IBM is buying privately held security ISV Q1 Labs, whose software is used to detect hacking threats and attacks through real-time data analysis. Terms were not disclosed. Q1 Labs, which competes with HP’s ArcSight acquisition and EMC’s RSA unit, will become part of a new IBM Security Systems Division to be run by Q1 CEO Brendan Hannigan and combine 10 other security acquisitions IBM’s made in the last few years.
In the fashion of the times Adobe is building a cloud and in the fashion of Adobe it’s called the Creative Cloud. Adobe calls it a major “transformative” new initiative. It’s meant to sell classic Adobe desktop and newfangled tablet applications. Adobe’s got a half-dozen cross-platform Touch Apps for content creation on tablets, Android to start in mid-November, Apple next year despite Apple’s rejection of Adobe’s Flash widgetry. In response to Apple’s distain Adobe seems to be moving increasingly to the more acceptable HTML 5. For instance, it’s buying Vancouver-based Nitobi Software, which makes PhoneGap, an open source platform for building cross-platform HTML5- and JavaScript-based mobile apps and donating its code to the Apache Software Foundation.
While it makes sense to take a strategic approach towards collaboration software, as a tool which will have far reaching effects on how a business operates, oftentimes, businesses opt for collaboration software in response to an immediate problem. This is a first of a series of informative articles we will feature on the HyperOffice blog [...]
With the onslaught of mobile devices and platforms from multiple vendors, the current technology underpinnings of mobility solutions are in a state of flux. With the hype surrounding the hardware and software offerings across the mobility solutions, it is a challenge for enterprises to differentiate between the offerings and also to plan for enterprise mobility strategies. Across the solutions, however, there are four distinct patterns that have emerged, which are fundamental to the underlying architecture of various mobility solutions. Each of these patterns solves a broad usecase and has their own advantages and disadvantages. Understanding these patterns provides enterprises a clear view of evaluating multiple solution offerings, compare the pros and cons and also determine a mix of technologies that they can adopt for strategic mobile offerings.
With his passing just six weeks after stepping away from his role as CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs has made Wednesday, October 5th, 2011, one of those days that many of us will remember for the rest of our lives - a day when someone whose shining brilliance and persistence brought him victory after victory throughout the past four decades. The only thing that beat him, and even that took seven years, was pancreatic cancer.
Steve Jobs has died. Apple has put out an announcement saying, “We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.” Jobs, who only resigned as Apple’s CEO on August 24, has been fighting pancreatic cancer for years. He was 56 and died too young for all his gifts to flourish.
Seems we will probably be deprived of the spectacle of Oracle going after Google and Google doing a lot of whimpering because it looks like the Oracle v Google trial over Google’s use of Java, which is set to start on Halloween, will probably be postponed to give precedence to a big unrelated criminal trial. The FOSS Patents blog says that the trial judge, William Alsup, is making postponement noises. It says he “just put in a new ‘notice re pretrial conference,’ which says that the Oracle-Google trial ‘will likely be postponed’ and that the Halloween trial date ‘will not yet be vacated’ though it ‘now seems unlikely’ to work out.”
The Jelastic platform as a service enables any Java application to run in the cloud. Hivext Technologies has announced free beta availability of Jelastic, which runs any Java application in the cloud without code changes. Java applications can be uploaded in minutes without changes to code or programming language and with no need to write for specific APIs (application programming interfaces). Application developers can choose which stack components they want and need, and their application will run and can scale easily on the Jelastic platform. In addition, the company announced its first hosting partners – ServInt, in the U.S., and Host Europe, for Europe – that will offer Jelastic to Java developers. “Application developers can leverage existing Java skills on the Jelastic platform, which is the world’s first cloud platform to host and auto-scale any Java application," said Ruslan Synytsky, CEO, Hivext Technologies. “Our mission is very simple: we make it easy to run Java code from the cloud, without locking customers into a single vendor.” Jelastic supports any JVM-based application including pure Java 6 or 7, JRuby, Scala and Groovy. During the beta program, SQL databases supported are MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Non-SQL database support is provided for MongoDB and CouchDB. Supported application servers include Tomcat 6 and 7, GlassFish and Jetty. Jelastic provides load balancing and caching though integrated nginx, and developer tools integration via Maven and Ant plug-ins.
Salesforce CEO and sometime drama queen Marc Benioff claimed on Twitter Tuesday night that Oracle had canceled his keynote speech entitled “Welcome to the Social Enterprise” scheduled for 10:15 the following morning at Oracle OpenWorld. He said he was moving it to a restaurant in the St Regis because “The show must go on! Sorry Larry!” Oracle said the speech wasn’t canceled just moved to Thursday morning at 8am due to “overwhelming attendance” at the conference. Oracle, however, is hosting a concert Wednesday night featuring Sting and Tom Petty so only party poopers are expected to be up and out early Thursday morning, making rescheduling tantamount to a cancellation.
This is a great place to start learning Java. I think the book is good for beginners to start learning Java, as well as great reference for those experienced with Java. The book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs. It uses javac and java commands to compile and run. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. Both worked fine, but I also have an interest in learning to use IntelliJ IDEA. The book covers the Java language, the Java Library, Software Development with Java Beans, Swing, Servlets, and ends with building 2 sample applications.
Apple and Samsung could have a decision on whether Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be temporarily banned in Australia next week pending trial for patent infringement. As part of the drama the Wall Street Journal said the court heard evidence from Apple’s then-chief patent counsel Richard Lutton that Steve Jobs tried to head off hostilities last year because Samsung was such a large supplier to Apple. Obviously since their litigation has gone global his phone call was futile. Some weeks ago Samsung informally agreed to withhold the challenged tablet from the Australian market until the court rules. It countersued in Oz on September 17 charging the iPhone and iPad with infringing seven of its patents.
Apple and Samsung could have a decision on whether Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be temporarily banned in Australia next week pending trial for patent infringement. As part of the drama the Wall Street Journal said the court heard evidence from Apple’s then-chief patent counsel Richard Lutton that Steve Jobs tried to head off hostilities last year because Samsung was such a large supplier to Apple. Obviously since their litigation has gone global his phone call was futile. Some weeks ago Samsung informally agreed to withhold the challenged tablet from the Australian market until the court rules. It countersued in Oz on September 17 charging the iPhone and iPad with infringing seven of its patents.
Samsung has offered Apple some kind of deal so it can put its Galaxy Tab 10.1 on the Australian market next week, or so a federal court in Sydney was told Friday, according to reports by both the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. Apple has been seeking a temporary injunction from the court to block the device from being sold. It accuses the Galaxy Tab of being a dead ringer for its own iPad in an infringement of its patents, the same thing it’s told courts on three other continents. Terms of the proposed armistice were not disclosed and Apple’s lawyer Steven Burley said the company would need time to consider it. Perhaps he was just being polite since he has claimed the Galaxy would launch with the “velocity of a fire hose” – impacting iPhone and AppStore sales as well as the iPad because buyers would become “Android people.” However, he did reportedly say that Samsung’s “inconvenience would be diminished and we would be comforted” through the secret proposal.
Last week Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said during a conference call with analysts that Autonomy was shopped to Oracle before HP bought it and that he was appalled at the price asked. He also said he didn’t need Autonomy because unstructured data can already be added to Oracle’s database, a better solution than a standalone unstructured product. What Larry said about Autonomy being shopped around jibed with what the rumor mill had been saying but then Autonomy chief Mike Lynch told the Wall Street Journal it wasn’t true that Autonomy was shopped to Oracle– (and that Larry’s grasp of the way unstructured data should be handled was dodgy) – although he conceded that some investment banker might have thrown out Autonomy’s name as a possible buyout candidate for Oracle. He also said that Oracle builds products using Autonomy technology.
China’s Lenovo and Taiwan ODM Compal Electronics are going to form a joint venture that Lenovo, which hopes to dislodge Dell as the world’s second-largest PC vendor this year, expects will expand its PC production capacity. They’re going to open a new manufacturing center in Hefei, a town in eastern China. The pact, the first joint venture between a PC brand and a contract manufacturer, calls for the pair to invest $100 million to start, followed by an additional $200 million in the next 18 months depending on business conditions and capacity expansion.
Collin Stewart chip analyst John Vinh, who doesn’t follow RIM, thinks the company “has stopped production of its PlayBook and is actively considering exiting the tablet market.” He claims Quanta has stopped making the things and last week laid off a thousand production workers at the plant where it was making the widgets. He says RIM “has canceled development of additional tablet projects.” RIM denied it, calling the report that it stopped production “pure fiction” and claimed to remain “highly committed to the tablet market.” Undeniably, however, Best Buy, Staples and Office Depot have cut prices on the $500 dingus in some cases by as much as $200 and RIM itself cut prices by $100 in Canada last week.
Comparing itself to kryptonite, Violin Memory thinks it’s got the stuff in hand to put an end to classic mechanical storage arrays in the data center. The disk arrays would be replaced by Violin’s built-from-the-ground-up 6000 Series NAND flash Memory Arrays, which it calls the industry’s first all-silicon storage systems. They’re supposed to have the reliability, performance and economics to be deployed as mission-critical primary storage. The 6000’s “Rack in a Box” skills extend to virtualization, private and public clouds, and Big Data initiatives. The company says its approach to flash aggregation created a completely hot swappable platform that accelerates all business-critical applications, allowing them to be virtualized and deployed in private clouds.
HTML5′s local storage is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and most talked about features in the HTML5 technology stack. Local storage is part of Web Storage specification and is supported by all modern browsers (destkop and mobile). Although local storage (or Web Storage) sounds rather sophisticated, the functionality is very easy to use. You basically get a map as storage inside the browser (available to all browser windows). You can insert, delete or read key/value pairs. That’s it. Data stored in local storage (localStorage) will be there when you close and open the browser. There is also session storage (sessionStorage). As the name implies, it will be only available as long as the browser window is open, and will be cleared when browser window is closed. The only other thing to know is that data saved by a page is only available for a pages from the same domain. In other words, a page loaded from abc.com, doesn’t have access to data saved by page from domain xyz.com.
The development of IT environments have naturally led to complexity. Put it down to the very nature of capitalism. Different vendors working together to achieve a common goal isn’t a common occurrence. Each vendor has over the years developed its own monitoring and reporting systems. This is all well and good for each specific application or system. It doesn’t work effectively when applications are executing across an IT enterprise comprised of everything from mainframe to cloud. Many of these cost are so ingrained into the IT system they aren’t perceived for the real impact they actually make on the business’ bottom line. For example, how much does it cost to maintain the service desk? If customers are submitting more help tickets than IT is catching ahead of time, then the business is losing money through the service desk.
Apple watchers are now pretty convinced that Apple will unveil the iPhone 5 next Tuesday since it sent the press a very pointed invitation to “talk iPhone” on its Cupertino campus. Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook is expected to usher the widget out. Reports continue to claim the thing won’t be available in shops until mid-October.
Terracotta, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Software AG, is out with a new release of BigMemory, the widgetry that bypasses Java garbage collection to enable caches over 1 terabyte. With commodity terabyte servers now coming out of Dell, HP, Oracle and IBM, the upgrade promises to let a Java application gorge on tens of terabytes of in-memory data at microsecond speed. The refreshed widgetry has added Automatic Resource Control (ARC), which dynamically allocates memory resources across multiple data caches and does automatic load balancing. Terracotta claims ARC “changes the game for in-memory data management” by giving users control over their memory resources and relieving them of the cost of trial-and-error iterative tuning. It’s supposed to do memory-based cache sizing at individual cache as well as grouped CacheManager levels.
This book is great for the person who is new to Java and new to programming. Let’s first set the context of my normal skillset. I am a .NET Software Architect and Developer. I have been 100% in the .NET world since 2001 (with a very little sprinkling of VB6). I recently decided to expand my skillset into the Java and iOS world. This is the first book on my long journey into the world of Java. I think this book is great for the person who is new to Java and new to programming. Although the book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs, that does not take away from the book's learning quality. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. The book covers the core language in-depth, has a short chapter on Swing, briefly introduces applets, but does not touch on Servlets. The book covers Data Types and Operators, Control Statements, Classes, Objects, Methods, Packages, Interfaces, Exception Handling, Inheritance, I/O, Multithreading, Enumerations, Autoboxing, Static Import, Annotations, Generics, Applets, Events, introduces Swing, and using Java's Documentation Comments.
Let’s first set the context of my normal skillset. I am a .NET Software Architect and Developer. I have been 100% in the .NET world since 2001 (with a very little sprinkling of VB6). I recently decided to expand my skillset into the Java and iOS world. This is the first book on my long journey into the world of Java. I think this book is great for the person who is new to Java and new to programming. Although the book does not use an IDE to create, compile, and run the programs, that does not take away from the book's learning quality. I used both the SDK command lines and the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition to compile and run the programs. The book covers the core language in-depth, has a short chapter on Swing, briefly introduces applets, but does not touch on Servlets.
After two days of apparently futile settlement talks, Oracle and Google have been ordered to give up their Saturday and on October 1 take one more stab at resolving Oracle’s claims that Google’s Android operating system treads on Oracle’s Java patents. Meanwhile, Oracle has been told to review its patents claims by September 29. The judge is hoping against hope it’ll abandon some of its 21 claims (seven patents, three claims per patent) simply to make the case more manageable. Therefore, it’s still not clear whether the trial, set to start October 31, will actually come off or be stayed in whole or in part pending re-examination of Oracle’s patents by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). Patent blogger Florian Mueller thinks Oracle will accept a stay rather than abandon too many of its claims since, as the judge has decreed, it would have to give up whatever it abandons for all time against Google. And a stay could run a year or two.
FedEx has cut its earnings guidance for the year ending in May on the expectation that shipment volumes will be weak. Demand for the consumer electronic gadgets made in Asia, particularly in China, has dropped. CFO Alan Graf said that though the slowdown extends to perishable foods, high-end apparel and automotive and industrial parts, “the primary driver of the reduced demand is lower sales of electronics products.” The slide started in July and is impacting Taiwan contract manufacturers like Compal and Quanta. So it looks like the holidays could turn sour. FedEx said retailers are keeping their inventories lean and it’s not predicting a “significant peak” season this year. However, it’s also not predicting a double-dip recession in the US, at least not yet. Graf said, “Our customers’ hair is not on fire. They’re just saying we’re taking it steady as it goes. It just feels completely different than it did back in ’08.” The company’s expecting the soon-to-be-announced iPhone 5 to boost volumes. Seeing momentum in the US “basically stall,” UPS CFO Kurt Kuehn said pretty much the same thing the week before, warning of a “bumpy ride” globally. When it reported its first-quarter results last week Fedex said US shipments fell for the second quarter in a row as the economy failed to grow as much as forecast. FedEx CEO Fred Smith blamed lack of confidence in US and European officials finding economic solutions for the lagging growth. FedEx’ US shipments dropped 3% last quarter; international packages fell 4%; domestic shipments in other countries were up 38%. Sales at FedEx jumped 11% to $10.5 billion. Its earnings were up 22% to $464 million or $1.46 a share. Graf said, “The US and global economy grew at a slower rate that we anticipated during the quarter. While FedEx Ground and FedEx Freight achieved improved operating results despite lower-than-expected growth, the more rapid decline in demand for FedEx Express services, particularly from Asia, outpaced our ability to reduce operating costs. We have slightly reduced our earnings forecast to reflect current business conditions and are aggressively working to adjust our cost structure to match demand levels.” The company’s Express revenues were up 12% last quarter while operating income dropped 19%. Revenues in its ground segment were up 16% to $2.28 billion and ground’s operating income was up 42% to $407 million. Economic worries typically see consumers and businesses switch to cheaper ground shipments to save money. FedEx now figures the best it can put on the bottom line at the end of its year is somewhere between $6.25 and $6.75 a share, down 10 cents from $6.35-$6.85. Wall Street was projecting $6.40. The company’s stock dropped 8.2% to $66.58, its lowest level since 2009 in response. It recovered a point Friday. UPS slipped 3.4% to $62.17 in sympathy. It slipped again Friday. FedEx handles shipments equal to about 4% of the US gross domestic product and 1.5% of the global GDP. It means to raise US rates 3.9% in January, which means UPS will do the same. FedEx’ projections are based on a 1.8% tickle in US gross domestic product this year, down from a previous calculation of 2.5%. Next year it now assumes a 2.5% rise, not 3%. UPS, which is putting $200 million into an expanded air hub in Germany, has said it expects US GDP will return to more normal growth in 2013 although it conceded it could take longer.