Over the last five years one of my responsibilities was interviewing and hiring software developers and many of them were physically located overseas. In this post I’d like to share with you my thoughts (and get your feedback) on one of the aspects for offshore hiring: pros and cons of hiring individuals vs. teams.
Alexander Podelko, a performance expert working with Oracle, recently wrote a blog post in which he takes a look at the current state of the APM market and what he thinks needs to change in order for companies to get … Continue reading
In its biggest enterprise move ever RightScale has cut a strategic partnership with Equinix, the ubiquitous co-location peddler tight with a lot of the world’s high and mighty, folks RightScale expects to make a happy hunting ground. After all Equinix services more than 4,000 companies and 300 cloud service providers – a lot of them Fortune accounts – out of 38 data centers in the Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa, and Asia-Pacific. Anyway, the pair will deliver what is called a complete cloud package for SPs and corporations, dangling RightScale’s Cloud Management Platform in front of prospective and existing Platform Equinix customers along with the prospect of managing all their clouds – public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud – from a single dashboard.
Okay, so you’ve got all this Big Data. Now what? According to Alpine Data Labs, the two-year-old Big Data start-up incubated inside Greenplum, all that stuff bulging out of your storage is useless. Unless it’s susceptible to predictive analytics, but finding those nuggets of insight can be a pretty pricey exercise. Alpine set out to take the sticker shock out of the equation with its initial product, Alpine Miner, which simplifies the process of building predictive models for massive datasets without using a single line of code. It’s supposed to be fast and intuitive, streamlining and enhancing data scoring and fully capturing organizational knowledge basically on the cheap. It works in the enterprise data cloud or in the data warehouse to make sure you’re using everything and are therefore accurate. Fancy that. The widgetry was advertised as the first predictive modeling solution for Big Data.
VMware has integrated the Spring Framework with Apache Hadoop to create what it straightforwardly calls simply Spring Hadoop. It’s supposed to make it easier for enterprise developers to build distributed processing solutions with Apache Hadoop. Spring is supposed to simplify data access and be a “natural way to integrate Hadoop systems into the enterprise application landscape.” The widgetry is downloadable and available under the Apache 2 license. Among other things it supports configuration, creation and execution of MapReduce, Streaming, Hive, Pig and Cascading jobs via the Spring container and comprehensive HDFS data access support through JVM scripting languages (Groovy, JRuby, Jython, Rhino, etc.).
Design patterns were not born equal. Some of them are boring, while others are special. Do you remember your feelings after learning what the Data Transfer Object is? Don’t remember? Of course – cause you didn’t have any special feelings about it other than “It’s easy”. What do you say about Singleton? Yeah, this is [...]
Java is the technology of choice for high-end enterprise applications. The most common applications that developers are involved with are JavaServer Pages web applications, also known as JSP applications. JSP has become one of the two standards for developing high traffic web applications, the other being Microsoft ASP.NET. Being part of Java, JSP has been popular for a long time and is highly instrumental in promoting Web technologies for developing high-traffic applications. Millions of people are using JSP applications and those numbers keep growing. These JSP applications are endowed with an architecture that scales very nicely. You can handle more and more users by adding more web servers to a load-balanced Web farm. As you have an increasing amount of transaction load, you just keep adding more servers to the Web farm. That way you can handle more transactions and more concurrent users.
Agile team should self-organize. The Scrum Master can influence the process but not directly intervene. We all know this. Well, if you are not sure how this process works then you should read what Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has to say: Leading a Self-Organizing Team Succeeding with Agile: Leading a Self-Organizing Team The … Read more
Google Analytics (GA) is a free service provided by Google for collecting statistics about website visitors. The product is currently in use by around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites across the globe. GA can track visitors, sessions, traffic sources, goal conversions, page performance metrics and more. GA is implemented by including what is [...]
Oracle’s vaunted patent infringement case against Google and Android has shrunk to the size of a thong bikini – and like a freshman during spring break, the Patent and Trademark Office is looking forward to another round of strip poker. Of the five patents Oracle started with after ultimately withdrawing two, the PTO’s re-examinations have left it only one. The latest to fall was Java pappy James Gosling’s US patent RE38,104 on a “method and apparatus for resolving data references in generated code.” The PTO says it’s invalid although its decision isn’t absolutely final yet. Before the PTO’s decision, which took an awfully long time, case watcher Florian Mueller was beginning to think Oracle might get a lot of mileage just out of the Gosling patent since it looked pretty fundamental. Now that the PTO has pretty much shot it down he reckons the patent part of Oracle’s case is pretty much lost unless – after a long-winded process – the PTO’s Board of Appeals for Patent Appeals and Interferences or the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit overrules the PTO on some counts.
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just seven weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...?
Just when the US Postal Service looks down for the count, a self-funded Seattle start-up called PaperKarma figures its destiny is to suppress junk mail on which the post office depends. The company was started by Sean Mortazavi, who hasn’t given up his day job at Microsoft yet, and PaperKarma’s sole employee Brendan Ribera. The pair has developed a free multi-platform mobile app that lets junk mail-inundated protesters take a picture of the junk mail flooding their mailbox, hit an “Unsubscribe” button and send it to PaperKarma. The start-up will automatically pass it on to the mailer with Federal Trade Commission-enforced instructions that the recipient be dropped from its mailing list. Mortazavi and Ribera reportedly spent a year collecting the names of the appropriate people at 10,000 of the biggest junk mailers such as the so-called privacy officers or customer advocates responsible for deleting names from mailing lists and its system automatically matches them to the e-mailed suppression request. It’s a system that’s constantly being updated and expanded.
Centrify is going into the mobile business in support of iOS and Android phones and tablets. The move involves putting its multi-platform support for Microsoft’s Active Directory on its own cloud so companies can protect the increasing ubiquitous BYOD they need to control and secure whether they’re on the corporate network or not. It promises an organization can re-use its Active Directory investment without deploying a complex new infrastructure or dealing with yet another “pane of glass” in the form of another standalone management console. Its new enterprise-scale subscription-based cloud service is called DirectControl for Mobile and harnesses a company’s existing on-premise Active Directory infrastructure, skill sets, familiar processes, and group policy-based management tools to enforce and update mobile security settings, lock or remotely wipe devices, automate the configuration of each user’s authentication credentials, e-mail, Wi-Fi and VPN settings and reduce helpdesk traffic.
Sooner than expected, Apple Thursday started previewing a developer-directed beta of Mountain Lion, its next-generation Mac OS X 10.8, due out late this summer. It’s borrowed some more features from iOS like the popular and unlimited iChat-replacing iMessages IM as well as Notes, Games Center and Reminders and changed the names of Mac’s Address Book to Contacts and iCalc to Calendar, making the two operating systems more alike – you can see where this is going, right? Mountain Lion also integrates with Twitter and Apple’s own iCloud. Documents created on Macs will be available and synced with iPhone and iPad. There’s a Gatekeeper system to vet software, a way to use Apple TV as a screen, and it adds features for the Chinese market in support of Chinese web sites like Baidu. All told there are reportedly 100 new features.
Fresh off a happy quarter, Rackspace said Thursday that it’s bought SharePoint911, one of those you-never-heard-of-them outfits that does SharePoint consulting, training and JumpStart services so it can deliver newfangled SharePoint services along with its existing SharePoint hosting. It didn’t say how much it paid for the self-funded unit so it’s obviously immaterial. Eight-year-old SharePoint911 includes six Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) and the authors of over 10 SharePoint books and nine SharePoint training courses. It’s thought Rackspace is fattening up because of AWS. Microsoft’s SharePoint operation is a billion-dollar-a-year business with tens of millions of users. As popular as it is, the software can be crotchety to set up and handle.
A Tel Aviv start-up called Porticor that’s just hit the radar says it’s got a way to secure the cloud, any cloud. Fancy that, a trustworthy cloud. And Porticor delivers its data encryption solution to IaaS and PaaS users through the cloud in minutes. Fancy that. It’s supposed to solve the biggest challenge for data encryption in the cloud – storing keys. It promises that a user’s data encryption key will never be exposed and that it can deliver data security across virtual disks, databases, distributed storage and file systems. All this wonderfulness, called the Porticor Virtual Private Data (VPD) System, a combination of the start-up’s Virtual Appliance and Virtual Key Management Service, comes complements of its patent-pending homomorphic split-key encryption technology, which is supposed to increase security by an order of magnitude through hosted key management.
Red Hat on Thursday announced that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.1.0 and 5.1.1 have been awarded Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) under the Common Criteria Evaluation and Certification Scheme (CCS). Common Criteria is a set of internationally approved criteria for evaluating and certifying the information security of IT products and information systems, and EAL4+ is the highest assurance level that is recognized globally by all signatories under the Common Criteria Recognition Agreement for this category of solutions. This certification also marks the highest level of Common Criteria certification for the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio. “Security remains one of the most important considerations for security-conscious industries like government, financial services and healthcare considering new technology solutions, and achieving Common Criteria certification gives customers the added confidence that our solutions meet specific, internationally recognized benchmarks for security performance,” explained Paul Smith, general manager and vice president, public sector operations, Red Hat. “We made the commitment to upgrade our Common Criteria certification for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform from EAL2 to EAL4+, and achieving the highest available certification level is a testament to our ongoing efforts to meeting the needs of security-conscious government organizations and businesses.”
Graal is a new project to explore implementing a dynamic compiler in Java that can be used in a native JVM as well as meta-circular VM. Graal compiler is a dynamic compiler in Java and it allows to extend its functionality to support the customizations. The Graal compiler allows Java libraries to extend their functionality to support customizations. For example, it enables custom optimization phases that we cannot achieve with the traditional Java compilers. It provides a Java API to control the compiler phases and it even allows us to introduce new phases, thus it opens the door for efficient implementations of new languages.
Intel has finally seen the back of that 2009 antitrust suit that New York State’s attorney general brought against it that was pretty much a case of New York copying over the charges AMD had made in its massive but now long-settled suit. See, AMD was building a big state-of-art chip plant upstate New York, a project that Globalfoundries inherited when it bought AMD’s factories, and New York figured it could get some easy money. Its mistake was in thinking that cases like AMD’s actually go to a jury – like Intel would ever let that happen – and not realizing that AMD needed the money and would take a settlement and run. When it did, New York was left in district court in Delaware, where it had piggybacked on AMD’s suit, with no home court advantage.
After hearing testimony from World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape co-founder Eroc Bina, HTML embedded tag inventor David Raggetr and prior art inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, who wrote the Viola browser back in 1991, two years before Eolas, and demo’d it to Sun in ’93, a Texas federal jury Thursday – in a district notorious for looking kindly on patent holders – found the patents held by Eolas Technologies, which once nailed Microsoft for a $565 million infringement decision, invalid. The patents claim that Eolas invented the idea of a web browser that supports plug-ins and AJAX development techniques. Eolas was suing YouTube, Adobe, Amazon, JC Penney’s, Staples, CDW and Yahoo before moving on to almost anybody with a web site. Oracle, eBay, Apple, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Playboy and TI previously settled. Eolas could appeal. It’s “evaluating its options.” The University of California co-owns the Eolas patents.
EquaShip, the ambitious start-up that wants to be the fourth US parcel carrier after UPS, FedEx and the USPS, has suspended its weeks-old service to regroup after it couldn’t get packages where they were going in a few days time. CEO Ron Wiener said it could take a year to fix the problem. Its failure to deliver within a closing time window put eBay and Amazon shippers’ critical performance scores at risk. The start-up has been courting the small and medium-sized B2C e-commerce merchants on Amazon and eBay that don’t qualify for FedEx and UPS discounts and are basically stuck subsidizing the unprofitable volumes of the FedEx and UPS mega-shippers. EquaShip’s low rates were supposed to make the discount-disenfranchised competitive so they could blithely offer the free delivery imperative to Internet sales these days without losing their shirt.
In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have happened recently with the Apache Hadoop project, what is has already accomplished (including real-world examples), and what it is going to make possible in the future.
AMD said late Tuesday that its chief sales officer Emilio Ghilardi had left the company and that CEO and president Rory Read is going to do his job while a replacement is sought. AMD didn’t say why Ghilardi left but it’s assumed Read wants his own people. Read is relatively new to the company so the sales experience will be good for him. He knows how to do it judging from his record at Lenovo although it does leave him with a full plate. Ghilardi joined AMD from HP to run EMEA in 2008 and was named sales chief the next year. Read last week told Wall Street that AMD is switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet.
Apple is going to launch the iPad 3, or whatever they call it, the first week of March at a special event in San Francisco according to AllThingsD, a prophecy the punters regarded as being as good as a statement from the company. As a result Apple Thursday hit an all-time high, teasing the magic $500 number, with a closing price of $493.17, up from $315 last June, after seeing $496.75 during the day. The blog figures street availability a week or so later. The dingus, the same size as the iPad 2, will reportedly be built on a way faster chip with improved graphics and a 2048×1536 Retina Display – “or something close to it,” the blog said.
Apple quietly wrote a letter to ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, in November asking it to set basic rules for the licensing of standards-essential patents and to make its patent-wielding members commit to the principles. Apple clearly had Google and its Android acolytes in mind in writing the letter. Motorola Mobility and Samsung are asking ludicrously high sums to license IP that’s supposed to be available on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). They have also sued alleged infringers like Apple and Microsoft demanding product-stopping injunctions. Apple wants all this to stop. It wants ETSI to insist on appropriate royalties, a common royalty base and no injunctions. Apple’s lead IP lawyer Bruce Watrous told ETSI that the industry lacks consistent adherence to FRAND principles in licensing all the patents necessary to make mobile devices.