‘Server huggers’ present obstacle to cloud adoption
Chipita America may be as close to a server-less company as one can find. Its ERP systems, EDI, BI, Office, Exchange and file servers are all hosted in a service provider's cloud.
About six years ago, when many IT managers were debating Nicholas Carr's book "Does IT Matter," Chipita CIO Scott Martin was moving the Tulsa, Okla.-based snack food maker's email to a third party's cloud hosted platform. Since then Chipita has moved the rest its core systems to the cloud.
Martin said he didn't see a competitive advantage in managing internal systems, believing that his time could be best spent focusing on business needs.
"The real difference that IT leaders [can make] is being able to leverage information to create competitive advantage in the marketplace," said Martin. Read more...
eBay launches Web query language
In the hopes of reducing the complexity of making data calls over the Web, eBay has launched a programming language, called ql.io, which bundles separate API requests into a single call.
"ql.io can reduce the number of lines of code required to call multiple HTTP APIs while simultaneously bringing down network latency and bandwidth usage in certain use cases," wrote Subbu Allamaraju, an eBay developer who led the effort to build ql.io, in a blog posting announcing the new language.
With its release, ql.io has joined the growing rank of software developed by large Web service providers that have been released for others to use and refine, including Twitter's Storm data stream analysis tool, LiveJournal's memecached data caching software, Facebook's Scribe log aggregation tool, and Google's SPDY HTTP replacement. Read more...
Mozilla denies OS X Leopard 2012 kill
Mozilla has denied that the death of Firefox on OS X Leopard, released just four years ago, is coming.
The browser operation has downplayed a proposal, broached by one of Firefox’s developers, to stop supporting OS X 10.5 with Firefox 13. This version of Firefox is due to ship on or near 5 June 2012.
The proposal was floated by Josh Aas, a member of the Mozilla platform group who works on Gecko and the Firefox rendering engine. The debate unfolded on Google Groups, here. Read more...
Yammer banks on Scala, ends up moving to Java
Sometimes trying a new technology works out great. And sometimes it doesn't.
Yammer, which bills itself as the "enterprise social network," had tapped Scala, a general-purpose, statically typed language on the Java Virtual Machine, for high-performance back-end services. But in a recent email to executives of Scala middleware vendor Typesafe, Yammer infrastructure architect Coda Hale pointed out problems Yammer had been having. Hale advised Typesafe chairman (and Scala founder) Martin Odersky and CEO Donald Fischer that Yammer would switch to Java.
"Right now at Yammer, we're moving our basic infrastructure stack over to Java and keeping Scala support around in the form of façades and legacy libraries. It's not a hurried process and we're just starting out on it, but it's been a long time coming. The essence of it is that the friction and complexity that comes with using Scala instead of Java isn't offset by enough productivity benefit or reduction of maintenance burden for it to make sense as our default language," Hale wrote. "We'll still have Scala in production, probably in perpetuity, but going forward, our main development target will be Java." Read more...
U.S. tech employment nears its all-time high
The U.S. government's report today that the unemployment rate is down and hiring is up showed some good news for tech workers as well.
The tech industry added 7,100 jobs last month, an increase of .17 percent from the previous month, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the TechServe Alliance, an industry group that tracks labor data month to month.
This brings the overall employment number for the industry to 4.068 million, which represents a year over year gain of 2.1 percent. Tech industry employment is nearing the all-time high of 4.088 million, which was set in June, 2008, according to TechServe. The government counts employees working high technology industries as tech workers. Someone working in IT at a food manufacturing company, for instance, may not be counted as a tech worker. Read more...
Intel says Android 4.0 for smartphones, tablets ready
Intel on Friday said it has readied Android 4.0 for smartphones and tablets based on its upcoming Atom processor code-named Medfield, raising the possibility of Intel-inside handheld devices being released next year with the new OS.
The company had a version of Android 4.0 for Medfield up and running within a day of Google open sourcing the OS, and now packages for smartphones and tablets with Medfield drivers are available to device makers, said Alec Gefrides, head of the Google Program Office at Intel.
Intel is working with device makers to optimize and fine-tune the OS for specific platforms and products based on Medfield chips. While the OS is expected to be ready in time for the product releases, it will be up to the device makers to decide whether they want to implement the OS in smartphones or tablets. Read more...
SAP faces cloud strategy questions with SuccessFactors buy
SAP's US$3.4 billion purchase of SuccessFactors not only gives the company an increasingly popular set of on-demand human resources applications, but could also bring its entire cloud software portfolio into a new focus.
The acquisition was announced Saturday and is set to be completed in the first quarter of next year. After it closes, SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard will run the company as a separate division. He has also been tapped to lead SAP's overall cloud business.
Over the past several years, SAP hasn't quite been able to settle on a cloud strategy. The Business ByDesign ERP (enterprise resource planning) suite was pulled back and reworked once the company determined it couldn't make money on it at scale in its original form. ByDesign's target audience has also shifted, with SAP now courting both small and mid-sized businesses as well as divisions of larger companies. Read more...
What to get a nerd who has everything
Having trouble finding a unique gift for the nerd who has everything? You could take the easy way out and give them an iTunes gift card and call it a day, or you can get them something truly different, such as life-sized boxing robots, an adult Big Wheel ... or Han Solo, frozen in carbonite.
Bionic Bopper
Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots just got real. Bionic Bopper Cars are gasoline-powered robots that people can actually climb into and beat each other mercilessly for up to five hours straight, using a thumb-triggered button and two independent joysticks. A successful hit sends the opponent's robotic head back, scoring a point that's tallied on a front-mounted display. $17,000 for the pair - Hammacher Schlemmer via Nerd Approved Read more...
Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal
One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.
In Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.
In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.
The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.
Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that. Read more...
Plan your vacation: Androidland opens in Australia
For all of its technical geekiness, the Android is fun. There is always an exciting new phone around the corner that trumps the last one and if you’re tech-savvy, you can have a different phone every day by flashing new ROMs and installing new launchers. It’s only fitting that now Android has its own playground. Androidland, the world’s first Android-themed store, has opened in Australia.
The store is the result of a collaboration between Australian carrier Telstra, Google, and device manufacturers Samsung, HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, and LG. Androidland is technically a single department in Telstra’s flagship store, rather than a stand-alone shop, but we won’t hold that against it. Read more...