For each of these neuroscience-driven areas there is a key limitation—scalability.

This is not just scalability in terms of software or hardware systems, but on the application side, limits in terms of efficiently deploying computational tools at sufficient size and time scales to yield far greater insight. While adding more compute to the problem …

Strong Scaling Key to Redrawing Neuroscience Borders was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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Google will help people find lost iPhones

Google is giving iPhone users another way to find their misplaced devices -- by searching the Web for it. Soon, when iPhone or Android users enter "I lost my phone" at Google.com, the search engine will respond with options that will allow them to ring the device, or locate it on a map. Right now, users can already get access to that functionality through Google's My Account feature, which serves as the nexus for people to understand and access the information connected to their Google account.Unlike Apple's Find my iPhone, Google's phone location feature isn't capable of locking an iPhone or remotely erasing it. Still, it may be a useful feature for someone who have misplaced his phone and just wants to figure out where it is.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Worth Reading: Automation, Robotics, and the Future

And humility because of the poorness of our ability to peer into the future. When reviewing the mountains of books and magazine articles that have sought to predict what the future holds in automation and related fields, when reading the hyped tech headlines or when looking at the many charts and tables extrapolating from the past to help us forecast the future, it is striking to see how often our predictions go wrong. The New Atlantis

The post Worth Reading: Automation, Robotics, and the Future appeared first on 'net work.

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Take The 2016 Packet Pushers Audience Survey! (Please)

Please take the Packet Pushers audience survey. The results will help us improve our content & provide some useful info to share with sponsors.

The post Take The 2016 Packet Pushers Audience Survey! (Please) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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EMC jumps into container market with open source storage platform

Storage giant EMC today dipped its toe into the hot application container market, taking aim at one of the unresolved areas in this burgeoning technology: storage.EMC announced libStorage, which the company describes as an open-source, platform-agnostic storage provisioning and orchestration framework for containers.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: A guide to container networking + libStorage is a client that sits atop a storage array that can talk to container management platforms, allowing that storage system to interact with containers. EMC posted the code for libStorage on GitHub and made it available as a free download.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Hey, Microsoft! Fish or cut bait on enterprise phones

Microsoft has a shot at saving what remains of its smartphone strategy, but the pivot toward the enterprise must be quick, an analyst said today."They're essentially starting over from scratch," John Delaney, an IDC analyst who covers mobility in Europe, said in an interview. "By the end of the year, they must show commitment from major ISVs and some really good mobile apps."Last week, Microsoft announced it would take another $950 million charge against earnings for the failure of its smartphone group to meet expectations, and lay off another 1,850 employees, two thirds of them former workers at Nokia, which Microsoft acquired two years ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Intel faces a challenge in the server market with new ARM chips

Intel has doubled down on servers as it looks to shed its reliance on PCs, but the chip maker's ARM competitors are ready to challenge it.New server and appliance chips based on the ARM architecture were announced at Computex in Taipei this week. ARM-based chips dominate smartphone and tablets, but the new chips from Cavium and Marvell show the processors are maturing quickly for use in servers.ARM servers are seen as a power-efficient alternative to Intel's x86-based systems, with companies looking to cut electric bills in data centers. ARM server chips have been around for years but have failed to register an impact because of hardware and software problems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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AP misses date of Lincoln’s death by four score and 20 years; we all miss copy editors

The typo itself – an Associated Press story reported that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1965 instead of 1865 – was just that, a typo, as even a middle-schooler knows our 16th president never lived to hear the Beatles.However, among journalists of a certain age (mine), the distressing though not unexpected aspect of the miscue was that the erroneous date made it onto so many prestigious news sites. As a 1970s-era college friend of mine put it in an email subject line: “Copy editing was a fine profession ...”Meaning that back before the near-extinction of copy editors, it would have been unlikely that the Associated Press would have allowed such a gaffe, never mind that it would have gone unnoticed by so many AP-subscriber news organizations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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DHCP Topology Customization Options

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is widely used, and yet poorly understood. There are, in fact, a large number of options in DHCP—but before we get to these, let’s do a quick review of basic off-segment operation.

When the client, which has no IP address, sends out a request for configuration information, what happens? The Router, A, if it is configured to be a DHCP helper, will receive the packet and forward it to the DHCP server, which is presumably located someplace else in the network. The router generally knows what address to send the request to because of manual configuration—but how does the server know how to get the packet back to the original requester?

The helper—Router A in this case—inserts the IP address of the interface on which the request was received into the giaddr field of the DHCP packet. As boring as this might seem, this is where things actually get pretty interesting. It’s possible, of course, for a router to have an logical layer three interface that sits on a bridge group (or perhaps an IRB interface). The router obviously needs to be able to put more information in the DHCP request to handle this Continue reading

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IDG Contributor Network: Triggered NetFlow — A Trick of the Trade

Triggered NetFlow: A Woland-Santuka Pro-Tip Vivek Santuka, CCIE #17621, is a consulting systems engineer at Cisco Systems who focuses on ISE for Cisco’s largest customers around the world. He and I devised, tested and deployed the methodology discussed in this blog entry, which we like to call “Triggered NetFlow.”NetFlow is an incredibly useful and under-valued security tool. Essentially, it is similar to a phone bill. A phone bill does not include recordings of all the conversations you have had in their entirety; it is a summary record of all calls sent and received.Cisco routers and switches support NetFlow, sending a “record” of each packet that has been routed, including the ports and other very usable information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: Triggered NetFlow — A Trick of the Trade

Triggered NetFlow: A Woland-Santuka Pro-Tip Vivek Santuka, CCIE #17621, is a consulting systems engineer at Cisco Systems who focuses on ISE for Cisco’s largest customers around the world. He and I devised, tested and deployed the methodology discussed in this blog entry, which we like to call “Triggered NetFlow.”NetFlow is an incredibly useful and under-valued security tool. Essentially, it is similar to a phone bill. A phone bill does not include recordings of all the conversations you have had in their entirety; it is a summary record of all calls sent and received.Cisco routers and switches support NetFlow, sending a “record” of each packet that has been routed, including the ports and other very usable information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: Triggered NetFlow — <br>A Trick of the Trade

Triggered NetFlow: A Woland-Santuka Pro-Tip Vivek Santuka, CCIE #17621, is a consulting systems engineer at Cisco Systems who focuses on ISE for Cisco’s largest customers around the world. He and I devised, tested and deployed the methodology discussed in this blog entry, which we like to call “Triggered NetFlow.”NetFlow is an incredibly useful and under-valued security tool. Essentially, it is similar to a phone bill. A phone bill does not include recordings of all the conversations you have had in their entirety; it is a summary record of all calls sent and received.Cisco routers and switches support NetFlow, sending a “record” of each packet that has been routed, including the ports and other very usable information.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Lenovo advises users to remove a vulnerable support tool preinstalled on their systems

PC maker Lenovo is recommending that users remove an application preloaded on their computers because it contains a high-severity flaw that could allow attackers to take over their systems. The vulnerable tool is called Lenovo Accelerator Application and is designed to speed up the launch of other Lenovo applications. It was preinstalled on more than 100 laptop and desktop models shipped with Windows 10, but not those from the ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines. The flaw was discovered by researchers from security firm Duo Security as part of an analysis of OEM software update tools from five PC manufacturers. The company found that a process called LiveAgent, apparently the update component of the Lenovo Accelerator Application, does not use encrypted connections when checking and downloading updates. LiveAgent also does not validate the digital signatures of the downloaded files before running them, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Lenovo advises users to remove a vulnerable support tool preinstalled on their systems

PC maker Lenovo is recommending that users remove an application preloaded on their computers because it contains a high-severity flaw that could allow attackers to take over their systems. The vulnerable tool is called Lenovo Accelerator Application and is designed to speed up the launch of other Lenovo applications. It was preinstalled on more than 100 laptop and desktop models shipped with Windows 10, but not those from the ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines. The flaw was discovered by researchers from security firm Duo Security as part of an analysis of OEM software update tools from five PC manufacturers. The company found that a process called LiveAgent, apparently the update component of the Lenovo Accelerator Application, does not use encrypted connections when checking and downloading updates. LiveAgent also does not validate the digital signatures of the downloaded files before running them, the researchers said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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IDG Contributor Network: Is ‘in situ’ performance monitoring the holy grail for cloud-native apps?

Developers specifically design apps natively for the cloud with the expectation that they will achieve massive scale with millions or billions of concurrent users. While many aspire to be the next Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Uber, plenty of app developers for banks, ecommerce sites or SaaS companies design for scale that is still far beyond what was even imagined a decade ago.Monitoring the performance of cloud applications with this kind of scale, however, is daunting, and the traditional approach of doing periodic collection and analysis of statistics is simply impractical. Only machine learning techniques, applied to intelligent performance data collection, can reduce data loads without inadvertently omitting context- and performance-sensitive data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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Flash Needs a Highway

Last week at Storage Field Day 10, I got a chance to see Pure Storage and their new FlashBlade product. Storage is an interesting creature, especially now that we’ve got flash memory technology changing the way we think about high performance. Flash transformed the industry from slow spinning gyroscopes of rust into a flat out drag race to see who could provide enough input/output operations per second (IOPS) to get to the moon and back.

Take a look at this video about the hardware architecture behind FlashBlade:

It’s pretty impressive. Very fast flash storage on blades that can outrun just about anything on the market. But this post isn’t really about storage. It’s about transport.

Life Is A Network Highway

Look at the backplane of the FlashBlade chassis. It’s not something custom or even typical for a unit like that. The key is when the presenter says that the architecture of the unit is more like a blade server chassis than a traditional SAN. In essence, Pure has taken the concept of a midplane and used it very effectively here. But their choice of midplane is interesting in this case.

Pure is using the Broadcom Trident II switch as their Continue reading