Beware the pretty ones? This isn’t high school

Beware the pretty ones? This isn't high school

by Brian Boyko, Contributor - March 24, 2015

Normally, I’d be the first to agree with an article whose premise implies that the nature of the tech industry is changing, because when is it not? However, I’m not sure I agree with the central premise of this article by Jon Evans at TechCrunch. He asserts that the tech industry was originally the personal playground of geeks and has become co-opted by the “cool kids” as the industry has matured and grown.  

It is true, as Evans contends, that many geeks are motivated more by the work than by impressing other people or making money, and that the tech industry probably offers more opportunities to people like that than some other industries.

But I think Evans’ idea of the geek vs. the pretty people is, well, short-sighted, and kind of “high schoolish.”  It is not us vs. them - there isn’t even an us or them. “People skills” and “technical skills” are not mutually exclusive.  And they never have been.

Yes, it is true that the tech industry has been the go-to “safe haven” for technically minded, socially awkward people, Continue reading

US FCC faces lawsuits against proposed net neutrality order

U.S. broadband industry trade body USTelecom and Internet provider Alamo Broadband filed Monday lawsuits against a controversial U.S. Federal Communications Commission proposal to reclassify broadband providers, which could be the harbinger of similar lawsuits from Internet companies.The FCC voted by 3-2 in February to approve new net neutrality rules that would help ensure the uninhibited flow of Internet traffic. It aims to reclassify broadband as a regulated public utility, thus prohibiting providers from selectively blocking or throttling or offering paid prioritization of traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google catches bad digital certificates from Egyptian company

Google said Monday an Egyptian company issued digital certificates that could have been used to intercept data traffic to its services, which did not appear to have been abused.The incident is the latest example of longstanding problems around the issuance of digital certificates, which are used to encrypt data and verify the legitimacy of websites.Google detected on March 20 that unauthorized digital certificates had been issued for several of its domains by MCS Holdings, a Cairo-based networking and security company, wrote Adam Langley, a Google security engineer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitter tests videos that play automatically

Twitter has started to let videos play automatically in some people’s feeds, in a test that could allow it to make more money from video advertising.The videos will play automatically for a small percentage of people who use Twitter’s iOS app in the U.S. “We’re running a small test on a few variations on the video playback experience,” a Twitter spokesman said.The test, first reported by Advertising Age, applies both to videos uploaded by users and to those posted by advertisers, but it doesn’t apply to looped videos from Twitter’s Vine service.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Imagination floats sub-$100 MIPS tablet running Firefox OS

With Android and iOS dominating the tablet market, Mozilla’s Firefox OS hasn’t had much of a look in. It’s now getting a bit of help from ARM rival Imagination Technologies, which has ported a version of Firefox to a prototype tablet based on its MIPS chip architecture.The tablet is a reference design built by China’s Ingenic and it’s designed to be priced under $100. It can run either Android 4.4, known as KitKat, or an experimental version of the Firefox OS, Imagination said in a blog post.It’s designed to help Imagination and Mozilla target the market for very low cost tablets sold in emerging markets like Brazil and India.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twitch hit by possible data breach, resets user passwords

Account information for users of Twitch, the popular live-streaming service for gamers, may have been accessed through unauthorized means, the service warned on Monday.Twitch, which is owned by Amazon.com, has reset users’ passwords and stream keys and disconnected accounts from Twitter and YouTube. Users will need to set up a new password the next time they log in, it said.In a brief blog post, Twitch didn’t say how many accounts were affected, nor did it say exactly what data was accessed, referring only to “user account information.” A spokesman for the service declined to comment further.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Seth Rogen will play Steve Wozniak in the next Steve Jobs biopic

Freaks and Geeks alum Seth Rogen is set to play the Mac community’s favorite ubergeek Steve Wozniak in the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic (no, not that one, the other one), alongside Christian Bale as Steve Jobs. Hopefully it won’t be Superbad. (Sorry.) The news comes from Variety, which also reported that “Jessica Chastain is being eyed for an unspecified role.” Perhaps that’ll be a composite character of every woman in Jobs’s orbit—after all, last year’s Jobs (the one starring Ashton Kutcher) was seriously bereft of women actors who weren’t playing Steve’s mother, wife, or girlfriend.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How to create a GitHub pull request (PR)

Being a network engineer, Git is not something that I used to use very frequently before I started messing around with Kubernetes.  It can be a frustrating tool to work with if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.  And while it tries to help you from cutting yourself, it’s pretty easy to lose code you’ve worked on if you aren’t careful.  On the flip side, once you learn the basics it’s a very awesome tool for all kinds of revision tracking.

While playing around with the newest Kubernetes binaries I noticed a issue with the ‘fluentd-elasticsearch’ add-on in my lab.  After some debugging, I think I found the issue so I’d like to suggest a change to the code to fix it.  This is what’s called a ‘pull request’ or often just a ‘PR’.  A PR means you are submitting a request to ‘pull’ new code into the active repository.  Once your PR is submitted, people have a chance to review and comment on your suggested changes and if everything looks good, it will get pulled into the repository.  So I thought it would be good to document this PR so Continue reading

OpenNetworking.tv interview


The OpenNetworking.tv interview includes a wide ranging discussion of current trends in the software defined networking (SDN), including: merchant silicon, analytics, probes, scaleability, Open vSwitch, network virtualization, VxLAN, network function virtualization (NFV),  Open Compute Project, white box / bare metal switches, leaf and spine topologies, large "Elephant" flow marking and steering, Cumulus Linux, Big Switch, orchestration, Puppet and Chef.

The interview and full transcript are available on SDxCentral: sFlow Creator Peter Phaal On Taming The Wilds Of SDN & Virtual Networking

Related articles on this blog include:

Facebook Messenger as a platform? It’s a gamble

Facebook’s Messenger app has traditionally been used for keeping in touch with friends. Now people can also use it to send each other money. In the future, it could become a platform which other apps could use, if recent rumors prove true.This Wednesday and Thursday at its F8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook will show off new tools to help third party developers build apps, deploy them on Facebook and monetize them through Facebook advertising.Among those tools might be a new service for developers to publish content or features of their own inside Messenger, according to a TechCrunch article. Facebook did not respond to requests for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Former AMD CEO Rory Read finds a home in Dell

Former AMD CEO Rory Read has seemingly stepped down the executive ladder by taking a job at Dell to lead global commercial sales, but some analysts think the move could give him a career boost.Read will be responsible for sales planning and execution as president of worldwide commercial sales and chief operating officer of the company’s Enterprise Solutions Group. He will report to Marius Haas, who is Dell’s Chief Commercial Officer and President of the Enterprise Solutions Group.Read was AMD’s CEO from August 2011 until October last year, when he stepped down and was replaced by Lisa Su. Read took aggressive steps to turn around AMD, replacing top management, revamping the product roadmap, cutting staff, and entering new markets outside PCs like custom chips. Under his leadership, AMD delivered a few quarters of profits, but remained financially unstable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Five moves Microsoft must make to advance in mobile

At one time, people considered Microsoft a true contender in the mobile space. Just four years ago, some analysts predicted that Windows Phone would leapfrog BlackBerry and iOS to claim the number two spot behind Android. Some researchers expected Microsoft’s market share to hit 20 percent, while others even predicted the company would edge past Android. But we all know how that turned out.Now, the company must execute a comeback. Microsoft has reinvigorated interest in Windows with the upcoming Windows 10, and revealed innovative surprises like HoloLens, a nod to its vision of the future. By many accounts, today’s Microsoft feels fresher and newer than the Microsoft of old. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Holy smoke! The new MacBook Pro literally is twice as fast

When Apple launched the new MacBook Pro earlier this month, the company claimed its performance would be double that of the previous model.As it turns out, that wasn't an exaggeration.Benchmark tests with Blackmagic software on a new 13-in. MacBook Pro with Retina display revealed it can pin the needle at more than 1,400MBps for writes and more than 1,300MBps for reads. The machine that Computerworld tested had a 512GB PCIe M.2 form-factor flash module ($1,799) and an Intel dual-core i7 2.9GHz processor, 8GB of (1866MHz LPDDR3) RAM, and was running OS X 10.10.2 (Yosemite).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Samsung will add Microsoft services and let users remove bloatware

Samsung both giveth and (allows users to) taketh away.The South Korean device maker is, for the first time, giving its customers access to Microsoft services and apps in its newest smartphones and tablets. At the same time, Samsung is allowing customers to strip away apps and bloatware they don't want on the company's newest phones.Recent posts on the XDA Developers Forum indicate that many pre-installed apps on the upcoming Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones can be removed legally and easily. These apps include Gmail, Google + and YouTube; Samsung's own S Voice and S Health software; and Microsoft's OneNote, OneDrive and Skype, as reported by Forbes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Integrating our Integrations: Getting WHMCS and cPanel Talking

WHMCS + cPanel

CloudFlare provides integrations for several of the most popular hosting control panels and billing systems such as WHMCS, cPanel, and Plesk. Each of these integrations provide a simple interface for our partners’ customers to sign-up for CloudFlare and start adding domains almost immediately.

But what about partners that use more than one system? The best experience occurs when we can get our integrations talking to each other, as our recently updated WHMCS and cPanel plugins do.

Integration Basics

All of our hosting integrations speak directly to CloudFlare through our host API. With just a single click, the integration passes the necessary information for CloudFlare to create an account and provision the domain. We respond when the provisioning completes, and the integration finishes the setup by making the necessary changes locally (adding and adjusting several DNS records) to route traffic to the domain through CloudFlare.

This makes signing up through a hosting partner integration even easier than signing up directly with CloudFlare. These proven systems make DNS changes accurately in order to save a lot of headaches.

Where do I integrate CloudFlare?

Many hosting companies expose two different applications to their customers: a billing system and a hosting control panel. The Continue reading

The trajectory of Open Daylight

When the Open Daylight project started, it was clear that the intent on the part of IBM and RedHat was to replicate the success of Linux.

Linux is today a de-facto monopoly on server operating systems. It is monetized by Redhat (and in smaller part by Canonical) and it essentially allowed the traditional I.T. companies such as IBM, Oracle, HP to neutralize Sun microsystems which was in the late 90s, early naughts, the platform of choice for Web application deployment.

Whether the initial target of these companies was Sun or Microsoft, the fact is that, by coming together in support of a open source project that had previously been an hobby of university students they inaugurated the era of corporate open source.

This was followed by a set of successful startup companies that used open source as a way to both create a much deeper engagement with their customers and of marketing their products. By originating and curating an open source project, a startup can achieve a much greater reach than before. The open source product becomes a free trial license, later monetized in
production deployments that typically need support. Open source also provides a way to engage with Continue reading

Cisco, Microsoft part of optics consortium directing data center standards

A group of big name vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, Juniper and Arista Networks this week created a consortium to address switch faceplate bandwidth density and airflow constraints caused by increasing networking speeds.The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) is promoting collaboration in defining industry standards that permit relocating the optical module from the faceplate to inside the networking equipment where economic and environmental benefits can be achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco, Microsoft part of optics consortium directing data center standards

A group of big name vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, Juniper and Arista Networks this week created a consortium to address switch faceplate bandwidth density and airflow constraints caused by increasing networking speeds.The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) is promoting collaboration in defining industry standards that permit relocating the optical module from the faceplate to inside the networking equipment where economic and environmental benefits can be achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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