IT Systems News

Silverlight 3 goes live on Microsoft's servers

Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash is (unofficially) here, with prospects of higher-speed, higher-resolution video and for the first time, 3D.

Three Android phones on the way from T-Mobile in 2009

T-Mobile's myTouch 3G, launched Wednesday, will be followed by two more Android phones later this year, but neither of them will be HTC's Hero.

Best Buy-brand TVs to get TiVo

A new alliance will place the retailer's own brand alongide the manufacturers, and could also lead to future partnerships on services.

LTE still lacks a voice

The 4G Wireless standard that Verizon hopes to show off before this year is out is still at a loss for (spoken) words.

Data sharing among online advertisers: Is sanity in sight?

Lockdown with Angela Gunn In the middle of a 15-page plea not to get regulated, a spark of smart thinking.

T-Mobile's strategy to combat Apple's iPhone with Android

With a trio of Android phones now in the pipeline for 2009, T-Mobile hopes to break the iPhone's emerging stranglehold.

EC's Reding: Government should act as broker for media downloads

If Internet media services don't step up and build an attractive way for users to start paying for downloads, a commissioner says, government may do the job instead.

Sony TVs get Netflix, still no PS3

Though it's coming in behind LG, Samsung, and Microsoft, Sony will begin to offer Netflix streaming, too.

Google Chrome OS: Too little, too early

Carmi Levy: Wide Angle Zoom Don't start the revolution just yet, says Carmi, who isn't so certain Chrome OS will be the "Windows Killer."

GAO pen test brings the hammer down on federal rent-a-cops

But are the computers to blame for the contract-guard fiasco at FPS?

What's Next: Chrome OS will have at least some friends in high places

Also: South Korea takes another round of DDoS abuse, and Neelie Kroes and Steve Ballmer may shake hands before she exits stage left.

Report: Evidence of further creativity with Windows 7 upgrade prices

A ZDNet blogger did some serious digging for clues as to a reported price break on multiple Windows 7 Home Premium licenses, and may have found it.

Will Oracle's Java-based Fusion middleware 'fuse' with Java?

By Tim Conneally on July 2, 2009, 2:29 PM

After nearly three years in development, Oracle yesterday officially launched Fusion Middleware 11g, its vast enterprise middleware suite, and kicked off the related "100 Days of Innovation" campaign, where the company will travel the world to show off the massive amount of new services contained in this release.

In the course of Fusion 11g's development, Oracle acquired more than 50 companies, and pulled in some 2,000 individual software improvements as a result. When you have a middleware platform as all-encompassing as that, unity among the platform's different services is critical to success.

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HP, Lenovo lead off with the first free Windows 7 upgrades

By Scott M. Fulton, III on June 26, 2009, 10:40 AM

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced it was giving PC manufacturers the option to offer buyers of new PCs with Windows Vista pre-installed, starting today, free upgrades to Windows 7 on October 22. Betanews asked the big five PC manufacturers directly, will you be offering free upgrades? This morning, global #1 manufacturer Hewlett-Packard is the first to respond with an emphatic "yes."

"The program will enable customers who purchase qualifying HP PCs to enjoy the benefits of a new Windows-based PC immediately, and receive a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available in October," reads HP's statement to Betanews. "Following general availability of Windows 7 on October 22, qualifying customers will receive the Windows 7 upgrade and an upgrade utility disk with a step-by-step guide for installation at their convenience."

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Germany gains a foothold on Top 500 supercomputer list

By Scott M. Fulton, III on June 23, 2009, 7:03 PM

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In the inaugural edition of What's Now | What's Next , we mentioned that the Jülich Supercomputer Center was boasting it had used the IBM supercomputer design responsible for the world's fastest machine several times over, to build what would likely be recorded as the third fastest supercomputer in the world. This morning, Mannheim made that official with the release of the June 2009 edition of the Top 500 Supercomputer list.

There, Jülich's BlueGene/P -- a 294,912-core, 850 MHz PowerPC 450-based cluster -- claimed the #3 position, with an R max score of 825,500 . The design that inspired it, former champion BlueGene/L at Los Alamos National Labs, lagged 72.6% behind with its historical score of 478,200 .

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Farewell, Centrino...We think we knew ye

By Scott M. Fulton, III on June 18, 2009, 8:56 AM

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Two brands saved Intel from possibly being permanently relegated to also-ran status as an innovator. "Core" is one of them; arguably, the "Core" ideal that thinking smaller can lead to better performance plus power savings, may have saved the company by itself. But there was also Centrino.

And despite that fact, consumers remain confused over the whole question of just what a "Centrino" is. No, mom and dad, it's not the processor...Well, then, what is it, son? The Centrino ideal in 2003 was that a laptop computer manufacturer could base its entire design around a set of chips, most with the Intel brand. The CPU would be at the center of that heap, and six years ago, Pentium M was the CPU Intel had intended, back before Core Microarchitecture revolutionized mobile CPUs -- back then, processor overheating was still a huge issue.

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Verizon deploys its cloud, complete with admins for rent

By Scott M. Fulton, III on June 4, 2009, 1:12 PM

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As a recognized public utility already, Verizon may be one of the best suited organizations on the planet to provide a monthly billable service to businesses, that just happens to include computing. That's the basis of the US' number one carrier's announcement yesterday. But what is it that Verizon plans to sell? With something as nebulous as cloud computing, it's often difficult to determine just what it is that a service provider is actually offering, and whether it's on a par with competitive brands. And like much of its competition, Verizon "buries its lead" with paragraphs and paragraphs of introduction about how big the cloud is these days, and how competitive business is these days, and how crappy the economy is these days.

What's the news in all of this? A company that already has a huge connectivity infrastructure is leveraging it to deliver a service for businesses to offload not only their applications, but the administrative responsibility for those apps as well , to Verizon for a monthly fee.

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AMD to ship its six-core Opteron server CPU

By Scott M. Fulton, III on June 1, 2009, 12:33 PM

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At a press conference from its Round Rock headquarters this morning, AMD made good on one of its most important promised milestones: It's preparing to deliver its six-core Opteron server processors, which will beat Intel to market with the first drop-in six-cores for 4P and 8P configurations. Shipping, according to executives, begins now. Intel isn't expected to have Nehalem generation EP- and EX-class Xeon processors in configurations other than 2P until sometime next year.

As the company's server business director John Fruehe told reporters this afternoon, this new class of six-core Opteron will feature a new element of its HyperTransport bus, called HT Assist. As Fruehe explained, this feature will enable all the processors in a multi-way configuration to share portions of their L3 cache as a pooled lookup table. This way, calls to the table are directed to the appropriate processor, even across processors. The promise here is to dramatically reduce crosstalk and traffic, and cut stream memory bandwidth by as much as 30%.

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6 Gbps SATA transfer speed is on its way

By Scott M. Fulton, III on May 27, 2009, 12:30 PM

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The solid-state disk drive is supposed to be fast. After all, it's mostly made of memory -- and last we checked, flash RAM was fast. In practice, however, some applications with SSDs can be slower than with HDDs, the reason being the way data is cached as it's collected and moved through I/O channels into system RAM.

The transfer interface is the bottleneck, and the engineers that contribute to the Serial ATA (SATA) transfer specification admit that fact openly. Just a few years ago, you might never have thought that 3 gigabits per second (Gbps) would end up causing problems; but as it turned out, the faster SATA 2.0 maximum transfer rate enabled new applications, which ended up introducing users to those bottlenecks for the first time.

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AT&T re-enters the data services field by way of the cloud

By Scott M. Fulton, III on May 18, 2009, 10:53 AM

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It was literally during the 1960s when engineers first envisioned a realistic concept for remote storage of electronic data. It would be stored and retrieved using a radically redefined telephone network, one which folks might have to wait until 1980 or so to finally witness. And since it required the telephone, the master of the new concept seemed inevitably to be the Bell System -- AT&T.

The reason it didn't happen that way (the breakup of AT&T aside) was because local storage ended up being relatively cheap, and hard drives made sense. But four decades later, in a vastly different global economy, businesses' appetite for storage space is exceeding the ability of even cheap technologies like hard drives to keep providing it. So businesses are once again investigating a telecommunications-based option, and it is amid that backdrop of historical irony that AT&T is re-entering the picture. This morning, the company announced a programmed, systematic entry into the cloud-based data storage market, choosing a few customers at a time for a new on-demand storage service model it's calling Synaptic Storage as a Service.

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Opting to go one-up in virtualization, Oracle ingests Virtual Iron

By Angela Gunn on May 13, 2009, 2:37 PM

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The company already has a decent hypervisor in Oracle VM, and more options on the way as the Sun buy comes to pass, but Oracle is apparently looking to upgrade its toolset. The company announced on Wednesday that it's acquiring Virtual Iron (nee Katana Technology), which offers a hypervisor with an interesting and speedy set of system tools. It's expected that those tools will be combined with the current Oracle offering.

Virtual Iron has in recent years been overtaken by big-iron (Citrix, VMWare, Microsoft) interest in the category, but the company brought some interesting policy-based and modular thinking to the table. Past and current customers include Priceline.com, Sandia National Labs, Siemens, Toyota, Hitachi and the office of the Maine Attorney General.

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IBM tackles Microsoft with blade servers and cloud services

By Jacqueline Emigh on May 8, 2009, 5:19 PM

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Targeted mostly at midrange customers who might otherwise turn to Windows, the new IBM Express Advantage products rolled out this week include newer and faster models of IBM's BladeCenter Express servers, along with a new hardware/software bundle called the "Comprehensive Data Protection Solution," said Bob Kelly, TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) product manager, in a briefing with Betanews.

In a separate announcement this week, IBM launched WebSpan, a fee-based, service-oriented software environment that's already drawing a lot of comparisons with Microsoft's Azure.

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Lenovo abruptly drops ThinkVantage 'big blue button' support

By Angela Gunn on May 8, 2009, 3:31 PM

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It was announced in late March, but only as Lenovo owners get around to updating their systems are they becoming aware that ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU), the power behind the " big blue button ," has been discontinued, eliminating the line's beloved automatic-update capability.

One-click driver update capability has been a longtime feature of the ThinkPad line, which include a large programmable button (labeled "Access IBM" on IBM-era machines and "ThinkVantage" on the later Lenovo models) set up for that purpose. Clicking the button after boot-up fired up the TVSU process, which downloaded many if not all of the driver updates required for that particular machine.

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Xerox rolls out pioneering ColorQube printer with crayon-like ink

By Jacqueline Emigh on May 7, 2009, 2:22 PM

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Formerly codenamed Jupiter, the ColorQube 9200 series printers unveiled today will bring groundbreaking cost efficiencies to color printing through a combination of solid ink technology and per-click pricing plans, Xerox officials contended, in a series of press launches.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to announce that, for the first time, you can release your 'true colors' in the office," declared Xerox Corp. President Ursula Burns, touting ColorQube as the "most significant change in office printing in the past 30 years."

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Even more fusion after the latest AMD reorganization

By Scott M. Fulton, III on May 7, 2009, 11:37 AM

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In the business press and in business marketing, the term "merger" is often used quite loosely, sometimes to mean the incorporation of another company as a division of the acquirer. When AMD acquired ATI in July 2006 , the merger was touted as a pairing of equals, and the forging of a permanent fraternity between two giants in their respective fields. But almost immediately afterward, talk of ways to build processors that used AMD cores and ATI pipelines together led to discussion about truly fusing the two divisions' business units; and the first sign of the fallout from that discussion was former ATI CEO Dave Orton's departure from the AMD executive ranks in July 2007.

Almost precisely one year ago, the actual fusion of the two divisions began, with the creation of a Central Engineering group that would conduct research and development for all the company's processors. Freescale Semiconductor veteran Chekib Akrout was brought in to lead that department, but in a partnership arrangement with AMD veteran Jeff VerHeul. Yesterday afternoon, AMD announced the remainder of its fusion is complete: As AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie explained to Betanews this morning, there is now one marketing department and one product management department as well, while some of the functionality of Akrout's department is being shifted.

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How to really test the Windows 7 Release Candidate

By Scott M. Fulton, III on May 5, 2009, 2:31 PM

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Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 32-bit from Fileforum now.

Download Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit from Fileforum now.

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HP and RIM announce new allied services

By Tim Conneally on May 4, 2009, 2:56 PM

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The mobile enterprise sector has got its newest supergroup. Today, HP and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion announced their alliance and that their first collaborative efforts are ready to be shown to the public: HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones, and HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

CloudPrint is a product of HP Labs , which, in short, is a cloud-based print server. It allows Internet-connected mobile devices to print e-mail attachments, Web pages, photos, and documents, and has been in various stages of development since 2007. Through its partnership with RIM, HP will make the service available to BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers.

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Is 'XP Mode' in Windows 7 something you'd want to use?

By Scott M. Fulton, III on May 4, 2009, 11:34 AM

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Since Microsoft's acquisition of SoftGrid application virtualization two years ago, the company's engineers have known that this technology could present an attractive and even preferable shortcut to the perennial problem of downward compatibility. If you set aside the problem of affordability for a moment, the other key reason businesses remain hesitant to adopt Windows Vista at present is because of the uncertainty that existing business applications will be seamlessly portable into the new environment.

This is much more of a problem for businesses than consumers, although a lot of the excitement around what Microsoft's calling "XP mode" in Windows 7 (whose first and probably only Release Candidate should be available to the general public tomorrow) came from everyday users who perceived the company's move as a nod toward the efficiencies of the past, as opposed to the planned obsolescence of the future. The fact is, businesses continue to invest in software up front with the expectation that it will pay off in the long term, depreciating it like an asset rather than supporting and nurturing it like a resource. And it is for those businesses that Microsoft must ensure that it facilitates and ensures the same general infrastructure over time.

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Flashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0

By Scott M. Fulton, III on May 1, 2009, 4:24 PM

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This is most likely neither the first nor the last article you will read on the subject of Microsoft Windows 3.0. The attention being given the new product is not only deserved, but in many cases carefully orchestrated. The weeklies and fortnightlies have already extolled the merits of Win3's "three-dimensional" buttons, proportional text, and now-boundlessly managed memory. Their gold-star awards have no doubt been bestowed upon the product for being the best in its class, albeit the only product in its class. The "pundits" have already laid blame upon someone for Win3's alleged tardiness to market. The entire story is so well-patterned, it may be read without ever having laid eyes to the printed page.

Yet if we follow the pattern, we miss the real story...

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Nvidia's licensing situation with AMD is just as bad as with Intel

By Scott M. Fulton, III on April 23, 2009, 6:45 PM

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During yesterday's unveiling of its accelerated roadmap for 12- and even 16-core processors, an AMD executive said he did not believe the licensing situation between his company and Nvidia would enable Nvidia to produce chipsets that support future AMD platforms. Specifically, it appears Nvidia is not yet licensed to produce motherboard chipsets that support AMD's next-generation processors, reducing the likelihood for multi-GPU SLI support for AMD's "Istanbul" and future generations.

"For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time," stated server business unit vice president Pat Patla. "We don't expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010."

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The plan to get AMD Opteron back in sync

By Scott M. Fulton, III on April 23, 2009, 6:25 PM

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Two years ago, after AMD promised to deliver the best performing CPU to data centers, its Barcelona architecture found the company trying to explain to customers why they shouldn't want performance , in an explanation that looked just as embarrassing as it sounded.

For AMD's last quarter, it actually managed to heal some of the ill effects of the negative economy on its desktop and mobile CPU segments, but not yet in the data center. Server CPU revenue is still hurting, though the company now declines to provide a specific breakdown. The way back for the company, it believes, is to create a marketing position that's similar to where it was in 2006, where system builders and partners started perceiving AMD as "one-upping" Intel.

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For the desktop, AMD covets the budget enthusiast with 3.2 GHz quad-core

By Scott M. Fulton, III on April 23, 2009, 3:48 PM

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If you've ever had the pleasure of owning a Nissan Z car (I've owned two in my lifetime), you understand the extra feeling of confidence you get from still being able to afford your house, your clothes, and food. They're very solid performers, they look presentable in a crowd full of Porsches and BMWs, and yet their owners are conscientious folk who can also maintain a budget.

Every time I tell the fellows at AMD that I've been a Z owner, they shout back at me, "Well then, you know what we're talking about!" They're hoping that there's a certain niche of enthusiast system builders who aren't all that interested in displaying the measurements of their disposable income in public. For them, on time, AMD released its next version of sensible high-performance: the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU.

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