It's always enlightening to learn what inventor, scientist and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Dr Stephen Wolfram is sharing with the world. The latest dispatch from his company, Wolfram Research, is the Wolfram Data Drop, a solution for handling data from the emergent Internet of Things. Dr Wolfram notes the power of the Wolfram Language for interpreting, visualizing, analyzing, querying and otherwise doing interesting things with this data. The question however, notes Dr Wolfram, is this: how should the data from all those connected devices and everything else actually get to where good things can be done with it? The Wolfram Data Drop is Wolfram Research's next-step contribution toward making the world computable. The Wolfram Data Drop not only gathers and stores information from connected devices and the Internet of Things, but once data is in, it also becomes both universally interpretable and universally accessible to the Wolfram Language and any system that uses it. Dr Wolfram adds that the Wolfram Data Drop will be of great value to organizations or individuals that create connected devices, enabling them to store their data in the Wolfram Cloud, or a private version of it, where it will be readily accessible to analyze, visualize, query or deploy.
Mobile developer Jolla shows how our tribe shines brightest when options are few. Chafing at the vanilla-chocolate, iOS-Android dominance, the team at Jolla has released the secure—and first “truly open”—mobile phone platform called Sailfish Secure. Based on Sailfish OS and utilizing SSH Communications Security's SSH communication encryption and key management platform, Sailfish Secure is a secure, adaptable mobile phone solution for government officials, corporations and consumers. With Sailfish Secure, Jolla and partner SSH seek to satiate the increased demand for privacy in mobile communications as well heed the call for a secure, transparent and open mobile solution alternative that is not controlled by any country or major industry player. Sailfish Secure also enables significant adaptation to local needs and hardware configurations. Jolla and SSH welcome other industry players to join the initiative.
To illustrate the power of its new Ryft ONE analytics platform, Ryft Systems claims that a single device, using less power than a hair dryer, can store and analyze the equivalent of the contents of Wikipedia in 4.5 seconds. Ryft ONE, says its producer, is the first commercially available 1U analytics platform capable of an unprecedented 10+ GB/second performance without any data indexing, preprocessing, tuning or partitioning. The company further shared that the Ryft ONE, powered by a new massively parallel, hardware-accelerated architecture, analyzes historical and streaming data together at speeds 200X faster than conventional hardware, enabling data scientists and business analysts to slash operational costs by 70%. The new architecture, called Ryft Analytics Cortex, is a platform built for real-time analysis, optimizing compute, storage and I/O in tandem. The Ryft ONE, adds Ryft, “is open and compact like a Linux server but executes like a high-performance computer”.
EarthLCD's new Pi-Raq, an open-source Raspberry-Pi-based 1U rackmount Internet appliance, was inspired by the potential of an earlier company innovation, the “world's first” 10" x 1" (25.4cm x 2.5cm) TFT LCD. That display is integrated directly into the Pi-Raq. This was possible thanks to EarthLCD completing a comprehensive open-source reference design for the new product, which includes packaging, software and firmware to build a 1U rackmount appliance. EarthLCD notes the importance of Raspberry Pi for allowing it to get the TFT LCD into customers' hands quickly and allowing them to design high-value Internet appliances rapidly, merely by adding their software- and application-specific I/O via USB or I2C interfaces. Running Debian Linux opens up the Pi-Raq standard network analyzer software, allowing music servers and numerous open-source applications to be ported to the Pi-Raq.
Red Hat's newly announced Certified Container Ecosystem Program is really a three-“product” solution set for delivering secure, reliable and verified Docker-based containers to the enterprise world. The first element of the program for ISV partners consists of access to the Red Hat Container Development Kit, a collection of tools and resources to create enterprise-ready containers. The second element is the toolset for delivering the Red Hat Container Certification, which verifies that a container's contents are secure, unmodified, free of vulnerabilities and supported on Red Hat infrastructure. And finally, the third element is the distribution mechanism, the fully supported Red Hat Container Registry. This inaugural registry eventually will be part of a network of federated, standardized container registries hosted by partners and ISVs. The new product is based on Red Hat's outlook of Linux containers as the next wave of enterprise application architecture. Containers facilitate the creation of an efficient, composable fabric of lightweight “microservices” that can be woven into more complex applications, yet still are flexible enough to adapt to changing IT needs.
Formerly known as SUSE Cloud, the new SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 is available—the latest edition of the company's OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private clouds. SUSE OpenStack Cloud 5 is based on the newest OpenStack Juno release and provides increased networking flexibility and improved operational efficiency to simplify private cloud infrastructure management. Version 5 also provides “as-a-service” capabilities to enable development and big-data analytic teams to deliver business solutions that integrate with SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 data-center solutions rapidly. Additional version 5 benefits include greater networking functionality and support for third-party OpenStack networking plugins, seamless incorporation of existing servers running outside the private cloud and centralized log collection and search.
NVIDIA is establishing itself further outside the confines of the PC with the newest member of the SHIELD family of gaming devices. NVIDIA SHIELD is NVIDIA's first living-room entertainment device, and the company calls it “the world's first Android TV console to deliver music, apps, console-quality games and video”. SHIELD is built on Android TV and powered by NVIDIA's powerful Tegra X1 processor. The artistically designed SHIELD console streams high-quality 4K video content and enables native and streaming gameplay at 1080p resolution/60fps. The console provides complete access to Android TV's rich app and games ecosystem, with more than 50 games optimized for the platform. Other games, such as Crysis 3, Doom 3: BFG Edition and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!, are under development. SHIELD also is the gateway to the NVIDIA GRID game-streaming service, which the company sells as “the Netflix for Games”. SHIELD comes pre-packaged with NVIDIA's console-grade controller, and optional accessories include a remote control, additional controllers and a vertical stand.
Since Linus Torvalds invented Git in 2005, it rapidly has become the standard distributed version control system in existence. If you need or want to stop stumbling around in Git and truly understand what you're doing, a professionally developed training resource is available. Jeffrey Haemer's Git Under the Hood contains more than six hours of video instruction covering four in-depth lessons to help developers gain a deeper understanding of Git so that they can use it more effectively. Intermediate to advanced developers comfortable using a terminal window/command line will learn the varied pieces of Git's repository, basic Git commands and how to use them, design parallels between Git and Linux, how to experiment when Git does something unexpected and how to extend Git with new commands.