New products of the week 06.01.2015

New products of the weekOur roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow.Arista NavigatorKey features: software tool designed for supporting Arista network infrastructures. The Arista Navigator reduces troubleshooting analysis time by visually providing intelligent access to Arista information. More info. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 to ship on July 29 for PCs and tablets

Microsoft will start shipping Windows 10 on July 29 for PCs and tablets. The upgrade includes the Cortana digital assistant, a whole host of new apps and the return of the start menu.After the failure of Windows 8, Microsoft has a lot to prove with the latest version of its operating system. The launch date puts pressure on Microsoft’s developers to finalize the feature-set and the look of the operating system. On Friday, the company released the latest version, dubbed Build 10130, which has new icons, Cortana improvements and some changes to the Start menu.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VMware’s vSphere 6.0: Faster, smarter, more resilient

VMware's vSphere 6 pays more attention to high availability and large deployment than prior editions—with a kick to the throttle in terms of overall speed of scale, not just size of scale. This comes with a mixture of incremental upgrades, and a bit of administrative thoughtfulness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

VMware 6.0: Faster, smarter, more resilient

VMware 6 pays more attention to high availability and large deployment than prior editions—with a kick to the throttle in terms of overall speed of scale, not just size of scale. This comes with a mixture of incremental upgrades, and a bit of administrative thoughtfulness.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

First Look: Amazon Echo: Novelty item or ready-for-prime-time part of your digital life?

Our Amazon Echo, a voice-controlled appliance—for want of a better word—arrived on May 17 and we’ve been using it all week. As Prime members, we paid $100 for ours, but the list price is $200. While some parts are beautifully done, the information services at the back end have a long way to go before the Echo is more than a novelty.The Echo is a heavy cylinder, about nine inches tall and three inches in diameter. Colored black, it sits inconspicuously anywhere you can get it AC power and a Wi-Fi connection. (Wired Ethernet is not included) Most of the Echo is made up of speakers, which gives you an idea of what the Echo is best at: playing music.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

ARM hopes to extend battery life of IOT devices with new chip design

ARM is trying to resolve the thorny problem of battery life in Internet of Things devices with a new chip design that will significantly reduce the power consumed by processors, sensors and wireless chips.The company has overhauled the way it designs low-power Cortex-M chips that go into IoT devices such as health monitors, smart home devices and sensors. The restructured design could almost double battery life, ARM executives said at Computex in Taipei on Monday.For example, the battery life of a connected hearing aid could more than double with chips based on the new design, said Jeff Chu, director of marketing at ARM.Chu provided another example of a smart lightbulb lasting a lot longer on a battery charge with new chips based on the design. The smart bulb could have solar cells to refresh the battery, and the chip’s lower power consumption could help the battery last for years.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ulbricht’s judge punished him for political dissent; you should find this outrageous

Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Maybe this is a fair sentence for selling $200 million in illegal drugs. Or, since all the lawyers I talk to think it's excessive (worse than what even the prosecutors asked for), maybe it's within the normal range of excess in the War on Drugs. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't judge this.

But, I'm interested in the comments the judge made justifying her hard sentence. According to Andy Greenberg at WIRED, the judge said:
“The stated purpose [of the Silk Road] was to be beyond the law. In the world you created over time, democracy didn’t exist. ... Silk Road’s birth and presence asserted that its…creator was better than the laws of this country. This is deeply troubling, terribly misguided, and very dangerous.”
This is silly on the face of it. The stated purpose of all crime is to "be beyond the law". I mean, when I go above the speed limit in my BMW, my stated purpose is to go beyond the legal limit. I'm not sure I understand the logic here.

I'm being disingenuous, of course, because I do understand. What the Continue reading

Case Study: Scale-Out Cloud Infrastructure

I helped several customers design scale-out private or public cloud infrastructure. In every case, I tried to start with a reasonably small pod (based on what they’d consider acceptable loss unit – another great term I inherited from Chris Young), connected them to a shared L3 backbone (either within a data center or across multiple data centers), and then tried to address the inevitable desire for stretched layer-2 connectivity.

You’ll find a summary of these designs in my next ExpressExpress case study: Scale-Out Private Cloud Infrastructure, and if you need more details, I’m usually available for online consulting.

More details…

Apple vulnerability could allow firmware modifications, researcher says

A zero-day software vulnerability in the firmware of older Apple computers could be used to slip hard-to-remove malware onto a computer, according to a security researcher.Pedro Vilaca, who studies Mac security, wrote on his blog that the flaw he found builds on previous ones but this one could be far more dangerous. Apple officials could not be immediately reached for comment.Vilaca found it was possible to tamper with an Apple computer’s UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface). UEFI is firmware designed to improve upon BIOS, which is low-level code that bridges a computer’s hardware and operating system at startup.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud gaming at 4K still years away, Nvidia CEO says

Don’t expect online games to stream to your TV or PC at 4K resolution anytime soon.While it is possible to stream 4K movies from online services like Netflix to PCs, TVs and set-top boxes, streaming games from the cloud requires many infrastructure changes, said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a media briefing at Computex.Nvidia can currently stream 1080p games at 60 frames per second from its Grid online gaming service, but the technology needs to be developed for 4K streaming and a lot of fine-tuning is needed at the server level, Huang said.“It’s going to be a while,” Huang said.Many 4K TVs and monitors are already available, and display images at the 3840 x 2160-pixel resolution. Games typically require two-way communications, and servers process bits related to games differently than video streams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Android developer advocate: everyone’s doing networking wrong

Twitter Google developer advocate Colt McAnlis: “Bad networking costs your customers money.”  Google developer advocate Colt McAnlis said that Android apps, almost across the board, are not architected correctly for the best networking performance, during a talk he gave Friday at Google’s I/O developer conference in San Francisco.“Networking performance is one of the most important things that every one of your apps does wrong,” he told the crowd.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senate delays vote on NSA phone records dragnet

A controversial program allowing the U.S. National Security Agency to collect millions of domestic telephone records expired Sunday night after the Senate failed to vote on a bill to extend the authority for the surveillance.The Senate, meeting on Sunday as provisions of the counterterrorism Patriot Act were hours from expiring, voted on a so-called cloture to limit debate and move toward a vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would rein in the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records while allowing the agency to collect records in a more targeted manner.The 77-17 vote for cloture on the USA Freedom Act sets up a final vote on the bill, but the Senate isn’t likely to take action before Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Senate delays vote on NSA phone records dragnet

A controversial program allowing the U.S. National Security Agency to collect millions of domestic telephone records expired Sunday night after the Senate failed to vote on a bill to extend the authority for the surveillance.The Senate, meeting on Sunday as provisions of the counterterrorism Patriot Act were hours from expiring, voted on a so-called cloture to limit debate and move toward a vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would rein in the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records while allowing the agency to collect records in a more targeted manner.The 77-17 vote for cloture on the USA Freedom Act sets up a final vote on the bill, but the Senate isn’t likely to take action before Tuesday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 rumor rollup: Getting chippy, Force Touch all around

You know it’s a slow week for iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 rumors when most of the scuttlebutt centers around who’s going to be making the next great Apple smartphone’s processors.But that’s what we’ve largely been reduced to, in nanometer detail, this past week.Apple in recent years has used rival Samsung as well as Taiwan’s TSMC as chip suppliers, with speculation about the future of Samsung’s contributions to the iPhone and iPad fluctuating in sync with just how nasty or nice Apple and the Korean company are being to each other at the time.GforGames, which has been increasingly making a name for itself as a source of early news on mobile devices, reported this week on the battle for the next iPhone processor – the A9 – and the one after that, presumably the A10. The thinking goes that the iPhone 6S/6S Plus would get the A9 later this year and the iPhone 7 next year would be powered by the A10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia seeks to sharpen gaming on laptops with G-Sync

Nvidia is bringing its G-Sync desktop display technology to laptops, which should lead to dramatic improvements in gaming for portable PCs.Nvidia’s G-Sync technology synchronizes monitors and display panels to the refresh rate of games, which reduces stutter and lag time. With G-Sync, GPUs are connected directly to displays, so images of a game appear almost instantly on a monitor as they are drawn up on a computer.As a result, games can run at more frames per second, improving the overall experience. The instantaneous refresh of screens also resolves the age-old problem of conventional monitors and displays being a bottleneck in the gaming experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Compose and Docker Machine, Swarm, Compose Interworking

This is a continuation of my previous 2 blogs on Docker machine, Swarm. In this blog, I will cover Docker Compose and how Docker Machine, Swarm and Compose can work with each other. The interworking part is actively being developed by Docker team and is still at the preliminary stages. Docker Compose: Docker Compose comes from … Continue reading Docker Compose and Docker Machine, Swarm, Compose Interworking →

Docker Swarm

This is a continuation of my previous blog on Docker machine. In this blog, I will cover Docker Swarm. Swarm manages a set of Docker nodes as a single cluster. This has the following advantages: Rather than managing individual Docker nodes, the cluster can be managed as a single entity. Swarm has an in-built scheduler … Continue reading Docker Swarm →

Connecting VMs between Virtualbox and VMWare Player

I had written blogs earlier on using Virtualbox and VMWare Player. I recently had a need to connect VMs running on Virtualbox and VMWare player. This is for my Windows laptop. I found the procedure mentioned in this link to be very useful. There are 2 options. Use bridged mechanism. Create a networking interface with … Continue reading Connecting VMs between Virtualbox and VMWare Player →
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