A deadlock is a situation where two or more threads are blocked while waiting to obtain locks that some of the other threads in the deadlock are holding. Deadlocks can occur when multiple threads need the same locks, at the same time, but obtain them in different order. For instance, if thread 1 locks A, and tries to lock B, and thread 2 has already locked B, and tries to lock A, a deadlock arises. Thread 1 can never get B, and thread 2 can never get A. In addition, neither of them will ever know. They will remain blocked on each of their objects, A and B, forever. The most common way of detecting whether your application is deadlocked is by analyzing thread dumps of the Java Virtual Machine while its in the state of appearing hung. A thread dump is a snapshot of the virtual machine's current state, including stack traces for each Java thread.
Armed with $3 million, a lot of it from Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s personal account, a start-up called Cloudwords aims to push the gentle art of localization into the cloud. Well, the $20 billion business behind the gentle art of localization at any rate. It’s got a Translation Management Automation (TMA) platform and it claims this native cloud widgetry will do a cheaper, quicker job brokering materials to be translated to real live translators Cloudwords lines up than dealing with, say, SDL, which seems to have a corner on the market. The alternative, it says, is to manage the translation process without any effective tools or pay a few million dollars for on-premise software. TMA comes in two editions, Basic and Professional, and includes a project management platform that’s supposed to be secure, scalable and easy to use.
IBM is buying yet another business analytics outfit. This time it’s UK-based i2, which looks out for crime, fraud and security threats via unstructured Big Data. Financial terms with the investor group headed by Silver Lake Sumeru that owns i2 were not disclosed. I2’s got 4,500 customers in 150 countries in banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail including 12 of the top 20 retail banks globally and eight of the top 10 largest companies in the world. IBM expects to join its real-time analytical solutions with i2’s technologies.
RPost, the Registered Email outfit, has gone into the cloud business, calling its new widgetry the “new global standard for legal electronic messaging.” The RPost Cloud, for that is its name, is targeted at software applications, service providers, developers, IT departments, ye olde postal services and John Q public. The platform will let any of these users, regardless of stripe, lease the RPost infrastructure and transform data into a product, reconcile transactions and return reports to the sender or sending system. It’s supposed to cost pennies and can be done on a message-by-message or user-by-user basis. Its cloud can be used to give data and e-mail messages any of the company’s many services, which roughly fall into four buckets: legally valid proof of delivery and non-repudiation; security, encryption and compliance; secure electronic signatures, contract e-signing and authentication; and collaboration and deliverability.
MapR Technologies, one of the latest Hadoop commercializers, the one with the strategic relationship with EMC, has brought in a $20 million B round led by Redpoint Ventures with Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA tagging along. The money is earmarked for scaling operations. MapR claims its distribution of Hadoop is the only one to provide full HA support, native NFS access, snapshots, mirroring and a full random read/write storage layer. Last week MapR added ExpressLane and Mac client support. ExpressLane makes small jobs complete quickly, even if a cluster is busy, upping MapR’s value for ad hoc analytics. Other Hadoop distributions apparently make them wait their turn.
Despite the shrinking government dollar Intel has formed a brand new Intel Federal LLC subsidiary to “address new opportunities in working with the US government” on HPC, including exascale computing with the Department of Energy and other agencies. It says “Reaching supercomputer performance levels of a hundred times more powerful than today by 2018 will require the combined efforts of both industry and government. An ExaFlop supercomputer’s performance is the equivalent of every person on Earth making about 150 million calculations per second.” The subsidiary is supposed to give Intel “the ability to establish and maintain the unique processes, procedures and controls needed to develop and manage programs with the government.”
The launch of vSphere 5 and its new storage related features will set the precedent for a complete rethink on how a new datacenter’s storage infrastructure should be designed and deployed. vSphere 5’s launch is not only an unabashed attempt at cornering every single aspect of the server market but is also a result for the growing need for methodical scalability that merges the I.T. silos and consequently combines the information of applications, servers, SANs and storage into a single comprehensive stack.
Red Hat is building a policy-based cloud manager meant to spin up, deploy and, well, manage multiple Linux and Windows virtual images, their applications and their necessaries across clouds. It’s called Aeolus presumably after the Greek ruler of the winds. It’s advertised as “freeing users from cloud lock-in by making the choice of cloud provider – private, public, or hybrid – a simple launch-time option.” It’s theoretically supposed to pick the best solution, but it’s also part of Red Hat’s beta IaaS widgetry, CloudForms. Red Hat says it wants Aeolus to be an open source project, but you know how those things go, the butcher never quite gets his thumb off the scale.
Dell has made its first serious cloud move and gone into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business using VMware’s multi-tenant virtualized vCloud Datacenter Services environment hosted in a Dell data center. It’ll provide vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls and catalog capabilities. The widgetry, called simply Dell Cloud, is still in closed beta with a half-dozen customers ahead of expected rollout in the fourth quarter in the US and next year in EMEA and Asia Pacific-Japan. There should be a public beta in September. It’s just a first IaaS move. Dell means to add Azure and OpenStack next year. (Remember earlier this year when Dell said it would put a billion dollars into new data centers?)
The federal judge who oversaw the high-profile trial of SAP last year that ended with the jury awarding Oracle a record $1.3 billion in damages has overturned the decision, agreeing with the German company that the amount is "grossly excessive" and "contrary to the weight of evidence." She lowered the award to $272 million - all she said that Oracle had proven at trial - and told SAP it would get a new trial just on damages if Oracle didn't accept that amount. Looks like it'll be back to court then, your honor. Oracle - as you might expect - issued a statement saying, "There was voluminous evidence regarding the massive scope of the theft, clear involvement of SAP management in the misconduct and the tremendous value of the IP stolen. We believe the jury got it right and we intend to pursue the full measure of damages that we believe are owed to Oracle."
It appears from a WikiLeaks diplomatic cable drop that the US lobbied the European Commission to clear Oracle’s $7.4 million acquisition of Sun and all its satellites. Oracle apparently told the US, and the US apparently relayed the message that Oracle wouldn’t divest MySQL, a condition that would “destroy” the deal, and if Oracle didn’t buy Sun, Sun would go belly up. One of Oracle’s stated reasons for holding on to MySQL was to avoid a huge loss on a property that Sun had overpaid a billion dollars for and Oracle couldn’t unload for anywhere near that price. Deputy chief of the US Mission to the European Union Ambassador Christopher Murray wrote home saying, “The Department of Justice/Antitrust views this matter as a high priority. Its senior officials and investigative staff are currently engaging productively and intensely with their DG Comp [Directorate General for Competition] counterparts and are in close touch with Oracle and Sun in the hopes of preventing a divergent outcome.”
IBM is buying Algorithmics, the Toronto-based risk analytics firm, for $387 million cash. Its services are used by 350 banks, investment and insurance businesses such as Allianz, HSBC, Nomura and Société Générale. The money will go to the Fitch Group, the credit ratings agency majority owned by Fimalac, the Paris holding company. The acquisition will add 900 people to IBM’s Software Group. Blue’s business analytics and optimization team, the result of $14 billion spent on 25 acquisitions the last five years, currently has more than 8,000 consultants including 200 mathematicians with more than 500 patents.
Back in the seventies, I’d been taking entry exams to the Kiev Politechnic Institute (KPI). I lived in the Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union. At that time people of Jewish descent had a really hard time getting into most of the colleges and universities. Typically, there were four entry exams for the engineering majors: the verbal math, the written math, the verbal physics, and essay. There were no such things as multiple choice tests – we had to solve problems. Being a Jewish boy myself, I was raised knowing that getting into college would be extremely difficult for me, and I had to be much better prepared than regular Ukrainian and Russian kids. I was strong in math (can’t say this about the physics though).
While Steve Jobs deserves full credit for incredible achievements not only at NEXT and Pixar, I believe what enabled Steve Jobs to succeed at Apple was his application of the "Apple Brand" to the iPod. Apple Computer always had a cult-like group of followers who were willing to pay a remarkable premium for Apple's Macintosh line of PCs. Moreover, such people (and I was one of them) would not hesitate to vehemently evangelize the Apple vision and brand to any poor soul foolish enough to approach or befriend. For example, when I moved to New York City in or around 1993, I told a friend that I would simply not work for any company that had not chosen Apple as their computer platform. As a result I worked for firms like Ernst & Young (at the time Apple's financial auditor).
Yet several years later I found the burden of wearing the Apple "hair-shirt" too great and decided to defect to the world of PCs and UNIX and all thing outside the narrow little world of Apple. Yet the point I'm trying to illustrate is that Apple always had the ability to capture people's imagination and spirit and that this has been a characteristic of Apple that endured well beyond Steve Jobs's departure. What I believe is the event that unleashed the Apple "idea-virus" (to appropriate Seth Godin's most excellent phrase) is the iPod. Before the iPod a person needed to have a very very high level of faith and independence in order to join the Apple cult. To buy a Mac in 1987 I think the cost was in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars. The number of people at that time who were interested in computers was very small. And within that small group, the number of people who were rich enough to buy a Mac was even smaller. And among that group of the rich, only a subset subscribed to the Macintosh Way (Guy Kawasaki's title for his book on the Apple brand and marketing strategy).
So the problems Apple faced early on never involved the brand itself, the loyalty of the followers, nor did the fervor or loyalty dissipate quickly after Jobs's departure. Rather, the issue was that when selling products to consumers, the "network effect" remains powerful and manifests itself even more acutely in consumer products than it does in business to business products. The real genius of Steve Jobs was to translate what was essentially a misguided approach to market expensive business machines to an approach to selling consumer devices such as the iPod and the iPhone. In other words, the entire winning strategy had been in place from the beginning, it was simply that the number of followers and the pool of people who could potentially be converted was too small.
One could argue that Steve Jobs was ahead of his time, and yet this misses the point. The vision which endures beyond Steve Jobs is that of how to design user experiences. When Jobs applied that vision to a market for business machines, he failed in every case (Apple, NeXT). Yet when Jobs applied his vision to a true consumer market (iPod, iPhone) his vision resonated and brought into sharp relief the difference between the status quo and Apple. Once infected with Steve's vision his iPod users and iPhone users could no longer defile themselves with "unbeliever" desktop, laptop, or tablet computers. So in my opinion once, realized and unleashed in the consumer space, wild horses cannot return the masses to a world where Apple does not thrive and grow.
Oracle and Google may not get to go at each come Halloween depriving onlookers of a real treat. District Court Judge William Alsup told the pair Monday that the trial may have to be postponed. It all depends on whether a “large criminal” trial starts, as scheduled, on October 17. If it doesn’t then Oracle v Google will pick a jury on October 19 and the trial will start October 31. Then on Tuesday the judge said there were going to be two Java trials: one on liability, one on damages and that he’s appointed Brigham Young University professor of economics James R. Kearl as an independent damages expert.
This is another section that is broader than one would first imagine. There’s a reason that many large organizations employ dedicated database administrators. That said, this doesn’t prevent the average sysadmin from making some changes to enhance performance on their database. The easiest way to start on this is to utilize a script to automatically check your configuration options and make suggestions based on status variables MySQL sets. I’ve had good luck with a script called mysqltuner.pl. You can visit the project page at GitHub here: https://github.com/rackerhacker/MySQLTuner-perl. This script can be conveniently pulled with: wget mysqltuner.pl
Samsung won’t be selling or advertising any Galaxy Tab 10.1s in Australia before September 30. The Korean company agreed to a second blackout reportedly at the urging of a court down under that thought it would be right stupid for Samsung to follow through on its plans to field an allegedly different Australian version of the widget the week of September 12 only to have to withdraw it if Apple prevails at a formal hearing set for September 26 and 29 to sort out Apple’s motion for an injunction. Samsung followed through on its commitment to deliver three copies of the so-called modified Australian model of the Tab to Apple last week and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Apple thinks the device still infringes on at least two of its patents. As FOSS Patents case watcher Florian Mueller expected the modifications cost Samsung some functionality – well, at least according to Apple’s lawyers. Samsung’s lawyers say not. Florian says “The whole story of the Australian product being ‘different’ enabled Samsung to delay a formal decision by a month, and today Samsung was apparently afraid of a formal court decision against it and therefore agreed to delay the product launch once again. At this point Samsung can claim that it entered into this agreement ‘voluntarily,’ although it’s clear to an increasing number of people that Samsung is under serious pressure. But formally, an agreement is always voluntary, unlike a court ruling against someone’s opposition.” Apple is now supposed to explain to Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett, who owns an iPad, exactly what patents the reworked Samsung gismo infringes by September 2 and get into more detail by September 5. The Morning Herald said that “top executives and inventors from both Apple and Samsung may appear in person or over video link to explain their patents.” Samsung, meanwhile, is threatening to bring a countersuit against Apple’s iPad as well as challenge the validity of Apple’s patents. In a separate case Samsung Germany is forbidden to sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 anywhere in Europe.
The case for using developer testing as one mechanism for improving software quality.
VMTurbo, the two-year-old start-up doing application performance-directed intelligent workload management software, has hired former Citrix Xen Products Group general manager Louis Shipley as president and CEO. He replaces VMTurbo founder Shmuel Kliger, who will now focus on product and technology strategy as well as strategic partnerships. The outfit claims thousands of organizations worldwide, including British Telecom, NASA and Colgate-Palmolive, are using its year-old widgetry. It’s supposed to deliver Quality of Service (QoS) for virtualized mission-critical apps, using an economic scheduling engine to dynamically adjust resource allocation to meet business goals. Shipley has done the CEO gig a couple of times before. VMTurbo is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
VMware’s got a beta of its promised Micro Cloud Foundry, a Mac or PC laptop version of its open PaaS for building and testing end-to-end cloud applications locally. It’s out as a free download and available as a downloadable VM image. It’s supposed to save on configuring middleware without sacrificing scalability. It runs in a local virtual machine and offers a choice of frameworks, application infrastructure services and clouds in which to deploy applications. The widgetry supports Spring for Java, Ruby on Rails and Sinatra, Node.js, Grails and other JVM-based frameworks including Scala Lift, MongoDB, MySQL and Redis application services. VMware vFabric services are coming.
SYS-CON Events announced today that UShareSoft, a provider of a self-service cloud factory for virtual and cloud-ready software images, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 9th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 7–10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. UShareSoft simplifies application migration and software governance for the cloud. UShareSoft's UForge Appliance Factory enables "build-to-order" software delivery by automating the creation, maintenance and deployment of software appliances and image templates on any OS for any cloud, virtual or physical format. UShareSoft tools are helping hosting providers, ISVs and enterprises in their transition phase to the cloud.
There is now a new Amazon web service called ElastiCache meant to put users closer to frequently accessed data and maybe ward off some Amazon competition. It’s supposed to make it easy to deploy, operate and scale an in-memory cache for any web application running in Amazon’s cloud, reportedly granting Amazon customers one of their most fervent wishes, and replacing what AWS CTO Werner Vogels calls homegrown “operational muck.” It improves the performance of web applications by retrieving data from a fast, managed, in-memory cloud caching system instead of relying on slow disk-based databases.
Nobody else in the history of business has achieved what Steve Jobs has achieved as a CEO. He has taken Apple from its death bed (in 1997 it was dying) and made it the most valuable company on earth. Nobody else in history could launch a product the way Steve Jobs could do. Each of his product launches has become folklore. Remember when he pulled out the MacBook Air from an envelope? There is no doubt that he has redefined innovation. Nobody else in the history has designed 5 path breaking products.
Microsoft turned up Monday in Beijing with a cloud pact with leading Chinese Linux provider China Standard Software Co Ltd (CS2C). They’re supposed to co-develop, co-market and sell “mixed-source” solutions to the Chinese public and private cloud market. The widgetry will be built on Microsoft’s Hyper-V cloud architecture and include support for CS2C’s NeoKylin Linux Server products. A customer legal covenant agreement goes with it. What exactly that means wasn’t disclosed nor were any terms. The pair also pledged to sponsor a joint virtual technology lab in Beijing for solution development and testing of cloud solutions, which is supposed to enable customers to move to virtualization and a cloud-based IT infrastructure. It will focus on the certification of NeoKylin on Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V, creating Microsoft Systems Center management packs for NeoKylin application workloads, and incorporating support for NeoKylin in Hyper-V.
HP’s webOS chief Stephen DeWitt, a month in the job, told the AllThingsD blog Monday that the company still means to ship webOS on all its PCs and printers next year, which was its intention months ago before it killed off its app-starved webOS devices and decided it wanted out of the PC biz. Bloomberg, citing no sources, says the opposite. HP is supposedly entertaining some potentially large volume webOS licensing deals now that HP has pulled the plug on its webOS tablets and smartphones but apparently it doesn’t know whether to license the software to other device makers, partner with a single company, focus on non-device uses, or something else.