How would you change Apple’s iPhone 4S? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 01 Jan 2012 23:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CERN is pouring cold water on the rumor it’s gonna announce the discovery of the Higgs at today’s seminar in Zurich. For the uninitiated: the Higgs-Boson is the particle that is believed to give all things mass: it surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together. The scuttlebutt is that the ATLAS sensor picked up a Higgs with a mass of 125GeV (gigaelectronvolts) and rated at three-point-five-sigma — a one sigma barely warrants a mention, a five-sigma is a bona-fide scientific discovery. CERN hasn’t confirmed or denied anything, claiming it’s still got five femtobarns worth of data (roughly 5 x 70 x 10^12 of individual collisions) to examine before it can be sure, so just chuck the one bottle of champagne into the refrigerator — better to be safe, eh?

CERN: ‘Don’t believe the Higgs-Boson hype’ originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Updated: The networking industry is set for a change as the shifts caused by the needs of webscale and cloud operators as well as virtualization bring complexity and costs to moving data around a data center. The solution appears to be software-defined networks that can be programmed and virtualized. But if networks start to look like the cloud does the field need its own DevOps movement?

Earlier this week at the Open Networking Summit, the term DevOps came up often enough that I began to wonder how far people would take software-defined networks, and where the people who could understand systems level network complexity — as well as the overall application programming — would come from. The DevOps culture that emerged from the cloud computing world developed in response to the blending of a system administrator’s role with that of an application programmer. The idea that IT generalists who can understand broadly the entire IT stack are essential and that both programmers and systems administrators have a role in keeping production apps running is a new one.

So when Rob Vietzke and Matt Davy from Indiana University got onstage to discuss how they’ve created a self-provisioning ethernet network for developers to play on, I wondered where in the networking world these developers would come from. If telecommunications providers want to build network services applications, they will need a culture that encourages people to think differently — up and down the stack– about networking. They may also need a programming language.

The point is, the hype around software-defined networking and network virtualization is building, but the tools to take advantage of programmable networks aren’t quite in place. Indiana and Internet 2 are providing a platform, but do we still need a language and how will we train the people? Feel free to discuss below.

Update: Moments after I published this Kowsik Guruswamy, the co-founder and CTO of Mu Dynamics, reminded me that already vendors are trying to support this with developer-friendly tools such as Juniper’s network sandbox. It has a fancier name, but essentially this is a cloud-based network that a developer can mock up as their production network to test new applications in, so they can see how the network needs to be configured.

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Speaking to a jam-packed room of thousands, VMware CEO Paul Maritz kicked off today’s VMworld conference by declaring, once again, the advent of the cloud era. If you don’t believe him, just look at the numbers. As Maritz highlighted, there are now more virtual workloads deployed worldwide than there are physical workloads. There are 1 million VMs launched every second. There are more than 20 million VMs deployed overall.

Assuming that most of those are running atop some version of VMware’s hypervisor, there’s a lot of reason to care what Maritz has to say about the future of the cloud. His company will have a major role in defining the transition from virtualization to cloud computing.

Maritz noted that there’s a lot of hype around the cloud, even acknowledging that “We at vmworld are not immune to cloud fever,” but it’s more than just a fad, he said. Maritz thinks there are three very profound, and very real, forces driving the move to cloud computing: modernization of infrastructure; investment in new and renewed applications; and entirely new modes of end-user access.

However, there’s a big difference between what drove the world to deploying 20 million VMs and what will drive it to modernize infrastructure even further with the cloud. Consolidation largely drove the move to virtualization, but applications and mobile devices will drive the move to cloud computing.

On the application front, Maritz looks to “canonical applications.” “When canonical applications change, that’s when you see really profound change [across the computing ecosystem],” Maritz said. He pointed to bookkeeping applications as indicative of the mainframe era, and to ERP, CRM and e-commerce as the defining applications of the client-server era.

Real-time and high-scalability capabilities — both in terms of traffic and data — are driving the development of new applications. Being able to analyze data days after it’s generated, or to adapt to new traffic patterns within days, just isn’t good enough anymore. We can’t keep “putting lipstick around” current applications and expect them to meet these new demands, Maritz said.

How we write those applications also will be critical, because they’ll have to run on a variety of non-PC devices. We’re approaching the intersection of consumerization and next-generation enterprise IT, Maritz explained, which means that companies like VMware have to plan for very serious change. Running enterprise applications on consumer devices, especially of the mobile variety, is a big change.

They’ll have to embrace things such as HTML5 to enable cross-platform applications, and new programming frameworks to attract young developers that demand a simple, dynamic development experience. Companies will also have to figure out how to secure corporate data against the myriad threats that accompany employees downloading apps willy-nilly and operating often on unsecured (0r at least less-secured) networks. VMware CTO Steve Herrod actually will be highlighting VMware’s role in the mobile ecosystem at our Mobilize conference next month, and it’s safe to assume these will be among the topics he addresses.

Maritz, of course, thinks VMware has strong plays in all of these spaces — vSphere, Cloud Foundry, Horizon, the list does on — and he highlighted them. However, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham pointed out while highlighting the key VMworld trends, VMworld isn’t alone in making this realization. It has major competition, including from companies like Microsoft that know both the enterprise and the consumer spaces very well.

Every year at VMworld, Maritz highlights the movement toward cloud computing and how VMware is driving that migration. In large part, he’s right every time on the latter point. Now that almost everyone is on board with Maritz’s vision, though, I’m interested to see how long VMworld, and VMware in general, continues to drive the discussion around the future of IT.

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We reading an upcoming launch regarding Brad Callen’s niche finder bought at http://www.nichefinder.com and realized which good affiliates are vital. These affiliates can be converted into 2 categories. The 1st category, are the ones that care essentially the most about stats such as EPC.
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So which type of affiliate should you aspire to be? Normally the one with the giant list with no personal relationship, or the smaller list which has that personal connection? You be the judge. Both ways have potential to make many sales and make big money.

Whatever you choose, avoid the typical marketing “hype” and try to be honest with your listing. This will serve you better over time. People will always benefit honesty more.