Oracle wants to appeal a district court’s decision to cut a jury’s award of $1.3 billion in damages against SAP down to $272 million to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The federal judge who overturned the record award claiming it was “grossly excessive” and unsupported by the evidence doesn’t want Oracle to appeal. She’s asked the company to reconsider its request to go over her head. She’s already ruled that SAP would get a new trial just on the damages if Oracle rejected the $272 million payment for copyright infringement. SAP has admitted its defunct subsidiary TomorrowNow’s ransacked Oracle’s IP and illegally downloaded scads of Oracle software.
It’s a scenario with which many Java developers are all too familiar – and one which many fear. You log on to the network or arrive at the office to discover your Chief Security or Compliance Officer, Application Manager or even a VP of Sales and Marketing in a state of panic. A commonly used open source component has a serious security vulnerability that may expose your client-facing applications to attack. Even worse, the flaw was identified a few weeks ago, but your organization has just heard about it. The questions and accusations fly: “Why are we using open source components for our critical business applications?!” “Why don’t we just rip out this component and replace it with something more secure?” “Do you have any idea what will happen if people discover that our applications have a security flaw?!” “This could negatively impact revenue and our reputation!” And, of course, “What are you going to do to fix this – and ensure it never happens again?!”
Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder upgrades with brand-new UI and very cool new features. Brand-new attractive UI Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder got a new and very attractive UI. You can see how it looks below but the best way to experience it, is to log in or sign up. You will like it. Upgraded export-and-build capability with support for Android, iOS, and mobile Web That’s big one. From the screen shot you can see that it’s now super easy to get the source code and build for Android and get the source code for iOS.
Platfora, a Hadoop analytics start-up, has gotten $5.7 million in Series A money from Andreessen Horowitz and the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. The fledging is trying to make pretty, understandable graphs out of big petabytes-size Hadoop data. Its product, which will compete with Datameer’s, won’t be available until next year. It says Hadoop lacks the interactivity and sophisticated reporting capabilities needed by business users. It’s aiming to work with existing Hadoop clusters, including Cloudera, MapR and Amazon EMR, among others, and automatically turn the questions business users pose into dimensional and predictive dashboards, reports and insights.
After Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin reached out to Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha in early July about the Nortel patents Google had just lost to a dangerous rival, Google wound up bidding $30 a share for the whole company on August 1. MMI was supposedly afraid it would be defenseless without its 17,000 patents. Advised by Frank Quattrone’s indomitable Qatalst Partners, it wanted $43.50 a share. Google went to $37. MMI dropped to $40.50, according to an SEC filing, and settled for 40 bucks a share, a tidy $12.5 billion and a 63% premium, $10 to maybe $15 more than MMI’s board originally thought it could get. Google shelled out $3 billion or 33% more than its initial offer in the absence of any rivals.
It’s maybe a year before any Windows 8 products come out but Microsoft started pushing what it called its “re-imagined,” next-generation operating system to developers this week at its Build conference in California. Evidently it’s trying to freeze the market before its PC empire is utterly chipped away by the upstart Apple and Android. Microsoft is supposed to be “re-imagining” all its widgetry “from the chipset to the user experience” to run on or through the cloud, an exercise that’s supposed to equate to re-imagining Microsoft itself while Windows remains at its core and every business is cloud-optimized and tied together. Backward-compatible with Windows 7, on which it is based but requiring less memory, Windows 8 is both a leap into OS-disenfranchising cloud services and a tablet catch-up – at least for ARM tablets. It made no firm promises about Intel tablets but reassured the crowd that the highly rated ARM development is keeping pace with its Intel development although Microsoft didn’t show it.
When technologies turn obsolete and paradigms shift, what happens to the jobs that support them? Do they disappear into…the cloud? The world of IT is in perpetual motion, which means every job is potentially endangered. But even so, cloud computing has gotten many people spooked, and with good reason. This is a big change. Many in IT talk about being in business more than technology, but cloud computing makes that shift more real than ever. With the cloud hovering overhead, many specific aspects of IT must evolve or they will become extinct. Here’s the bottom line: with the shift to cloud computing, the IT department must hone a new set of skills – such as managing a broader set of service provider partners – in order to deliver hybrid cloud services to the business. In this new IT reality, business services become equally – if not more important – than technical minutiae. Vendor comparison, decision-making and management become a primary responsibility. IT folks need to shift, or risk being shifted themselves.
IDC has joined Gartner in clipping its projections for global PC growth this year. It figures the number of widgets shipped will only be up 2.8%, down from a previous forecast of 4.2%, citing tablet cannibalization, cautious spending by SMBs and consumers and saturated mature markets coupled with the lack of sexy new features and the uncertainty HP’s proposed spin-off of its PC business has inflicted on the market. IDC also cut its 2012 growth guidance from 10.2% to 9.3%. It still thinks 2013-2015 is good for growth of 11% a year because of replacements and rising penetration in emerging markets.
I always get excited when I see another person questioning the use of frameworks that ask you to either replace one language with another or write additional code as a life support to sustain the framework’s functioning. This time my kudos to Christin Gorman, who did a great job explaining why using the Hibernate framework over SQL is a bad choice. Watch this video , where Christin uses the Cake Mix metaphor to deliver her message loud and clear. In the past I was using a different metaphors. One was about the goat and rabbi. The other one is about the Axe Soup a.k.a. Stone Soup. I remember this story about a soldier returning back from war. He was very hungry, and, when reached some village, he asked a women living there to give him some food. She rejected. Then he asked for a pot of water so he could cook a soup form his axe. She became curious and agreed. After placing the axe in a boiling water he asked if she had just one small potato to add some flavor to the Axe Soup. She gave the potato. Than he asked the woman about a small onion, and on and on and on. When the soup was ready, he removed the axe from the pot and fed himself with a tasteful soup.
Are you familiar with the words “Intrapreneur” or “Intrapreneurship”? According to Wikipedia: Intrapreneur = A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation. Intrapreneurship = The practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as being the province of entrepreneurship.
Google has bought what appears to be another 1,023 patents from IBM, a transfer recorded by the US Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday and noticed by Bloomberg, which said Google bought them on August 17. The PTO also transferred 1,030 patents from IBM to Google in July after Google lost the auction for 6,000-odd Nortel patents to the combined might of Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson, Sony and EMC and their $4.5 billion. The blog SEO by the Sea flipped through the latest IBM haul and says the batch includes a bunch of Java and scripting-based patents. Whether any of them can defuse Oracle’s massive Java infringement suit against Google and its Android operating system is unclear.
In understanding the scalability challenge addressed by WebSphere eXtreme Scale, let us first define and understand scalability. Wikipedia defines scalability as a "desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged. For example, it can refer to the capability of a system to increase total throughput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added."
By caching strategically at many tiers, we are trying to offload processing to various tiers and ONLY dedicating processing in middleware when it is most important or the ‘window shoppers’ now mean business. We will dedicate our cycles to those business meaning clients and service them better with an enhanced experience. As business grows so does the resulting infrastructure and primarily the middleware which houses the business logic and in some cases this tier shares the presentation or the store front with business logic. So with growth in business either due to larger client base or new business model implies similar growth in middleware. This consistent growth poses a few challenges some obvious ones include costs – not only of software but also hosting infrastructure and hardware. Some non obvious challenges include manageability of platform i.e. general administration, handling performance and Service level agreement (SLA) and addressing scalability.
WebSphere eXtreme Scale can be used in different ways. It can be used as a very powerful cache or as a form of an in-memory database processing space to manage application state or as a platform for building powerful Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications.
Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal last Friday ordered Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Google CEO Larry Page to sit down next Monday and Tuesday and seek a financial settlement to Oracle’s Java infringement suit against Google. If they get nowhere next week they’ll have to show up for one more try on Friday, September 30. It’s still unclear whether the Java jury trial will start as scheduled on October 31. It all depends on whether an unrelated criminal case gets precedence. The Java case was recently divided in two: a liability part and a damages part. Judge Grewal, who will try to mediate, issued his Larrys order after Oracle railed against Google’s idea of sending Android chief Andy Rubin to a sit-down. Oracle sees Rubin as the author of the infringement and it’s got internal Google e-mail –one of the e-mails Google has been trying to suppress – supporting its position. He’s also not perceived to have the clout to settle.
I've been working on setting up a new environment for SAP IDM 7.1 SP5 (yes I know 6 is available). This installation is notable for me since I am configuring it around. So it's my first pure 64 Bit system. I'm pretty excited. So I got the OS installed no problem. Got SQL installed. (gotta say, 2008R2 is probably the smoothest SQL install I've done since SQL Server 7. Very much a fan) Got the IDM DesignTime and Runtime installs completed with no problems. Installed JAVA 1.6 and Installed the 3.0 SQL Server drivers. Then the skies began to darken...
Have you ever run into one of the many limitations of Type 4 JDBC drivers? Ever wished there was an EASY way around them? If you haven’t already, now is the time to check out Progress DataDirect’s Type 5 JDBC Drivers. In this short video you will learn how to install and test the benefits of the Type 5 JDBC driver in your own environment. After viewing this video, you can start enjoying all that Type 5 has to offer in 15 minutes or less. Guaranteed!
A deadlock is a situation where two or more threads are blocked while waiting to obtain locks that some of the other threads in the deadlock are holding. Deadlocks can occur when multiple threads need the same locks, at the same time, but obtain them in different order. For instance, if thread 1 locks A, and tries to lock B, and thread 2 has already locked B, and tries to lock A, a deadlock arises. Thread 1 can never get B, and thread 2 can never get A. In addition, neither of them will ever know. They will remain blocked on each of their objects, A and B, forever. The most common way of detecting whether your application is deadlocked is by analyzing thread dumps of the Java Virtual Machine while its in the state of appearing hung. A thread dump is a snapshot of the virtual machine's current state, including stack traces for each Java thread.
Armed with $3 million, a lot of it from Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s personal account, a start-up called Cloudwords aims to push the gentle art of localization into the cloud. Well, the $20 billion business behind the gentle art of localization at any rate. It’s got a Translation Management Automation (TMA) platform and it claims this native cloud widgetry will do a cheaper, quicker job brokering materials to be translated to real live translators Cloudwords lines up than dealing with, say, SDL, which seems to have a corner on the market. The alternative, it says, is to manage the translation process without any effective tools or pay a few million dollars for on-premise software. TMA comes in two editions, Basic and Professional, and includes a project management platform that’s supposed to be secure, scalable and easy to use.
IBM is buying yet another business analytics outfit. This time it’s UK-based i2, which looks out for crime, fraud and security threats via unstructured Big Data. Financial terms with the investor group headed by Silver Lake Sumeru that owns i2 were not disclosed. I2’s got 4,500 customers in 150 countries in banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail including 12 of the top 20 retail banks globally and eight of the top 10 largest companies in the world. IBM expects to join its real-time analytical solutions with i2’s technologies.
RPost, the Registered Email outfit, has gone into the cloud business, calling its new widgetry the “new global standard for legal electronic messaging.” The RPost Cloud, for that is its name, is targeted at software applications, service providers, developers, IT departments, ye olde postal services and John Q public. The platform will let any of these users, regardless of stripe, lease the RPost infrastructure and transform data into a product, reconcile transactions and return reports to the sender or sending system. It’s supposed to cost pennies and can be done on a message-by-message or user-by-user basis. Its cloud can be used to give data and e-mail messages any of the company’s many services, which roughly fall into four buckets: legally valid proof of delivery and non-repudiation; security, encryption and compliance; secure electronic signatures, contract e-signing and authentication; and collaboration and deliverability.
MapR Technologies, one of the latest Hadoop commercializers, the one with the strategic relationship with EMC, has brought in a $20 million B round led by Redpoint Ventures with Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA tagging along. The money is earmarked for scaling operations. MapR claims its distribution of Hadoop is the only one to provide full HA support, native NFS access, snapshots, mirroring and a full random read/write storage layer. Last week MapR added ExpressLane and Mac client support. ExpressLane makes small jobs complete quickly, even if a cluster is busy, upping MapR’s value for ad hoc analytics. Other Hadoop distributions apparently make them wait their turn.
Despite the shrinking government dollar Intel has formed a brand new Intel Federal LLC subsidiary to “address new opportunities in working with the US government” on HPC, including exascale computing with the Department of Energy and other agencies. It says “Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government. An ExaFlop supercomputer’s performance is the equivalent of every person on Earth making about 150 million calculations per second.” The subsidiary is supposed to give Intel “the ability to establish and maintain the unique processes, procedures and controls needed to develop and manage programs with the government.”
The launch of vSphere 5 and its new storage related features will set the precedent for a complete rethink on how a new datacenter’s storage infrastructure should be designed and deployed. vSphere 5’s launch is not only an unabashed attempt at cornering every single aspect of the server market but is also a result for the growing need for methodical scalability that merges the I.T. silos and consequently combines the information of applications, servers, SANs and storage into a single comprehensive stack.
Red Hat is building a policy-based cloud manager meant to spin up, deploy and, well, manage multiple Linux and Windows virtual images, their applications and their necessaries across clouds. It’s called Aeolus presumably after the Greek ruler of the winds. It’s advertised as “freeing users from cloud lock-in by making the choice of cloud provider – private, public, or hybrid – a simple launch-time option.” It’s theoretically supposed to pick the best solution, but it’s also part of Red Hat’s beta IaaS widgetry, CloudForms. Red Hat says it wants Aeolus to be an open source project, but you know how those things go, the butcher never quite gets his thumb off the scale.