Category: News

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Kip Tom, a seventh-generation family farmer, harvests the staples of modern agriculture: seed corn, feed corn, soybeans and data. “I’m hooked on a drug of information and productivity,” he said, sitting in an office filled with computer screens and a whiteboard covered with schematics and plans for his farm’s computer network.

Mr. Tom, 59, is as much a chief technology officer as he is a farmer. Where his great-great-grandfather hitched a mule, “we’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones,” he said. The demise of the small family farm has been a long time coming…

Grazed from ITNews.  Author: Brett Winterford.

Mi9 has dramatically improved the speed at which it can deliver new websites, apps and features and additionally halved its data centre footprint via an aggressive adoption of public cloud and a restructure of its IT operations around the concept of DevOps.

The media company, formerly known as Ninemsn, is wholly owned by Channel Nine after Microsoft divested its share in the company in late 2013.  Under the new ownership structure, the company can now open up about its plans to go ‘all-in’ on public cloud – and not, as previously anticipated, with Microsoft…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeff Burt.
 
Cisco Systems officials have spent much of the year talking about extending the cloud with "the fog."  In January, the networking giant introduced its fog computing vision, the idea of bringing cloud computing capabilities—from applications and data analytics to processing, networking and storage—to the edge of the network, closer to the rapidly growing number of end-user devices that are consuming cloud services and generating the increasingly massive amount of data.

Cisco officials also unveiled the company’s IOx platform, designed to bring distributed computing to the network edge.
Earlier this month, the vendor rolled out the next phase of IOx, which included adding to the list of Cisco products that support the platform and the list of partners involved…

Grazed from ScientificAmerican.  Author: Melissa C. Lott.

A German company wants to turn server farms into “distributed cloud heaters.” By spreading computing power across a number of buildings, the company believes that it can provide reliable computing services while increasing the energy efficiency of these notoriously wasteful centers.

Server farms currently use about 30 billion Watts of electricity each year around the globe – the equivalent of about 30 nuclear power plants worth of energy. As global demand for websites, e-mail, and Internet commerce continues to grow, this number is rising more quickly than any other part of the building sector. To make matters worse, computing hubs are notorious for their low energy efficiency, frequently wasting 80-90% of the electricity that they take from the power grids…

Grazed from TheConversation.  Author: David Glance.

The Parliament of the European Union last week voted to call on member states and the European Commission to investigate the operation of search engines in Europe to ensure “a balanced, fair and open internet search structure”.

Although the official text of the resolution doesn’t mention Google specifically by name, the message was clearly aimed at the company that claims 93% of the European search market. The Parliament called on the EC to “consider proposals aimed at unbundling search engines from other commercial services”…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

As mentioned in previous posts, certifications and accreditations are huge pluses for careers. They offer highly focused, lower-cost alternatives to formal continuing education from universities and colleges, and help resumes stand out. Plus, surveys show credentialed professionals often draw higher incomes than their non-credentialed counterparts. For managers and professionals in the fast-changing digital and tech economy, certifications may be the only way to keep skills current and relevant.

That’s why it’s interesting to see there have been efforts underway to organize and offer certifications in the emerging field of cloud computing. The programs now offered cover a range of roles — from developers to administrators to architects to security specialists…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Aurthur Cole.

I’ve pointed out many times over the years that everyone has their own perception of green. To a coal plant operator, a 20 percent reduction in emissions is cause for celebration, while the environmentalist still frets over the 80 percent still coming out of the stack.

So it is understandable that the data center industry – arguably the top energy consumer on the planet – is both the hero and the villain when it comes to greening up the world’s digital infrastructure. And in time-honored tradition, the biggest targets are always first on the hit list, which in this case would be the hyperscale providers like Google, Facebook and Amazon…

Grazed from TheWhir.  Author: David Hamilton.

I was sent a few infographics over the past few days regarding Amazon Web Services that provide some insight into how organizations are using AWS, as well as how it compares with other IT infrastructure options.  The first was from workload management provider 2nd Watch, which provides a look at what its customers typically used for their cloud services based on anonymized data from its thousands of customers over the four months from July to October.

Organizations using EC2 typically used Small instances (38 percent), followed by Medium (19 percent) and XLarge (15 percent). The very large (2XLarge, 4XLarge and 8XLarge) and very small (Micro) made up only 27 percent collectively…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Dean Takahashi.

Otoy makes tools that artists can use to create stunning 3D art that looks as real as anything captured on film. The company recently launched its X.IO App Streaming service so that developers can create cloud graphic services such as next-generation cloud games, streaming virtual reality media, and workstation applications that can run on low-end devices.

The service is the latest cloud-based innovation from Los Angeles-based Otoy, which has also created cloud-based tools for filmmakers via OctaneRender and for game makers with its Brigade tools. Those tools enable artists to create photorealistic images for games or movies using cloud-based computing resources, said Jules Urbach, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Otoy, in an interview with GamesBeat…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

Docker, the Linux container for run-anywhere apps, has a major vulnerability in all but the latest version of its software which can enable malicious code to extract hosted files.

The vuln, described as ‘critical’ in severity, was first spotted by Red Hat’s security researcher Florian Weimer and independent researcher Taunis Tiigi, with Docker crediting them in a security advisory…