Death of the G-Cloud was greatly exaggerated – but there’s a lot of catching up to do
Early in 2010 the government unveiled the G-Cloud - its grand plan to slash £1bn from the public sector's annual IT spend by using cloud technologies to haul its tech infrastructure into the 21st century.
Soon after the initial fanfare, however, the G-Cloud was called in for review by the newly elected coalition government.
Government has fallen behind schedule on creating a central government app storePhoto: Shutterstock
Despite the review, the core parts of the G-Cloud programme - the creation of a centralised government application store to allow public bodies to find applications, and plans to reduce the number of datacentres used by government - still appear to be intact.
Martin Bellamy, who sits on the government G-Cloud delivery board, told a Westminster e-Forum event in London on Tuesday: "Anyone who thought the G-Cloud had gone a bit quiet, or that it's died - well, no it's not, it's alive and kicking."
"With a change of government it is inevitable that IT policy will be reviewed, and indeed it is a good thing because IT policy needs to be aligned to the overall government's business objectives," Bellamy told silicon.com. Read more...
Windows Server 8 plays catch-up with VMware and Unix
"The cloud is a tectonic shift," said Microsoft's corporate vice president of server and cloud Bill Laing, introducing an in-depth press preview of Windows Server 8 and mixing metaphors with abandon.
In response to this cloudy earthquake, the company is declaring Server 8 to be a cloud-based operating system, though note that this is not about Azure – Microsoft's platform as a service – but instead focused on plain Windows Server running on virtual machines, either in private clouds at corporate data centres, or in public clouds hosted by Microsoft partners.
The main justification for Microsoft's cloud-based claim is in extensive improvements to Hyper-V, the Windows virtualization platform. There are also changes to Microsoft IIS Web Server that make it better suited to multi-tenancy.
Before taking a detailed look at these, though, consider this statement from Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft's lead architect for the Windows Server division: "We don't want management GUIs to run on servers – that's a bad thing." Read more...
Blocked from China, Twitter goes after overseas Chinese
Twitter plans to offer a Chinese-language user interface in the coming weeks. But the company doesn't expect the bulk of the Chinese-speaking population will be using it anytime soon.
China, which heavily censors the Internet, has blocked Twitter since 2009. This has denied the company a vast market of 485 million Internet users, many of whom have taken to China's own locally developed Twitter-like services.
Twitter's Chinese interface is meant to reach native Chinese speakers living outside the country, said Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner. The size of this market amounts to 35 million people living in 30 countries, she said.
The new interface will be offered in both simplified and traditional Chinese Mandarin. Simplified Chinese Mandarin is the written language predominately used in mainland China, where Twitter is blocked. Both Taiwan and Hong Kong -- where Traditional Chinese Mandarin is used -- allow users to access Twitter. Read more...
Google, Motorola file for merger clearance in many countries
Google and Motorola Mobility plan to file for pre-closing antitrust clearances for the merger of Motorola with a Google subsidiary in a number of jurisdictions including Canada, China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, and Turkey, in addition to filings in the U.S. and before the European Commission.
The companies have already filed for clearance to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice on Aug. 29 under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, and the request is still within the usual waiting period of 30 days, Motorola Mobility said in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
The U.S. agencies can either allow an "early termination", or if either agency determines during the waiting period that further inquiry is necessary, it can in a "second request" call for additional information and documents beyond the waiting period. Read more...
Servers with new Intel Xeon E5 chips due early 2012
Servers with new Xeon E5 chips based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture will become available early next year, Intel officials said Tuesday.
The E5 chip will have up to eight processing cores and will be able to run 16 threads per socket, said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The chip has already started shipping in volume and will deliver significantly higher performance than current Xeon chips, Skaugen said.
"This is the most phenomenal chip we've delivered on Intel to the server market," Skaugen said. Read more...
Demand for iPhone 4 still high even as iPhone 5 looms
Apple’s next iPhone is expected to be announced this month and probably released in the early part of October. Despite the fact that there’s likely another iPhone on the horizon, though, it seems demand for the current-generation Apple device is still going strong.
According to a story from All Things D, at least one analyst expects Apple to sell better than 18 million iPhone 4s in this quarter, despite the fact that the iPhone 5 is considered imminent by just about everybody. Stern Agee analyst Shawn Wu upped his expectation for Apple’s iPhone 4 sales to 18.5 million from 15.7 million for this quarter, which isn’t quite the 20.4 million of last quarter, but is fully respectable for a phone that was released in June 2010. Read more...
Here’s Why You’ll Ditch Your iPad for Windows 8
Yesterday, before Microsoft revealed its latest operating system to developers at the BUILD conference, we suggested Windows 8 might wow the world, providing a real competitor to Apple's iPad dominance. And we were right. Or at least that's what early critics are saying, giving the new product rave reviews. "'Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win,'" tweeted win Supersite editor Paul Thurrott. And Boy Genius Report's Zach Epstein titled his take "Sorry Apple, Windows 8 ushers in the post-post-PC era." Microsoft hasn't revealed when consumer products will make it to the masses--and things could change on both the Apple and Microsoft fronts--but the developer's preview has techies giddy. What about this system will make users forgo their Apple monikered tablets for a Windows product? Read more...
Hotfile Sues Warner Bros. For Copyright Fraud and AbuseHotfile Sues Warner Bros. For Copyright Fraud and Abuse
The Florida-based file-hosting service Hotfile has sued Warner Bros. for fraud and abuse. Hotfile accuses the movie studio of systematically abusing its anti-piracy tool by taking down hundreds of titles they don’t hold the copyrights to, including open source software. Among other things, Hotfile is looking for damages to compensate the company for the losses they suffered.
Earlier this year five major Hollywood movie studios sued the popular file-hosting service Hotfile for several copyright-related offenses. The case is ongoing and two weeks ago the MPAA studios scored a victory when Hotfile was ordered to share detailed information on the site’s users and affiliates.
Hotfile, on the other hand, is fighting back hard as expected. Yesterday the company filed a counterclaim accusing movie studio Warner Bros. of fraud and abuse. According to the complaint, Warner systematically misused the anti-piracy takedown tool (SRA) Hotfile had built for them. Read more...
How The FBI Caught an Actor Uploading Movie Screeners To Pirate Bay
In April 2011, the FBI raided the apartment of a Screen Actor’s Guild member suspected of uploading several pre-release screeners of Hollywood blockbusters to The Pirate Bay. The man, an actor, has now agreed to plead guilty and potentially faces three years in prison. There were claims he could’ve been connected to a release group but as his amateurish online actions show, nothing could be further from the truth. Read more...