Programmable networks could mean less downtime.

HP is following other big systems makers into the world of software defined networking with a line of 16 OpenFlow-enabled switches. That’s a pretty serious commitment to OpenFlow, a protocol that helps take the intelligence associated with routing packets off of the high-priced switching gear and puts it on commodity servers.

HP not only introduced OpenFlow enabled switches, but said that customers with existing HP switches can download software that will add OpenFlow capabilities to their current gear. This looks like a far bigger committment than IBM’s and NEC’s effort to build out a hardware and services package around OpenFlow and software defined networking from earlier this month, and is a continuation of the trend toward OpenFlow making it into production environments this year.

OpenFlow and software defined networking has been a topic for academics, webscale vendors and carriers, as they seek to do to routers and switches what virtualization did for servers — make them more agile and scalable. OpenFlow is just one tool to build SDNs while Juniper, Cisco and other vendors also offer tools for network virtualization. Of course, most vendors say they will support the OpenFlow protocol as well, including Cisco, the vendor that stands to be hurt the most if OpenFlow ushers in an age of folks buying cheap switches and shifting the networking intelligence to commodity servers.

As we add more devices to the network they have to scale out better, and as IT relies more on on-demand compute and storage, the networking has to become as flexible as the virtualized servers that spin up and down. The network becomes a bottleneck if every time you want to add capacity to your cloud or associate new networking policies with a series of virtual machines, someone has to manually unplug boxes or install new load balancing or firewall gear. Virtualization and software defined networks are seen as the solution.

HP said that so far it has more than 10 million OpenFlow-capable switch ports deployed, which is tiny number compared to the overall switch market. However, it’s not alone in pushing OpenFlow, and it has made quite a commitment with a full upgrade of its existing switches and 16 new ones on offer.

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Underlying all the useful and inspiring applications, like Hadoop, that have emerged out of the Big Data ecosystem, there’s a fundamental assumption: The data that companies want will be able to be accessed when companies want and need it. That functionality requires the ability to transfer files at the speeds that people expect it, and is one of the constraints of the big data world, explained Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Aspera.

Aspera has built a proprietary high-speed file-transport technology, fasp, that helps data move across networks with issues like over-burdened WANs. Aspera is primarily the province of large companies dealing with big data, from digital media companies sending content among supply chain partners to life sciences researchers sending genome-sequencing data among institutes to government intelligence customers sending video files between agencies.

Munson said current Internet infrastructure lacks three qualities:

1. availability
2. geographic independence
3. security

While all these issues need to be addressed in the fundamental architecture itself, the constraint has created an opportunity for Aspera’s transfer product. The reliability of Internet services is going up, which creates an expectation that this data will be available quickly, said Ammar Hanafi, general partner with Alloy Ventures.

While consumer web services can easily meet customer expectation, Aspera’s customers are a different story. “Our customers are moving many gigabytes and larger [quantities] of data that has to be chunked up and then distributed,” said Munson. But even if Aspera’s file transfer tech can make sure the delivery is as fast as the consumer web, the company has learned it can provide something else: predictability. “After solving the bottleneck, then you can offer customers predictability,” that manage their expectations, Munson said.

At the end of the day, its a physics problem, both Munson and Hanafi said. TCP, the transmission protocol used by IP networks, just doesn’t perform all that well for moving big data long distances. That’s both a big opportunity for startups like Aspera and big data infrastructure companies.

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If you’re the sort of guy who enjoys a great skiing holiday then you’ll admire the import of a good wipers. Winter safety is such an necessary topic that it’s crucial you have a ok grasp of the basics before going out on the open road. This advice may save your life one day. Making sure your winter truck is suitably equipped is akin to leaving the house wearing the correct kind of gear. You probably wouldn’t leave your home during a snow storm wearing just your dressing gown; well the same principle applies here.

Often times, all the more in the United Kingdom where individuals aren’t quite as au fait with the winter driving styles as countries with perennial snow and ice, they go out and buy snow chains. Most of the time these appliances are left cast down in the garage just waiting to be fitted by the lazy owner in fact some estimates by industry experts say that at least sixty five percent of snow chains are not even employed. The rational behind this assumption is that if the weather states are so bad as to require snow chains the normal United Kingdom driver will just ride it out at home. Crazy but true. One easy thing you can do however is too consider your options of wipers this winter. Another weird fact is that people very abnormally consider buying better winter tyres, even though that is one of the best ways to combat snow and ice. They come under numerous names of them being snow and mud tyres and in contrast with the hardcore variety come without the spikes making them completely legal for road use in the United Kingdom. These are designed a fortiori to increase the quantity of force or grip imparted from the road to the tyre and even have gates set in the rubber to help bottleneck away water and prevent aqua planning. Another thing you can consider this winter is buying a pair of silicone wiper blade; these have a variety of unique characteristic which make them ideal for winter driving, more on this later. In summation winter tyres are significantly more effective than snow chains, what’s more is that they will save you money in the long run by conserving your summer tyre set from redundant damage.

What’s more is that they won’t ablate up the roads like snow chains so its win win all around. The simplest thing you can do is buy replacement wiper blades for your car this winter, the most effective ones are made from a material called silicone and can be bought online from reputable dealers. Silicone wiper blade have a way of resisting changes in temperature without becoming stiff or atrophied in the cold or pliable and sticky in the heat. They will not stick to your wind screen in the winter and have a slippery quality to them which simplifies the wipers slide over the wind screen. These sorts of wipers actually represent superior value to the normal rubber ones as there life expectancy is considerably higher. So when you buy wiper blade this winter make sure they are silicone and not some other substitute.

In a statement to the press today following the announcement of the newest MacBook Pros, which sport hybrid graphics and increased battery life, an Apple representative had this to say:

We are proud to continue a decades-long commitment to not providing a compelling platform for gaming. We chose the NVIDIA GT 330M 256MB after some consideration: how can we, in days of inexpensive and powerful graphics technology, still provide a sub-par environment for 3D games?

With Valve’s Steam platform coming to OS X, this was an important question, and although the GT 330M is a current-generation card, we were able to get the 256MB version, which should make high-resolution textures and long draw distances a mere fantasy for Mac-curious games. And with increasing multi-core support by many games and high-performance applications, we felt that a two-core CPU would be the best way to limit users’ productivity. And of course the low-capacity hard drives are a minus too, preventing the kind of media and game accumulation popular among tech-savvy consumers.

The RAM we chose, 1066MHz DDR3, was the slowest we could find for this chipset. It does provide somewhat of a boost over the previous systems, but we have been careful to adjust the pricing to be so high that no one in their right mind would order an extra 4GB — as if this system’s bottleneck is memory anyway!

We are looking forward to not improving the performance of our products or making them affordable alternatives to Windows gaming machines, ever. We hope gamers of the world will continue to not enjoy Apple products!

Needless to say, Apple didn’t actually say any of that. I really just saw this article and thought, did anyone ever think Apple laptops, if any laptops at all, were competent gaming machines? No. I was hoping for a big boost, but my guess is that Apple is stalling out with the space and heat restrictions they’ve set for themselves with the unibody MacBook Pros. I mean, I have one and it’s great — for blogging. With Steam coming out for Mac, I was looking forward to doing a little gaming on a new machine next year… but no. Ah well.

We’ve seen a few systems (mainly laptops) come with the Intel Core i3, a sort of entry level, dual core processor. The questions on everyone’s mind is, is it a viable processor when it comes to gaming? Apparently so~!

I type this on an overclocked Intel Core i7 860 (up from 2.8GHz to 3.8GHz. I’d go higher but that might require liquid cooling, which I have no idea how to do. I feel like I’d have to get a whole new wardrobe, à la Seinfeld, if I were to start liquid cooling my system.), so I have plenty of sympathy for those looking to squeeze every bit of peformance out of their Core i3. TomsHardware did the heavy lifting, determining once and for all if the Core i3, which can be found for less than $150 online, is worth your time. You know, benchmarks and the like. Benchmarks make the world go ’round.

Conclusion: yes, it’s a good processor. It’s obviously not an Extreme Edition processor or anything (which are silly to begin with), but gamers on a budget shouldn’t be too concerned that the Core i3 will “bottleneck” their performance. It’s an easily overclockable CPU—Toms got it up to 4.3GHz with minimal effort—and it absolutely won’t hold back today’s modern video cards, like the ATI Radeon 5850 and the Nvidia GTX 470. (I’d say GTX 480, but the GTX 470 is Nvidia’s equivalent of the ATI Radeon 5850, one step down from the top-of-the-line, non dual-GPU video card.)

Just don’t try to play Metro 2033 at the very highest settings. That game’s the Crysis of 2010.

Another great DIY project: making your own bottle slide out of an old wine bottle. Bottle slides, if you weren’t aware, are those great things bluesmen use to get the high lonesome sound out of a lap steel guitar.

There are obvious ways to make these things including a glass cutter or a cutting disc, but here’s the method Rober Johnson used at the crossroads.

This is just one of many ways to make a slide, another great one is the “Burning Twine” method. Legend says this is how a lot of the old bluesmen made their slides. Follow step one above “drink the contents” then find some old hemp twine, soak it in kerosene, wrap it around the bottleneck and light it on fire. Then after it goes out, plunge it into a bucket of ice water, and, it the theory is correct, it will break off cleanly and presto, you have a great authentic bottleneck slide.

SlidePlayer has more info for your reading pleasure.
via Craft