Showing headlines posted by henke54

Gartner deconstructs the mega-vendors. CIOs should be wary of any claim by a large IT vendor that their set of products can combine to form an ‘integrated suite’, according to analyst group Gartner. In a highly informative session at Gartner Symposium on the Gold Coast yesterday, analyst Dennis Gaughan gave a broad overview of the strategic direction of the world’s largest application vendors IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, with some strong recommendations as to how CIOs should engage with each of them. Combined, the four vendors have US$100 billion at their disposal to influence CIO decisions, he said, but end users needed to ensure they mastered their own destiny by using each of the vendors selectively.

Strategic Forecasting, Inc, or STRATFOR, provides strategic intelligence on global business, economic, security and geopolitical affairs. At 1145PST on Christmas Eve, 2011, the hacker group Anonymous broke into the STRATFOR servers and have claimed to delete over 200GB of email and other data.

In August 2011, Download.com was taken on a new path by their General Manager and V.P. Sean Murphy. They started wrapping legitimate 3rd party software into their own installer which by default installs a wide variety of adware and other questionable software on users machines. It also does things like redirect user search queries and change their Internet home page. At first their installer forced people to accept the malware or close the installer (see screen shot of infected VLC installer in this article). Later they added a non-default "decline" button hidden way on the left side of the panel. Also, the initial installer shown in the previous screen shot claimed the software was “SAFE, TRUSTED, AND SPYWARE FREE”. In an unusual show of honesty, they removed that claim from the rogue installer.

The Turkish company's prototype uses a 10-inch Android Honeycomb-based tablet to power a 65-inch LCD with 1080p support for basic gestures, like pinch and zoom. The display currently has two touch sensors, but a version with four sensors is on the way, which will bring multi-touch support.

IP attorney Edward J. Naughton is repeating his arguments that Google's use of Linux kernel header files within Android may be in violation of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), and tries to discredit Linus Torvalds' thoughts on the matter along the way. Naughton, or the clients he may be representing, seems intent on trying to cast doubt on the legal framework upon which Google's Android platform rests. To that end, Naughton has released a detailed whitepaper containing what he claims are more examples of the kind of problems he's been pointing out. Here's the basic premise of Naughton's arguments:

* Adobe is Stopping development on Flash Player for browsers on mobile.

Adobe is now focusing their development efforts on:

* Applications for mobile * Expressive content on the desktop (in and out of browser) * Increasing their investments in HTML5 in general

Nokia would abnegate the ownership of Qt, a cross-platform C++ application framework, shortly. Nokia would comply byopen-governance and would remain as 'Maintainers of Qt', said Kalle Karkas, head of Operator Marketing, Nokia, Finland at the third edition of the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 held in Bangalore today. Nokia would continue to invest in Qt and it has been recruiting people in this arena. He added that Nokia is not porting Qt to other platform but the company intends to focus on the developers community.

I have met and interviewed almost all of the leaders of the free software and Linux world. I interviewed Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux in 2006 when Forbes published a story that Linux infringes upon Microsoft’s license. That was a long interview. Ever since 2006, I wanted to meet Linus in person. And LinuxCon was the closest opportunity I could get to meet Linus. We were able to have a 50-minute, one-to-one interview with Linus Torvalds. Here is the complete interview.

HP launched its Redstone server range using low-power processors from both Intel and ARM vendor Calxeda. HP claims Redstone servers are designed for testing and proof-of-concept, presumably the concept that it can produce ARM-based servers.

"As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software," Gates wrote in an infamous open letter. "Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?

Microsoft has sent a Happy Birthday message to the Linux Foundation, congratulating them on turning 20 years old. The video, created by the Microsoft Germany team and shared on the Linux video site, documents the past twenty years of sniping and rivalry between the two platforms, though suggests that the end for such arguments might be in sight.

In a follow-up to the Bloomberg story, Lifehacker suggested opening suspect hardware in a virtual machine. There are better, simpler options.

The safest approach is to use Linux, as so little malware targets it.

Windows users are best served with a copy of Linux on a USB flash drive. Just yesterday I ran Mint version 10 off a USB flash drive to delete files in the Windows recycle bin, files that Windows itself would not display, but were there nonetheless.

The sixth ODF Plugfest will take place on July 14th and 15th 2011, Invalidenstr. 48, 10557 in Berlin (Germany). This Plugfest is a two day interoperability workshop on open document exchange formats hosted by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in Berlin, in collaboration with OpenDoc Society, the OASIS ODF TC, OASIS ODF OIC and the OASIS ODF Adoption TC.

It's easy to take things for granted – to assume that the world will always be as it is. And then sometimes you receive a mild jolt: some new information appears that makes you sit up and reconsider your preconceptions. Here's one jolt I received recently..

Open...and Shut. In the tech industry today, and particularly in mobile, you can make lots of money as a premium innovator (Apple's iOS) or as a mass-market commoditizer (Google Android). But it turns out that there's little room for more than one company in either category, That's why Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and RIM are struggling to compete with Apple, while Canonical, MeeGo, and others are falling behind Google.

The PCM hardware is only half of the Moneta story though. The system's real value is contained in the software, which has been tuned for the higher performing PCM. Specifically, they developed a low-level block driver for Moneta that bypasses the Linux I/O scheduler, such that throughput and latency are optimized.

In a move it describes as "maximising its investment in Linux", Yahoo! has become a silver level member of the Linux Foundation. This sees Yahoo! pay the Linux Foundation fees of between $5,000 and $20,000 per year, though closer to the latter as the rate is dependent on the number of employees. The Foundation describes Yahoo! as a major enterprise Linux user, using Linux as an integral part of its technical and developer infrastructure.

Windows — not Linux — is the No 1. MySQL platform, several execs said, noting that enterprises can leverage the LAMP [Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl] stack for web applications across any application platform — but Oracle chose to highlight Windows on this day.

Oracle execs, for example, pointed out that the performance of MySQL on Windows is now on par with MySQL on Linux. That can’t be good news for the Red Hat clan.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 9, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Panasonic is joining the organization as a Gold member.

In mid February there were news reports that Canadian government computers at the Finance Department, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada had been hacked and information mined by persons unknown, most probably operating out of China.