Well, no invitation to the supposedly thinner 7.85-inch iPad mini’s unveiling materialized last week as most of the press corps predicted. So now according to All Things Digital the widget, whose existence Apple hasn’t acknowledged, will appear October 23, three days before Microsoft is scheduled to trot out its Apple-rivaling Windows 8 Surface tablets. The mini’s price is rumored to be $249 or $299 with 8GB of storage. Apple is supposed to post its quarterly numbers on October 25. It’s supposed to have 10 million mini units on order this quarter.
Chatterboxes in the Apple supply chain have got the rumor mongering US press, including the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Apple has placed orders for more than 10 million 7.85-inch iPad minis to be delivered in Q4. Apple of course hasn’t acknowledged the existence of such a dingus although this Wednesday it’s supposed to send out invitations to the thing’s grand unveiling next week. The number of minis on order is reportedly twice the number of Kindle Fires Amazon is planning on making. The Fire and Google’s Nexus 7 are assumed to be the baby iPad’s biggest rivals.
Before the trial that led to Samsung being told to paid Apple over a billion dollars in damages for infringing its patents, Apple propose they cut a cross-patent license but they couldn’t agree on terms. The proposal came to light when the court unsealed some documents this week. It’s in a three-page letter dated April 30 from Apple’s IP licensing director Boris Teskler to his counterpart at Samsung Seongwoo Kim. Apple offered to license Samsung's 3G/UMTS patents on FRAND terms of 33 cents a device instead of the sky-high 2.4% of the selling price the Korean company was demanding. In return Apple would license Samsung its standards-essential UMTS patents for the same 33 cents a device.
Oracle has formally advised Judge William Alsup that it intends to appeal the verdict in its patent and copyright suit against Google and Android. Judge Alsup, you’ll remember, decided Oracle’s Java APIs weren’t copyrightable, an issue it’s got to prevail on in its appeal. Whether Oracle or Google wins at the Federal Circuit, FOSS Patents thinks the issue could get to the Supreme Court eventually. Oracle also needs to defeat Google’s fair use defense. FOSS thinks the judge’s instructions to the jury were confusing and prejudiced Oracle’s case because the jury couldn’t decide the point although it did find that Google infringed.
Red Hat is looking for a new name for the open source JBoss Application Server, a k a JBossAS, because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has gotten bigger than just Java. So it’s staging a community election to rechristen the widgetry with a name that reflects polyglot programming and support for Java EE-alternative frameworks like Spring. In a press release issued Monday Red Hat said it is “embracing the evolution of transformational technologies such as dynamic service fabric, cloud, NoSQL, mobile and multi-language polyglot computing as part of its product strategy. To mark this evolution, Red Hat plans to enable broader developer access to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform product, and will be holding an open election to select a new name for the JBoss Application Server community project.” It’s hoping for quicker evolution.
If they plan to remain viable in today’s markets, now is the time for real estate firms to make some dramatic changes by offering intelligent amenities in their commercial properties. How do we prop up our dying shopping center? How do we develop and maintain more business for our stadium? How do we raise our commercial properties’ occupancy from 45% to 85%? These questions are being asked more and more in the commercial real estate industry as the economy remains in a slump in many locations. Many executives are baffled because their usual management techniques are not working. In addition, assessments and property appraisals that overlook or discount technology within the property’s infrastructure are inadequate at best, and totally erroneous at worse.
There is truly a difference in terms of scope, application and business need between security "in" the cloud and security "from" the cloud. No, this isn't 7th grade English...I promise. With all the important decisions IT departments make, what’s the big deal whether cloud security means from the cloud, in the cloud, of the cloud or for the cloud. Well, a lot. Amongst the various media, blogs, professional chatter, webinars, conferences and the like, the concept of cloud security is getting a significant amount of airplay. However, the difference in the application of a simple preposition completely alters the scope and meaning of these conversations to that of a problem or a solution.
Cisco has bought start-up vCider for its expertise in developing virtual network overlay technology for secure data center infrastructure. The price wasn’t disclosed. GigaOm rates it as a counter to VMware buying Nicira, which, it says, “has strained the once close partnership between Cisco and VMware.” It figures it’ll be used “to build a unified yet distributed Cisco-based cloud.” The new prize will be integrated into Cisco’s Cloud Computing organization, reporting to cloud CTO Lew Tucker, the vice-chairman of the new OpenStack Foundation. In a blog posting Cisco said it expects vCider to play an important part in its Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, particularly in support of OpenStack, a key pillar of Cisco’s open, multi-hypervisor, multi-stack cloud computing strategy.
Press reports claim Apple is going to announce its unconfirmed iPad mini tablet on Wednesday, October 17 and a major Apple investor told Fortune that he heard from multiple sources that Apple will send out invitations on October 10. The mini is supposed to have a 7.85-inch screen compared to the classic iPad’s 9.7-inch screen. The cheaper widget would compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Android, which are offering smaller, cheaper alternatives to the market-defining iPad. Google, for instance, now has its own seven-inch Nexus tablet selling for $199 and Amazon’s got a Kindle Fire priced at $159. iPad starts at $499.
AMD said Monday that it’s going to contribute to the Sumatra OpenJDK Project, which is focused on bringing heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments. Sumatra will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to let applications take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).
Late Monday Judge Lucy Koh lifted the temporary injunction she ordered in June forbidding Samsung to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the United States. She said the jury that decided Samsung should pay Apple $1.05 billion for infringing its patents didn’t find that it infringed the Apple D'889 design patent that the injunction was based on. “Thus, the sole basis for the June 26 preliminary injunction no longer exists.” The jury did find the Tab infringed two other Apple patents and Apple may get the jury’s D'889 finding overturned after a hearing scheduled for December 6.
In an odd, unexpected, unusual, and perhaps Byzantine move, Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility has dropped its second ITC complaint against Apple. It was filed in August right before a California jury found Samsung guilty of infringing and awarded Apple $1.05 billion. In the complaint Motorola charged Apple with infringing seven patents that aren’t standards-essential. The ITC formally took the case two weeks ago and on Monday reassigned it to Administrative Law Judge Theodore Essex, who handled Microsoft’s ITC complain against Motorola. Motorola Tuesday moved “to terminate all claims in this investigation without prejudice,” which means it could re-file. It also said there was no deal of with Apple.
Because Apple only managed to sell a record five million iPhone 5s over the weekend – not as many as Wall Street bulls thought – and admittedly can’t keep up with demand, it’s perceived as having component issues blamed on its new thinner, lighter, bigger in-cell touch screen, which combines the display and the touch sensor into a single part. The dingus is made by LG Display. Apple also pulled in Sharp but the Japanese company, hobbled by defects, couldn’t get the product out before the iPhone launch according to Barclays, which thinks it will have 10 million in-cell panels available this quarter.
Apple filed papers with the Federal Circuit Tuesday to head off Samsung’s request for the appeals court tell District Court Judge Lucy Koh to lift the injunction on its Galaxy Tab 10.1. Samsung’s trying to get the remand ahead of Judge Koh overruling the jury and finding that Samsung infringes Apple’s D'889 tablet design patent on which the injunction is based. Samsung originally said enjoining the tablet wouldn’t have a significant impact on its business because it was near the end of its life then wanted its statements redacted but Judge Koh left them in the record. Apple’s counting on those statements coming home to roost.
Google appears to be perfectly happy to let Apple dangle in the wind and not rush to take advantage of complaints about its newfangled maps program by putting an iOS 6-compatible Google Maps application on the market. The Verge, however, claims Google was blindsided when Apple unilaterally announced in June that it would drop Google Maps from its widgets because their Google Maps arrangement had more than a year left to run. The announcement forced Google to scramble to develop an iOS 6 app and it won’t be able to ship anything for several months. The Verge says Apple felt the Google Maps for iOS that it bundled was falling years behind the Android program, missing popular items like turn-by-turn navigation. Apple’s new maps have that missing ingredient.
Enterprise Framework service in Datapower environment is a service implementation to minimize the exposure of ports and their configuration on firewall. All services running inside the Datapower need to be installed on the appliance IP address and on the port. As the number of services increase on the appliance, it does create complexity and following underline issues to any environment.
Although Apple quickly fixed their delete test page that caused problems with user's wifi connections on their new iPhone 5s, that is not the real issue. There is still a huge issue with iOS 6 and possibly iPhone 5 hardware. The forums are buzzing with users having issues and returning phones. Apple is currently silent on the issue. I have the same problems. iOS 6 causes iPad 2 wifi issues. The signal has a very short range, the speeds are slow, and the connection constantly drops.
Apple put out a statement Monday morning saying it sold over five million iPhone 5s since Friday. It’s not as many as the eight or 10 million Wall Street has been talking about, which may be why the stock is down 2% pre-market. The company said the “incredible” demand for the phone “exceeded the initial supply and while the majority of pre-orders have been shipped to customers, many are scheduled to be shipped in October.” It had CEO Tim Cook say that “stores continue to receive iPhone 5 shipments regularly and customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date. We appreciate everyone’s patience and are working hard to build enough iPhone 5s for everyone.”
Apple wants the judge who presided over its case against Samsung for egregious copying to tack another $707 million in damages onto the jury’s $1.05 billion verdict and really, really wants a permanent injunction on Korean products that infringe its patents, including Samsung’s new flagship Galaxy S III phone.
The ability to conduct effective performance testing has become a highly desired skillset within the IT industry. Unfortunately, these highly sought-after skills are consistently in short supply. "Front-end testers" can work with a tool to create a realistic load and although this is an important skillset, creating the load is just the beginning of any performance project. Understanding the load patterns and tuning the environment makes the unique talents of a "performance engineer" worth their weight in gold. Performance engineers require skills in data analysis such as resource usage patterns, modeling, capacity planning, and tuning in order to detect, isolate, and alleviate saturation points within a deployment. Performance testing generates concurrency conditions and exposes resource competition at a server level. When the competition results in a resource (such as a thread pool) becoming over-utilized, this resource becomes a bottleneck or a saturation point. Performance engineers need to first understand the underlying architectures and develop a sense of where to look for potential scalability issues. Much of these "senses" or skills come from experience, working in many multi-tier environments and successfully tuning bottlenecks. Here are some tips to make the challenging but rewarding transition from a front-end tester to a performance engineer.
According to the smart money at the Linley Group and AnandTech Apple developed the A6 ARM chip it’s using in the iPhone 5 – something it’s not talking about –and it’s probably having the widget made by Samsung on its 32nm process, which may account for why it’s 22% smaller and doubtlessly cheaper than the A5. If the dingus has 2x the performance of the A5 like Apple says it’s probably got two custom CPU cores (unless it’s three) clocking roughly 1.2GHz, less than it might to save power. Linley says a month after Apple bought low-power processor start-up PA Semi for $278 million in April of 2008 it cut a secret deal with ARM for a rare instruction set architecture license so it could develop its own ARM-compatible CPUs.
1972: Most commonly used languages (Cobol, Fortran, Algol, PL/1, Basic, APL) all had complicated syntax. The prevailing thought process was to add new language syntax for every new feature. Writing a compiler for such languages was a nightmare. Then came “C”. The syntax was simple and could easily be parsed. Compiler could be lightweight. Every additional feature were added though a function library. This was a paradigm shift. Syntax of most popular languages (Java, C++, C#, JavaScript) are C like. 2001: The focus was on formal, well specified software development processes. You had SSAD, OOAD, and RUP. SEI had just released its CMM framework.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh, responsible for the Apple-Samsung trial, refused Monday evening to lift the three-month-old preliminary injunction forbidding Samsung to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the US. She said she didn’t have jurisdiction and bounced the issue to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit but told the appeals court that Samsung’s motion raises “substantial issues” that must be addressed and anticipated the appeal court kicking the question back to her.
Today will be a very interesting day for those companies that quite rightly have supported the iOS platform in their Enterprise... September 19 is the day that Apple will release iOS 6 to the iPhone and iPad user base. Apple have a great upgrade process, that over the last few versions have allowed updates to be downloaded and applied OTA (over the air), easily by the device user. So the upgrade is only a click away and for some users it is far too tempting! Ask yourself, "Are we ready?". For companies that either embrace consumerization via BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) or support CYOD (Chose Your Own Device) which is akin to Corporate Controlled Consumeriszation, today could be a day where some apps may not work quite the way they should. This is NOT very common, but if gone unchecked, could stop your mobile strategy in its tracks, costing time, money and lost opportunities.
My wife and I are going to do something we have never done before. We are going to get up early on Friday morning and drive to our local (everything is local in Boise) Apple store so we can report on the silly crowds standing in line to get the new iPhone 5. If by chance we happen to end up in the store and our iPhones get upgraded C'est la vie. The things we do for our readers... Ever since Apple announced the new iPhone 5, each time I open my iPhone there are apps that need updated. This reminded me of the impact hardware and operating system updates have on enterprises. In the old days (four years ago), Microsoft would rarely update their mobile OS, and when they did you would have many months of advanced notice. Today, all you have are rumors up to the very day of the announcement. This can cause problems for custom built native applications in the enterprise.