VMware figures to push virtualization onto more desktops with the release next week of its next-generation View 4.0, advertised as the only purpose-built desktop virtualization solution in the industry. The gussied-up vSphere-based widgetry, a gateway to the desktop as a managed service, is supposed to overcome the barriers of user experience, cost and scale that have so far limited the adoption of desktop virtualization to what VMware calls a “small niche group of industries.” VMware claims View’s performance will match the most demanding environment while reducing desktop TCO by as much as 50%.
Poor beaten-up Sun Microsystems confided the financial results of its September quarter to the SEC on Friday and they weren’t pretty. Sun was supposed to be part of Oracle by now and not washing its linen in public anymore but the European Commission hasn’t sanctioned the union, and isn’t expected to now unless Oracle does something about Sun property MySQL. What the EC wants exactly isn’t clear.
Intalio, the Enterprise Cloud Company, today announced the immediate availability of Jetty 7, the leading lightweight open source Java application server. The new release includes features and capabilities that extend Jetty's reach into mission-critical environments, as well as support its deployment on top of cloud computing platforms.
For several months now a subset of the JCP's Executive Committees has been meeting as the Java ME Working Group to address Java ME-specific matters. In this column I'll focus on Java ME and on some of the issues that the Working Group has been discussing. (To follow our activities, check out our bulletin board at jcp.org.)
GigaSpaces and GoGrid have been strategic partners for quite a while. This week, we jointly announced a new technology partnership aimed at offering Java and .NET as a PaaS solution. To further explain our combined solution, there is a webinar slotted for October 14th where Guy Nirpaz (EVP of R&D at GigaSpaces) and Paul [...]
Cisco CEO John Chambers, who has turned into something of an economic oracle probably because he is more in command of his catbird seat than most big-time CEOs, said Wednesday when Cisco reported its quarterly results that the economy hit a “clear tipping point” before mid-summer and is now accelerating worldwide, enough for Cisco itself to start cautiously spending again. He’s planning targeted hiring.
According to Aster Data, applications need to go to “Big Data,” not the other way around. And to do that the company’s got a massively parallel data-application server that can embed applications inside a massively scalable MPP data warehouse and analyze petabytes of data – or terabytes, if that’s all you’ve got – ultra-fast. Apps are automatically parallelized for scale; users can take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.
HFS Wrapper is a popular and reliable Mac OS X file system. The HFS+ volume could be made to contain within the HFS file system volume in a way that make it look like the HFS volume and not the HFS+ volume to your system
The European Commission is about to object formally to Oracle’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of Sun because Oracle is hanging tough and refusing to make any concessions concerning the open source database MySQL, a potential Oracle rival as the EC sees it, according to the Financial Times. The paper says a statement of objection (SO) could be issued in the next few days unless one side or the other blinks.
3Leaf Systems, the well-funded start-up, dropped its fig leaf Tuesday and took a running jump into the pools of memory, I/O and cache that it can construct and deconstruct at will based on the application, creating scale-up shared-memory SMP systems the likes of mainframes, proprietary mid-range machines and pricey RISC-based Unix boxes out of racks of cheap and dirty two-socket scale-out x64 systems.
Altova, creator of XMLSpy, today announced the availability of Version 2010 (v2010) of the Altova MissionKit®, an integrated suite of XML, database, and UML tools. Version 2010 delivers over 70 of customers' "most wanted" features across the product line, from support for new technologies like WSDL 2.0 in XMLSpy and MapForce®, JSON in XMLSpy, and SysML in UModel®, to enhanced functionality for working with XBRL in XMLSpy, a completely new stylesheet design option in StyleVision®, and much more. For users working on the newest version of the Microsoft® Windows® platform, Version 2010 is also compatible with Windows 7.
icloud has announced the launch of its improved desktop with Super Search and a new innovative start menu. Super Search integrates many of the most popular services on the internet with simultaneous search of your private files in the cloud. It has never before been more convenient to find what you are looking for. This major release of icloud also introduces Universal Sharing. Decide what to share, who you want to share with, and icloud will find the easiest way to reach them.
Distribution and communication between applications and services is a central concept in modern application architectures. In order to profit from distribution you have to keep some basic principles in mind – otherwise you can easily run into performance and scalability problems. During development these problems often do not surface. Then suddenly in load testing or production you might then realize that your chosen software architecture does not support the required performance and scalability requirements. In this post we will look at major points to keep in mind when building distributed applications.
Today is finally the day that Umoo tournaments is coming out of private beta and into the public arena. I can now set up my own tournaments with a larger crowd, maybe I can push the magic “Invite my Facebook friends button’. Currently, I mostly play Fun games, without any entry fee that is, but I am itching to do the real game. For a few bucks I can make some real money with this game. We are interviewing Umoo players and some of them make a lot of money on Umoo. Surprisingly, they make more money than I ever made juggling my 401K account on the real stock market. However, after playing for a couple of weeks now, I have concluded, I am not going to quit my day job just yet.
AppLogic 2.7 integrates server, storage and networking virtualization, hardware operations, volume management via highly-available integrated IP SAN, advanced network security, orchestration and multi-service operations into one turn-key cloud computing system. Because of this integration, AppLogic offers the industry's lowest cost of operation available for enterprises and datacenter operations.
Have we reached the point where email’s influence over our electronic lives is waning? It is hard to imagine, especially for those of us who grew up in the minicomputer/PC era. For two generations, email was the killer application. It delivered information reliably and within a few minutes. But today the properties that made email so attractive for so long are now a liabiliity. “A few minutes” for a response is so last year, driven in no small part by texting and cell phone ubiquity. At the same time this was happening, wikis, blogs and social networks have begun to erode email’s document exchange role. The notion of sharing photos or a slide presentation using email attachments is becoming quaint.
By Tom Hopkins In business situations, when you are trying to reach the person who has the authority to make decisions regarding your product you are very likely to have to go through one or more people before reaching that person. For the sake of efficiency, there will likely be a receptionist and/or assistant who takes the initial calls for the decision-maker. It’s important that you realize most assistants are taught to protect decision-makers. Or, shall we say, screen calls so the decision-makers only speak with the [...]
IBM today announced a more effective way for organizations to quickly build, deliver and manage high quality services. Through new software integrations, organizations can manage and automate processes across their development, test and operations teams. These new integrations give clients better control over the services they provide to customers while lowering the overall cost of delivery and shortening the time to market for new services.
Yahoo! is developing and utilizing Internet-scale cloud computing services to improve Yahoo! consumer experience, speed innovation, simplify operating environments, and reduce costs. Yahoo! Cloud Services are in production today supporting web-serving properties and data processing environments. Keynote Speaker Shelton Shugar will also discuss how Yahoo! Cloud Services store and deliver web content, personalize content for consumers, optimize Ad selection and placement, improve search results, provide scalable virtual computing environments, and process and store enormous amounts of data to improve consumer experiences and drive innovation.
In the previous post we looked at how to configure the SQLAuthenticator password encryption options. Among other encryption algorithms we discovered that on creating a user from the WLS console, WLS would create the associated user in a database table with password "password" encrypted to:
{SHA-1}W6ph5Mm5Pz8GgiULbPgzG37mj9g=
...when the SHA-1 option was set.
As was mentioned in the previous post, as the database table with its users and passwords may be shared by non-WLS based applications, it's important that those systems can encrypt passwords and compare them to the WLS result. In other words, in the example above, given that WLS generated a SHA-1 encrypted password, if another system uses the same SHA-1 algorithm will it generate the same encrypted password allowing it to compare the database SHA-1 encrypted password against the SHA-1 encrypted password it has?
In order to check we can get the same encrypted results, we'll investigate generating a SHA-1 password using the Oracle database's encryption facilities (so in this case the database acts as the other subsystem), comparing the database's encrypted SHA-1 password to that of WLS.
The following solution owes thanks to Sean at Oracle Support who very patiently led me in the right direction with my findings.
dbms_crypto
Oracle database fans will be familiar with the dbms_crypto package that provides encryption support.
dbms_crypto allows us to generate an encrypted password that we can compare to the WLS result. From table 34-1 of the dbms_crypto link, we note that dbms_crypto supports the following one-way hash algorithms: SHA-1, MD4 and MD5. As WLS via the JCE extensions (see the previous post) supports SHA-1, MD2 and MD5, it's fortunate we picked SHA-1 for this example.
The following anonymous PL/SQL block shows an example using the dbms_crypto package hash function with SHA-1 to produce an encrypted result:
Note the output, a hex value, and doesn't match our WLS output for the same plaintext password "password" encrypted with SHA-1.
DECLARE
input_string VARCHAR2(8);
raw_input RAW(128);
encrypted_raw RAW(2048);
BEGIN
input_string := 'password';
raw_input := utl_raw.cast_to_raw(convert(input_string, 'AL32UTF8','US7ASCII'));
encrypted_raw := dbms_crypto.hash(src => raw_input, typ => dbms_crypto.hash_sh1);
dbms_output.put_line('Output: ' || encrypted_raw);
END;
/
Output: 5BAA61E4C9B93F3F0682250B6CF8331B7EE68FD8
...where the hexStringToByteArray function is borrowed from Dave L on StackOverflow.
byte[] bytearray = hexStringToByteArray("5BAA61E4C9B93F3F0682250B6CF8331B7EE68FD8");
String base64encoded = new BASE64Encoder().encodeBuffer(bytearray);
Securing data and applications that run on the web and in the cloud are among the most pressing information technology challenges for organizations today. Attacks made through common hacking techniques can lead to financial loss, compliance headaches and disastrous issues with customer privacy and overall satisfaction. At the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Lars Ewe will further discuss that while business applications are going online at a record pace, security solutions today are not keeping up. The lack of a proper protocol to test for application vulnerabilities can quickly result in large-scale security breakdowns.
As the Cloud Computing model proliferates, so will the potential threats. Thanks to the Cloud, the line between the endpoint and the enterprise has blurred. Therefore, it calls for a radically different kind of approach using a trustworthy computing model. At the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, Dipto Chakravarty will examine ways to use a combination of open source as well as proprietary tools to protect the business assets at the edge of the network in concert with the hub of the enterprise.
Many in the industry have heard of Hadoop, and in his session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Christophe Bisciglia, Co-Founder of Cloudera, gets a little deeper. Hadoop is based on the same methods Google uses to store and process petabytes of data, but thanks to contributions from many in the open source community you can leverage these same methods to make sense of every increasing volumes of enterprise data. Bisciglia will highlight the technical and business issues that make Hadoop so powerful for large scale data processing.
Hundreds of definitions from swarms of providers have created confusion and devalued the cloud storage landscape. In his session at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Cameron Bahar, Founder and CTO of ParaScale, will skip to the real questions, who is using cloud storage and why? He will detail cloud storage customer examples and the benefits achieved by leveraging this technology.
VMware’s recent SpringSource acquisition, the Java widgetry folk, is moving to Spring 3.0, a major release of its vaunted Java development framework for building web and service-based applications. It announced a feature-complete release candidate Monday and expects to go to GA soon.