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PDC 2009: What have we learned this week?
There was the freebie that no one will forget, the heebie-jeebies courtesy of Scott Guthrie, and a teensy bit clearer picture of how this cloud thingie should work.
Live report: Will Google Chrome OS change Linux?
The mysteries of just what Chrome OS is, and how much of an operating system it truly is, may be resolved today.
PDC 2009: Microsoft cares about Web browser performance
The effort to give users of the world's dominant Web browser the impression of quality, is a personal one for the man who leads that battle.
Nokia re-affirms its commitment to Symbian, sort of
Maemo won't necessarily be replacing Symbian in the Nokia N-Series, but that's definitely a place where it will be found.
E-book readers will be in short supply this holiday season
E-readers are hot this year, and a lot of compelling new products have been released, but are there enough electrophoretic displays to go around?
Sony looks to finally open a single storefront for downloads
Sony has had many different download portals for movies, music, e-books, and games, and now it's looking to make a single shop for all of it.
Tuning out the tablet: Time to give the endless speculation a rest
Wide Angle Zoom: Wishing and hoping and thinking and praying....won't put an iTablet on the market.
Five improvements for IT managers in 2010
If businesses are to improve their efficiency for next year, they need to stop and reassess the basic tenets of their job.
AOL's spinoff from Time Warner to shed 2,500 jobs
As AOL moves toward become an independent company again, it will cut nearly a third of its workforce.
Gartner: SMS-based money transfer will be bigger than mobile browsing, search
Gartner issues its predictions for the 10 things our phones will be doing in 2012.
Don't forget to upgrade to Firefox 3.6 beta 3 today
Mozilla has released the latest beta its Firefox 3.6 browser software, just over one week after beta 2.
Five improvements for IT managers in 2010
By Ed Moyle, TechNewsWorld on November 19, 2009, 8:51 PM
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Every year around this time, everyone from antimalware companies to analyst firms line up to tell us about the top IT and security trends -- what they are and why we should care. This year, chances are they'll tell us all about cloud computing, virtualization, and social networking, and why these technologies are the new best (or worst) friends for security folks in 2010.
Now if you're sensing a bit of snarkiness here, you're right -- I find these lists a bit frustrating. That's not because of inaccuracies in the lists themselves (to the contrary, many of them are dead-on), but instead because they sometimes inappropriately drive how IT managers make budgeting decisions. Don't get me wrong, keeping abreast of the new areas is always valuable -- and I'm always fully on board with keeping us and our staff up to date and capable of reacting to new types of threats. But it's also important to keep in mind that what's new isn't always what's most critical. Where should you be investing budget dollars? At critical areas, not just what's new and shiny.
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PDC 2009: Windows Server's plan to move customers back off the cloud
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 18, 2009, 2:21 AM
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Much of the value proposition for Windows Azure -- the star of the show Tuesday at PDC 2009 in Los Angeles -- has been its ability to open up new business avenues for customers who had not been able to envision hosting high-intensity data center operations before. Azure could give these customers a leg up, a new and more affordable way to get off the ground.
But once they're off the ground, the question becomes, why stay up in the air? What's to keep those customers grounded -- to mix metaphors like an old editor of mine -- in the cloud? The surprise answer to that question is coming from a senior product manager for Windows Server, not Azure. Scott Ottaway told Betanews today that provisions are being planned for customers to move their deployed applications back off the Azure cloud, onto on-premises data center servers.
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Microsoft's Top 3 advances in Exchange Server 2010
By Scott M. Fulton, III on November 9, 2009, 6:16 PM
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The biggest change to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 was supposed to have been the introduction of something called Unified Communications -- the introduction of a singular console for the handling of all forms of digital communication, wrapping voice mail, instant messaging, and e-mail into a single delivery system. History may yet vindicate UC as the product's singular achievement.
But in the near term, administrators credit Exchange more for what it gives them than the world at large. In that light, the inclusion of PowerShell as not only the underlying language of the system but as its engine as well, changed everything for the admin. It may very well be why the product has surged to a two-thirds market share, by some estimates, over once formidable competition such as Lotus Notes.
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Amazon lowers EC2 cloud service fees, adds MySQL relational instancing
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 27, 2009, 6:07 PM
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Come November 1, Amazon's Web Services division will be lowering the per-hour prices for all of its current five instance types (AMIs), while adding two new AMI types on the high-end, according to a multitude of announcements from Amazon today. At the new high end of the scale will be a "quadruple extra-large" AMI with 68.4 GB of dedicated RAM, and the virtual computing power of a 1 GHz, 26-core Intel Xeon processor (albeit a 2007 model).
The new high-end instances won't come cheap -- they'll carry a premium of $2.40 per instance-hour for Linux editions, and $2.88 per instance-hour for Windows Server 2003. The previous high-end AMI, still called "extra large," had been priced at nearly one-third that amount.
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Flashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 21, 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...
Continue reading Flashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0...
A Sidekick crisis post mortem on cloud confidence
By Tim Conneally on October 21, 2009, 4:15 PM
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I was sitting in the dentist's chair getting my teeth drilled, while the technician complained about her now-worthless Sidekick. With no way to access her contact lists, she couldn't get in touch with her family due to arrive in DC for a reunion, and had to rely on the frequently failing device as a simple inbound line for family members to contact her. When that failed, she had to use a payphone.
It was a pretty sad story, and thousands of users were faced with a similar communication breakdown...for more than a week.
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Office 2010, SharePoint public betas for November, VS 2010 Beta 2 Wednesday
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 19, 2009, 2:56 PM
16 Comments
During an industry event whose original purpose was to concentrate on SharePoint 2010, Microsoft's collaborative server product, CEO Steve Ballmer revealed that his company is making ready an official "public beta" of Office 2010, the applications suite for Windows.
The most likely timeframe for such a release would be during PDC 2009, Microsoft's annual developers' conference now scheduled for the third week of November in Los Angeles.
Continue reading Office 2010, SharePoint public betas for November, VS 2010 Beta 2 Wednesday...
How do you define performance?
By Carmi Levy on October 15, 2009, 4:26 PM
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System performance is an interesting concept; everyone seems to define it differently. To some, it involves chewing through a complex spreadsheet. To others, it's how fast a 3D video sequence can be rendered, or how easily Web pages are served up.
Call me a rebel, but after years of living off of a BlackBerry, my thinking has evolved. As much as I focused on megahertz and gigahertz for much of my computing life, the most important criteria for me these days are how fast the thing turns on, and how long it stays on before I have to recharge it.
Danger signs: Now how secure does the cloud look?
By Carmi Levy on October 12, 2009, 5:57 PM
26 Comments
There are service outages, and then there are service outages. T-Mobile customers who carry the Sidekick smartphone are learning the hard way that there's a major difference between having no access to a service for a little while and losing every contact, calendar entry, and related shred of personal data they've got.
In the not too distant past, Google, Twitter, and Facebook have all experienced basic, quaintly simple service outages. Despite the headlines and general chaos associated with each incident, the bottom line impact was never all that onerous: When service returned, so did their users' data. For the most part, users were given an easy excuse to take a few hours off. And with the exception of Google's subscription services, most were free, so folks couldn't argue that they weren't getting their money's worth.
Continue reading Danger signs: Now how secure does the cloud look?...
'Amateur' Linux IBM mainframe failure blamed for stranding New Zealand flyers
By Scott M. Fulton, III on October 12, 2009, 11:20 AM
6 Comments
12:05 pm EDT October 11, 2009 · The president of a design firm that specializes in data center power efficiency, and that was working on a new design last year for the Auckland-based data center that failed Friday morning, told Betanews today that even if changes were being made to that data center, if both the original design and the changeover plan were implemented properly, the data center failure would not have happened.
"What seems strange about this incident is that they are blaming it on a generator failure during testing," stated California Data Center Design Group President Ron Hughes, whose organization was not responsible either for the data center's current design or the changeover. "If this failure did occur during testing, the question I would ask is why didn't the redundant generators assume the load or why didn't they just switch back to utility power."
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Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #9: Processor core parking
By Scott M. Fulton, III on September 25, 2009, 1:06 PM
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When you think of kids on the playground playing Star Trek make-believe, you see the guy who plays Scotty inevitably being shouted at to increase or decrease the power, and then the guy putting on his best (or worst) Scottish accent and complaining back to the captain about how it canna be done, she can't take this abuse much longer or we're all genna bloe! Powering up and powering down is the most common task that amateurs think of when they consider the role of an engineer running a big machine.
And yet up until very recently, servers have existed in a perpetual "on/off" state -- they're either turned on and consuming the energy they've been designed to consume, or they're off and your data center is offline. Only in the last few years, with the introduction of the multicore era coupled with the sudden ubiquity of virtualization, has there been the notion that you can move the entire serving job at any one time to the most efficient processor available. New CPU technologies like Intel SpeedStep have created the opportunity for administrators to eliminate the problem of processor latency by turning off entire cores when they're not in use.
Continue reading Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #9: Processor core parking...
For AMD, keeping it too simple may be too stupid
By Carmi Levy on September 21, 2009, 4:59 PM
8 Comments
The "Keep It Simple, Stupid" rule works in business as well as in everyday life, primarily because it forces us to focus on the one or two basic issues we need to make the right decision. My kindergarten teacher shortened it to "KISS," perhaps in the interest of simplicity. When you're driving a car: Know where you are, know where you're going. Leader of the free world: Keep your hands clean, know what you're aiming at. Reprogramming your iPod/in-vehicle audio system interface: Pull over, let the semi pass you.
More data, please
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Like HP, Dell also acquires a Perot empire for enterprise services
By Tim Conneally on September 21, 2009, 2:09 PM
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Though Dell has extended its brand to consumer electronics of all sorts, the company's latest drive is straight into enterprise services, a segment of the IT market which has helped HP retain a competitive edge on Dell in hardware sales.
Today, Dell announced it will be acquiring Perot Systems in a $3.9 billion all-cash transaction expected to be completed in January.
Continue reading Like HP, Dell also acquires a Perot empire for enterprise services...
Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #10: Boot from virtual devices
By Scott M. Fulton, III on September 8, 2009, 4:50 PM
4 Comments
Last month, Microsoft made available to its TechNet partners the first release-to-manufacturing code for Windows Server 2008 R2, the next edition of the server operating system that premiered in January 2008. While I've said here before that I feel Windows 7 is "Vista service pack 3" (and I meant that in a good way), Microsoft is right up front about the fact that R2 is the Windows 7 kernel applied to WS2K8, the result of that alone being an immediate improvement in the system.
But there are other bonuses as well -- so many, in fact, that it took me much more time than I anticipated to pore through the multiple lists of new features, research the potential impact of each one, confer with others as to their significance, and peek into how they are already impacting businesses' deployment plans. In a number of key aspects, WS2K8 R2 is actually the complete package that WS2K8 should have been, minus the Vista core that led some shops to stick with Windows Server 2003.
Continue reading Top 10 Windows Server 2008 R2 Features #10: Boot from virtual devices...
FCC ponders a future with multiple 'internets'
By Tim Conneally on September 4, 2009, 6:24 PM
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While many of the FCC's broadband workshops have dealt with current, concrete issues such as the deployment, adoption, and utilization of broadband in the United States, Thursday's FCC workshop took a refreshing departure from the here and now -- which in government practices is the equivalent to three years ago -- and spent time discussing the ideas that could potentially change what we know as the Internet.
One of the questions in the discussion was, "What might the Internet architecture look like in ten to twenty years, beyond incremental changes like speed increases?"
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Here come AMD's six-core, ultra-low-power Opteron EEs
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 31, 2009, 12:43 AM
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There are three "rails" of wattage in AMD's architectural plan for its CPUs: its higher-performance SE line, its lowest-power EE line, and its hybrid HE line that trades some performance for power savings. Two months ago, AMD introduced its first six-core Opterons in the SE flavor first, setting the general trend for future rollouts; last month, it trotted out the HE hybrid line in that same series.
Today, as expected, the company is announcing stage 3 of its plan: the rollout of its first ultra-low-power six-core Opteron series, including the model 2419 EE, with 40 watts of average power consumption (ACP) clocked at 1.8 GHz. This time, AMD's value proposition is this: Server centers that already have quad-core 75W Opteron-based units can replace them for dropped in 40W six-core units, and see better performance per watt while gaining two cores per socket in the process.
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The 'partly cloudy' network: Amazon's new partial clouds via IPsec VPN
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 26, 2009, 5:07 PM
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This past year, what has very clearly distinguished one company's cloud services from another has been their intended uses. Whereas Microsoft Windows Azure has been a custom applications platform, and Salesforce.com has built a business logic platform around Force.com, Amazon Web services has been about deploying entire servers in the cloud, letting customers lease the processing time and bandwidth to deploy their own Web fronts on Amazon's hardware.
Up to now, the question for AWS customers has been to deploy or not to deploy; but this morning, data center architects will be asking how much to deploy. With the rollout of what it's calling Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, the service will enable a new class of customers to deploy limited resources into the cloud, and then secure and administer those resources through the customers' own firewalls and admin software. Amazon announced the initial beta of VPC to select customers this morning.
Continue reading The 'partly cloudy' network: Amazon's new partial clouds via IPsec VPN...
Glass: Android for office phones
By Tim Conneally on August 19, 2009, 9:12 PM
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Earlier this year, we took a look at a desktop phone running Android built by California startup Touch Revolution. While that device provided a look into the potential application of the OS in fixed telephony, the devices we saw were running a version of Android almost indistinguishable from the publicly available build.
Today, Cloud Telecomputers has debuted a completely unique build of Android as a part of its Glass "telecomputer" platform. The company's reference design has the Android environment running on a TI OMAP processor, and all telephony (VoIP and DSP, SIP Stack and Voice Codecs) being handled by a separate Audiocodes processor.
Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate available today
By Scott M. Fulton, III on August 18, 2009, 11:43 AM
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Download Exchange Server 2010 x64 Release Candidate from Fileforum now.
This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company will be making available the first public release candidate for its Exchange Server 2010 e-mail server today. As of late Tuesday morning, the links still pointed to the last ES 2010 public beta.
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Microsoft and Nokia join forces to take on BlackBerry
By Tim Conneally on August 12, 2009, 11:53 AM
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Nokia's Symbian S60 today became the first non-Windows Mobile platform to receive support for the Microsoft Office Mobile suite of applications and services. Microsoft and Nokia today announced their long-term partnership to collaborate on the design, development, and marketing of mobile productivity solutions.
Beginning next year, Nokia's E-series handsets will ship with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile built in, and later, other Office applications and software will be added to the Symbian platform, such as mobile versions of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote, as well as SharePoint Server and Microsoft System Center.
Continue reading Microsoft and Nokia join forces to take on BlackBerry...
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