The rumors were true, only the price was off. AMD formally announced this week it intends to acquire FPGA maker Xilinx for $35 billion, not $30 billion as originally rumored. Xilinx is the biggest maker of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, a class of chips that can be reconfigured for a variety of specialized tasks by the end user. They are especially popular in vertical markets like automotive and cellular base stations, where a chip…

The sheer number of connectivity options available for IoT networks will create chaos in the coming year, according to a newly released set of predictions from Forrester Research. As there’s no single connectivity option that meets every use case for IoT, businesses should expect to navigate a landscape that includes proprietary low-power options like Zigbee, unlicensed standards like Bluetooth, both public and private varieties of 5G, Wi-Fi, and even satellite in order to make deployments…

Midnight Commander – the “mc” command – provides an easy way to browse directories and to view, move, delete, compare, change and edit files. Similar in some ways to ranger, mc makes it easy to move around directories and offers side-by-side file/directory listings that work independently of each other. In addition, it provides a very wide range of actions that you can take through simple menu choices. To start Midnight Commander, simply type “mc” in a…

Secure access service edge (SASE) architecture rolls networking and security into a cloud service, making it easier for enterprises to provide simple, secure access to corporate resources, but it’s still in its infancy. Vendors and service providers sell offerings that they call SASE, but what they actually provide and how they provide it varies widely. SASE—pronounced “sassy”- is a term coined last year by Gartner, and it combines software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) with access control and…