Apple inspires Oracle on hardware-software combo strategy
Oracle's strategy of launching hardware-plus-software appliances - known as engineered systems - finds inspiration in the successes of Apple, according to the database giant's CEO Larry Ellison.
The company launched its first engineered systems with the Exadata database machine and middleware system Exalogic some years ago, subsequently adding Database Appliance and Exalytics in recent weeks. During his keynote at the company's annual OpenWorld event, Ellison cited Cupertino's approach to making both hardware and software inhouse. Read more...
Fedora 16: Linux home for lost Ubuntu GNOMEs
Call me Verne: Fedora 16 floats a nautical desktop
Dubbed "Verne" and sporting desktop artwork that echoes Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Fedora 16 is shaping up to be a worthwhile alternative to Ubuntu 11.10, particularly for those that aren't happy with Canonical's home-brewed Unity shell.
Among the big changes in Fedora 16 is GNOME 3.2, the latest version of the GNOME 3 shell Ubuntu ditched for Unity.
Fedora has always been a reasonably popular Linux distro, but now it is acting as a kind of flagship for the GNOME 3 desktop, since Ubuntu has gone its own way. Fedora releases are likely undergoing much closer scrutiny from the Linux community.
IBM open sources Blue Spruce to aid medical research
IBM has open sourced part of its Blue Spruce web collaboration suite for use by doctors studying the features and genetic origins of illness.
Big Blue has passed the code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb), where it is already being used in a National Institutes of Health funded study of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGeneR). The COPDGeneR team is studying the CT scans and medical records of over 10,000 patents in an attempt to understand causation factors and find cures. Read more...
Red Hat raids the cloud storage market by acquiring Gluster
Red Hat announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Gluster, which makes open-source software that clusters commodity SATA drives and NAS systems into massively scalable pools of storage, in a cash deal valued at about $136 million. Gluster is also a contributor to the OpenStack cloud project and Red Hat is promising this involvement will continue. Indeed, Red Hat is now uncharacteristically saying its support of OpenStack will grow even beyond Gluster to the next release of Fedora.
This is the first acquisition Red Hat has made in 2011 and the deal is expected to close pretty much immediately, in October.
Gluster, which was founded in 2005, has its R&D and engineering facility in Bangalore, India, while its leadership team resides in California. The company's flagship technology is GlusterFS, which allows an enterprise to cluster large numbers of commodity storage and compute resources into a centrally accessible and managed and storage pool. It names Pandora, Box.net and Samsung among its customers. Read more...
Oracle shows JavaFX on iOS and Android
Oracle on Tuesday showed JavaFX rich client software running on both an Apple iPad and a Google Android-based Samsung Galaxy tablet, along with introducing a separate project using HTML5 to bring Java to Apple's iOS platform, called Project Avatar.
The company at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco also cited intentions to converge its Java ME (Micro Edition) platform, which puts Java on mobile devices, with Java SE (Standard Edition). Oracle also said it was delaying until 2013 the release of Java SE 8; it had been due next year.
Java has been barred from Apple's iOS devices, thanks to Apple's official policy not allowing third-party technologies, such as Flash Player or Java, on the units. But a brief demonstration showed a JavaFX game running on an iPad. This effort effectively puts Java on iOS but is still in a developmental mode. "We want to hear from the community. If this is something you want to see, we're happy to make it a priority," said Nandini Ramani, vice president of development in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Group. The Samsung Android device ran the demo as well, although Oracle referred to the device as a "Linux" unit without mentioning Android. Oracle is suing Google over Android, alleging patent violations. Read more...
Mozilla aims to add silent updating to Firefox 10
A year after it pulled the plug on silent updates in Firefox 4, Mozilla said it will debut most of the behind-the-scenes feature by early next year.
Assuming Mozilla pulls off silent upgrading this time around, it would make Firefox only the second browser to take that route. Google's Chrome has been the poster boy for automatic updates that remove the user from the equation and can't be switched off.
Mozilla did not say it was copying Chrome -- it's denied doing so with other features -- but the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell Baker, acknowledged what she called "update fatigue."
"In the past we have been very careful to make sure people know something is changing with their Web browser before it changes," said Baker, who heads the non-profit organization that oversees the Firefox-making Mozilla Corp. "Today people are telling us -- loudly -- that the notifications are irritating and that a silent update process is important." Read more...
Japan to launch smartphone-only TV broadcast channel
A television broadcast viewable only on smartphones and tablets with special tuners will go live across Japan next year, according to a venture funded by the country's largest television stations and mobile operator.
New broadcaster nottv said at Ceatec, the Japanese electronics show running this week, that it will use bandwidth frequencies left over when the country ended its analog broadcasts earlier this year.
Because it will function as an over-the-air broadcaster, its quality will not suffer as the number of viewers increase, and it will be able to deliver digital content, including games and newspapers, simultaneously to a mass audience.
"Television is currently designed for viewing at home, with everyone sitting around a TV. We want to be more personal and interactive," said Hiroaki Ban, a manager in the corporate strategy division of mmbi, the company that will operate nottv. Read more...
Self-service IT: Are users up to the task?
Self-service procurement. Self-service business intelligence. Self-service recovery. User provisioning in private clouds. It's a wondrous world for end users these days as IT departments roll out tools that hand them the reins to the data and services they desire, whether it's instant access to their employee benefits account or a deep dive into corporate data stacks that were once off-limits.
But all this user empowerment raises the question: Are users up to their new role? To be sure, it's been a long time since IT staffers have had to show employees how to use a mouse or check that a desktop PC is plugged in, but there's a big jump between choosing a dental plan from a drop-down menu and applying advanced analytics to large volumes of enterprise data.
Have users really advanced so far that they can roll out their own business intelligence (BI) queries or recover from a hard disk failure entirely on their own? Yes and no, say IT managers and industry analysts. Read more...
Meet Siri, your personal iPhone assistant
Want to to know what the weather is like in Seattle or Austin without checking the Web or even your pre-set weather maps on your phone? How about having your text messages read to you? Siri will do that for you and a whole lot more. Apple unveiled the personal assistant as part of its iPhone 4S announcement Tuesday.
Siri is the company Apple bought last year for an estimated $200 million, and developed the artificial intelligence behind the program. Apple exec Scott Forstall showed off Siri with various questions and impressive answers, such as:
Forstall: "What time is it in Paris?" Read more...
Digital Monopolies A Bigger Threat Than Piracy, Says Miramax CEO
Miramax CEO Mike Lang and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos gave a keynote talk at the MIPCOM conference. The two discussed the challenges they face in the continuously changing digital world. Both agreed that piracy is not much of an issue as long as you give consumers what they want. Digital monopolies, such as Apple’s dominance in the music industry, are a far bigger threat.
If we believe the words of the MPAA and RIAA, piracy is the root of all evil resulting in billions of dollars in losses every year.
However, not all of the big players in the entertainment business subscribe to this theory. During the MIPCOM conference where movie and TV moguls gather, Miramax CEO Mike Lang and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos touched on the subject of piracy. Both appeared to have a rather positive stance towards the issue.
Lang, whose company today debuts the Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Pulp Fiction, emphasized that people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want. “Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers. Read more...