The Qik and the dead
Can it only be a week ago that Microsoft announced an agreement to buy Skype for a stunning $8.5 billion? The investment group selling Skype will make more than $5 billion on its September 2009 investment -- pay off that is sure to send venture capitalist vultures circling around the craziest Silicon Valley startups. But there's a cautionary tale -- a troubling backstory: The fate of Qik.
It's a far too common story, and Microsoft has been there before: Somebody buys a tech company that recently acquired a smaller one, which gets lost in the acquisition. Skype bought Qik in January for around $100 million. Qik's fate is perhaps the great uncertainty in the Skype acquisition, and none of the companies involved will say anything during the quiet period between regulatory approval and the deal closing. Read more...
Mozilla to auto-update Firefox 3.5 users to 3.6 version
Mozilla plans to push 12 million users of the aged Firefox 3.5 to a newer version next month by taking the unprecedented step of automatically upgrading their browser.
Firefox 3.5, which debuted in mid-2009 , is already on life-support: Mozilla gave users their last version 3.5 security patches three weeks ago.
But in June, Mozilla will use another strategy to make Firefox 3.5 "being dead," as one page on the company's site said.
While it will continue to "dangle the carrot" of Firefox 4 to those users -- Mozilla started offering an upgrade to Firefox 4 to people running Firefox 3.5 and Firefox 3.6 last week -- it will "force 3.6 on 3.5 stragglers not choosing to update to Firefox 4 or 3.6 (give them the stick)," wrote Christian Legnitto, the Firefox release manager, in a message posted to a developer mailing list . Read more...
HTML5 not yet solving mobile dev issues
HTML5 will likely make mobile development easier but not for some time, a group of wireless experts said Monday.
"HTML5 is not a panacea. It won't solve all your problems," said Ted Woodbury, an executive with AT&T. "It won't be a disaster but I think people will always do both" apps and HTML5 sites. Woodbury and others spoke at Mobile Northwest, a conference in Seattle that is organized by the Miller Nash law firm.
Companies have been debating the value of HTML5, which allows developers to build new kinds of features into websites so that sites behave on mobile phones like applications. Read more...
US green card lottery will be redone because of in-house programming error
The Associated Press and MSNBC are reporting that the green card visas won in this month’s lottery have been nullified and the entire process will have to be redone. Some 20,000 people around the world won this year’s lottery to gain legal residency in the US. But the State Department, which oversees visas, said on Friday that there was a computer glitch in the selection process and that it will have to run the visa lottery again. The glitch is blamed on an in-house programming error, “dashing the hopes of the 20,000 winners but reopening the hopes of the near 15 million who had applied for the lottery process” to win a visa to come to the US. Winners are chosen at random making the odds of winning a visa very small. It is even smaller to win a second time. The visas become available next year and applicants would have had to submit their names online last October to qualify. Read more...
SAP, Dell partner on in-memory and the cloud
SAP and Dell are expanding their relationship in the areas of cloud computing and in-memory databases, the companies will announce on Monday during the Sapphire conference in Orlando.
First off, SAP customers will be able to deploy the applications on Dell's VIS Next Generation Datacenter Platform, which has been bolstered in recent years by acquisitions like storage optimization vendor Ocarina Networks and server provisioning provider Scalent.
SAP and Dell will be joined at Sapphire by a representative of the University of Kentucky, which is moving its SAP implementation to a Dell-managed cloud, said Kaj van de Loo, senior vice president of technology strategy at SAP. Read more...
Nintendo 3DS Targeted in Anti-DRM Campaign
Hard on the heels of the Free Software Foundation's Day Against DRM earlier this month, the advocacy organization last week launched a new campaign targeting the Nintendo 3DS.
"The Nintendo 3DS comes with Terms of Service (TOS) that should not be accepted," wrote the group's campaign manager, Joshua Gay, in a recent blog post. "In fact, the TOS are so unbelievable that we have included a more detailed summary of them on a separate page."
Top of the FSF's list of complaints, for example, is that the device's TOS "makes a threat that Nintendo will brick your device if you use your 3DS in a way that they do not approve," Gay explained. Read more...
RIM recalls 1,000 PlayBook tablet computers
BlackBerry smartphone maker Research In Motion Ltd. has recalled about 1,000 of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computers due to defective operating software that can make it impossible for users to set up the device.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based gadget maker said in a statement Monday that it learned that the affected tablets were shipped with software "that may result in the devices unable to properly load software upon initial set-up." Only PlayBooks with 16 gigabytes of memory were affected, RIM said, and the majority of them had not yet been sold to customers. Read more...
Changing career from finance to IT
There are a number of great jobs within IT that do not require the ability to program. These jobs include Business Analyst, Software Tester, Project Manager, Application Trainer, Documentation Writer, and Web Designer. Please note that there are also a number of job types in the Help Desk, hardware and data center areas, but given you are coming from finance I’m assuming you do not have the background or interest in these types of positions.
The best way to transition into a job within IT is to find a position that takes advantage of your existing skills, knowledge, and experience. For example, as a finance person you have a strong understanding of accounting and potentially other activities performed within the finance function. These activities could include budgeting, cash management, product line profitability analysis Read more...
‘Project Triforce’: How Facebook Tested Its New Data Center
When Facebook built its first company-owned data center in Prineville, Oregon, designing and managing the facility was only part of the challenge. In a blog post Monday, the company explained how it had to stress-test its entire software infrastructure by commandeering a giant cluster of production servers on the other side of the country.
The Oregon data center marked a change of tack for Facebook, which had relied exclusively on two leased facilities in Northern California and Virginia. The Prineville data center was the first to be designed and built from scratch Read more...
Bing and Facebook grow closer
Microsoft on Monday began letting Bing search results reflect "likes" of people's friends at Facebook as the social networking star and the software colossus grew closer.
"The best decisions are not just fueled by facts, they require the opinions and emotions of your friends," Bing senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi said in a release.
"We're marrying fact-based search results with your friends' street smarts to combine the best data on the Web with the opinions of the people you trust the most and the collective IQ of the Web." Read more...