Apple has started borrowing money to underwrite the three-year $60 billion share buy-back program it promised stockholders last week. The company is also going to pay out $55 billion in dividends through 2015. It’s issued floating-rate notes maturing in 2016 and 2018 and fixed-rate securities due in 2016, 2018, 2023 and 2043, it said in a regulatory filing, starting with a bond offering worth $17 billion on Tuesday, reportedly the largest non-bank bond offering ever . It was swamped with orders reportedly worth $50 billion.
When you look at the database market, it’s a virtual jungle out there. Those of us in the industry 15 years ago can look back and remember when we only had the option to use a relational database from Sybase, Oracle, Microsoft or IBM. That was pretty much it if you were planning to build a new complex application with persistent storage. Nowadays, the number of options is absolutely brilliant, but this also means you need to do your homework. I found a great visualization of the database market landscape by 451 Research. The similarity to the London underground map is striking.
If you are interested in getting started with Java, or just object oriented programming, this is a great book to start with. The book starts off with a high level overview of the Java platform and goes straight into an example of creating a hello world application. While creating the hello world application the authors take you on a tour of the NetBeans IDE. It then covers the basics of 0bject-oriented programming and the Java programming language. The authors cover objects, classes, inheritance, interfaces, packages, variables, operators, expressions, statements, blocks, and control flow statements. After the introduction chapter the chapters begin to go into detail about each of the topics that were introduced, and many more. I have listed the chapters below.
A panel of the six commissioners at the International Trace Commission Monday tossed out a Motorola claim that Apple’s iPhone 4 was in patent violation, foiling its attempt to get the widget banned in America. Motorola and its parent Google can appeal to the Federal Circuit and Google said it was evaluating its options. Apple was absolved of infringing the fourth of four remaining Motorola patents in the suit, which the ITC ultimately found invalid for want of novelty and obviousness. It was about sensors and programming touch screens so a user’s head doesn’t interfere while talking on the phone. Motorola started with six patents covering IP stuff like signal noise.
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the critical architectural considerations and success factors organizations must internalize to successfully implement, optimize and innovate using next generation architectures.
The cloud has proven to be an attractive cost-efficient and flexible model for many organizations. However, some skepticism remains when it comes to the return on investment for cloud computing and the real costs related to building a hybrid cloud. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Pavan Pant, Director of Product Management for Verizon Terremark, will discuss the challenges enterprises face when migrating their business-critical applications to a cloud environment and how organizations can drive efficiency and value through hybrid cloud models.
Every business wants to protect its confidential financial information. But for an organization like ours, financial information is our entire business. Over the course of a year, Broadridge handles millions of trades worth trillions of dollars, so it’s easy to see how security must be intertwined in everything we do. It was foremost in our minds when we were spun off from our parent company in 2007, because we wanted to grow the business while retaining security as a priority. One data breach, or a few hours of downtime, would cost us millions. We had a team of 55 IT professionals working together for the first couple of years to make sure that our core functions and sensitive information were fully protected. We had several different security solutions on our endpoints that didn’t interact well, so we implemented new security software on all our endpoints, as well as encryption technology. These were all incremental steps toward embracing the latest trend: mobility.
I started my career as a Telecom Engineer for Rational Software in the load testing space back in the late ’90s, and when I look back on the last decade, there were enormous advances in the broader IT world including development methodologies, processing speeds, network speeds, mobile devices (it’s hard to believe the first iPhone was only released 6 years ago). But the question is: Has the world of load and performance testing really changed all that much? Are the missions the same? Are the challenges different? And how can we be prepared for the future of load and performance testing? Let’s start with what hasn’t changed.
Everyone is virtualizing, but are they realizing any of the promised savings? This overview of IBM's new virtualization optimization solutions will show you how integrated Cloud Solutions like SmartCloud Provisioning and SmartCloud Monitoring can deliver the savings virtualization promises. Organizations are using intelligent management and analytics to provide the insight needed to optimize their virtualized infrastructure and dramatically improve availability, reduce data storage footprints and streamline patch management. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dan Carr, an Executive IT Architect at IBM, will review lessons learned from real-world experience.
There suddenly seems to be a run on API management start-ups. First Intel acquired Mashery. Then CA bought Level 7. Now six-year-old 3scale of Barcelona and San Francisco has gotten $4.2 million in funding from Javelin Venture Partners and Costanoa Venture Capital. The round is meant to broaden the start-up’s set of services and bring it to a global audience, enabling more valuable APIs and API delivery by its customers. 3scale claims 200 clients serving over 85,000 application developers including Fortune 500 companies, small businesses and tech start-ups like Skype, FlightStats, Wine.com, 1WorldSync, SITA, PagesJaunes.fr , the French Yellow Pages don’t you know, FullContact and Yummly.
Over the last couple of months I have been talking to more and more customers who are either bringing their Hadoop clusters into production or have already done so and are now getting serious about operations. This leads to some interesting discussions about how to monitor Hadoop properly and one thing pops up quite often: Do they need anything beyond Ganglia? If yes, what should they do beyond it? Like in every other system, monitoring in a Hadoop environment starts with the basics: System Metrics – CPU, Disk, Memory you know the drill. Of special importance in a Hadoop system is a well-balanced cluster; you don’t want to have some nodes being much more (or less) utilized then others. Besides CPU and memory utilization, Disk utilization and of course I/O throughput is of high importance. After all the most likely bottleneck in a Big Data system is I/O – either with ingress (network and disk), moving data around (e.g., MapReduce shuffle on the network) and straightforward read/write to disk.
In a discrete low-key press release API house Apigee said Thursday that it’s getting backing from the CIA’s strategic venture arm In-Q-Tel (IQT) to enhance its widgetry to support the US intelligence community. No number was mentioned. Apigee has already raised $72.1 million in five rounds that included SAP, the German company, four times. The CIA and other spook agencies want to improve their data sharing and figure out what to do with information once they get it, especially since there’s more information than ever before and Apigee is focused on mobile apps, which spew out information like an open fire hydrant during a hot summer in the projects.
A panel of the six commissioners at the International Trace Commission Monday tossed out a Motorola claim that Apple’s iPhone 4 was in patent violation, foiling its attempt to get the widget banned in America. Motorola and its parent Google can appeal to the Federal Circuit and Google said it was evaluating its options. Apple was absolved of infringing the fourth of four remaining Motorola patents in the suit, which the ITC ultimately found invalid for want of novelty and obviousness. It was about sensors and programming touch screens so a user’s head doesn’t interfere while talking on the phone. Motorola started with six patents covering IP stuff like signal noise.
In the most anticipated quarterly report in recent memory, Apple – which a few brief months ago was the largest company in the world before its record stock price collapsed – indicated Tuesday that its growth has tempered and its margins have been crimped. It made $9.5 billion, or $10.09 a share, down 18%, on revenues up 11% to $43.6 billion in the March quarter, against earnings of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 a share, on $39.2 billion in revenue a year ago. It was the company’s first earnings decline and first revenue slowdown in years although it beat Wall Street’s lowered revenue estimates of around $42.3 billion. It also forecast flat revenues of only $33.5 billion to $35.5 billion this quarter against Wall Street expectations of $38.2 billion, which could mean its first year-over-year decline in a very long time.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Commerce, intents to sponsor a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to facilitate public-private collaboration for accelerating the widespread adoption of integrated cybersecurity tools and technologies. This is the first of three notices which must be published over a 90-day period in order to advise the public of the agency's intention to sponsor an FFRDC. DATES: Written comments must be received by 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on July 22, 2013.
Last week, I presented Caching Up and Down the Stack at the Boston Web Performance meetup. It was great to get the chance to present to the 60+ people who came out for the talk. Unsurprisingly, many of the people there knew a lot about caching in all of the different levels I touched on, and some great conversation developed. I covered six of the major areas of caching available to web devs today. On the HTML / JS / CSS side, you can use client asset caches, full-page HTTP caches (like Varnish) and partial template caches. On the back end, you can use generated code caches, manually cache objects in memory or nearby services or even enable your database’s query cache (though, as the audience reminded me, if you’re using MySQL, just don’t. See below for why). Caching at each layer has advantages and disadvantages, and throughout, you’ll only be effective if you know what you’re caching, why you’re caching it and if you measure the improvement of doing so.
In the most anticipated quarterly report in recent memory, Apple – which a few brief months ago was the largest company in the world before its record stock price collapsed – indicated Tuesday that its growth has tempered and its margins have been crimped. It made $9.5 billion, or $10.09 a share, down 18%, on revenues up 11% to $43.6 billion in the March quarter, against earnings of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 a share, on $39.2 billion in revenue a year ago. It was the company’s first earnings decline and first revenue slowdown in years although it beat Wall Street’s lowered revenue estimates of around $42.3 billion. It also forecast flat revenues of only $33.5 billion to $35.5 billion this quarter against Wall Street expectations of $38.2 billion, which could mean its first year-over-year decline in a very long time.
Our fundamental unit of performance data is the trace, an incredibly rich view into the performance of an individual request moving through your web application. Given all this data and the diversity of the contents of any individual trace, it’s important to have an interface for understanding what exactly was going on when a request was served. How did it get handled? What parts were slow, and what parts were anomalous? Over the past year, the TraceView team has been listening to your thoughts on this topic as well as hatching some of our own. Today we get to share the fruit of our labors: Trace Details, redesigned!
Hibernate is one of the most used ORM Java frameworks out there. It is really simple to use, just add few annotations and you’re ready to go. However, it is also really easy to experience strange behaviors and bugs if you don’t respect Hibernate’s best practices. That’s why at Tocea we developed rules to detect coding mistakes and to make sure that your experience with Hibernate will be painless. Our Hibernate repository currently contains 30 rules. Some of them are related to the detection of possible bugs, other treat of maintainability or performance. In this article, we're going to present 4 rules that deal with a famous Hibernate's usage problem : the implementation of equals() and hashCode() methods.
Today's developers want platforms that make innovation faster, less complex, and more efficient. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Gene Eun, Sr. Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle, will provide an overview of Oracle Cloud's easy-to-use, enterprise-grade, and open standards-based platform services. Learn how you can transform the development experience and quickly build applications in the cloud using the tools and techniques developers love and already use today. Gene Eun is Sr. Director, Oracle Cloud at Oracle.
Big Data has made a huge splash in the enterprise world, but the legal and risk management implications are seldom discussed. It’s critical for businesses to assess these issues and develop a proactive strategy to protect the enterprise from costly errors. Corporate policies and regulatory compliance require managing Big Data and information governance issues such as data security and privacy. However, to respond to litigation, professionals must ensure that eDiscovery requirements are addressed. Those who handle records management, security, information privacy and IT must know how to collect, assemble, protect and manage Big Data and respond to changing requirements.
The JBoss Application Server project has been succeeded by widgetry called WildFly described as both a brand refresh and a renewal of Red Hat’s determination to drive the next generation of application server technologies. The name was chosen by members of the open source community on JBoss.org during a special election late last year. Red Hat says it’s supposed to address some of the key forces shaping middleware today, including the shift toward more flexible and modern approaches to application development, open hybrid cloud enablement and Java Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7). It’s also supposed to be a significant opportunity for wider community adoption and involvement.
The easiest way to make your code run faster is to do less. At some point, though, you don’t want to do less. Maybe you want to do more, without it being any slower. Maybe you want to make what you have fast, without cutting out any of the work. What then? In this enlightened age, the answer is easy — parallelize it! Threads are always a good choice, but without careful consideration, it’s easy to create all manner of strange race conditions or out-of-order data access. So today, let’s talk about a different route: event loops.
Many enterprises are pursuing cloud computing to reduce costs and speed time to value, all with lower risk and improved service levels. We've seen many customers succeed by organizing their transformation into distinct, manageable phases: a Journey to the Enterprise Cloud. Service Delivery is an advanced phase of the journey, and provides elasticity, resiliency, automation and self-service capabilities. When the journey is planned and executed correctly, enabling these capabilities does not require upgrades or re-architecting. Instead, meeting these goals is a natural evolution that builds on the earlier phases by employing the relevant features and options.
Before you start to envision and design your cloud, you’ll need to make sure it’s built on a solid architectural foundation. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Matt Mullins, Principal Consultant – Cloud Platform Implementation Engineer with Citrix Systems, will cover critical concepts and principles for architecting your cloud and best practices for supporting multiple workloads from a single cloud platform. You will learn about: Components and architecture of a cloud orchestration How workloads and workload availability drive cloud architecture Sample reference architectures from leading implementations