A couple of years ago (almost to the day) Forbes covered the suggestion that PayPal was going to drop VMware from its infrastructure in favor of OpenStack. The article actually impacted upon VMware’s share price for a time and it only surfaced later that PayPal was only making an initial foray into OpenStack. VMware breathed a sigh of relief. VMware will be catching its breath again today on the news that PayPal has converted almost 100 percent of the traffic of its web/API and mid-tier services to run on an internal private cloud that has been built on OpenStack. A massive story for OpenStack, but some very bad press for VMware. In a blog post about the news, PayPal’s vice president of global platforms and infrastructure, Sri Shivananda, pointed out the massive scale at which PayPal works – last year the company served 162 million customers, across 203 markets and in 26 different currencies, who transacted $228 billion in total payment volume. To allow that growth, PayPal has been reinventing all the parts of its business, including its core infrastructure – OpenStack gives them the agility, availability and manageability that they need. By extension, he’s saying that VMware doesn’t. Ouch. Part of the project has been rearchitecting PayPal’s platforms from a traditional manual-build-on-demand model to a multi-tenant private cloud infrastructure with end-to-end automation. The company has been dabbling with OpenStack for years; it first rolled out some OpenStack based infrastructure back in December, 2011. Since then, PayPal has closed watched the maturing of the OpenStack project and decided recently that it was sufficiently stable to go “all in” with it. According...
There’s a China connection in the recent deal that PCH made to buy the once high-rising and well-funded e-commerce startup, Fab, which crashed last year. The product development and supply chain firm PCH has a major manufacturing and logistics base in Shenzhen, where its operations assemble, package and get products ready to ship for major multinational companies as well as small to medium-sized businesses. I’ve toured the operation in Shenzhen and interviewed founder Liam Casey there. No photos to share though since no snapshots were permitted due to confidentiality of their corporate clients. PCH has been expanding from that Shenzhen operation into services higher up in the chain, and with the recent acquisition of New York-based Fab, getting a higher profile as a result — and by helping more companies go international, narrowing the innovation distance between China and the U.S. Its year-old PCH Innovation Hub in San Francisco is loaded with equipment to churn out and fine tune hardware products. The ground floor is a big loft space with bleachers (a cool venue for Silicon Dragon) and a patio. The company’s related Innovation Highway accelerator works with 12 entrepreneurs at a time in a four-month course, taking a small equity stake along the way and offering $50,000 in cash. PCH founder Liam Casey with Silicon Dragon’s Rebecca Fannin PCH is well on its way to making its mark in hardware startups, one of the fastest-growing sectors in technology as software and hardware have integrated. PCH looks for startups with a good concept and hardware prototype, then helps them design a product that’s fit to go to market. With this acquisition of Fab, PCH is taking a further step to boost hardware startups, providing the entrepreneurs...
Now that the FCC pulled the trigger on Net Neutrality the ISPs are lining up to respond with lawsuits challenging the authority of the FCC. Again. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less sad and unfortunate. What the ISPs and the anti-Net Neutrality crowd seem to forget, though, is that Net Neutrality didn’t occur in a vacuum and it didn’t have to be this way. Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, wrote a blog post explaining why he is opposed to the direction the FCC has taken. Prince is definitely in a place to understand the pros and cons of the Net Neutrality debate and he makes a number of very good points on both sides of the equation. Ultimately, however, I disagree with his position because his vision for how the FCC should have handled things seems to conveniently forget the last five years or so of Net Neutrality history. In Prince’s vision FCC chairman Tom Wheeler should have given a speech outlining the critical importance of the Internet to our culture and economy. He says that the FCC should have expressed concern about the potential for abuse from ISPs, and used the threat of its Title II authority as leverage to keep ISPs in line. Specifically, Prince believes the FCC should have laid out these ground rules for ISPs: · Providers should not discriminate against or for any byte flowing across their network · Providers should continue to invest in their networks to provide higher quality of service across the entire Internet · Providers should not offer so-called “fast lanes” that content providers...
New data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope is allowing astronomers a glimpse at potentially catastrophic flaring in a solar-type star roughly 300 light years away. The observations detail some of the largest flaring events ever detected from a fully-mature G spectral-type star, known for now by its Kepler Input Catalog number KIC 11551430. Flaring from the star is several thousands times stronger than the Carrington Event — a September 1859 solar super-flare, hundreds of times stronger than most of our Sun’s “X-class” flares (the most powerful solar flares yet classified). We are counting thousands of white light flares from KIC 11551430 in a range from 10 to 10,000 times bigger than the biggest flares produced by our own Sun, Rachel Osten, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and the team leader on the Kepler survey of this star, told Forbes. “When you count and plot these really energetic stellar flares,” said Osten, “you expect to have more and more energetic flares happening less and less frequently.” The fact that we see a limit on the flare energies for these stars, Osten says, “sort of” confirms that these flares get their energy from star spots, or magnetic fields poking through the stellar surface. A major solar eruption is shown in progress October 28, 2003. (Photo by Solar & Heliospheric Observatory/NASA via Getty Images) In the mid-19th century, x-ray measurements of the Carrington Event weren’t yet available. But because the superflare was associated with spectacular Earth auroras, Osten says the event was likely coupled with a coronal mass ejection (or CME) — a magnetized plasma streaming high-energy accelerated particles...
Yes, it is true that Xenoblade Chronicles 3D doesn’t fit onto the internal SD card. But memory is pretty cheap these days. I bought a 64GB card for just $10 on Amazon. I’ll admit that it was kind of annoying that I had to unscrew the back plate in order to insert the new card. But I won’t have to open it again; so it is not such a big deal. I have now spent more than a month with my New 3DS XL. Actually, Nintendo sent it to my nine year old son. He’s part of their “Kid Reviewers” program so he gets lots of free stuff: games, toys, hardware. I stole the New 3DS before he noticed. That’s okay, all his favorite games are already downloaded onto his old one. He doesn’t need the new one until there are many more games with amiibo support. Besides, I let him use the New 3DS whenever he wants. Ironically, no matter how many times I tell him (or his seven year old brother) that the stable 3D works shockingly well, they both refuse to turn it on. The old 3DS conditioned them to keep the 3D off. “It hurts my eyes. And it’s annoying,” my nine year old says. I’m sure they’ll both give it another try soon. It really is awesome. Little kids are not impressed with terms like “eye-tracking.” But I am. And the new portable console’s new technology finally delivers on the 3D promise Nintendo made with the original. At first I didn’t believe the 3D was worth it. Like my children, I’ve also been conditioned...
By Ryan Mac and Frank Bi Amazon.com is not pleased with the pace by which the Federal Aviation Administration is addressing the commercial use of drones and it let the public know in a congressional hearing on Tuesday. In a Washington, D.C. meeting with Senate members of the Subcommittee on Aviation, Operations, Safety and Security, Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global public policy, criticized the FAA for lacking “impetus” to develop timely policies for the operations of unmanned aerial systems (UASs or UAVs). Amazon, which has been pushing for greater regulatory clarity and experimental permission for its Prime Air drone delivery service, said that the United States has been far less progressive than other countries with its unmanned aircraft regulations that have, in part, stifled innovation. “Although the United States is catching up in permitting current commercial UAS testing, the United States remains behind in planning for future commercial UAS operations,” Misener told the senators. While Misener remained polite with his points, he made Amazon’s message clear: the U.S. is simply not doing enough for businesses that want to use drones, whether that be for the delivery of packages or the inspection of power lines. Ironically, his comments came less than three hours after the FAA issued an interim policy that streamlined the approval process for commercial drone use, granting companies that had gained exemptions under current law a “blanket” permission to fly UAVs anywhere in the U.S. with certain restrictions. Currently, it is illegal for businesses to operate drones unless they have an exemption from the FAA. Dressed in a light gray suit and removing his glasses...
Recent Comments