#distributed networks

[consciousenergies-blog]

Super Force: A Unified Theory of Physics

In the intricate cosmos, the Super Force emerges as a potential master weaver. It aims to harmonize the four fundamental forces into a single, elegant framework. More than a theoretical curiosity, this concept lights the path to a new era of technological innovation and energy mastery. Is the Super Force Nature’s Ultimate Unifier? The quest for a unified field theory has captivated physicists…

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[engineeratheart3]

I hate my life so much

[melisssssssssm]

"Today, Australian Privacy Ends" - Metadata and Cyber-Surveillance

"Today, Australian Privacy Ends" - Metadata and Cyber-Surveillance #DIGC202

Since its inception the internet has been collecting data — data on users, website history and patterns of internet behaviours. It’s default setting has been to record information and store it (Mitew, 2014). The Internet to date is an increasingly populated place and as a result of this distributed environment with a multitude of users, governments such as our ownhave decided to implement ways to…

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[quoint]

Authors: David Lo†, Liqun Cheng‡, Rama Govindaraju‡, Parthasarathy Ranganathan‡, and Christos Kozyrakis† Stanford University† Google, Inc.‡

User-facing, latency-sensitive services, such as websearch, underutilize their computing resources during daily periods of low traffic. Reusing those resources for other tasks is rarely done in production services since the contention for shared resources can cause latency spikes that violate the service-level objectives of latency-sensitive tasks. The resulting under-utilization hurts both the affordability and energy-efficiency of large-scale datacenters. With technology scaling slowing down, it becomes important to address this opportunity.

We present Heracles, a feedback-based controller that enables the safe colocation of best-effort tasks alongside a latencycritical service. Heracles dynamically manages multiple hardware and software isolation mechanisms, such as CPU, memory, and network isolation, to ensure that the latency-sensitive job meets latency targets while maximizing the resources given to best-effort tasks. We evaluate Heracles using production latencycritical and batch workloads from Google and demonstrate average server utilizations of 90% without latency violations across all the load and colocation scenarios that we evaluated.

[mouseworldnow-blog]

New Post has been published on www.mouseworldnow.com

New Post has been published on http://www.mouseworldnow.com/news/breaking-news/eset-launches-plug-in-for-kaseya-virtual-system-administrator.html

ESET Launches Plug-in for Kaseya Virtual System Administrator

ESET India Director Pankaj Jain[/caption]MUMBAI, India – October 11, 2014: ESET, a leading player in proactive protection for more than 25-years, has announced the general availability of the ESET Remote Administrator Plug-in for Kaseya Virtual System Administrator (VSA), the industry leading IT systems management platform. Integrating with latest version of Kaseya, the ESET Remote Administrator Plug-in allows IT managers to use the familiar Kaseya interface to manage and maintain ESET Endpoint Antivirus and Endpoint Security deployments across distributed networks.

Pankaj Jain, Director at ESET India said, “We are very sure that ESET’s pre-emptive detection of malware marks Kaseya IT managers to achieve much safer environment with in Kaseya interface. The lighter ESET will also enhance the productivity and PC speed.”

The ESET Remote Administrator Plug-in for Kaseya VSA gives administrators the ability to deploy antimalware configurations to endpoints with a variety of ESET clients installed, initiate scans and virus signature updates, view threat data and generate reports using the Kaseya Info Center.

It is available at no additional charge for customers with an active license of any of the following ESET Endpoint Products: ESET Endpoint Antivirus, ESET Endpoint Security, and ESET NOD32 Antivirus Business Edition for both Mac OS X or Linux Desktop. It can also be used to manage and monitor select ESET Windows Server or Linux File Server Products.

Ben Lavalley, Director of Product Management for Kaseya said, “Kaseya VSA users have more antimalware options than ever before when it comes to protecting their computers, devices and files.

He continued and said, “ESET is an excellent provider of threat detection and prevention and we are happy that this new plug-in makes it easier than ever for Kaseya customers to manage their ESET products from our platform.”

In addition to robust scanning and reporting capabilities, the ESET Remote Administrator Plug-in for Kaseya VSA allows users to customize the dashboard with easy-to-read graphs and charts, and create Kaseya alerts based on pre-determined status updates. The plug-in also lets organizations define permissions for different user roles to allow or deny access to product settings.

[kschumacher-blog]

What Sandy tells us about the free market and distributed networks

One thing that is abundantly clear in the wake of Hurricane Sandy on Long Island is that towns with municipal power have fared much better than those served by LIPA. Public services like the post office, trash collecting and recycling were back in service for many on Tuesday, yet private supply of electricity may take 10 days to come back for over 1/2 million residents (as we are getting into sub-freezing nights...). Now, there are many reasons for this, and many free market apologists will argue the value that privatized electricity providers bring outweighs the costs.  However, they would be failing to look at the facts clearly.

The fact is that the power grid in Long Island (and much of the North-East) is very old and in a general state of disrepair.  We are in a low lying, fast growing temperate forest with relatively shallow soil.  Yet we have the majority of our electrical supply grid strung through millions of tree branches which are not religiously trimmed.  The capacity of the grid itself is stretched to the max as population has outpaced investment and we have regular blackouts during hot summer months.  

One logical solution - years ago when we first started having regular problems - would have been to have a plan to bury the majority of the power grid as we regularly are upgrading and repaving streets.  This investment would not pay for itself, since it would only raise the cost and not raise the market price for electricity.  The argument for privatizing critical infrastructure is that government run agencies are inefficient compared to private enterprise which is driven to efficiency by the demands of the market.  Supposedly we get lower costs and more innovative market driven improvements.  While this may be debatable for some non critical services, or at least services that could actually have competition, it can not work for critical services.  

Any private monopoly is infinitely worse than a government run agency, and this is where we see the myth of the free market exposed.  No matter what feeble attempts to force competition into the electricity market through hard to understand energy credit purchasing schemes are put into place, one company owns and controls the grid in any particular area and the vast majority of their customers are essentially captive.  In the long term you could say that events like Sandy will drive people to become energy independent with off grid solar and wind generators, and that this is the effect of the free market.  That may be partially true, but you can't ignore the fact of over a million people without power and a disaster that could have absolutely been mitigated if all towns had their own municipal power supply.  Taxes might have been higher, but there is no way that you can say this for certain as they might not have - it's just a matter of how you prioritize your budget and there's definitely a lot of real waste at the local level to be trimmed.

In reality I am a fan of Freed markets.  That is, markets for everything other than critical services and supplies which are freed from the constraints of excess regulation.  That being said, no market can be truly free because it is run by people and by rules (both written and unwritten). Any person in charge will seek to maximize something - either profits, salary, power, or social benefit.  Those in charge of private monopolies will always seek to maximize the first three.  

There is no reason that a CEO or manager of a private electric company should seek to maximize social benefit if it is to the detriment of corporate profit.  In fact this is illegal for them to act in a way that is not in the fiduciary duty of their stakeholders.  In the case of updates to the electric grid, you can say that LIPA will pay the price for not updating now and the market will punish them, but it's simply not true.  Even if it forces the government to implant another competitor or they loose many customers to off grid solutions (not likely), they will have made their profits already.  If they spent the money before a crisis happened, they would have made less money up until now.  This way, they can pocket all of the money (millions, billions?) It would have cost to update, take federal emergency money to help get the grid back up and running, and then go ahead like nothing happened.  Oh, they may even cite lower temporary revenue and high rebuilding costs as a reason to let people go so they can end up with even higher margins in a year's time.

Now we can't assume that someone in charge of a non-profit or government agency will always seek to maximize social benefit  but we can tie the salary and power to the social impact through incentives much in the same way that a good sales incentive drives a salesforce to grow the business in the right way.  At the very least, it is now clear that we have to take corporate profit (different than INDIVIDUAL profit - i.e. salary&bonus) out of the equation for critical services.

The other thing that we see, is that a network of small distributed municipal power plants, which it may end up costing more of a raw material side in $/KW, costs less in overhead and is much more flexible.  The flexibility of a distributed network makes it much less risky over the long term and the ability to minimize catastrophic impacts actually makes it less expensive when looking at a full life-cycle cost.  If you are one who still insists on privatizing electricity, consider a network of small local supply with some overlapping service areas so they all have to compete on overhead cost, but with a mandate that they are non-profits and much contribute x% of revenue to planned upgrades in any area that they are serving.