Intel has gone into the open source Apache Hadoop business with its own distribution, which it calls the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop or simply the Intel Distribution. Its reason for joining the Hadoop push is to sell more high-end Xeon server chips into scalable Hadoop clusters by goosing Hadoop’s development. It also wants to move solid-state memory and its own networking. Obviously it thinks the stuff is pretty fundamental. As part of its effort Intel has added features to the Hadoop widgetry that nobody else has like silicon-based security. That makes Intel’s the only Hadoop distribution to include complete encryption. Since the widgetry supports the AES instructions in the Xeon chip, it’s supposed to maximize Big Data performance and, together with the other improvements Intel has added, promises a 40% performance boost.
A Texas district court Wednesday upheld a jury verdict arrived at in November awarding Internet security firm VirnetX more than $368.2 million after it found Apple and its FaceTime video chat service infringed four virtual private networking patents designed to establish a secure connection between two devices. The court denied Apple’s motion to lower the damages. Apple has to pay VirnetX more than $333,500 a day until the case is settled, a situation supposed to force the companies to come to an agreement on future royalties. Failure to reach an agreement could mean more damages. The iPhone 5, iPad mini, iPod touch and recent Mac computer are all implicated.
Over the past 6 months, CA Technologies has been running IT innovation-related polls on http://www.ca.com/. On average, these 9 polls garnered 660 responses each, and present a stark picture of the challenges and frustrations that come with being an IT leader today.
While some of the results are presented in this recent infographic, it doesn't fully answer the question that, gauging from our...
Have you ever been invited to present a product solution and within a few minutes the audience is thumbing on their mobile devices? Have you ever presented to a remote audience and asked the end "any questions?" and there are none? Here are some tips for giving a great demo. (Credit to this material goes to Peter Cohan of The Second Derivative who presented this material at a workshop I attended and have me permission to write a summary.) "Let me show this awesome product and all its cool features."
If you’ll ask me what would be a job that you always wanted but never got, I’d answered a Technical Evangelist for a large corporation. I know how to do it, I like travel, I like meeting new people, and I can convince that the software I believe in is good for you. But. I [...]
A component is a reusable software entity that is developed and deployed independently. Component based software development has many architectural advantages. In the previous article Componentizing a Monolithic Application in Java, we learnt the need for componentizing applications for getting the benefits of reusability and modularity. In this article let us look at how multi layered application can be componentized. We take the example of a multi-layered POS (Point-Of-Sale) application and understand how the application can be componentized at various layers like presentation, business and persistence layers. Consider a Point-of-Sale (POS) application meant for tracking orders and payments in a restaurant. The POS is used to track the tables being occupied by the guests, orders being made from various tables, and to print bills. Apart from these operational features, the POS application can also be used for restaurant administration. Total number of tables in the restaurant, list of foods sold in the restaurant, their prices, and the associated tax rates can be managed.
Although I started with ColdFusion for application development, I did plenty brochureware sites with HTML. I believe the version was HTML 2.0 for IE 2.0. I lived in the browser world for years doing Cold Fusion, ASP, and HTML sites. When winforms and Smart Client with web services emerged I changed my religion. Since then I have been avoiding the browser whenever possible since. For the past couple of years my extent of using simple HTML has been limited to writing blogs and book reviews. Simple HTML means no ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC. I have used HTML/JavaScript/CSS a lot as a byproduct of building ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications for public consumption. Internal enterprise applications I will still push for using WPF and web services over ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC, but I lose that battle a lot, especially when the developers have never learned WPF (XAML) and have no interest in learning anything new.
The cloud is changing not only how businesses access applications and provide services to their customers, it’s changing the way they view their own employees, according to a recent report. With the impact of cloud computing on data access and the availability of cloud storage, job descriptions are also undergoing change as businesses move to the cloud. This change is transforming IT departments as well as the company as a whole. IT workers are now expected to search for cost-effective cloud computing applications, according to an article on CloudTimes.org. With cloud computing, CIOs can now focus on creating business strategies rather than devote their time to fixing IT problems. There is now a growing demand for cloud strategy consultants, cloud architects and cloud service planners. According to a report released by the Center for Economics and Business Research and EMC, the growing demand for cloud computing services will generate at least 446,000 jobs yearly until 2015.
I have had the opportunity to lead dozens of software development projects which I love doing. I have also had the opportunity to watch dozens of software development project from the sidelines, while working on my own project, or in place as a consultant to accomplish something other than run the development process. From the sidelines I have seen some succeed, some crash and burn, and the rest get close enough to success that the team can sell it as a success. Sometimes the later takes a heck of a sales job. I would say in my book 80% of those sold as successes failed. They either came in well over budget, well beyond their projected delivery date, or delivered such buggy software that the maintenance effort was as big as the development effort. Success to the team simply meant they considered the project over. You will find of those project teams run as fast as they can instead of doing a retrospective study.
Word that contract manufacturer Foxconn had stopped hiring across its Chinese plants sent Apple stock into a tizzy this week on an assumption by the Financial Times that the bottom had dropped out of demand for iPhones, Apple’s bestselling and most profitable product. Foxconn claimed the hiring freeze had nothing to do with iPhone 5 production, which Apple has already said should be less this quarter than last, but happened because more workers came back to work after the Lunar New Year than usual or expected. UBS analysts Steve Milunovich thought maybe it had to do with cutbacks in orders from HP, which represents about 8%-10% of Foxconn sales, ya know, desktop PCs, printers and some servers.
Few, if any, information technology subjects have garnered more attention over the past two years than Big Data. It’s a savior. It’s evil. It’s the killer app of killer apps. And now, according to Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular, “Big Data Is Falling into the Trough of Disillusionment.” This disillusionment is giving me a little bit of Big Data fatigue — at least in the sense that so much buzz is focused on what Big Data can do for marketing and business intelligence departments. Lost amid all the hype and hoopla is the story of how predictive analytics can help IT teams better understand and support the business applications that are the very lifeblood of their enterprise. After all, predicting the right service to offer your online customer won’t help if the customer experiences sluggish application performance.
Flash storage array start-up Violin Memory is storing up greenbacks. According to an amended SEC filing made late last week it’s gotten $96.3 million out of what may become $130 million in new funding. All Things Digital reports hearing the financing was done at an implied valuation of $850 million to fund operations ahead of a delayed IPO that was supposed to come off late last year and is now supposedly targeted for early May. Granted that seems an awful lot of money for just a few months. Violin reportedly filed to go public under that newfangled Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act that lets companies keep their financials hush-hush until close to going public. As of last April Violin had raised $172 million, money that came from Juniper Networks, Toshiba, SAP Ventures, Highland Capital and GE Capital.
Pity IBM won’t say what it spent on mobile last year sans acquisitions, but whatever it was it’s going to double it this year under a big new “ second wave” initiative decreed by its new CEO Ginni Rometty, who has apparently sensed an inflection point that will grow Blue by a few billion dollars. It’s Ginni’s first big initiative, and Mike Riegel, IBM’s VP in charge of mobile solutions, has been heard to say that the rise of mobile connectivity and e-commerce is “bigger than the web.” That makes the new initiative the equal of IBM’s famous push into analytics and the cloud. So, the company is mustering its troops and its 270 mobile patents and its R&D people behind the effort and has carved a new MobileFirst platform out of the products and services bought in by its 10 acquisitions in mobile that it will hawk.
Word that contract manufacturer Foxconn had stopped hiring across its Chinese plants sent Apple stock into a tizzy this week on an assumption by the Financial Times that the bottom had dropped out of demand for iPhones, Apple’s bestselling and most profitable product. Foxconn claimed the hiring freeze had nothing to do with iPhone 5 production, which Apple has already said should be less this quarter than last, but happened because more workers came back to work after the Lunar New Year than usual or expected. UBS analysts Steve Milunovich thought maybe it had to do with cutbacks in orders from HP, which represents about 8%-10% of Foxconn sales, ya know, desktop PCs, printers and some servers.
After you have secured your private electronic information using encryption and learned how to encrypt and digitally sign files for others, how do you extract the information and determine who encrypted the file? Asymmetric public/private key encryption allows you to decipher the information and verify the accompanying digital signature if it exists. This article illustrates how to decrypt and verify the digital signature on files encrypted using a hybrid combination of asymmetric public/private key encryption and symmetric encryption. A symmetric key is used to encrypt the file and the asymmetric public key encrypts the symmetric key. The asymmetric private key decrypts the symmetric key which in turn is used to decrypt the encrypted file.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has evidently called in a few markers and persuaded some of his friends to stand up with him in his legal battle over Java against Google and its Android operating system. On Tuesday, the last day to file amicus briefs supporting Oracle’s appeal of the district court decision flaying Oracle’s infringement case, the Federal Circuit of Appeals was flooded with paper (figuratively speaking) backing Oracle’s position on the copyrightability of APIs and Android’s infringement of Java. District Court Judge Alsup found that “So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API.”
Some cloud-based file sync vendors tout their solutions as viable alternatives for the online backup of business information stored on laptops and desktops. But existing sync products lack a variety of critical backup capabilities, including those required to secure enterprise data. Understanding the differences between cloud-based sync and cloud-based endpoint backup is critical to properly protecting sensitive business information. In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Andrew Renz, Principal Enterprise Engineer at Code 42, will define cloud-based sync and cloud-based endpoint backup, and provide recommendations for which solution type best meets your data needs. He will share wisdom gained from his experience selecting and/or deploying enterprise backup solutions for Apple, Oracle, Expedia and Intuit.
Tuesday when a report by American security firm Mandiant that’s been six years in the making was circulating tracing an “overwhelming percentage” of Communist China’s far-flung corporate and governmental cyber espionage to a 12-story building in Shanghai connected with the People’s Liberation Army know as PLA 61398, the usually secure Apple disclosed that its Macs had been hacked and infected with malware by bad guys leveraging the known vulnerabilities that Oracle doesn’t seen to be able to eradicate from the Java software used as a browser plug-in. Facebook last Friday confessed to experiencing the same infestation.
Tuesday when a report by American security firm Mandiant that’s been six years in the making was circulating tracing an “overwhelming percentage” of Communist China’s far-flung corporate and governmental cyber espionage to a 12-story building in Shanghai connected with the People’s Liberation Army know as PLA 61398, the usually secure Apple disclosed that its Macs had been hacked and infected with malware by bad guys leveraging the known vulnerabilities that Oracle doesn’t seen to be able to eradicate from the Java software used as a browser plug-in. Facebook last Friday confessed to experiencing the same infestation.
There have been quite a lot of rumors these last few weeks with regards to Apple reportedly working on an iWatch. I was wondering what they would gain with such a move? Some have pointed out that they already have the iPod Nano as a simple watch, but this repeats the functionality of the music player and lacks functionality of the full iOS device. Does this mean the age of Dick Tracy is around the corner? Far fetched you think? I would have agreed, but after I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA last week it may not be. The Computer History Museum exhibits hardware up to the year 2000 and it's awesome how far we have gone beyond that in 13 years! So this may not be far off… and trust Apple to make it happen.
Industry-specific clouds are those PaaS, IaaS, and PaaS services that are tailored for a specific vertical, such as transportation, retail, finance, and health care. IDC sees a $65 billion market in these industry solutions for 2013, rising to $100 billion in 2016. The value of industry-specific clouds is that businesses within a vertical can connect to applications, processes, and databases that are pre-defined for that vertical within a public or private cloud. They can extend processes and databases into the business domain, versus defining the data and processes within a generic cloud-based platform. So, are industry specific clouds right for your business? What options are out there? How do you figure out the ROI?
It’s common knowledge that the subscriber growth enjoyed by wireless Communication Service Providers (CSPs) over the last several years is tapering off. The CSPs really need new sources of revenue to deliver the required growth. Over-The-Top (OTT) players on the other hand are moving quickly into the SP ecosystems and reaching out to their subscribers. To top it all, the regulators are encouraging new entrants and driving prices down. In Europe, regulations for low mobile termination rates and new international roaming charges are impacting revenue and profit for CSPs. The growth of mobile data traffic and the customer demands for better and personalized services are forcing CSPs to invest significantly to upgrade their networks and devices. There are a lot more similar challenges that CSPs face; however, the key point is that the CSPs have to focus on new sources of revenue to augment what they generate from their infrastructure, services portfolio and customer base.
Apple has cut the price of its 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop by $200 and updated its processors. It’s also put out new models with faster processors and more memory. It said the MacBook Pro with a Retina display and 128GB of flash memory will now cost $1,499, down from $1,699. A new model with 256 gigs of flash will cost $1,699. The 15-inch model has a faster processor and the same price. Apple put out new MacBook Pro models last fall with flash memory instead of the traditional hard drive, making it thinner and lighter. Mac sales dropped in Q4 down 22% to 4.1 million units.
Oracle Monday appealed the multibillion-dollar Google-Java decision that went horribly against it last year when Android was found not to infringe on its patent or copyrights. It says if works of fiction are protected by copyright, so should the Java language claiming that Google copied a blockbuster literary work and imagining a writer named Ann Droid poaching a Harry Potter book. Groklaw says Oracle had as many as 28 lawyers working on the 200-page and counting brief.
Now that you have the JavaScript skills that you need for using jQuery, you’re ready to learn jQuery. So, in this excerpt, you’ll learn a working subset of jQuery that will get you off to a fast start. When you complete this section, you’ll have all the jQuery skills that you need for developing professional web pages. You can also go on to any of the three sections that follow because they are written as independent modules. If, for example, you want to learn how to use Ajax next, skip to section 4. In this chapter, you’ll quickly see how jQuery makes JavaScript programming easier. Then, you’ll learn a working subset of jQuery that will get you off to a fast start. Along the way, you’ll study four complete applications that will show you how to apply jQuery.