Facebook hires Gowalla talent, gets ready to shutter location-based site
It's official: Facebook has hired the makers of the Gowalla location-based social networking app.
"We're excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams," Facebook said in a statement. "In talking with the Gowalla team, we realised that we share many of the same goals: building great products that reach millions of people, making a big impact quickly, and creating new ways for people to connect and share what's going on in their lives. While Facebook isn't acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we're sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time." Read more...
Oracle whips out Solaris 11 system lasher
Oracle has duly announced the high availability clustering companion to the new Solaris 11 operating system, and as you might expect from a company that is pitching its own SPARC-based "engineered system" stacks, a whole bunch of third-party software and hardware that was supported with the prior Solaris Cluster 3.3 code has not made it into the 4.0 release.
Solaris 11 made its debut last month after six years of development, and it runs only on modern SPARC T and SPARC M series processors sold by Oracle. Which is fair enough, given that Oracle is perfectly happy to sell the older Solaris 10 software and support it on older iron.
Similarly, Oracle will continue to sell and support Cluster 3.3 on Solaris 10 and earlier releases for those customers who want or need to stay on these earlier versions.
But if you want to cluster Solaris-based systems at the system level – not at the database level as Oracle does with its Real Application Clusters extensions to the 11g database – and you want to run Solaris 11, then you are going to have to move to Solaris Cluster 4.0. Read more...
Microsoft seeks to woo developers with Windows 8 store
Microsoft is looking to woo application developers to its Windows 8 software store with more flexible licensing than usual, and a purported larger user base.
Speaking at an event in San Francisco, Antoine Leblond, vice president of Windows Web Services, said that Microsoft would allow developers much greater flexibility than other stores, including in-game purchasing, subscriptions, and free applications supported by advertising. In addition, once an application has generated more than $25,000 worth of revenue, Microsoft will cut its commission from the industry standard 30 per cent to 20 per cent. Read more...
Red Hat RHEL 6.2 boosts storage performance and cuts cost
Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with new technologies designed to cut the cost and improve performance of enterprise storage, the company announced Tuesday.
RHEL 6.2 also offers new features to boost reliability and improve I/O performance.
"As systems get more complex, and [run] more consolidated workloads, it becomes increasingly important to be able to efficiently deploy and manage these large-scale systems," said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of Linux engineering.
For storage, RHEL 6.2 is the first version to fully support iSCSI extension of RDMI (Remote Directory Memory Access). This will allow organizations to achieve the throughput of a SAN (storage area network) using iSCSI disks and Ethernet. "iSCSI obviates the need for separate Fibre Channel hardware, enabling you to use commodity Ethernet channels for your storage infrastructure," Burke said. As a result, "RHEL 6.2 can be used as a storage server." Read more...
Intel, Micron double density of NAND flash memory
Intel and Micron Tuesday announced that their joint NAND flash manufacturing venture will begin using a more dense circuitry that will allow a terabit of data, or 128 gigabytes, to fit on a fingertip.
The joint venture, IMFT (IM Flash Technologies), said today it has created the world's first 20nm (nanometer), 128Gbit MLC (multilevel-cell) NAND flash die.
The new 20nm chips have the highest capacity for their form factor of any in the market today and are targeted for use in tablets, smartphones, and other consumer electronic devices.
The die doubles the capacity of the venture's 25nm lithography process, which has been used to make the 64Gbit dies used in today's SSDs (solid-state drives), tablets, and smartphones. Read more...
Cisco continues expanding its cloud universe
Cisco has demonstrated in recent months that it really and truly does have a cloud strategy, and the networking giant unveiled today its broad-reaching cloud framework dubbed CloudVerse, designed to help organizations build, manage, and connect public, private, and hybrid clouds. Also in the CloudVerse bucket: An array of hosted collaboration and security applications, along with new capabilities for delivering those services to mobile users.
CloudVerse isn't a cloud platform like Microsoft Azure or Hadoop. Rather, Cisco's clear intent remains to apply its network expertise to provide a framework with which companies can roll out cloud-based services to customers or seamlessly stitch together disparate cloud platforms and services for their own use. The ability to combine clouds is increasingly important for organizations that, for any number of reasons, want to extend certain services to the public while keeping other processes and data protected under lock and key. Read more...
After trademark loss, RIM renames BBX OS to BlackBerry 10
A court in the U.S. has barred Research In Motion from using the BBX name at the company's Asian DevCon conference this week in Singapore, after a software company, Basis International, filed for a temporary restraining order in a trademark dispute. The BBX mark is identical to the mark which RIM is allegedly using to present its BBX product, observed the United States District Court for the District of New Mexico on Tuesday. Although Basis and RIM are not direct competitors, their respective BBX products are highly related and target the same class of consumers, consisting of business application software developers, it added.
RIM did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in a tweet later it said the official name of the forthcoming new OS is now BlackBerry 10. Read more...
Yahoo simplifies developer access to BOSS search development platform
Yahoo will introduce on Wednesday several new features in its Search BOSS application development platform intended to make it easier for programmers and web publishers to adopt and use.
Search BOSS, which developers use to create custom search engines on top of Yahoo's infrastructure, will now offer a "self-service" platform for which developers can sign up online, log into their account and start using in a matter of hours.
Until now, that process was much more cumbersome, involving the drafting of a custom contract, which had to be signed on paper and submitted for approval, which in turn could take weeks or months to finalize.
"The goals we're aiming for with this self-service platform is agility, flexibility and creativity," said Shashi Seth, Yahoo's senior vice president of search and marketplaces, in an interview. Read more...
Apple faces legal threat to iPad trademark in China
A Chinese court has rejected Apple's lawsuits to gain control of the iPad trademark in China, while a little-known Chinese firm raises the stakes and seeks to ban the iconic tablet from being sold in the country under the iPad brand.
The Shenzhen Municipal Intermediate People's Court said in a Tuesday statement online that it had rejected Apple's two trademark lawsuits against Shenzhen-based Proview, a display monitor vendor now in financial trouble. In 2001, Proview registered for the trademarks "iPAD" and "IPAD" in China, which it later used to unsuccessfully launch its own tablet.
The court said that in 2009, a Proview subsidiary in Taiwan had sold the iPad trademark rights to a U.K.- based company called "IP Applications". In 2010, the U.K.-based company then sold the trademark rights to Apple. Read more...
Hackers exploit Adobe Reader zero-day, may be targeting defense contractors
Adobe today confirmed that an unpatched, or zero-day, vulnerability in Adobe Reader is being exploited by criminals.
Those attacks may have been aimed at defense contractors.
Adobe promised to patch the bug in the Windows edition of Reader and Acrobat 9 no later than the end of next week. Tuesday, Dec. 12 is also Microsoft's regularly-scheduled Patch Tuesday for the month.
The upcoming patch will be Adobe's sixth for Reader and Acrobat this year.
"A critical vulnerability has been [found] in Adobe Reader X (10.1.1) and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh, Adobe Reader 9.4.6 and earlier 9.x versions for Unix, and Adobe Acrobat X (10.1.1) and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh," Adobe said in an early-warning email. "This vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system." Read more...