Microsoft outlines Internet of Things plans for Windows 10

At the Computex show in Taipei last week, Microsoft outlined its plans for the Internet of Things (IoT) and how both Windows 10 and Azure will play a part in the strategy.The IoT news was just one of many announcements made as part of a bigger keynote by Nick Parker, corporate vice president of the OEM Division at Microsoft, who was joined by Tony Prophet, corporate vice president for Windows and Search Marketing, and Roanne Sones, general manager of Windows Engineering.Prophet discussed Microsoft's goal of having 1 billion devices running Windows 10 in the next two to three years. The first partner in that ambitious project is Toshiba, which will build "next-generation Windows- and Azure-powered IoT solutions."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Five things Apple is doing to please developers

Apple had lots to offer developers at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. Headline improvements included a new version of the soon to be open sourced Swift programming language and upgraded frameworks for creating more advanced Watch apps.Developers have played a key part in making Apple the hugely successful company it is today, and with the announcements made in San Francisco on Monday the company hoped to lay the groundwork for developers to be more effective and build better apps. The company’s developer programs were merged into a single one, called the Apple Developer program, but that was just the start:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s 14 most important announcements at WWDC 2015

WWDC 2015Apple on Monday kicked of WWDC with its standard keynote address. Per usual, the event was chock full of exciting and surprising announcements that touched on all things iOS, Mac, and Apple Watch. From a brand new music service to an Apple Watch SDK, there's a whole lot of information to digest, and both developers and Apple enthusiasts alike will have a lot to look forward to in the coming months. Here are a few of the more important announcements Tim Cook and co. made yesterday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Automatic Ansible Inventory with Vagrant

Yesterday, I posted about using Vagrant to learn Ansible, in which I showed you one way to combine these two tools to make it easier to learn Ansible. This is a combination I’m currently using as I continue to explore Ansible. Today, I’m going to expand on yesterday’s post by showing you how to make Vagrant automatically build an Ansible inventory for a particular Vagrant environment.

As you may already know, the Vagrantfile that Vagrant uses to instantiate and configure the VMs in a particular Vagrant environment is just Ruby. As such, it can be extended in a lot of different ways to do a lot of different things. In my case, I’ve settled on a design pattern that involves a separate YAML file with all the VM-specific data, which is read by the Vagrantfile when the user runs vagrant up. The data in the YAML file determines how many VMs are instantiated, what box is used for each VM, and the resources that are allocated to each VM. This is a design pattern I’ve used repeatedly in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository, and it seems to work pretty well (for me, at least).

Using this arrangement, since I Continue reading

Cybercriminals increasingly target point of sales systems

The data breach landscape could look very different in the future with the increased adoption of chip-enabled payment cards in North America—but for now point-of-sale systems account for the majority of breaches there, compared to a tiny minority in other regions of the world.Hacked point-of-sale (PoS) terminals were responsible for 65 percent of the data compromises investigated by security firm Trustwave last year in North America, compared to only 10 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa and 11 percent in the Asia and Pacific region. Worldwide, the company investigated 574 breaches, half of them in the U.S.The difference between PoS breach numbers in North America and other regions is largely due to a payment card standard called EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa), which mandates the use of electronic chips in cards for antifraud protection. These are also called Chip-and-PIN or Chip-and-Signature cards and they have only recently started to be introduced in the U.S. and Canada.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There’s No Such Thing As Free Wireless

Wireless

If you’ve watched any of the recent Wireless Field Day presentations, you know that free wireless is a big hot button issue. The delegates believe that wireless is something akin to a public utility that should be available without reservation. But can it every really be free?

No Free Lunches

Let’s take a look at other “free” offerings you get in restaurants. If you eat at popular Mexican restaurants, you often get free tortilla chips and salsa, often called a “setup”. A large number of bars will have bowls of salty snacks waiting for patrons to enjoy between beers or other drinks. These appetizers are free so wireless should be free as well, right?

The funny thing about those “free” appetizers is that they aren’t really free. They serve as a means to an end. The salty snacks on the bar are there to make you thirsty and cause you to order more drinks to quench that thirst. The cost of offering those snacks is balanced by the amount of extra alcohol you consume. The “free” chips and salsa at the restaurant serve as much to control food costs as they do to whet your appetite. By offering cheap food Continue reading

Review: Dell’s slim FC830 server packs a heavyweight punch

Dell introduced the PowerEdge FX2 platform late in 2014 as its flagship entry into the converged infrastructure hardware market. With slots for up to four half-wide 1U server modules or two full-width modules, you could use the 2U FX2 enclosure to implement a heavy-duty virtualization cluster and/or software-defined storage solutions such as VMware Virtual SAN and Windows Server Storage Spaces. The PowerEdge FC830 FX server block is the latest addition to the FX2 family, packing four sockets of computing power and up to 1.5TB of memory into a full-width 1U module.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

iOS 9 FAQ: Everything you need to know about Apple’s new mobile OS

When you call “Hey Siri,” you want to know your phone is listening to you. But with the new proactive intelligence in iOS 9, Siri will start to anticipate your desires before you even have a chance to ask. That’s just one of the updates announced Monday at Apple’s Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Rather than adding a ton of new features, Apple focused on refining the experience of using your device. This time around, Siri can use your location, time, app usage and connected device data to forecast your needs. Several built-in apps get either updated substantially (Maps, Notes) or replaced entirely with more exciting alternatives (Wallet, News). And iOS 9 also brings two-apps-at-once functionalities to the iPad.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How IBM Watson apps are changing 7 industries

Watson transforms industriesSince IBM opened IBM Watson to the world last year, it has been building a developer and entrepreneur community around the development platform. The community now consists of more than 280 commercial partners, as well as tens of thousands of developers, students, entrepreneurs and other enthusiasts that are generating up to 3 billion monthly API requests on Watson.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 9

Apple shares a wealth of news on its big day, but few surprisesOnce a year, Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference, and the tech world gets a boatload of updates from the company. The ship’s not quite as leak-proof as it used to be, though, so there were few surprises in the mix. Tim Cook and company unveiled:— Apple Music, a streaming service, and an Internet radio station called Beats One;— an update to iOS 9 that features multitasking, a new, improved Siri and an actual “news” app;To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 9

Apple shares a wealth of news on its big day, but few surprisesOnce a year, Apple holds its Worldwide Developers Conference, and the tech world gets a boatload of updates from the company. The ship’s not quite as leak-proof as it used to be, though, so there were few surprises in the mix. Tim Cook and company unveiled:— Apple Music, a streaming service, and an Internet radio station called Beats One;— an update to iOS 9 that features multitasking, a new, improved Siri and an actual “news” app;To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VIRL versus Junosphere

I’ve been using Junosphere a lot recently, and it’s a great tool – quick and easy creation of topologies without the need to go to a physical lab to try things out. Takes the guesswork out of a lot of things, which is a real bonus. There are obviously a few things you can’t do in a virtual environment that would be possible in a real one (e.g. QoS, MTU greater than 2000 bytes, MS-MIC in an MX), but it caters for 80% of what you need.

I always thought that it put Juniper leagues ahead of Cisco because you can buy credits to use the system right on the front page. Cisco were late to the party with something called VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab.  They were late, but rumour had it that a lot of developers moved from Juniper to Cisco to bring VIRL about.  However Junosphere always had the edge for the networking student (as we all remain, whether we are JNCIE or not) because of its accessibility – with VIRL you had to be a Cisco customer and gain access through your account manager.  I’ll stick with GNS3 thanks!

That appears Continue reading

VIRL versus Junosphere

I’ve been using Junosphere a lot recently, and it’s a great tool – quick and easy creation of topologies without the need to go to a physical lab to try things out. Takes the guesswork out of a lot of things, which is a real bonus. There are obviously a few things you can’t do in a virtual environment that would be possible in a real one (e.g. QoS, MTU greater than 2000 bytes, MS-MIC in an MX), but it caters for 80% of what you need.

I always thought that it put Juniper leagues ahead of Cisco because you can buy credits to use the system right on the front page. Cisco were late to the party with something called VIRL – Virtual Internet Routing Lab.  They were late, but rumour had it that a lot of developers moved from Juniper to Cisco to bring VIRL about.  However Junosphere always had the edge for the networking student (as we all remain, whether we are JNCIE or not) because of its accessibility – with VIRL you had to be a Cisco customer and gain access through your account manager.  I’ll stick with GNS3 thanks!

That appears Continue reading

Aruba and HP – The Ecosystem Is King

Aruba-HP-LogoNote: This is part of a multi-post series I am writing that compares Aruba to HP and how the integration of Aruba Networks into HP might play out. You can read my intro post here.

I am a HUGE fan of vendor ecosystems. A HUGE fan. I have written about them before. The last post I wrote on them can be found here. I really do think they are the key to driving a vendor’s success. One could argue that the large vendors have it easy. They have the resources to build those ecosystems. They can spend money that the smaller vendors cannot and can essentially buy loyalty from customers and partners. Of course, at some point, those large vendors were small ones. They did something different to propel them to the large vendor status. Their competition fell by the wayside and either drifted off into obsolescence, or just outright died.

Sorry. There is no TL/DR for this post. Buckle up. It’s a long one.

So let’s get a lay of the land when it comes to ecosystems between HP and Aruba. Let me clear about one thing. This is specific to wireless. This has nothing to do with the Continue reading

US wants to collect bulk call records for six more months

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for permission to continue the bulk collection of call records for another six months, as the new USA Freedom Act allows for this transition period.The filing, made public Monday, was submitted to the court last Tuesday, the same day President Barack Obama approved as law the USA Freedom Act, which puts curbs on the bulk collection of domestic telephone records by the National Security Agency.The new legislation was passed by the Senate following the expiry at midnight of May 31 of the authorization of the bulk collection under section 215 of the Patriot Act. It leaves the phone records database in the hands of the telecommunications operators, while allowing a targeted search of the data by the National Security Agency for investigations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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