Fast networks key to new apps, says White House
Fast food franchises have a larger presence in many communities than next generation, high-speed gigabit networks, a fact the White House says it's attempting to address.
Officials believe that connecting the nation's disparate and sparse high speed gigabit deployments with government help could trigger the development of new types of applications. The new applications could prove a boon to the manufacturing and medical delivery industries and even to SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)-like efforts that rely on networked computer resources.
Thursday, White House science and technology officials outlined plans to accelerate high-speed network deployments by allowing network carriers to run lines on federal property and highway rights of way. Read more...
A third of IT shops support personal smartphones, tablets at work
Some IT shops provide technical support for personal smartphones, tablets and laptops used at work, but the percentage is still relatively small, a Gartner poll found.
Of 938 businesses surveyed in nine countries, 32% said they support personal smartphones, while 37% said they support tablets, Gartner said Thursday. Laptops owned by workers got the highest level of IT technical support, at 44%.
The overall level of support for personal devices was 44% in Brazil, Russia, India and China, known as the BRIC countries, which have a larger number of young workers and growing economic power. The five non-BRIC countries surveyed, U.S., U.K., Germany, Australia and Japan, had support levels at 28%, Gartner said. Read more...
Got no idea what Hadoop is, but think you need it? You’re not alone
Hadoop is quickly becoming essential infrastructure for enterprises hoping to glean insights from the massive quantities of data they collect. The problem is that relatively few enterprises have the necessary competence to make effective use of the still-complex open-source project. While Hadoop vendors like Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC, and MapR are doing their parts to simplify Hadoop, the real breakthrough for Hadoop may come from the applications that run on it, and not improvements to the infrastructure, according to Cloudera CEO Mike Olson. Read more...
New Opera 12 hooks web apps to 3D graphics acceleration
A new version of Opera's desktop browser rolls out today, six weeks after the public beta.
The list of new features hasn't changed much - and the new version also deprecates older features such as Opera Unite and widgets. HTML apps can now take advantage of experimental hardware acceleration and also access to the computer's webcam.
The hardware acceleration drills into the machine's 3D graphics processor to render pages, WebGL JavaScript code and the browser's user interface. It is enabled on an opt-in basis and remains labelled "experimental". Read more...
Cisco + OpenFlow + OpenStack = ONE software-defined network
Everybody is talking about OpenFlow, the "Quantum" networking abstraction project that is part of the OpenStack cloud controller, and software-defined networks in general. A lot of the talk has been about removing the hegemony of Cisco Systems in switching and routing. Now it is Cisco's turn to talk, the company's top brass declared at its annual customer event in San Diego.
Cisco executives talked for hours about software-defined networks and Cisco's plan to create them on its switching and routing iron. Execs holding forth at the preceding press conference included Shashi Kiran, senior director of data center, cloud, and switching solutions, and David Yen, general manager of Cisco's Data Center Group. Meanwhile Padmasree Warrior, CTO at the networking giant, gave a keynote address to the multitudes at the Cisco Live event following in its wake. But it was David Ward, dressed in jeans and not wearing any shoes, who stole the show when he explained, at length and rather eloquently, why Cisco has been so quiet about how it was going to make networks externally programmable and why it has taken so long to come up with its Open Network Environment, or ONE for short. Read more...
Nokia’s Great Software Cleansing scrubs off everything since the ’90s
Nokia took an axe to much of its non-Windows software capacity today, leaving all but a core team working on S40, company insiders say. Among the 10,000 casualties officially announced are teams working on Meltemi, Qt and QML. The team imported via the Smarterphone acquisition will work on S40, we understand.
Engineers were locked out of their source code management systems and wikis before the announcements were made this morning. Read more...
Internet Explorer flaw triggers Gmail nation-state attack message
A security flaw in Internet Explorer is triggering messages in some users’ Gmail accounts that they may be the target of an attack from a nation-state.
The vulnerability in IE was revealed by Microsoft on "Patch Tuesday," a day designated by the company every month to move fixes to its software programs.
Although the package of fixes includes a patch to address the vulnerability in IE, the flaw triggering the warning message was not addressed in the package.
"The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted webpage using Internet Explorer," Microsoft explained in an advisory. Read more...
Amazon Web Services revises support plans, cuts prices
Amazon has revised its support pricing for Amazon Web Services, expanding basic free support and lowering the cost of premium support.
The company has also added a number of support features, including alerts and the ability to interact with support personnel through chat.
Launched in 2006, AWS has been widely used by organizations and users looking to outsource their computer infrastructure by tapping into IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offerings. It provides computing nodes, databases, storage, load balancing and other services, all available on pay-as-you-go pricing plans. Read more...
Oracle: Java 7 auto-update could kill E-Business Suite functionality
Oracle has issued an urgent bulletin asking desktop administrators to immediately turn off the Java Runtime Environment auto-update option "for all Windows end user desktops connecting to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i, 12.0, and 12.1" due to a critical incompatibility.
The auto-update process to JRE 7 will happen as soon as July 3, but right now, Oracle's Forms development toolkit isn't compatible with Java 7, Oracle said in an official blog post. In addition, it said, the E-Business Suite itself has not been certified for Java 7.
Therefore, "Oracle E-Business Suite functionality based on Forms -- e.g. Financials -- will stop working if you upgrade to JRE 7," the post states. Read more...