Bill Vass is one of the smartest/sharpest minds I know. He is an incredible thinker with a deep understanding of human nature, physics, electronics, construction, art, philosophy, history and business. He is also one of the smartest technologists I know. When Bill decides to associate himself with something we should all take note. With that context in mind, Bill’s joining of the ZafeSoft advisory board is cause for us all to focus on the potential of this firm.
Despite nail-biting concern over possible component shortages because of the Japanese tragedy – lately about whether it’ll have a steady supply of batteries – Apple’s web site started forecasting iPad 2 deliveries in another two-three weeks on Monday, better than the three-four weeks it was previously estimating. The improved outlook seems to be true of all the markets where the widget’s been introduced.
Greg Papadopoulous, Sun’s old CTO, who’s been hanging around New Enterprise Associates as entrepreneur-in-residence since Oracle took over Sun last year, has become a venture partner at the firm. He’s supposed to work with the company’s seed and early stage investments on their fundamental technology development and go-to-market strategies apparently focusing on the cloud and enterprise. He used to be – for better or worse – responsible for Sun’s $2 billion R&D portfolio.
Schooner Information Technology, the web caching and database acceleration start-up that just dumped the market-limiting IBM hardware its Memcached and MySQL appliances were tied to so it could be software-only, has added a high-availability/disaster recovery solution called Active Cluster that guarantees 100% synchronous replication. Unlike the typical MySQL replication and failover solutions that are asynchronous and vulnerable to data loss, Active Cluster is supposed to bring 100% synchronous replication to a maximum of eight MySQL servers in a cluster. That means that any transaction that was completed on the master server is guaranteed to be completed on each of the slaves so all the data is current.
Mainframe system or cloud computing? IT organizations don’t necessarily have to choose. Many mainframe advocates would argue that developing a private cloud would be redundant, as the mainframe provides the flexible, agile and always available environment promised with cloud computing. And those looking to bring cloud computing into their environments shouldn’t assume the mainframe won’t be a factor. “We are inventing the new mainframe in a sense. The internal private cloud is taking the application hosting and delivery infrastructure and managing it as a service. It has all the pieces it had before, but now you have to think of it in a service-oriented approach,” says Jim Frey, research director at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “It is not separate from the mainframe; the mainframe will be included in an evolutionary role. The cloud is forcing organizations to become more cross-domain and service-oriented in their management.” An October 2010 study commissioned by CA Technologies showed that 79 percent of 300 IT decision makers believed the “mainframe is an essential component of their cloud computing strategy.” And 70 percent indicated that cloud computing will sustain or extend the mainframe environment. “Your back-end data is still in the mainframe even if you have a plan for a distributed cloud environment. The data will stay where it is, and you will see cloud-hosted transactions that will continue to need to access that back-end data,” explains Wendy Wong, senior software architect for CA Technologies. “Cloud computing may require more exotic access to the mainframe than you would have traditionally, but that data is not going to move anywhere and you have to determine how you want your cloud implementation to access the mainframe and provide visibility for management.”
Dell, Equinix and Rackspace have rigged up an OpenStack cloud demonstration and test environment that they’ll show off at Equinix’ data centers in Silicon Valley and Virginia and Rackspace’s data center in Chicago. There will be additional demo environments at Equinix’ data centers in Europe and Asia in the second quarter. The idea is to get organizations assessing applications on the newfangled open source cloud platform and doing proof of concepts (POCs). The trio figures it’ll be the first demo of an open standard platform where applications and workloads can be moved between geographically dispersed OpenStack clouds.
There’s a dense filing that Novell sent the SEC a couple of weeks ago – made denser still by being redacted to the hoi polloi – that suggests that Microsoft may have done some horse trading to persuade the Justice Department to wave through the CPTN consortium’s proposed $450 million acquisition of those 800-odd Novell patents. It looks as though Microsoft is selling certain unidentified patent rights to Attachmate – which is supposed to be buying Novell for $2.2 billion – paid for with maybe as much as $8 million of Elliott’s money, Elliott being the party that put Novell in play a year ago and got a piece of the action for its trouble.
Amazon Web Services has started selling single-tenant instances that run on dedicated hardware inside an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The classic definition of a cloud is multiple virtual machines on a server used by multiple tenants sharing the cost, but that definition doesn’t suit everybody’s security or governance needs so Amazon changed the definition. It says the VPC can be just physically isolated Dedicated Instances or a mix of Dedicated Instances and non-dedicated instances. Amazon is charging a premium hourly per-instance fee plus a $10-an-hour dedicated per-region fee regardless of how many Dedicated Instances a user is running there. The regional fee is supposed to compensate Amazon for business lost because the hardware isn’t multi-tenant.
Those rumors about Apple paying top dollar for iPad parts because of the trifecta disaster in Japan may be true. DigiTimes claims the company has “agreed to absorb all the additional costs in exchange for smooth shipments” for upstream components, pushing any shortages off on rival tablet makers if they can’t match Apple’s wallet. It says Apple wanted four million iPad 2s a month in the second quarter and that suppliers of anisotropic conductive films (ACGF) and ITO materials have enough inventory to last through May but June may be dicey.
If you plan to appear for a TOGAF foundation level certification or part 1 exam, one of the difficulties you will face is a lack of free sample questions. Some questions are provided as a part of the study guide, but if you want to more practice then you will have tough time locating anything freely available on the net. This lack of practice multiple choice questions prompted me to create my own set. I have gone by the advice of Chris Eaton to create this paper before I take the test to avoid any issue that these questions copy the official exam questions.
James Gosling, the so-called father of Java, started working at Google Monday after stalking out of Oracle last year and slamming the door after it acquired Sun. One might imagine he’s been under a non-compete ever since, considering it’s just about a year since he found the Oracle harness chaffing. Oracle of course has subsequently sued Google over the way it uses Java in Android. Gosling said on his blog that he doesn’t know what he’ll be working on – which seems hard to believe – “I expect it’ll be a bit of everything, seasoned with a large dose of grumpy curmudgeon,” but he expects it to be “interesting fun with huge leverage.” It is assumed it will be related to Java and Android and the lawsuit. After he left Oracle he blogged about how “during the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle, where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle.”
Terracotta has enhanced the Quartz Scheduler, the de facto standard for Java job scheduling, giving it improved management, greater control and optimal scale and simplifying a key component of cloud orchestration. It’s the first rev of the stuff since Terracotta acquired the open source project in September of 2009.
In my last article I explained what a major Garbage Collection is. While a major Collection certainly has a negative impact on performance it is not the only thing that we need to watch out for. And in case of the CMS we might not always be able to distinguish between major and minor GC. So before we start tuning the garbage collector we first need to know what we want to tune for. From a high level there are two main tuning goals.
With the ever-increasing popularity and acceptance of tablets, ebook readers, etc., it is little surprise that the traditional form of paper books and it's ecosystem is coming under immense pressure to survive and remain profitable. How long will the paper book and related industries, merchants, suppliers and consumers be able to resist the onslaught of electronic media alternatives? Or though it will shrink it will manage to survive by sticking to its core characteristics? There was news here in the UK a couple days back about HMV considering selling off Waterstone's, the popular book chain. HMV struggling in it's traditional media market is not a new story. The way we consume media, music, movies and news has been changing for the past several years. The businesses which adopt have a chance to succeed. The ones who don't will struggle. Analysts have been writing about the truth is that the music industry is in a near-death spiral. According to Forrester Research, U.S. music sales and licensing revenues plummeted from $14.6 billion in 1999 to less than half that figure - just $6.3 billion - a decade later. The print industry is struggling equally spectacularly. In the US alone the newspaper industry is losing billions of dollars through loss of advert revenue, a large extent to online, electronic and social media channels.
California Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd ordered that Steve Jobs, still on medical leave, be deposed for no more than two hours about the allegation that Apple made it impossible for the iPod to play music bought from RealNetworks’ music store. The judge figures Jobs has “unique, non-repetitive, firsthand knowledge.” The order stems from a monopoly maintenance suit lodged in 2005 over Apple’s so-called FairPlay Digital Right Management software that allegedly overrode RealNetworks’ Harmony technology restricting iPod downloads to Apple’s iTunes store and only letting iTunes music play on iPods. The now-discontinued FairPlay was ostensibly supposed to prevent piracy.
Google accused the Chinese government Monday of screwing with Gmail and making it look like it was Google’s problem. It said China has been making it hard for Chinese users to access the e-mail system and send e-mails or IMs since the end of January. “There is no technical issue on our side,” it said, “we have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail.” Google also complained about “highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target.”
Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, all big network owners, said Monday that they have formed a standards-setting Open Networking Foundation (ONF) that’ll promote an approach to networking called Software-Defined Networking (SDN) that makes networks programmable like computers. They got 17 other companies to sign up including heavyweights like Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper Networks, NTT, IBM, HP and VMware. ONF says SDN works through relatively simple software changes and applies to all kinds of networks including data centers, wide area telecommunication networks, wireless networks, enterprises and homes. SDN is supposed to give network owners and operators better control over their networks, let them optimize network behavior and prioritize data.
Trying to get its arms around the possible component shortages, postponed product launches, higher parts prices and the impact of iPad 2 on laptops, Barclays Capital has cut its PC growth projection for 2011 from 8% to 5% as a result of the disasters in Japan and weaker-than-expected demand. It expects Q1 to be down 10% sequentially, Q2 flat with Q1 and a rebound in the second half. The Japanese government calculates the March 11 earthquake and tsunami could cost $309 billion, close to three times the cost of Katrina, making it the costliest natural disaster in history.
Dell has put out its third generation of micro servers and it’s not making the things custom-made any more. They’re going mainstream, targeted at shared and cloud computing infrastructures. Dell says the widgets are optimized for dedicated and virtualized IT hosting and Web 2.0 environments. It calls the stuff the PowerEdge C5000 line, which includes the C5125 and C5220. Applications are supposed to run on individual dedicated physical servers without compromising on price, power or density.
Intel has apparently sacked the guy who’s been running its Atom operation. Anand Chandrasekher suddenly said Tuesday that he’s leaving Intel “to pursue other interests.” The company immediately moved Intel Architecture Group (IAG) VPs Mike Bell and Dave Whalen in to co-manage the Ultra Mobility Group (UMG). IAG chief David Perlmutter said in the canned announcement that “Intel remains committed to this business,” a statement that immediately underscored the fact that Intel is unhappy with the progress of the Atom against ARM and its many minions in tablets and smartphones. Even Windows 8 is going to run on ARM.
Java EE and .net continue to be the major enterprise platforms. With their clones taken up the PaaS space on cloud, it is all the more important for the enterprises to think in terms of interoperability. This article analyzes the interoperability between two major PaaS platforms in .net and Java EE respectively.
Despite the fact that iPad 2 is in hysterically short supply in the United States – and apparently likely to remain so for at least the next month or so – and despite the fact that events in Japan have raised doubts about iPad’s component supply line – Apple put out one of its rare press releases Tuesday to say that the widget will go on sale in retail stores at 5 p.m. on Friday March 25, as planned, in 25 more countries. Apple will start taking online orders at 1 a.m. Friday morning. The company also said that the dingus would be available in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and other unidentified places in April. It didn’t say whether it thought that there would be enough to go around.
In a recent post we have shown how the Java Garbage Collection MXBean Counters have changed for the Concurrent Mark-and-Sweep Collector. It now reports all GC runs instead of just major collections. That prompted me to think about what a major GC actually is or what it should be. It is actually quite hard to find any definition of major and minor GCs. This well-known Java Memory Management Whitepaper only mentions in passing that a full collection is sometimes referred to as major collection.
OSGi technology brings a number of much needed benefits to the Java enterprise application market, and is disruptive in that it impacts the software development, deployment, and management practices of many organizations. OSGi impacts deployment given the shared, modular nature of OSGi, meaning application code must be written differently to capitalize on the benefits of OSGi. Equally important, application management processes need to be adjusted, given the highly shared nature of OSGi modules across many applications. This article provides a high-level overview of OSGi, and the impact this framework is having on the software lifecycle.
Need to get that contract executed today, but you are sitting in the airport heading to a conference? The popularity of Apple's iPad and iPhone mobile devices are liberating employees and users from their desks, and with SmartSign Web allows them to sign anywhere, anytime. The iPad holds the particular promise to accelerate the mass adoption of electronic signatures. Imagine walking into your local bank to open an account and the bank employee hands you an iPad to affix your signature to the account application or the check signature card. Or when you are returning a vehicle off lease at the dealership, quickly go through the vehicle inspection and sign off right there with the iPad.