Apple Watch: Function Over Form Otherwise It's Just a Fad
So yet another technology company wants to put some jewelry on my wrist. Good luck. You know it’s not that I don’t want the Apple Watch to succeed. It’s just that I’ve been down this path already.
This past weekend I was reading a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Thomas Lee, “Why we need Apple to fail.” While I’m not really buying Mr. Lee’s line of thinking - my ego is not going to be bruised one way or the other should Apple fail or succeed with this product - it did start me thinking.
My father was an employee at Hewlett Packard back in the good old days. One of the latest and greatest products of those days was the desktop calculator. It was a time when each successive year found significantly more computational power in much smaller footprints. Eventually someone said, “Hey, we could make a calculator as small as a watch now.” So they did.
I don’t know how many watches HP produced over the lifetime of the product Continue reading
Cup of Joe with Jon and James
Two of Ansible’s very own Solutions architects, James Martin and Jonathan Davilla, will be hanging out at various coffee shops in the Washington, DC metro region in the upcoming weeks. Stop by during your lunch hour and ask them about automation, DevOps culture, Ansible, and the difference between a latte and a machiatto. Follow them on twitter for last minute updates @grepless and @defionscode.
3/13 , 11am-2pm - Swing’s Coffee 1702 G Street NW
3/27, 11am-2pm - Chinatown Coffee 475 H St. NW
When you buy a server, you don’t worry whether or not Windows will run on the server. You know it will. That’s because the server industry has a comprehensive solution to a hard problem: rapid, standard integration between the OS and underlying open hardware. They’ve made it ubiquitous and totally transparent to you.
This is not the case for embedded systems, where you have to check whether an OS works on a particular hardware platform, and oftentimes you find out that it’s not supported yet. Bare metal switches are a good example of this.
It’s time to change that. We need the same transparent model on switches that we have on servers.
To make open networking ubiquitous — and to give customers choice among a wide variety of designs, port configurations and manufacturers — the integration between the networking OS and bare metal networking hardware must be standardized, fast, and easy to validate. We need open hardware.
Today, a bare-metal networking hardware vendor supplies their hardware spec to the NOS (network OS) provider. The NOS team reads the spec, interprets it and writes drivers/scripts to manage the device components (sensors, LEDs, fans and so forth). Then Continue reading
We are excited to announce that the next AnsibleFest will be held in New York City!
We are still working out the details, but we wanted to make some tickets available at a huge discount. AnsibleFest NYC is currently being planned for early June and will be at a great venue in New York City. If you are flexible and can plan ahead as well as make changes to your schedule, these tickets are for you!
The SUPER Early Bird price is just $179 (over 30% off the standard price) and is only available until March 23, 2015.
Purchase Super Early Bird AnsibleFest tickets here
We'll be announcing the exact date and location soon!
It’s 9am and CloudFlare has already mitigated three billion malicious requests for our customers today. Six out of every one hundred requests we see is malicious, and increasingly, more of that is targeting DNS nameservers.
DNS is the phone book of the Internet and fundamental to the usability of the web, but is also a serious weak link in Internet security. One of the ways CloudFlare is trying to make DNS more secure is by implementing DNSSEC, cryptographic authentication for DNS responses. Another way is Virtual DNS, the authoritative DNS proxy service we are introducing today.
Virtual DNS provides CloudFlare’s DDoS mitigation and global distribution to DNS nameservers. DNS operators need performant, resilient infrastructure, and we are offering ours, the fastest of any providers, to any organization’s DNS servers.
Many organizations have legacy DNS infrastructure that is difficult to change. The hosting industry is a key example of this. A host may have given thousands of clients a set of nameservers but now realize that they don't have the performance or defensibility that their clients need.
Virtual DNS means that the host can get the benefits of a global, modern DNS infrastructure without having to contact every customer Continue reading
One of my readers left this comment to the Four Paths to SDN blog post:
You didn't mention Cumulus. SDN protocols become much less important when you have an open Linux switch platform. You can compile and install your own management daemon and implement whatever protocol best suits the task (and blend local and remote control).
Here’s my usual response to this line of thinking:
Read more ...