CBS tunes in to open source, cloud
Ring in open source and cloud apps, ring out old packaged software. That's the message relayed by Peter Yared, CTO for CBS Interactive, at this week's open source-focused Open Business Conference in San Francisco. And on a related software front, broadcasting giant CBS says it is not caving to patent trolls and is instead choosing to give them a fight.
"We love open source" and run a ton of it, Yared said. CBS Interactive, which includes CBS Web properties, has utilized open source software including the Apache Hadoop distributed computing system and the MySQL database. Read more...
Reg Office 365 Live Chat: What’s in it for you?
Microsoft Office is the planet’s most ubiquitous productivity suite and Word and Excel still set the standard on personal productivity apps.
The way the software suite is embedded in each office's day-to-day business means that with each new update, Microsoft finds itself struggling to convince people to upgrade. After all, the enterprise in general is known for its tendency to cling to what it's used to.
This time, there’s a new challenge - and it’s not Google Docs: it's the web. Microsoft released Office 2013 with an updated Office 365, a package of webbified Office apps such as Word and Excel combined with Microsoft hosted versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint once found in the old Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Read more...
Firefox ‘death sentence’ threat to TeliaSonera over gov spy claims
Firefox-maker Mozilla could issue a "death sentence" to TeliaSonera's SSL business over allegations the telecoms giant sold Orwellian surveillance tech to dictators.
The punishment would be an embarrassing blow to the company: it would effectively cut off HTTPS-encrypted websites verified by TeliaSonera from Firefox users, who make up one-fifth of the planet's web surfers.
Crucially, it will be seen as a tough stance against corporations that trade with authoritarian states.
TeliaSonera, which has globe-spanning operations and sells SSL certificates to Nordic websites, asked Mozilla to include its new root certificate in Firefox's list of trusted Certificate Authorities (CAs). Read more...
Objective-C’s dip in popularity tied to decline in iPad and iPhone
Objective-C, best known as the programming language used for building applications to run on Apple's popular iPad and iPhone devices, is beginning to level off in popularity, one monthly assessment of languages reports.
The Tiobe Programming Community Index for April has Objective-C slipping a spot, dropping to fourth place and displaced by C++. The index gauges language popularity based on the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertinent to each language, with popular search engines such as Google and Yahoo, as well as other sites used to make the assessment. This month's index had Objective-C coming up in 9.60 percent of searches, which was down from 10.23 percent in April. The language is still up from one year ago, when it showed up in just 8.24 percent of searches. Read more...
WD releases first 12Gbps SAS SSDs
Western Digital subsidiary HGST today announced the world's first solid-state drives (SSD) that sport a 12Gbps serial-attached SCSI (SAS) interface.
The 2.5-in., enterprise-class SSD family ups the SAS interface bandwidth by 2X and boosts throughput by two-and-a-half times from the company's last generation SAS SSD.
The drives range from 200GB to 1TB in capacity. Read more...
Zimbra to make HTML5 push in next version
VMware's Zimbra division has provided a preview of some of the enhancements it's working on for the next major release of the ZCS (Zimbra Collaboration Server), including an HTML5 Web client interface for both online and offline access to the product.
Currently, ZCS has both a Web interface and a desktop application, but the goal is to merge the two experiences so that users will be able to work both online and offline via the same client interface. Read more...
Google Translate for Android adds offline translation option
The latest update to the Google Translate app for Android aims to solve one of its trickier issues: how to use the app when you're traveling abroad without incurring expensive overseas data roaming charges or fiddling with foreign SIMs.
Previous versions of the app required you to be connected to the internet, and all of the actual translation took place on the Chocolate Factory's servers.
The new version now gives you the option of downloading "offline language packages" for some 50 different languages, enabling you to translate text even when your phone is in airplane mode. Read more...
Dell blames ‘uncertain adoption’ of Windows 8 for some of its financial woes
Dell blamed Microsoft's Windows 8 as one of several causes for its grim financial future, according to a filing with securities regulators.
"The difficult environment faced by the Company as a result of its underperformance relative to a number of its competitors [includes] ... the uncertain adoption of the Windows 8 operating system," Dell said in a lengthy proxy statement filed Friday with the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The proxy statement laid out Dell's case for shareholders accepting a $24.4 billion offer, led by its founder and CEO, Michael Dell, to take the PC maker private. Michael Dell has joined with private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to buy the company, with Silver Lake in turn tapping Microsoft for a $2 billion contribution. Read more...
How Microsoft lost the future of gesture control
Microsoft used to rule the technology world.
Ten years ago, Windows, Office and Internet Explorer were the only "platforms" that really mattered.
Microsoft historically attained its glory by making end user products for the masses, and only later and secondarily going after enterprise and vertical markets.
But the rise of Apple as a consumer electronics company, Google's emergence as an everything company, and the advent of Web 2.0, the cloud and the social Internet have left Microsoft struggling to find a way to succeed in the markets of the future. Read more...
Apache helps free CloudStack from Citrix fetters
The ASF (Apache Software Foundation) has approved CloudStack as a TLP (top-level project), helping the open source cloud software effort further establish its independence from Citrix, which acquired the program's codebase in its 2011 purchase of Cloud.com.
"Independence from a single vendor was absolutely required of the community" to become an official Apache project, said Chip Childers, who leads the CloudStack project.
As a TLP, CloudStack has demonstrated that it has a viable and diverse contributor community, as well as an effective governance structure that operates under ASF's meritocratic principles, according to the nonprofit ASF. Read more...
Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL
Gnome project cofounder and current Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza says he's done wrestling with Linux on the desktop, and that he now uses Apple kit exclusively for all of his workstation needs.
De Icaza is well known in the open source community for developing a number of client-side technologies for Linux, including the Midnight Commander file shell, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Mono project.
But in a blog post on Tuesday, de Icaza wrote that not only does he no longer use Linux for his day-to-day computing needs, but he hasn't actually booted his Linux workstation since October 2012. In fact, he says, he hasn't even bothered to plug it in. Read more...
Which tech degrees pay the most from day one?
Young technologists have a variety of undergraduate degrees that they can pursue at the collegiate level. But which degree is going to produce the most job offers and the highest starting salaries? Should college students major in computer science, software engineering, IT, or some other niche in order to snare the top prize four years from now: a six-figure starting salary, perhaps with stock options?
We talked to colleges and professors across various tech disciplines about industry demand for their graduates. We pored over starting salary data from the PayScale College Salary Report 2012-13. We also looked at unemployment rates by college major compiled by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.
One trend is clear: The more challenging the tech-oriented major, the more job opportunities available to newly minted graduates ... as well as higher starting salaries. Students who take more math, science and engineering courses in college, tend to earn higher salaries upon graduation. Of course, whether a senior in college has multiple job offers with signing bonuses and other perks depends on their grades and internships. Also, graduating from a highly selective technical college helps tremendously with on-campus recruitment. Read more...
Canonical announces Mir display server to replace X Windows
Canonical has announced plans to develop new, open source Linux display-server software called Mir, in a move that it says will help further its goal of offering a unified Ubuntu user experience across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
Traditionally, desktop Linux distributions have rendered their GUIs using software derived from the X Window System – X, for short – a venerable graphics layer that was developed for Unix by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1980s.
But many Linux developers think X is showing its age, and that it makes it too cumbersome to create the kinds of sophisticated graphical effects that modern desktop users have come to expect. Read more...
VMware working on public cloud service
Sources told CRN on Friday that VMware is developing a public cloud solution to compete with Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's EC2 services.
At VMware's Partner Exchange Conference in Las Vegas just last week, "sources familiar with the plans" let slip some information about the cloud service to CRN.
The public cloud solution is, reportedly, referred to internally as "VMware Public Cloud" and currently in beta.
CRN reported in August of last year that VMware was working on a similar-sounding hosted solutions service, but wrote that this latest leak refers to a separate project. Read more...
Tech groups question new do-not-track bill
New legislation in the U.S. Senate that would allow Internet users to tell companies to stop tracking them is unnecessary and could slow e-commerce growth, some tech groups said.
Senators John "Jay" Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, reintroduced do-not-track legislation on Thursday. The Do-Not-Track Online Act, similar to legislation Rockefeller introduced in 2011, would require all online companies to honor do-not-track requests from consumers.
Online companies have failed to live up to promises to honor do-not-track requests, Rockefeller said in a statement. Read more...