VMware brings Windows apps to any device – from iPad to Android
VMware chief technology officer Steve Herrod gave attendees at the annual VMworld conference here today a glimpse at a technology the company is developing that will let workers access Windows applications regardless of the type of device they're using or the operating system it runs. Read more...
What do you need to work in Iraq or Afghanistan? 3G, business intelligence – but no servers
Iraq and Afghanistan are among the most unpredictable regions in the world, so if you're planning to do business there, you need to be well prepared.
Companies such as Control Risks provide advice, risk assessment, support and physical security for organisations in the financial services, mining, gas and oil industries, with the aim of allowing them to work in such regions as safely and productively as possible.
Technology plays an important role in Control Risks' work, according to the company's CIO Duncan Scott. When helping clients move around in dangerous areas, for example, Control Risks uses business intelligence to plan safe routes, using information that has been gathered about previous incidents to create a picture of situations in different regions that can inform operatives' travel decisions. Read more...
Apple’s iTunes Match music service goes beta
Apple's iTunes Match service – which, as its name implies, matches your music collection with tunes in Apple's iCloud – has gone beta to US developers.
As reported by MacRumors and others, the announcement came in an email message to developers on Monday evening. To take advantage of the beta, devs will have to subscribe to the service – $24.99 per year – but they'll have access to iTunes Match during the beta period, plus have an extra three months added to their subscription.
iTunes Match has a more-efficient model than similar your-music-in-the-cloud services offered by Amaxon and Google, which require that you upload your entire music library to Amazon or Google's servers, a chore that can take an inordinate amount of time if you have a huge music collection. Read more...
New Relic adds app performance service for Heroku Java users
New Relic is taking its Web application performance service to Java apps running on Heroku's platform.
Customers using Heroku's platform-as-a-service to run Ruby apps can already use New Relic's service to monitor real-time performance data about transactions, applications and websites.
With Heroku's announcement last week that it is now also supporting applications built in Java, New Relic is making its service available to Heroku customers running Java apps. Read more...
Oracle wants HP-Hurd settlement tossed out
Oracle is accusing Hewlett-Packard of fraud in connection with the companies' settlement agreement over the hiring of former HP CEO Mark Hurd, and wants the pact dissolved, according to a court filing Tuesday.
HP ousted Hurd last year after a scandal involving his relationship with a company contractor. Oracle quickly moved to hire Hurd as president, prompting HP to file a lawsuit, arguing that he could not perform his job effectively without violating a confidentiality agreement.
The companies' relationship grew even more strained when Oracle announced in March it would stop developing software for Intel's Itanium chips, which are used in high-end HP servers running the HP-UX OS. HP filed suit against Oracle in June over the matter. Read more...
Brocade caters to cloud customers
Brocade has unveiled an infrastructure procurement model designed for cloud computing, along with additions to its new VDX data center switch line.
At the VMworld 2011 conference, Brocade rolled out a subscription-based acquisition option that allows customers to acquire network capacity on demand as required by fluctuating business demands. Brocade Network Subscription is optimized to address cloud-based IT environments, Brocade says.
Brocade Network Subscription is designed to allow customers to scale capacity up and down according to actual network utilization with no capital outlay. Customers pay for their network infrastructure on a monthly basis, and can return equipment to Brocade when capacity demands are not as high. Read more...
Apple’s MacBook Air to be ‘big hit’ in China
Apple has started selling the new MacBook Air in China, a move one analyst said would prove a "big hit" in the country that delivered more than an eighth of the company's revenues last quarter.
The MacBook Air, which debuted in the U.S. and other markets last month, went on sale in China this week.
Currently, Apple's online store for Chinese customers lists all four MacBook Air models -- two each in 11-in. and 13-in. configurations -- for sale, but with lengthy shipping delays.
The 11-in. MacBook Air's estimated delivery time, according to the e-store, is 9-to-11 working days, while the 13-in. models will reach customers approximately 5 working days after ordering. Read more...
Akamai employee tried to sell secrets to Israel
A 43-year-old former Akamai employee has pleaded guilty to espionage charges after offering to hand over confidential information about the Web acceleration company to an agent posing as an Israeli consular official in Boston.
Starting in September 2007, Elliot Doxer played an elaborate 18-month-long game of cloak-and-dagger with James Cromer, a man he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer. He handed over pages and pages of confidential data to Cromer, providing a list of Akamai's clients and contracts, information about the company's security practices, and even a list of 1,300 Akamai employees, including mobile numbers, departments and e-mail addresses. Read more...
Masterful mousing: 6 out-of-the-ordinary laptop mice
If you're still using a traditional computer (as opposed to a tablet), you're probably also still using a traditional mouse. While laptops all come with touchpads to help us move our cursors around the screen, there's no denying that many users are more comfortable pushing a mouse around a desktop. However, sometimes there isn't a desktop -- and sometimes you need a mouse that is more portable or more powerful than the $20 piece of plastic that you picked up on sale.
To help deal with such issues, we've found six mice that break the design mold that most of today's mice are built from. They do have some things in common -- they are all laser mice and they all use wireless Bluetooth to connect with the computer. Otherwise, these cursor-control devices don't have a whole lot in common -- except possibly the ability to make computing more efficient.
Cyborg R.A.T. 9 Gaming Mouse
You think a mouse is a simple device? You've got another thought coming. The Cyborg R.A.T. 9 Gaming Mouse is one of the most customizable mice around -- this is the mouse for gamers who are really, really serious about their pursuits. It offers a wide variety of tweaks, including interchangeable palm rests and pinkie grips; two batteries (one to power the mouse, the other to recharge in the wireless receiver/recharge dock); five 6-gram weights that you can subtract or add in order to get a perfectly weighted mouse (the knob that you unscrew to get at the weights doubles as a screwdriver to help you adjust other parts of the mouse); five programmable buttons; the ability to change the dpi rating (which goes up to an impressive 5600 dpi) -- and that's just for starters. This $150 device is the Maserati of mice. Read more...HP to make more TouchPads
Hewlett-Packard said it will manufacture more TouchPads in response to "stunning" demand following the company's decision to discontinue the tablets.
"Despite announcing an end to manufacturing webOS hardware, we have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand," Mark Budgell, an HP spokesman, wrote in a blog post. The site appears to be overloaded and is currently unavailable, but the post has been reposted elsewhere online.
The newly manufactured tablets will go on sale in a few weeks. He said a "limited" number would be made but couldn't say exactly how many. "We can't promise we'll have enough for everyone," he wrote.
The company will produce the tablets during its fourth fiscal quarter, which ends Oct. 31. Read more...
IBM’s 120 petabyte drive could help better predict weather
The development of the world's largest single-file name data repository could help predict weather and prevent overhyping of hurricanes like Irene.
Forecasters had predicted Irene could devastate cities such as Washington and New York, but instead some of the most severe damage occurred far further inland in states such as Vermont, which was drowned in tropical-storm downpours.
Several post-Hurricane Irene reports pointed to inaccurate forecasts as problematic. As the UK publication, The Guardian, wrote: The "storm surge that could have swamped [Manhattan] failed to materialize." And many New Yorkers were unhappy about having prepared for the worst only to experience little to no damage. Read more...
Nokia developer forum hacked, still unavailable
The community section of Nokia's developer site was hacked, and some member's email addresses have been accessed, the mobile phone maker said.
The part of the site has been taken down, and instead delivers a statement from the company about the hack.
Nokia said that during its ongoing investigation of the incident, it discovered that a database table containing email addresses of developer forum members was accessed, by exploiting a vulnerability in the bulletin board software that allowed an SQL injection attack. Read more...
Red Hat’s Aeolus to ‘out-Linux’ Rackspace’s cloud
Red Hat is leading a Fedora-like effort to succeed where OpenStack has struggled in building an open-source cloud founded on broad community input.
Red Hat's engineers are building Aeolus, a software suite to spin up, manage and deploy applications from physical and virtual servers to any public or private cloud.
Red Hat claims Aeolus will let you pluck apps from various virtual machines and throw them into different clouds: so your choice of cloud is not pre-determined by the hypervisor you use.
While it works with vSphere, Aeolus also runs on KVM, the open-source hypervisor embraced by Red Hat and at the heart of the anti-VMware Open Virtualization Alliance it launched in May with server heavyweights and aspiring cloud providers Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Read more...
Facebook pays out $40K to hackers in three weeks
Three weeks after launching a bug bounty program that pays Web hackers cash for finding flaws with its website, Facebook said it has paid out more than $40,000 in rewards.
Facebook called the program a success Monday, saying it has mobilized security researchers around the world to help make Facebook.com more secure. "We know and have relationships with a large number of security experts, but this program has kicked off dialogue with a whole new and ever expanding set of people across the globe in over 16 countries, from Turkey to Poland who are passionate about Internet security," the company said in a Facebook post about the program. Read more...
Firefox’s rapid release schedule harms bug-squashing efforts
Mozilla has garnered unfriendly attention lately after a former volunteer criticized the group's slow responses to bug reports. The timing of the post and the resulting response from observers is notable: It all comes in the wake of Mozilla's "rapid release" initiative, through which the group has pledged to roll out an updated version of its Firefox browser every 16 weeks, possibly sans version number. Mozilla's decision to dramatically speed up its development cycle has met enough resistance to put the group's chair, Mitchell Baker, on the defensive.
Further, the criticism of Mozilla's bug-handling procedures comes at a time when Firefox continues to lose both market share and credibility in the browser space. In terms of the latter, a recent report from NSS Labs (PDF) on browser security found that Firefox 4 caught only 7.6 percent of live socially engineered malware threats, far less than Internet Explorer 9, which snagged 99.2 percent, and behind Chrome, which detected 13.2 percent. Firefox's results were 11.4 percent lower than the 19 percent protection rate observed in the Q3 2010 global test, according to NSS, indicating an overall drop in protection for Firefox. Read more...