OpenStack abandons AWS challenge dreams, makes eyes at telcos

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Virtualisation is the future. Not cloud. Got that?

OpenStack, once seen as the open alternative to Amazon’s AWS, is positioning itself as virtualized telecoms middleware.…

1 in 10 Broadly Shared Files in Cloud Apps Expose Sensitive and Regulated Data, Reveals New Elastica Cloud Threat Labs Report From Blue Coat

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Blue Coat Systems, Inc., a market leader in enterprise security, today released its Q4 2015 Shadow Data Report from the Elastica Cloud Threat Labs… Read more at VMblog.com.

Drone sets record for carrying the heaviest cargo ever

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A team of engineers from the University of Oslo recently set a Guinness world record by lifting a 61 kilogram load with nothing but remote-controlled drones. Or rather, one gigantic Voltron-esque multi-rotor monstrosity appropriately named the Megakopter. It’s built from eight hexacopters that have been daisy chained together, utilizes 13 rotors powered by four dozen individual motors mounted on an aluminum-plywood frame. With it, the team recently hoisted a 61-kilogram load — that’s a little over 134 pounds — and held it there for 37 seconds to earn a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The team hopes to make future iterations of the the Megacopter even stronger — potentially burly enough to carry large packages or even people (weather permitting). Looks like the Ehang 184 is going to have competition sooner than we thought.

Via: International Business Times

Source: University of Oslo (Facebook)

Hello Barbie: A Creature from the Internet of Things. Coming to Your Home?

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Barbie? Yes, but this Barbie isn’t just your ordinary (and iconic) plastic doll. Hello Barbie is a creature from the Internet of Things, a tech gadget/connected device launched by Mattel in November 2015. Basically, Hello Barbie is an Internet-connected toy that relies on consumer-grade artificial intelligence and voice recognition software to listen and talk back […]

Internet of Things could save lives during Antarctic expedition

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Can the internet of things do more than just let your phone control your home’s lighting and temperature? It’s an idea that Sigfox is putting to the test after revealing that it’s equipping an Antarctic research base with its low-power wireless network. Rather than being used to run the facilities’ creature comforts, the tech will be used to connect personal GPS trackers onto the team stationed there. It’s hoped that the system can be employed to prevent personnel getting separated from each other in the harsh blizzards encountered during expeditions. The only thing we’re wondering is how come it’s taken until 2016 before someone’s been able to get a system like this working in such a dangerous environment.

Equipping a remote area with wireless gear is hardly exciting, but Sigfox has been able to do it with just two antennas. That’s because the company’s low-power, ultra-narrow band signals that can travel up to 40 kilometers in open space. Such equipment is ideal for critical but low-data tasks in barren wastelands like the Antarctic. The system will be tested by the 2016-16 BELARE expedition, a Belgian expedition to the region, at the Princess Elisabeth research facility (pictured). The first results of the project will be published in March, and if successful, Sigfox might find its gear in demand for projects more exciting than making sure your lights work.

[Image Credit: Philippe Siuberski/AFP/Getty]

Via: Computerworld

Source: Sigfox

Amazon cloud increasingly powered by hot air

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150 megawatt wind farm comes online in Indiana

Amazon Web Services’ aspiration to power its clouds with not much more than hot air are closer to fruition, after the company flicked the switch on its first wind farm.…

Big reader? Toshiba tweaks endurance, wrings out low-write SSD

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It’s enterprise-tastic, says Tosh

Toshiba has fashioned a fifth enterprise SSD variant by cutting the entry-level PX04’s endurance in half, and fitting it for another read-intensive market niche.…

Top 25 Worst Passwords of 2015: ‘123456’ Still World’s Most Popular Password

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Congratulations, you can count, but you’re still an idiot.

HP’s 3D-scanning Sprout Pro PC is built for schools

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HP originally pitched its 3D-scanning Sprout computer to creatives and hobbyists, but doesn’t it seem like an ideal machine for curious classrooms? The company agrees, apparently. It’s introducing the Sprout Pro, a version of the unique all-in-one for businesses and schools. It’s brawnier (you get a 6th-generation Core i7 with improved graphics), but the big deal is the addition of software that makes it far more useful from groups. You can share the view from the scanner, the webcam or your screen, in case you want to show a project to the class — you can even send 2D captures through Skype for Business. There are also tools that turn the downward-facing camera into a pro-grade document scanner and magnifier.

You will pay a premium if you’re hoping to use a Sprout Pro at school or a maker space — it’ll cost you $2,199 when the PC ships in February, or $300 above the usual price. Given that this is a shared system, though, the higher price may be easier to swallow.

And don’t worry if you’re content with traditional computers. HP is trotting out Education Edition versions of the ProBook 11 G2 and Pro 310 x360 convertible, both of which have rugged designs, improved battery life (up to 18 hours on the ProBook), upgraded wireless performance and teaching-focused software. The ProBook and Pro 310 x360 variants respectively ship in February and March for $359 and $449.

Source: HP

‘Minecraft’ fan finds a way to program BASIC code in-game

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You may have seen Minecraft used to teach programming or even mods that allow some in-game programming, but writing BASIC code inside Minecraft? That’s virtually unheard of… until now. SethBling has developed a BASIC interpreter that lets you compile and run simple programs and scripts within Mojang’s world-building game. It boils down to using many, many command blocks, but it really works. You can not only print text, but have in-game robots ("turtles") perform tasks. Need to dig a long tunnel? Just start a digging script and let the bot do all the hard work.

Suffice it to say that you won’t be writing elaborate software in a game world that was never meant for it. Code is inherently slow due to Minecraft‘s 20Hz operation clock (you can never perform more than 20 commands per second), and it bogs down the more you use it. However, you won’t have to spend weeks recreating the interpreter yourself — SethBling has posted the necessary material, so it’s just a matter of installing the add-on and brushing up on your IF/THEN statements.

Via: Motherboard

Source: SethBling

Certified IT Pros Get a Free NFR Licencse Key of Veeam Availability Suite v9

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Are you a certified IT Pro? Are you interested in getting your hands on Veeam Availability Suite v9 and learning how to make use of this technology?… Read more at VMblog.com.

John Romero creates and releases a new Doom level 21 years later

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Doom
It’s been over 20 years since the release of the seminal first person shooter, Doom. Even after all of these years, dedicated fans are still engaged, with the DoomWorld modding community continuing to […]

Server retired after 18 years and ten months – beat that, readers!

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Home-brew 200Mhz Pentium FreeBSD box ran custom code that made replacement painful

The Register has learned, thanks to a post to a semi-private mailing list, of a server that has just been decommissioned after running without replacement parts since 1997.…

Airtop fanless systems are built for high-performance computing

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airtop
Fanless, air-cooled computers often sacrifice performance when they ditch the moving parts. Not Compulab’s newest offerings, though. They’re built to handle heavy workloads. Their new Airtop systems are available in a variety of […]

Raspberry Pi 2 vs Raspberry Model B+ vs Raspberry Pi Zero: Which Should I Buy?

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With so many different Raspberry Pi models to choose from, how do you pick the one that’s right for you? We compare the three most recent boards and offer some advice.

OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest January 9-15

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Success Bot Says

  • stevemar: Latest python-neutronclient use keystoneauth, yay!
  • devkulkarni: Devstack plugin for Solum finally working as expected.
  • dulek: Initial tests show that our rolling upgrades stuff is working fine – I’m able to use Mitaka’s Cinder API service with Liberty’s cinder-scheduler and c-volume services.
  • Tell us yours via IRC with a message “#success [insert success]”.

Cross-Project Specs & API Guidelines

  • Add clouds.yaml support specification [1]
  • Deprecate individual CLIs in favor of OSC [2]
  • Add description of pagination parameters [3].

Release Models To Be Frozen Around Mitaka-2

  • Deadline: Mitaka-2, January 21st
  • Example, your release model is release:independent, and you want to switch to cycle-oriented models (e.g. release:cycle-with-intermediary or release:cycle-with-milestones). [4]
  • To change your project, propose an openstack/governance change in reference/projects.yaml file [5].

Vision and Changes For OpenStack API Guides

  • New tool: fairy-slipper [6]
    • Migrate files from WADL to Swagger.
    • Serve up reference info.
  • New build jobs to build API guides from project repos to developer.openstack.org
  • It was discussed in the last cross-project meeting [7] to answer questions.
  • There are a variety of specs [8][9] to go over this work.
  • See what’s happening this month [10].

“Upstream Development” Track At the Austin OpenStack Summit

  • Call for speakers [11] at the OpenStack conference in Austin will have a new track targeted towards upstream OpenStack developers.
    • Learn about new development processes
    • Tools that the infrastructure team gives us
    • New OSLO library features (or elsewhere)
    • Best practices
  • Probably Monday before the design summit tracks start.
  • Have a topic that fits this audience? Submit it! [12]

You Almost Never Need to Change Every Repository

  • There have been a lot of patches that tweak the same thing across many, many repositories.
  • Standardizations are great, but if you’re making the same change to more than a few repositories, we should be looking at another way to have that change applied.
  • If you find yourself making the same change over and over in a lot of projects, start a conversation on the dev mailing list first.

Release Countdown For Week R-11, Jan 18-22

  • Focus:
    • Next week is the second milestone for the Mitaka cycle.
    • Major feature work should be making good process, or be re-evaluated to see it really needs to land this cycle.
  • Release Actions:
    • Liaisons should submit tag requests to the openstack/releases repository for projects following the cycle-with-milestone before the end of the day on Jan 21.
    • Release liaison responsibility update should be reviewed [13].
  • Important Dates:
    • Mitaka 2: January 19-21
    • Deadline for Mitaka 2 tag: Jan 21
    • Release models to be frozen: Jan 21

MesoGlue Is A Metallic Glue That Replaces Hot Solder

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SMDlong If you’ve ever soldered or welded, you’ll know that things get pretty hot. MesoGlue intends to fix that. It’s a room-temperature metallic glue that lets you stick parts together with reckless abandon and electrical control. The most interesting part of the entire system is that it allows us to solder parts onto boards without heat which will lead to press-fit electronics… Read More

Moovit Will Now Help You Find a Bike to Hire in More Than 110 Cities Around the World

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The new integration includes bike sharing schemes in London, Bath, Glasgow and more.

What’s next for application developer guides?

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Summary

This month, the developer.openstack.org site gets a new look and changes its source tooling. Read on for details about how these changes affect your project team.

Why are we changing the developer.openstack.org site?

You might know that the developer.openstack.org site documents over 900GET/PUT/POST/DELETE/PATCH calls for a dozen OpenStack services already on the developer.openstack.org site. As a couple of the keynote speakers in Tokyo so elegantly put it, the trustworthiness and consistency of the OpenStack APIs influenced their decision to run their business workloads in an OpenStack cloud.

Those interfaces need docs, lots of docs, and not only reference docs. While it takes a huge effort to maintain accurate references, we also need to document API usage and scenarios.

Now that we’ve written both an API Guide and a “Writing your first OpenStack application” tutorial, we want the site to be the go-to location for app devs, product developers, and anyone who needs to unlock the power of their OpenStack infrastructure.

In this release, the docs’ platform introduces tooling that lets you migrate from WADL to Swagger and integrate RST-sourced documentation with the API reference documentation. The “why” analysis is clear: we must community-source this info and make it easy to maintain and update so that users can trust it enough to bet their workloads on it.

Later on, this post answers the “how” questions.

Why all these changes at this point in the release?

Well, we haven’t had to release the API documentation like we release services documentation. We have done a lot of maintenance on the site, with bug fixing and so on. But it’s time to take the leap. Last release we made a proof-of-concept. This release we unleash a solution that helps us make incremental progress toward our goals.

How do you keep your API docs updated after January 16th?

On January 16th, we’ll migrate the Images API WADL and DocBook files to Swagger and RST files. Then we’ll test the build process and the content itself to validate the migration.

After testing, we will migrate the files for these services:

  • Identity
  • Compute
  • Images
  • Networks
  • Block Storage
  • Object Storage

Then, the remaining services can migrate their files by using the validated tooling.

If you do provide an OpenStack API service, read on.

For the nova project, place your how-to and conceptual articles in the api-guide folder in the nova repository. Other projects can mimic these patches that created an api-guide and build jobs for the Compute api-guide. You continue to update reference information in the openstack/api-site repo. However, the source files have changed.

With this release, you can embed annotations in your source code if you want to generate the reference information. Here’s an example patch from the nova project. Because we haven’t had a project do this yet completely, the build jobs still need to be written.

If your project already has WADL files, they will be migrated to Swagger files and stored in the api-site repository. The WADL files will be deleted; you can retrieve them from Git.

If your project does not have a WADL file, then you write Swagger plus RST to document your API calls, parameters, and reference information. You can generate Swagger from annotations or create Swagger from scratch that you store in the api-site repository. You should review, store, and build RST for conceptual or how-to information from within your project team’s repository.

All projects should use this set of API documentation guidelines from the OpenStack API working group any time their service has a REST API. This document tells you what and how much to write. If you follow the suggested outline, your API guide will be accurate and complete.

After the source files and build jobs exist, the docs are built to developer.openstack.org.

Where can I get help for my project’s API Guides?

These specifications describe the details: Application Developer Guides and Rework API Reference Information.

You can ask questions in #openstack-sdks or #openstack-docs on IRC. We await those magical API docs fairies who grant wishes, but in the meantime but we can point you in the right direction and give you the tools for your quest.

What if I still have questions?

Contact me, Anne Gentle, by email or IRC and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

I’m eager to enable our audience with great user-centric docs and hope that you’ll join us as we fulfill the vision.

Endless Has Built A $79 PC For The Offline World

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Endless Computer 1 There are affordable computers, there are cheap computers and then there’s the Endless Mini, which is available for as little as $79.
“Everybody in the world deserves the option to have a computer,” said Endless CEO and Chief of Product Matt Dalio.
In other words, Endless is building Linux-based computers for people who have never owned a computer, particularly those in… Read More

Decide Which Programming Language to Learn with This Interactive Quiz

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While we’ve walked you through the basics of picking a programming language that’ll suit your aspirations, sometimes an interactive quiz is more fun than reading. Best Programming Language for Me is just that.

Read more…



OpenStack Developer Mailing List Digest January 2-8

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SuccessBot Says

  • russellb: Ported OVS to Python 3.
  • notmyname: Removed the beta tag on the swift erasure code docs.
  • AJaeger: OpenStack configuration reference has been migrated from DocBook XML to RST [1].
  • notmyname: This season’s Outreachy intern had her first patch merged.
  • odyssey4me: OpenStack-Ansible 12.0.3 tagged.
  • jordanP: My 3rd party CI correctly warned me that a patch would break my driver.
  • asselin: OpenStack Third Party CI documentation published [2].

Slightly Longer Delays for Gate CI Testing

  • When: January 31, 2016
  • Why:
    • Due to the sunsetting of a public cloud [3] used by the OpenStack Infra team, we will have less resources available.
    • Jeremy Stanely says that the Infra team is working on bringing in new providers to absorb the impact.

Release Countdown For Week R-12, Jan 11-25

  • Focus:
    • Second milestone is coming up. Finish up major features or reevaluate if it really needs to land in this cycle.
  • Actions:
    • Identify work that needs to be completed before the M-2 tag.
    • Release liaisons responsibilities are being updated. Provide comments for questions or concerns [4].
  • Important Dates:
    • Mitaka 2: Jan 19-21
    • Release schedule [5].

Re-introduce Twisted to global-requirements

  • A change in global-requirements introduces mimic, an http server that can mock various APIs.
  • Mimic depends on twisted, which in the past was removed in favor of Eventlet to avoid developers having to know multiple frameworks [5].
  • Jim Rollenhagen explains Ironic’s need for Mimic:
    • To do functional tests, not unit tests which they could do with requests-mock.
    • To bring up a less expensive Ironic environment for doing these tests.
  • Jay Pipes notes:
    • This is another way to introduce a larger surface area of bugs to creep in since you have keep Mimic up-to-date with the real interfaces.
    • There’s not a clear value in the advantage  of functional tests of a client that calls a fake HTTP API versus unit tests of a client that simply uses requests-mock.

Your boss yells ‘build a secure IoT gadget’ and you don’t know where to start. Take a look at this

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Tech foundation publishes gentle guide

A 101 introduction to designing secure Internet-of-Things devices and similar systems has been published today by the MIPS-cheerleading Prpl Foundation.…

IPv6 Adoption Grows to 10 Percent as Internet Protocol Turns 20

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Casio’s first smartwatch is an even more rugged G-Shock

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Phone makers and start-ups were the first to attempt the modern smartwatch. Then, even more tech companies as well as a trickle of high-end watch makers, testing the water to see if their clientele were in the market for a wrist piece with something more modern than literal clockwork. Now, at a time where cheaper fitness wearables and the Apple Watch seem to have cornered the market, it’s Casio’s turn. The company reinvented its own basic digital watches years ago when it introduced the G-Shock, and its taking a specialized approach with the WSD-F10: a smart outdoor watch that not only does all things Android Wear, but also has a "timepiece" (or dumbwatch) mode that’ll last around a month on a single charge.

When it came to designing a smart watch, Casio apparently looked to the weaknesses inherent in current wearables. Yes, of course, battery life, but also survivability, especially when it came to using them outdoors. Along those lines, Casio’s smartwatch certainly isn’t a subtle wearable. Besides the orange color (it’ll come in green, black and red options too), meaty is a better way of describing the circular frame. When worn alongside an Apple Watch, it makes latter look slender. The weight difference between the two isn’t so bad, but if you have slender arms, Casio’s first smartwatch might not be for you — but it is a design decision often found on specialized wearables. Just ask Garmin. It’s also defiantly chunkier than my G-Shock.

casio smartwatch
Perhaps the most notable feature stems from that quest for a more acceptable battery life. You can actually switch off all the smart features of the WSD-F10, and the watch will live on like any simple digital watch for around a month on a single charge. It has both a monochrome and color LCD panels built-in, making the watch far more power efficient — if you’re willing to sacrifice the smart parts.

casio smartwatch

When it comes to the great outdoors, the watch has water resistance up to 50 meters, a pressure sensor, compass and accelerometer. To make access to your outdoor adventures easier, the upper right button acts as a dedicated "tool" shortcut for you directions, as well as tide and activity graphs.

Once the watch is paired with your smartphone, it’ll be able to tap into third-party apps that offer fishing assistance and hiking-specialized maps and functions. Then again, wasn’t avoiding any possible phone damage a major reason for Casio’s rugged watch? We asked if it was working on a solo-capable, SIM-embedded model and… there are no plans. The smartwatch is set to launch in Japan and the US later this year, around late March, early April. Preliminary US pricing is around $500.