Yahoo! and Gannett are hiring! Join them and recruiters from other top media companies and universities at the ONA09 Career Summit & Job Fair, Thursday, Oct. 1, at the Hilton San Francisco to hear about current openings.
The survey showed that 86 percent of U.S. drivers believe handheld texting while driving is "very dangerous" and 93 percent support a nationwide ban on texting. At the same time, only 42 percent of respondents believe drivers would stop texting behind the wheel if the practice was banned. However, more than 75 percent believe there would be more compliance if hands-free or voice-activated technologies were widely available.
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/3d123b/mobile_wimax_devic) has announced the addition of the "Mobile WiMAX Devices—2009 Global Mid-Year Update" report to their offering. This report provides an update to In-Stat's annual 802.16e, mobile WiMAX, device forecast. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the market in terms of vendor and service provider support for the technology, In-Stat will start updating the forecast twice a year.
Thousands of companies use NetSuite to manage their key business processes, leveraging its Software as a Service (SaaS) design to access invoicing, customer records, inventory, and financial reporting from any Internet-enabled computer. Now, for the first time, iPhone and iPod touch users can access NetSuite functionality using a rich interface designed to run natively on iPhone and iPod touch, adding to the anytime, anywhere features already offered by NetSuite's cloud computing platform. Additionally, if a company has implemented custom fields, custom records, role-based security or custom dashboard elements in their NetSuite account, they will all be seamlessly reflected in the NetSuite app.
Reuven Cohen launched today Cloud Security Journal on Ulitzer. Cloud Security Journal offers dedicated coverage of cloud security & privacy news, practical insights and editorials that give readers a unique virtual perspective of the rapidly evolving area of cloud security, threats and privacy. Reuven Cohen is Founder & Chief Technologist for Toronto based Enomaly Inc. - leading developer of Cloud Computing products and solutions focused on enterprise businesses. Enomaly's products include the Enomaly elastic computing platform, an open source cloud platform that enables a scalable enterprise IT and local cloud infrastructure platform. Cohen is a thought leader in the emerging cloud computing industry and maintains a blog at www.elasticvapor.com.
I have a good one, did you hear the joke about the telco who promised everything and started falling apart at the seems because we wanted it all? This may be the curse of AT&T.
Writing meaningful Java benchmarks is a tricky business. It's well known that the Java Virtual Machine's just in time (JIT) compilation process means that running an application for a few seconds won't let you predict the performance of the application over hours or days of uptime. In spite of this, developers often rely on micro-benchmarks to set performance SLAs for their applications.
SAP (Business Objects) has recently released Crystal Reports for Eclipse version 2.0 to provide reporting solutions for Java-based applications. This is available as free to use (within an organization) and has the advantage that it is built on the most tested and reliable component (Java Reporting Component in Crystal Reports) that has been in market for quite a few years now. This article discusses the features of CR4Ev2.0, usability of its designer and API, and starting off with an overview of Crystal Reports product architecture.
Against all the odds an individual manages to create an annual global 'Peace Day'; but can he inspire an actual ceasefire and silence the cynics by proving the day can actually save lives?
This documentary film follows 75 U.S. soldiers who have sustained debilitating emotional trauma and depression. A series of scenes chronicle their entry into a psychiatric hospital, their treatment and eventual recovery.
The administration of US President Barack Obama is seeking reforms to the country's healthcare system, in order to give 46 million uninsured Americans the opportunity to at last have coverage in the event of illness. Many of those who are uninsured are people with mental illness who were released from health facilities - and on to the streets with nowhere to go - during the 1970s. A large number of these unsupported people turned to crime to make ends meet, and were later imprisoned. Josh Rushing, a reporter for Al Jazeera's Fault Lines programme examines the criminalisation of the mentally ill.
Dell demonstrated the industry’s first Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) solution based on industry standards using technologies from Intel and Citrix to help improve virtualization performance across networked servers and storage. The companies collaborated to develop technology based on PCI-SIG I/O Virtualization specifications and Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d) to allow multiple operating systems to share a physical interconnect
In the summer of 1939 Albert Einstein was on holiday in a small resort town on the tip of Long Island. His peaceful summer, however, was about to be shattered by a visit from an old friend and colleague from his years in Berlin. The visitor was the physicist Leo Szilard. He had come to tell Einstein that he feared the Nazis could soon be in possession of a terrible new weapon and that something had to be done.
This new film delves deeply into the history of the Grove where powerful men make decisions that affect the world but are completely hidden from public scrutiny. The Order of Death details how the Grove has been the backdrop for some of the most earthshattering events in human history including the development of the Starwars program and the Manhattan Project. This is the second version of The Order of Death, with extra footage added
SmartPhones are taking the mobile phone industry by storm. The most popular of these phone brands includes the Apple iPhone, Palm’s Pre and an increasing number of Google Android phones. The challenge for any developer is to build solutions that will run across all of these platforms. There may, however, be an easy way to deliver solutions that work consistently across all of these platforms. That consistent technology is HTML5.
Since its introduction less than six months ago, there has been more than 200,000 downloads of Citrix Receiver for iPhone. Users have ranged from Doctor's to Lawyer's to Systems Admin's, all with a common desire to get their job done whenever and wherever they are.
A round-up of the problems, opportunities and issues being discussed October 6, 2009 in Washington, DC, at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com), a 1-day deep dive into the new wave of Internet-based technologies that are changing the way that Federal agencies leverage, procure and utilize IT.
Ok, so, here are my thoughts on Ulitzer... As a blogger, I focus on traffic and I spend quite a lot of time optimizing my SEO. Since the target audience of my articles is much greater than the reach of my blog, Ulitzer is actually helping me increase my content reach. Moreover, Ulitzer does it in a very fair way since links back to my posts or other locations are without the evil "nofollow" providing a nice SEO boost. It also gives me some good metrics that are very useful data point on the effectiveness of my blog article. And last but not least, it allows my article to appears in news.google.com, which is a very nice channel extension. So, all of these to say that while Utilizer might be seen as a competing channel to bloggers, I think that bloggers should realize the tremendous value it could bring to their blog. I think to materialize this value to bloggers, some sort of WordPress plugin would be very useful. I think that allowing bloggers to show and combined Ulitzer/SYS-CON stats, comments, Tweets/ReTweets with their blog posts would be a killer feature. Another approach would be to expose a simple REST API (just HTTP JSON gets) and do a sample Wordpress plugin showing developers how to integrate Wordpress with Ulitzer. Anyway, just some random thoughts.
With IP networks taking on many new challenges from VoIP, rich multimedia and other high-bandwidth consuming and high-priority applications, SMBs need to be sure the network connectivity between their business and Cloud Computing provider is protected with controls for reliable Internet circuit availability, and for optimizing delivery of traffic to critical applications.
Commoditized from solution to feature, from feature to function, load balancing is no longer a solution but rather a function of more advanced solutions that’s still an integral component for highly-available, fault-tolerant applications.
Unashamed Parody of Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Load balancers: I'm not dead.
The Market: 'Ere, it says it’s not dead.
Analysts: Yes it is.
Load balancers: I'm not.
The Market: It isn't.
Analysts: Well, it will be soon, it’s very ill.
Load balancers: I'm getting better.
Analysts: No you're not, you'll be stone dead in a moment.
Earlier this year, amidst all the other (perhaps exaggerated) technology deaths, Gartner declared that Load Balancers are Dead. It may come as surprise, then, that application delivery network folks keep talking about them. As do users, customers, partners, and everyone else under the sun. In fact, with the increased interest in cloud computing it seems that load balancers are enjoying a short reprieve from death.
They aren’t. Trust me, load balancers aren’t enjoying anything. Load balancing on the other hand, is very much in the spotlight as scalability and infrastructure 2.0 and availability in the cloud are highlighted as issues today’s IT staff must deal with. And if it seems that we keep mentioning load balancers despite their apparent demise, it’s only because the understanding of what a load balancer does is useful to slowly moving people toward what is taking its place: application delivery.
Load balancing is an integral component to any high-availability and/or on-demand architecture. The ability to direct application requests across a (cluster|pool|farm|bank) of servers (physical or virtual) is an inherent property of cloud computing and on-demand architectures in general. But it is not the be-all and end-all of application delivery, it’s just the point at which application delivery begins and an integral function of application delivery controllers.
Load balancers, back in their day, were “teh bomb.” These simple but powerful pieces of software (which later grew into appliances and later into full-fledged application switches) offered a way for companies to address the growing demand for Web-based access to everything from their news stories to their products to their services to their kids’ pictures. But as traffic demands grew so did the load on servers and eventually new functionality began to be added to load 
balancers – caching, SSL offload and acceleration, and even security-focused functionality. From the core that was load balancing grew an entire catalog of application-rich features that focused on keeping applications available while delivering them fast and securely. At that point we were no longer simply load balancing applications, we were delivering them. Optimizing them. Accelerating them. Securing them.
So it made sense that in order to encapsulate the concept of application delivery and move people away from focusing on load balancing that we’d give the product and market a new name. Thus arose the term “application delivery network” and “application delivery controller.” But at the core of both is still load balancing. Not load balancers, but load balancing. A function, if you will, of application delivery. But not the whole enchilada; not by a long shot.
If we’re still mentioning load balancing (and even load balancers, as incorrect as that term may be today) it’s because the function is very, very, very important (I could add a few more “verys” but I think you get the point) to so many different architectures and to meeting business goals around availability and performance and security that it should be mentioned, if not centrally then at least peripherally.
So yes. Load balancers are very much outdated and no longer able to provide the biggest bang for your buck. But load balancing, particularly when leveraged as a core component in an application delivery network, is very much in vogue (it’s trendy, like iPhones) and very much a necessary part of a successfully implemented high-availability or on-demand architecture.
Long live load balancing.
Related blogs & articles:
Did you miss the SYS-CON iPhone developer Summit EAST in New York City which happened June 22-23 2009? Shame on you if you were not there, but do not worry as the guys at SYS-CON.TV recorded an interview with Senthil Krishnapillai of Sybase iAnywhere.
On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry representatives, with one of the industry representatives providing a FedEx case study as the basis for their SOA experiences.
WARNING CONTAINS AN EXTREMELY GRAPHIC VIDEO OF A SHOOTING RESULTING IN DEATH. VIEW AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION. Hassan Haze presents Hood News
WhitePages now reaches more than 2 million mobile users through its iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, SMS and m.WhitePages.com mobile offerings. With popular features like caller identification and reverse phone lookup, click to call, GPS-aware directory services and directions, WhitePages mobile applications are achieving significant adoption.
When it comes to defining Cloud Computing I typically take the stance of "I know it when I see it". Although I'm half joking, being able to spot an Internet centric platform or infrastructure is fairly self evident for the most part. But when it comes to an "OpenCloud API" things get a little more difficult.