Android Wear smartwatches get fashion boost

Emphasizing fashion over functionality, Google today announced the MODE interchangeable and colorful, silicon and leather smartwatch straps—a sign that Android Wear smartwatch growth will come from making Android Wear more fashionable.Early Android Wear smartwatches, circa 2014, such as the Samsung Gear Live and the LG G Watch stressed functionality over style and form. These were prototypes to seed developers with a software platform they could use to begin to build apps and were for enthusiasts to begin to use and understand the smartwatch category.Many consumers, however, complained Android Wear watches didn’t match their expectations of what watches should look like. After all, a watch is a fashion statement first, a time piece second and app platform third. And so Android Wear watches began to subtly change, with Motorola’s Moto 360 winning praise for its round design over the Apple Watch and the round Huawei watch acting as Google’s de facto Nexus smartwatch.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More protection needed to guard grid from electromagnetic storm threat

The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More protection needed to guard grid from electromagnetic storm threat

The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

More protection needed to guard grid from electromagnetic storm threat

The United States isn’t as deeply unprepared for electromagnetic threats – either from space or man-made -- as it was a few years ago but a lot of work remains and awareness of the danger needs to be amped-up if the country wants to truly protect the electric grid.That was the general conclusion from a report by the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office this that looked at federal efforts to address electromagnetic risks to the electric grid.+More on Network World: Threat or menace?: Gaging electromagnetic risks to the electric grid+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flooding Domains versus Areas

At a fundamental level, OSPF and IS-IS are similar in operation. They both build neighbor adjacencies. They both use Dijkstra’s shortest path first (SPF) to find the shortest path to every destination in the network. They both advertise the state of each link connected to a network device. There are some differences, of course, such as the naming (OSI addresses versus IP addresses, intermediate systems versus routers). Many of the similarities and differences don’t play too much in the design of a network, though.

One difference that does play into network design, however, is the way in which the two protocols break up a single failure domain into multiple failure domains. In OSPF we have areas, while in IS-IS we have flooding domains. What’s the difference between these two, and how does it effect network design? Let’s use the illustration below as a helpful reference point for the two different solutions.

flooding-domains-02

In the upper network, we have an illustration of how OSPF areas work. Each router at the border of a flooding domain (an Area Border Router, or ABR), has a certain number of interfaces in each area. Another way of saying this is that an OSPF ABR is Continue reading

Flooding Domains versus Areas

At a fundamental level, SPF and IS-IS are similar in operation. They both build neighbor adjacencies. They both use Dijkstra’s shortest path first (SPF) to find the shortest path to every destination in the network. They both advertise the state of each link connected to a network device. There are some differences, of course, such as the naming (OSI addresses versus IP addresses, intermediate systems versus routers). Many of the similarities and differences don’t play too much in the design of a network, though.

One difference that does play into network design, however, is the way in which the two protocols break up a single failure domain into multiple failure domains. In OSPF we have areas, while in IS-IS we have flooding domains. What’s the difference between these two, and how does it effect network design? Let’s use the illustration below as a helpful reference point for the two different solutions.

flooding-domains-02

In the upper network, we have an illustration of how OSPF areas work. Each router at the border of a flooding domain (an Area Border Router, or ABR), has a certain number of interfaces in each area. Another way of saying this is that an OSPF ABR is Continue reading

Kiev, Ukraine: CloudFlare’s 78th Data Center

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Здоровенькі були! CloudFlare just turned up our newest datacenter in Kiev, the capital and largest city of Ukraine.

Kiev is an old city with more than 1,000 years of history. It was the capital of Kievan Rus’, an ancient country which is considered to be the ancestor of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. If you visit the city by plane, you may be almost blinded by the shining golden domes of numerous old churches and cathedrals - and once there, be sure to try the famous Ukrainian beet soup, “Borscht”. CloudFlare decided to contribute to the long history of Kiev with our 22nd data center in Europe, and our 78th data center globally.

Localizing content

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Frankfurt is arguably the biggest point of interconnection in the world, and is home to Deutscher Commercial Internet Exchange (DE-CIX) which plays an absolutely critical role and sees close to 5Tbps in traffic. While this is great if you live near Frankfurt, it is also where most traffic is exchanged for other parts of Germany, large parts of Europe (think Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Montenegro, Norway, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, etc.), and even countries such Continue reading

The Once And Future IBM Platform

More than anything else, over its long history in the computing business, IBM has been a platform company and say what you will about the woes it has had through several phases of its history, what seems obvious is that when Big Blue forgets this it runs into trouble.

If you stare at its quarterly financial results long enough, you can still see that platform company looking back at you, even through the artificially dissected product groups the company has used for the past decade and the new ones that IBM is using starting in 2016.

It is important to …

The Once And Future IBM Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Sponsored Post: Aerospike, TrueSight Pulse, Redis Labs, InMemory.Net, VividCortex, MemSQL, Scalyr, AiScaler, AppDynamics, ManageEngine, Site24x7

Who's Hiring?

  • Software Engineer (DevOps). You are one of those rare engineers who loves to tinker with distributed systems at high scale. You know how to build these from scratch, and how to take a system that has reached a scalability limit and break through that barrier to new heights. You are a hands on doer, a code doctor, who loves to get something done the right way. You love designing clean APIs, data models, code structures and system architectures, but retain the humility to learn from others who see things differently. Apply to AppDynamics

  • Software Engineer (C++). You will be responsible for building everything from proof-of-concepts and usability prototypes to deployment- quality code. You should have at least 1+ years of experience developing C++ libraries and APIs, and be comfortable with daily code submissions, delivering projects in short time frames, multi-tasking, handling interrupts, and collaborating with team members. Apply to AppDynamics

Fun and Informative Events

  • Discover the secrets of scalability in IT. The cream of the Amsterdam and Berlin tech scene are coming together during TechSummit, hosted by LeaseWeb for a great day of tech talk. Find out how to build systems that will cope with constant change and Continue reading

Worth Reading: Declaring IPv6 an Internet Standard

I don’t think that there is any doubt about the “significant benefits” part of this criteria when considering IPv6.But the issue of “technical maturity” is one I’d like to explore a little further. In so many ways IPv6 is just IPv4 with larger address fields. There are just a few technical differences, but it’s these differences that continue to be a source of technical exploration and potential uncertainty. -CircleID

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Juniper, Google, Microsoft & other IT vendors urge Congress to up CompSci education spending

Nearly 50 business leaders, including many enterprise IT company executives, have joined dozens of governors and educational system representatives in urging Congress to support the teaching of computer science in every K-12 school across the United States. An open letter/petition, titled "Offer Computer Science in our public schools," had accumulated more than 1,000 signatures on Change.org as of Tuesday morning. The petition was launched by the CS Education Coalition in partnership with Code.org. MORE: Top 25 computer science colleges, ranked by alumni earningsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The bot backlash begins

Bots are hot, hot, hot.Until they’re not, not, not.Unless you’ve been cut off from all media in a vain attempt to avoid the 2016 presidential campaign, you’re probably aware that bots are bright, new shiny things in the tech world.The idea behind “bot-mania” is that a conversation is often the best, most natural way for a program or service to communicate with a human. Instead of websites or apps, you can type or talk to the bot and get the answers or services you’re looking for.Sounds great right? And it is. Or at least it’s a great idea. Most of the time, anyway.Great bot expectations? It turns out, as so often happens in the world of technology, the hype may be getting ahead of the reality, creating expectations that cannot currently, or perhaps ever, be fully met.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 million accounts compromised via Lifeboat hack, a Minecraft Pocket Edition community

You’d think you’d hear about a hack that affects over seven million people … unless the company chooses to “cover it up.” Thankfully that is changing thanks to security researcher Troy Hunt, via Have I Been Pwned. Have I Been Pwned? Scale-wise, it's a big breach. Lifeboat is listed in Have I Been Pwned’s top 10 breaches; it currently is ranked eighth with 7,089,395 compromised accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

7 million accounts compromised via Lifeboat hack, a Minecraft Pocket Edition community

You’d think you’d hear about a hack that affects over seven million people … unless the company chooses to “cover it up.” Thankfully that is changing thanks to security researcher Troy Hunt, via Have I Been Pwned. Have I Been Pwned? Scale-wise, it's a big breach. Lifeboat is listed in Have I Been Pwned’s top 10 breaches; it currently is ranked eighth with 7,089,395 compromised accounts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Cloud to the Rescue

3Blades offers data science collaboration services. In addition to offering task based project management features, 3Blades also allows users to spawn custom workspace, model and data source instances within the context of their projects. A variety of resource configurations are … Continued

Riverbed looks to redefine networking in a cloud-first world

The technology industry has gone through several waves of innovation since the birth of computing. The industry kicked off with mainframes, which eventually gave way to client/server, which eventually evolved into branch office computing. Today, we are in the midst of the transition to a cloud-first world.Each of these waves brought with it new networking tools and technologies. The devices that we used to build local LANs were not the same ones we used to build WANs.This trend of requiring new tools is also true for the transition to the cloud. Organizations are rapidly shifting to Wi-Fi to enable mobile devices to connect to cloud services and embracing software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to give the network the necessary levels of agility required to meet the demands of a cloud-first world. Unfortunately, most of these technologies have been built independent of one another, making management of the end-to-end network in a cloud-centric business very difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Riverbed looks to redefine networking in a cloud-first world

The technology industry has gone through several waves of innovation since the birth of computing. The industry kicked off with mainframes, which eventually gave way to client/server, which eventually evolved into branch office computing. Today, we are in the midst of the transition to a cloud-first world.Each of these waves brought with it new networking tools and technologies. The devices that we used to build local LANs were not the same ones we used to build WANs.This trend of requiring new tools is also true for the transition to the cloud. Organizations are rapidly shifting to Wi-Fi to enable mobile devices to connect to cloud services and embracing software-defined WANs (SD-WAN) to give the network the necessary levels of agility required to meet the demands of a cloud-first world. Unfortunately, most of these technologies have been built independent of one another, making management of the end-to-end network in a cloud-centric business very difficult.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Networked clothing getting closer

Clothes with embroidered electronics that can act as internet-connecting antennas or as health monitors are just around the corner.High-precision embroidered circuits have been woven into fabrics with 0.1mm accuracy in experiments. That kind of precision could allow in-clothing antennas to be matched perfectly to radio waves and for sensors to be incorporated into fabrics in such a way as to feel the same on skin as the base material, scientists from Ohio State University say.The revolutionary “functional textile” medium will be known as “e-textiles,” John Volakis, director of the ElectroScience Laboratory at Ohio State University, said in a news release. His team has developed the precise technique.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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