It only took Samsung a week to lodge revenge suits against Apple in South Korea, Japan and Germany claiming that iPad and iPhone infringe its patents. According to Reuters the five South Korean, two Japanese and three German patents relate mostly to power reduction during data transmission, 3G widgetry for reducing errors during data transmission and wireless data communications technology. Patent watcher Florian Mueller figures it’s just a matter of time for Samsung, a key Apple supplier, to press its charges in a US court, at least as a counterclaim to Apple’s suit accusing Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy tablet and phones of brazen copying.
Cloud computing is changing the rules of the game for many industries. Every day we hear compelling stories about how banks use cloud-based solutions to help customers pay bills online, health care institutions tap cloud networks to collaborate on medical care, and colleges leverage technology to create virtual classrooms. Cloud computing hasn’t had a huge effect on business commerce. Despite billions spent on technologies to streamline the process, business commerce has been remarkably resilient to technological progress. Commerce collaboration between companies is still weighed down by paper-based processes and outmoded operating infrastructures. In fact, more than 80 percent of business-to-business commerce transactions are completed manually, and companies still send 85 percent of invoices and payments on paper.
PacketMotion, which does what they call User Activity Management (UAM), has got a PacketSentry Virtual Probe that extends its physical security to virtual and cloud environments. And what that means is it’s supposed to give the security and network teams responsible for meeting compliance regulations and protecting IP a solution for auditing and enforcing policies in a virtual data center, an area typically owned by server teams. The widgetry’s an appliance and it’s supposed to monitor and secure access to sensitive data in VMware clusters by delivering its application and identity-aware solution as a guest VM without the administrator needing to know IP addresses. It can, for instance, monitor databases, fileshares and web applications.
Build business advantage into your data warehouse – and ensure success. Many organizations have realized that their OLTP database management system can’t perform the high-volume analytic tasks required of today’s successful data warehouse. What’s their solution? Extend the benefits of their Oracle operational environment with a Teradata solution. This brochure outlines how the Oracle to Teradata Solution Migration Service integrates Teradata Database into your existing Oracle operational environment and allows you to reap the benefits of analyzing centralized, integrated detailed data from the source system based on Oracle or other database systems.
Google has been ordered to pay $5 million by an East Texas jury that found for Bedrock Computer Technologies LLC in an almost two-year-old Linux-related patent case. The jury found the patent valid. Patent watcher Florian Mueller, who broke the story, says the case has “major implications for the IT industry in general and for Linux in particular…Many companies using Linux have already been required by the patent holder to pay royalties, and many more will now, based on this jury verdict, elect to pay.” Mueller says the decision also has “ramifications for Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system.”
Virtualization maven VMware hit the ball out of the park Tuesday when it said its first quarter revenues cleared $843.7 million, up 33% year-over-year, and profits came in at $125.8 million, up 60%, or 48 cents a share. Wall Street thought it would do 42 cents on $815.4 million. Its shares were up over 14% Wednesday to $98.49, an airy height the stock hasn’t seen lately, based on its forecast. It said it imagines sales this quarter will be $860 million-$880 million, above the $845.1 million analysts were projecting, and that it would end the year at $3.55 billion-$3.65 billion. It means to keep hiring.
Setting up Application Performance Monitoring is a big task, but like everything else it can be broken down into simple steps. You have to know what you want to achieve and subsequently where to start. So let’s start at the beginning and take a top-down approach The first thing to do is to be clear of what we want when monitoring the application. Let’s face it: we “do not want to” ensure CPU utilization to be below 90 percent or a network latency of under one millisecond. We are also not really interested in garbage collection activity or whether the database connection pool is utilized. We need to monitor all of these things in order to reach our main goal. And the main goal for this article series is to ensure the health and stability of our application and business services. To ensure that we need to leverage all of the mentioned metrics.
Recently there was a bigger discussion at dynaTrace around the cost of exceptions. When working with customers we very often find a lot of exceptions they are not aware of. After removing these exceptions, the code runs significantly faster than before. This creates the assumption that using exceptions in your code comes with a significant performance overhead. The implication would be that you better avoid using exceptions. As exceptions are an important construct for handling error situation, avoiding exceptions completely does not seem to be good solution. All in all this was reason enough to have a closer look at the costs of throwing exceptions.
It’s not going to surprise anyone that Apple’s fiscal Q2 numbers were light on iPads given its obvious inability to meet demand, but what may surprise Google and its many Android followers was the surge in iPhone sales to 18.65 million units, a 113% jump in growth year-over-year, significantly ahead of IDC’s 48% growth projection. Apple said sales of the dingus were up 155% in the US and 250% in China, where alone it represented a bit under $5 billion, up 4x. iPads, whose future seems assured given what Apple called a “staggering” iPad lust resulting in the “mother of all backlogs,” only hit 4.69 million units in the quarter, reportedly demanding every widget Apple could make and turning into $2.8 billion in revenue.
Brazil, for all its bubbling BRIC status a notoriously hard place to do business with – harder still to repatriate money from – is anticipating that Apple’s iPad maker Foxconn will move there and start churning out the widgets by the end of the year. This according to what the country’s science and technology minister, Aloizio Mercadante, told the press reportedly ahead of working out infrastructure issues with the Taiwan-based company like electricity, logistics, airports and broadband. The government is interested in seeing its people armed with tablets and is apparently willing to negotiate tax concessions. An in-country plant, presumably located in a duty-free zone, could circumvent Brazil’s crippling import duties, perhaps serving as a supply point for the rest of South America.
A problem has come to my attention over the last few years and I thought Java.net would be a good place to talk about it. I have noticed that many reporting integrations use vendor-supplied examples verbatim. This is an issue. With JasperReports (the Java-based reporting tool), the reports contain SQL code. That SQL code can tell a hacker a lot about the database (type, version, table names, column names, and such). This opens up an attack vector, and many people host their report files in the same directory as the web files. Worse still, some people write JSPs with the database connection information (login, password, host name, database name) in plain text - inside the JSP files!
Seems we’re going to be treated to another Steve Jobs first early next year: an authorized biography called iSteve: The Book of Jobs based on what publisher Simon & Schuster says will amount to three years of secret interviews with the iMaven, his family, Apple people and competitors by his Boswell, Walter Isaacson. Presumably Jobs wanted to tell his side of the story before it’s too late. The interviews started when Jobs turned Apple over to COO Tim Cook and went off to have a liver transplant.
Apple and its iPad are supposed to dominate the tablet market into 2015 when, according to Gartner’s crystal ball, its market share is supposed to drop from 69% this year and 64% next year to a mere 49%. Google’s Android is projected to garner 24% in 2012 and 39% in 2015, leaving 22% for everybody else. Gartner thinks RIM and its QNX-based Android app-running Playbook will capture a 10% share by 2015, up from 5.6% this and 6.6% next year.
Java EE 7 is the next version of the major enterprise platform has been approved by the JCP board recently. We find significant support for Cloud Adoption in the proposed platform. This platform analyzes how Java EE could be a major Cloud Platform much like .net has been positioned in the form of Windows Azure.
It seems from a couple of press reports that EMC now has its very own VC arm – EMC Ventures – that it put together in February under Mark Lewis, the chief strategy officer of its Information Infrastructure Products unit run by Intel émigré Pat Gelsinger. VentureWire, which broke the news, suggests the thing has a broader scope than the usual strategy of investing in the odd, directly complementary start-up and then pointed out that EMC took a piece of the $20 million C investment that went into cloud biller Aria Systems in February, a round led by InterWest Partners.
The go-between who carried insider information about pending industry mergers between Wilson Sonsini lawyer Matthew Kluger and trader Garrett Bauer for 17 years pleaded guilty Monday to charges of securities fraud and conspiracy. He was identified as mortgage broker Kenneth Robinson, who ultimately taped compromising conversations between his friends for the FBI. Kluger and Bauer were arrested last week. The government said Kluger stole Wilson Sonsini’s M&A secrets about deals like the Intel-McAfee, HP-3Com and Oracle-Sun acquisitions and gave them to Bauer to trade on. Prosecutors said he’s been doing it since he was a summer associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore, IBM’s white glove law firm, and tipped Bauer off to Big Blue’s acquisition of Lotus and Tivoli.
The day after my last tweet regarding the lack of any new information about my abducted daughter Sofia since March 4, I received an updated letter on Thursday, April 7, 2011, from the State Department on Sofia's welfare in Syria. Sofia was abducted by her mother from the United States to Syria last July, following her diagnosis of GDD with possible autism. She had 13 remaining medical appointments left at the time of her abduction, none of which she was able to keep.
Golfers follow the Masters 2011 - but - if you try to access masters.com right now you will get annoying popup messages from your browser telling you that you better stop JavaScript from executing because it takes too long. On my browser this looks like this: JavaScript makes your browser unresponsive when browsing masters.com This happens on every page. So - why does that happen?
Netbiscuits, a cloud software service for cross-platform mobile sites and apps, on Tuesday reports a traffic increase of 100 percent over the last six months. Today the company's mobile publishing platform delivers more than eight billion mobile pages per month for over 20,000 sites and apps. Netbiscuits' internal metrics show that the majority of all sites and apps recently built on their platform include touch-enabled features from day one. Netbiscuits' CEO Michael Neidhoefer regards touch optimization to be the order of the day for any mobile web presence. Netbiscuits' HTML5+ Framework enables touch interaction on smartphones and media tablets while also catering for sites on the long tail of mobile devices. To understand how customers take advantage of the company's HTML5+ Framework to enable touch and gesture-driven user interfaces, Netbiscuits ran an analysis across the more than 20,000 mobile sites and apps that are based on the company's mobile development and publishing platform.
Cloud Expo New York, June 6-9, 2011 early bird registration will expire on Friday. Register now for a Gold Pass for the 8th International Cloud Expo on June 6–9, 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City and save $500 on your full conference pass. Gold Pass Delegates will receive full conference access for four days to all conference sessions at Cloud Computing Conference & Expo as well as the Virtualization Conference & Expo June 6-9. Gold Pass registration includes: lunch on Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Welcome Reception on Day 1, and refreshment breaks, collectible conference bag and access to all conference sessions including all technical sessions, the exhibit floor, keynotes, vendor technology presentations, Cloud Computing Bootcamp and SYS-CON.TV Power Panels.
Google is losing its product development chief Jonathan Rosenberg, who reportedly felt he couldn’t give the company’s brand new retread CEO Larry Page the open-ended commitment to stay on the job that Page wanted. Or so the story goes. Rosenberg was planning to leave in 2013 when his younger kid starts college. Now he’s going this summer with plans to write a book with Google’s old CEO-now-executive chairman Eric Schmidt about Google’s management culture. Apparently he’ll come back as a Google consultant after a vacation.
Nimsoft, the unified monitoring start-up that CA bought a year ago for $350 million, has integrated a bi-directional service desk into its multi-tenant management-as-a-service widgetry. It’s supposed to improve the delivery of IT services to business users across internal and external IT infrastructures, including public and private clouds, by helping ensure that problems and potential problems are addressed. The stuff promises a common user experience and common deployment.
Intel has trotted out its latest 32nm Westmere-EX or E7 Xeons, which support up to 10 cores connected by a ring bus and are supposed to deliver up to 40% better performance than the eight-core Nehalem-EX chips they replace. Amusingly the things are considered so powerful they’re pitted against competitive RISC chips like IBM’s Power chip and Oracle’s Sparc chip and by default Intel’s own Itanium, which Intel just had to defend when Oracle said it was going to stop supporting the largely HP-used part because Intel is going to discontinue it, an allegation roundly denied. Intel said of the new Xeons, “The days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architecture for mission-critical applications are nearing an end.”
Mark this date. Greenplum, the EMC unit, and SAS, the biggest privately held software company, have just given birth to a new buzzword: “Big Analytics.” The pair is going to start pushing an appliance that mates Greenplum’s “Big Data” database widgetry with SAS’ high-performance analytics. It will be the first time, they say, that users will be able to get an accurate read on all their data, apparently in seconds, rather than be confined to just a sample that can take hours, or even days, thanks to SAS algorithms being parallelized for the first time and a high-speed interface from Greenplum. SAS CTO Keith Collins says “SAS is redefining ‘in-memory processing.’” They’ll both sell the purpose-built Data Computing Appliance (DCA). Customers will need a license from SAS and get first-line support from Greenplum. The pair is hoping to have the widget out in late Q3, or worse case in Q4, when it will be priced.
Egenera just scored a plum. After a year of working on the deal, the company’s latest PAN Manager software is going to be available on HP’s BladeSystem c-class servers, the leader of the blade pack, creating what Egenera calls “the highest performance, most flexible platform” it’s ever released. Since Egenera already supports Dell and Fujitsu blade server platforms – as well as its own BladeFrames – its HP score means it’ll be represented on 70% of the blade systems out there. Of course HP’s decision to run with the stuff might have a little something to do with the fact that Egenera’s biggest rival is HP’s un-friend, Cisco.