Linux growing, Windows declining among Eclipse users

Ian Skerrett just posted six insights from the Eclipse community survey. They're all very interesting, but Insight No. 1 is really surprising. Ian writes: "Insight #1 – Linux is doing really well at the expense of Windows." Ian bases this on the following data:

It's long been held that developers build applications on Windows regardless of which operating system the (server side) application will be deployed on. This Eclipse data suggests a change might be under way.
It's long been held that developers build applications on Windows regardless of which operating system the (server side) application will be deployed on. This Eclipse data suggests a change might be under way.

Is anyone else surprised that nearly half (27 percent vs. 64 percent) as many Eclipse users build applications on Linux as they do on Windows? Frankly, I've worked with more customers whose developers build applications on Mac OS X than on Linux; emphasis on the word "on" versus "for." Nonetheless, this data should definitely get some attention from folks at Microsoft.

Yes, these results are based on Eclipse users and do not account for the Visual Studio developers who are 100 percent on Windows. But let's say Eclipse and Eclipse-based tooling is used by (as little as?) one-third of all enterprise developers; it's still a large enough audience that Microsoft needs to keep on Windows. Maybe there's work that Microsoft could do to optimize Eclipse for Windows, much like Microsoft has done with PHP and Windows?

More worrisome (to Microsoft) is the fact that Linux has secured the No. 1 position for deployment operating systems among Eclipse users. In related news, Sun Solaris/OpenSolaris fared no better, declining from 8 percent in 2007 to 5.2 percent in 2009. My data analysis spidey senses are tingling. I'd love to have more time with this data! But alas, life calls...

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Former MySQL CEO joins cloud management vendor

Marten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL, has joined the board of directors of RightScale, which provides cloud computing management, RightScale said on Thursday.

Mickos had been MySQL CEO from 2001 to 2008, when the open source database company was acquired by Sun. He then held the position of senior vice president of the database group at Sun until leaving the company earlier this year.

"I look forward to offering my experience as a member of the RightScale board to help the company maintain and expand its leadership in a rapidly growing market," Mickos said in a statement released by RightScale.

"Marten has proven to be one of the industry's most innovative leaders, and we hope to tap his experience as we aggressively expand RightScale's cloud management offerings to new markets," RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said, also in a statement.

The saga of MySQL recently took an interesting twist, with Sun now in the process of being acquired by commercial database giant Oracle.

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Bugs hit Facebook application verification program

Facebook's Application Verification Program, controversial due to its concept of charging developers to have their applications certified as "trustworthy," has run into technical problems.

Announced in November and launched on Wednesday, the program has system bugs that are preventing developers from reaping some benefits of having paid to have their applications reviewed and approved.

In a thread on the official Facebook developer forum, developers who shelled out the $375 review fee began reporting a variety of system problems on Wednesday.

In that same thread, Facebook on Thursday afternoon acknowledged that at least three of the bugs reported exist and that the company is working to fix them.

For example, the special green checkmark that denotes verified applications' special status isn't appearing in the Applications Directory search results. Consequently, without that special badge, the applications look no different from those posted by developers who didn't pay for the verification.

In addition, some developers are reporting that they can't submit their applications for review because the link to do so doesn't work, another bug Facebook has acknowledged exists for some applications.

Another bug Facebook has acknowledged is that the boost in user notifications and requests that verified applications get isn't always showing up in the developer's control panel stats.

Other developers complained in the thread that they couldn't find their applications at all-- green checkmark or not -- although this may be due to the way the Facebook algorithms work in displaying certain applications to certain people and not others.

The program became instantly controversial when it was announced in November because critics said developers shouldn't have to pay to have their applications labeled "trustworthy." They argued that it should be up to Facebook to ensure that applications built for its site comply with this requirement.

In response, Facebook has said that, in fact, all of the more than 52,000 applications on its platform must comply with requirements and policies that make them trustworthy. The Application Verification Program, which is optional, gives developers a chance to make their applications stand out by adopting an additional set of best practices for them regarding user experience and user communications, according to Facebook.

Still, some Facebook developers remain unconvinced about the value of the program, and even more so now with the technical issues affecting it.

"I will not pay to be approved. It's not worth the money. Any good application will do just fine without it," said Christopher Bourton, games developer and consultant at Lethos Designs in London, which has developed three Facebook applications and is building two more.

Bourton, contacted via e-mail on Thursday, said he fears that the program will create "an elitist two-tier system" in which large developers that can pay the fee will get the benefits, while smaller developers with fewer resources will not be able to afford it.

Applications approved through the system get the verified status for 12 months, after which developers must re-submit them for review and pay the $375 fee again.

Other developers are more positive about the program, like Tim O'Shaughnessy, CEO of LivingSocial, which has created about 10 applications for Facebook, including its very popular namesake and Visual Bookshelf.

"The verification program is a nice way of allowing users to weed through the noise and know [that] if they're adding a [verified] application, there is a sense of trust behind that add," O'Shaughnessy said via e-mail.

Living Social submitted Visual Bookshelf for verification and got it approved, but while the process was fairly simple and straightforward, it took Facebook longer than O'Shaughnessy expected to complete its review. "Now that the initial applicants have been verified, however, my guess is the process will be much shorter in the future," he said.

For O'Shaughnessy, a big question regarding the value of the program is whether it will truly give Facebook users a sense of security towards verified applications. He also hopes that Facebook will continue to evolve the program.

"As new Facebook features and functionality are made available, will the verification program keep up with new, relevant additions? This seems like a necessity in order for the program to have long-term value," he said.

Gartner analyst Ray Valdes thinks that establishing the program was a good move by Facebook. "Facebook's value proposition is having a quality user experience and that includes the experience of applications," Valdes said in a phone interview. "As the number of applications has grown, the quality of the experience has decreased. This is part of their ongoing maintenance and cultivation of the user experience."

IDC analyst Al Hilwa concurs that end users will benefit from having a set of applications that Facebook has certified as meeting special criteria for user experience and trust. "I think this is a welcome move to rein in what could potentially be a tiring process of finding well-behaved and trustworthy apps," he said via e-mail.

"Relying on market forces to sort out the wheat from the chaff may work in the long run and sounds good as an ideal, but with the velocity of business these days, and the ephemeral stickiness of online sites, it is maybe too late for a platform to be successful to wait for that process to settle down," Hilwa added.

On Wednesday, Facebook launched the program with an initial set of 120 verified applications, but it expects developer interest to pick up considerably now that the program has been launched.

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MySQL, Forked beyond repair?

One month after Oracle announced its takeover of Sun Microsystems, the future of MySQL remains up in the air. Can the leading lightweight open source database still thrive when it's controlled by the leading proprietary commercial database vendor? So far, the prognosis doesn't look good.

Even before the Oracle buyout, there were signs of strain within the MySQL community. Not long after Sun acquired MySQL in 2008, key MySQL employees began exiting the company, including CEO Mårten Mickos and cofounder Monty Widenius. Widenius, in particular, was vocally critical of the MySQL development process under Sun's stewardship, citing rushed release cycles and poor quality control. Another MySQL cofounder, David Axmark, left out of frustration with the bureaucracy and tedium of Sun's buttoned-down corporate culture.

In the wake of this exodus came another ominous development: Forks of the MySQL codebase began to appear, including Drizzle and MariaDB, offering users and contributors ways around Sun's control of the main branch. Drizzle is an attempt to shed some of the feature bloat that has crept into recent MySQL releases, in favor of a lightweight database server aimed at cloud computing and Web applications. MariaDB, on the other hand, aims to be feature-compatible with MySQL, but it uses a brand-new, transaction-capable storage engine by default. And perhaps even more significantly, MariaDB is spearheaded by none other than Widenius himself.

If that wasn't troubling enough for MySQL's new minders at Oracle, Widenius has since dropped the other shoe. Last week, he announced the formation of the Open Database Alliance, a "vendor-neutral consortium" whose stated aim is to become "the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem." Notably, no one from Oracle is listed among the Open Database Alliance's contacts.

If all this leaves you scratching your head, you're not alone. In March, former MySQL employee and Drizzle developer Patrick Galbraith wondered aloud just which branch of MySQL should be considered "official" these days. The ultimate answer to that question will determine the fate of the MySQL database.

Can Oracle keep the MySQL product relevant?
Of course, there can only be one real, official version of MySQL: It's the one that was originally developed by MySQL, was later bought by Sun, and was finally acquired by Oracle. Oracle now owns all the copyrights, trademarks, and other intellectual property associated with the MySQL name -- and that intellectual property has always been defended vigorously. MySQL had even been known to send trademark-violation notices to partners that had the temerity to call their service offerings "MySQL support" instead of "support for MySQL databases."

While that's all well and good, however, the MySQL brand alone isn't likely to comfort customers who worry that an open source database won't get the attention it needs from one of the world's largest commercial software companies. Already some customers must be questioning Oracle's commitment to a low-end product like MySQL, when it has a lucrative, proprietary database to sell. And as the MySQL community fragments and begins turning to alternatives, the economics of Oracle's MySQL business become steadily less attractive.

But if MySQL's approval ratings are slumping, all the more reason for Oracle to move decisively. Oracle must work to regain the trust and support of the MySQL community or risk losing mindshare to a fork, such as Drizzle or MariaDB. To do that, it has to avoid making the mistakes that Sun made when it acquired MySQL. In a sense, to succeed with MySQL, Oracle will have to stop acting like Oracle.

Open source customers are a notoriously fickle bunch. If one project doesn't deliver what users need, the users go elsewhere -- and the same goes for developers. Forks are a fact of life in the open source community, and arguably an entirely healthy one. Oracle just better hope it doesn't end up on the wrong side of the fork.

When projects fork, there are winners and losers
Coincidentally, a similar drama is playing out elsewhere in the open source world right now. This one concerns glibc, the Gnu standard C library that is used by practically every piece of software running on Linux systems. Earlier this month, the Debian Project opted to switch its entire distribution from using standard glibc to a fork called eglibc. Ostensibly the new fork works better for embedded systems programming, but the community scuttlebutt says the switch was really the result of ongoing problems with glibc's notoriously obstinate maintainer, Ulrich Drepper. (One contributor even went so far as to file a bug report describing the problem.)

The name eglibc is surely no accident. It echoes an earlier, contentious incident in which a group of developers working on gcc, the Gnu C compiler, frustrated by the project's restrictive contribution model, split off to form a new fork called egcs. Freed from excessive bureaucracy, the fork thrived, while development on the main gcc branch stagnated. Eventually it died off completely; all that was left was for egcs to formally change its name back to gcc. The fork became the main branch -- and according to some egcs developers, that had been their intention from the very beginning. It seems likely that the eglibc maintainers have something similar in mind.

There's a real lesson to be learned here for Oracle and other maintainers of open source projects. Creeping authoritarianism in the development and contribution processes is something that many users of open source software are simply unwilling to tolerate; quite naturally, the contributors with the most to offer are the most likely to become frustrated when they feel stymied by red tape (or simple pigheadedness). Projects that are maintained by commercial entities are particularly susceptible to this tendency. Twelve years after Eric S. Raymond published his landmark essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," too many projects -- and companies in particular -- can't seem to let go of their cathedral mentalities.

That's why the best course of action for Oracle would be to join the Open Database Alliance and take an active role in the ongoing development of MySQL in an open, community-driven way. Oracle acquired MySQL as an asset of Sun, but Sun never knew what it had in the first place, nor how to manage it. If Oracle can't figure out how to do what Sun couldn't, it will still own the MySQL name; unfortunately, however, that name won't mean much.

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Microsoft, HP expand unified communications push

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have expanded their partnership to develop and sell a common platform for delivering voice, video, and messaging services to office workers.

The companies plan to spend $180 million over the next four years on developing products and services for unified communications, and on sales and marketing for those products, said Meg Shea-Chiles, worldwide director for HP's partnership efforts with Microsoft.

The work will include development around HP's ProCurve networking products and Microsoft's Office Communications Server, Office SharePoint Server and Exchange products. HP will also certify its TouchSmart Business PCs and some smartphones for Microsoft's communications software, as well as some new IP desk phones that HP plans to develop.

Unified communications lets workers do things such as listen to a voice-mail from within an e-mail program and make calls from an IM client. It includes presence software to show when people are online and what communications systems they have access to at that moment, as well as software that aims to simplify management on the back end.

Vendors such as Microsoft and Cisco are pushing unified communications as a way to make office workers more productive while keeping costs down. Many have latched onto the recession as a good time to promote these products, especially when companies are cutting back on travel and in-person meetings.

Microsoft and HP have an existing unified communications partnership that goes back several years. In 2006 they said they would deliver unified communications systems using Microsoft software and HP's blade servers, storage gear, and professional services.

HP also partners with Cisco for unified communications. Its ProCurve gear has made the two companies compete more directly, but Shea-Chiles said HP's Cisco partnership continues unchanged.

She wouldn't say how many joint unified communications customers Microsoft and HP have today, but she said the investment they plan to make is "significantly" more than it has been. She also wouldn't say how much of the money they plan to invest is for product development and how much for sales and marketing.

The joint work will also involve adding greater support for Microsoft's Office Communications Server in HP's Business Technology Optimization software, including the ability to provide real-time quality-of-service metrics for IP-based voice and video traffic. OCS users will also be able to join telepresence meetings conducted with HP's Halo system.

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New Windows netbooks may harbor malware

After discovering attack code on a brand new Windows XP netbook, antivirus vendor Kaspersky Labs warned users yesterday that they should scan virgin systems for malware before connecting them to the Internet.

When Kaspersky developers installed their recently-released Security for Ultra Portables on an M&A Companion Touch netbook purchased for testing, "they thought something strange was going on," said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher with the Moscow-based firm. Schouwenberg scanned the machine -- a $499 netbook designed for the school market -- and found three pieces of malware.

"This was done at the factory," said Schouwenberg. "It was completely brand new, still in its packaging."

With a little more digging, Schouwenberg found multiple Windows system restore points, typically an indication that the machine had been updated with new drivers or software had been installed before it left the factory. One of the restore points, stamped with a February date, included the malware, indicating that it had been put on the machine before then. And the malware itself hinted how the netbook had been infected.

"In February, the manufacturer was busy installing some drivers for an Intel product in the netbook," said Schouwenberg, citing the restore point. Among the three pieces of malware was a variant of the AutoRun worm, which spreads via infected USB flash drives.

"The USB stick they used to install the drivers onto the machine was infected, and [it] then infected the machine," said Schouwenberg. Installed along with the worm was a rootkit and a password stealer that harvests log-in credentials for online games such as World of Warcraft.

Kaspersky has reported its findings to M&A, said Schouwenberg, but the netbook maker has not been in contact with the security company since then.

Although factory-installed malware is rarely found on consumer electronics, there have been cases. Last December, for example, Amazon.com told customers it had sold Samsung digital photo frames before the holidays that came with a driver installation CD infected with a Trojan downloader. "These [cases involving computers] are much rarer than picture frames," said Schouwenberg.

To ensure that a new PC is malware-free, Schouwenberg recommended that before users connect the machine to the Internet, they install security software, update it by retrieving the latest definition file on another computer and transferring that update to the new system, then running a full antivirus scan.

"That's the best course of action, even though it sounds like a lot of work," said Schouwenberg.

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Why More Megapixels Don't Make Better Pix ?

When it comes to electronics, more is better. Consumers want more features, more hard-drive space, more cellphone minutes and more battery life.

But with digital cameras, it's not that simple. Many stores will tell you that the worth of a camera is measured in megapixels. The more manufacturers can pack in, the better, right?

Not necessarily, says Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo.com, an online newsletter for camera tips and projects.

A high-megapixel count doesn't always equate to better image quality. Actually, if camera designers try to cram too many megapixels into a small camera, it can have the opposite effect.

Such a counterintuitive snag mostly affects tiny digital cameras, the ones compact enough to fit in your pocket.

To keep sizes down, manufacturers place itty-bitty image sensors inside their point-and-shoot models. These small parts perform well within a certain range. But when companies try to raise the megapixel count without increasing the dimensions of the camera, the same size sensor now has to do more work.

The result are larger but less accurate images, Gupta says. The overburdened sensor can lose sharpness, struggle in low-light situations and add "noise" (small blotches or odd colors).

Digital SLR cameras are bulkier than sleek point-and-shoots, but the extra room allows for much bigger sensors and often better image quality per megapixel.

Cameras are rarely advertised on their sensor sizes, which makes the warning difficult to act on. But the problem usually pops up when companies release two very similar models, one with more megapixels and, most likely, a higher price. In those situations, the extra few hundred dollars doesn't necessarily buy you a better camera.

Sensor technology improves all the time, making the issue of cramped megapixels less important each year. Improved lenses and anti-shake features also dampen the effect.

But even if companies could make a flawless 18-megapixel camera the size of a deck of cards, few people will ever need that much, Gupta says.

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Facebook Gets New Governing Rules

The votes are in, and the initial tally shows that Facebook users want a new set of governing documents.

The vote came about a few months after thousands of outraged Facebook users slammed the social networking site for taking too much control over their content. In a move to make amends, and to give the angry users more say in what happens to their content, Facebook late last week announced that it would let them choose between two terms-of-service options - the current terms of use and a new set of rules called the Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Voters overwhelming selected the new set of principles and rights rules over the existing terms of use. Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said in a blog post today that the new rules were preferred by 74.4% of the 600,000 voters. Voting closed at 11:59 p.m. last night.

However large, the turnout was far smaller than Facebook had hoped for.

In a blog post announcing the vote late last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that at least 30% of active Facebook users -- that's 60 million people - would have had to vote for the results to be binding. But Ullyot said that while only 600,000 users voted, Facebook will nonetheless adopt the Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities as the governing documents for the site.

"We'd hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users, just like it was a first for Facebook," said Ullyot. "We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes. In the meantime, we're going to consider lowering the 30% threshold that the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities establishes for a user vote to be binding."

He added that he believes the new documents satisfy concerns that unhappy users had raised a few months ago.

"We're pleased that users supported the proposed documents and validated our efforts to respond to their concerns," wrote Ullyot. "You can expect to see the new documents on the site in the coming weeks. After that, all future proposed changes to the Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities will be subject to the notice, comment and voting provisions of the documents."

"I think these new terms on data ownership and usage will go a long way toward assuaging the feelings of those who protested earlier," said Dan Olds, principal analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc., in an earlier interview. "Facebook's new terms and conditions are much more readable than the typical legalese in the last version. It clearly outlines Facebook's terms of service in a way that should be understandable to the majority of users. The terms are also more user-friendly."

Five-year-old Facebook announced earlier this month that it had hit a major milestone as an influx of older users helped it reach the 200 million user mark.

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Prepare Microsoft Windows 8 !!!

Windows 7 information may not be fully released, because Microsoft has been preparing the next generation operating system, Windows 8. Microsoft says that the initial work is focused on data management system and Windows 8. Microsoft has created its own ads for the presence of 8 Windows developer and tester to send the 'improvisation' of this system.

Indications of the 8 form of Windows that Microsoft tried to develop a management file among the extensive network and the Internet, also make WinFS system to make the scale more than the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 is even not final. Microsoft will also build in file sharing applications, such as Windows Live Messenger and online meeting system Windows Meeting Spaces.

"We will start the improvisation 8 for Windows, including the innovative features that will merevolusi file access in branch offices." Said the Microsoft. In a blog called www.codenamewindows.com mentioned, Microsoft will start to recruit a developer to develop a special system is Windows 8. In blog also said that Microsoft began to post the job April 14.

In addition, in the blog also mentioned that there was a posting news about Windows 8, starting 16 April, focused on making 8 of Windows Server or Windows Server 2011 or in another name. If Microsoft still attached schedule with the launch of Windows 7, Windows 8 will be then be released in the year 2011 or 2012.

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Facebook Changes Set TOS

After the voting phase to determine the changes in the TOS (Term of Services) for a week ago, the Facebook parties agree to make changes that fundamental rights in terms of setting up each account data members. Article TOS that the new member states that have full rights and control the information they post of their respective their Facebook account. By the changes outlined in Facebook Facebook Statement of Principles and Rights and Responsibilities.

Voting and decisions on changes to this TOS is a form of protest against Facebook's millions of its member rights associated with ownership and control access to member information in this social networking site. Previously, in its TOS Facebook has the right to declare member data information that has been posted in it.

Open to encompass the aspirations of the Facebook member is conducted for about one week, followed by about 600 thousand Facebook member. This amount was expected to represent more than 200 million Facebook members worldwide. Steps taken by the changes that Facebook is considered by many as a step responsive and aspiratif, given as one of the social networking site, Facebook is currently the largest social networking in the world.

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Victoria University overhauls data centres

The University, which caters to some 45,000 students, will run both centres in an ‘active-active' configuration, instead of the existing ‘primary-secondary' set-up.

This means the two centres will operate as a single logical data centre across two physical sites, rather than have one data centre act as the ‘main' and have a second used only for disaster recovery (DR) purposes.

The two sites are to be connected by redundant 1-2 Gbps fibre paths using the VERNet network.

Although part of the "incentive" to build the new 100 square metre facility in Sunshine, approximately 11km away, was initially DR, it is also intended the new facility will form part of energy efficiency initiatives being rolled out across the institution, according to director of information technology services Phil County.

IBM has been contracted to design and build the Sunshine data centre. It will replace an end-of-life secondary facility located at Footscray Park.

Arrangements for re-development of the primary facility, also in Footscray Park and currently the University's main data centre, haven't been announced.

"We've got one main data centre at the moment that we're keeping but will be rebuilt inside and out," County said.

"We've also got a smaller one like a back-up that is going to be replaced by the new [IBM-designed] one."

IBM said it had adopted a modular design employing a combination of in-row cooling targeted at the heat load source, combined with free cooling chiller plant technology.

Smaller uninterruptible power supply (UPS) modules will be used in the design, according to Malcolm Mackay, executive for site and facilities services at IBM Australia.

The University is one of the first in Australia to implement a free cooling system. Fujitsu has previously announced its intention to run a similar set-up in its new data centre in Perth.

The free cooling system will only cut in when the outside temperature in Melbourne drops under 15°C.

"It'll do it automatically," County said.

The data centre is also being designed to maximise air flows and floor grate positioning in a hot/cold aisle configuration.

Although IBM admitted the free cooling system would add a premium to the cost of the centre, County believed the return on investment was there.

"It pays itself back within the first year in our situation," he said.

The new combined total of data centre floor space in the facilities will be 340 square metres.

County said the University had already rationalised some 350 servers down to 240 using VMware as part of a previous server centralisation project, but he was unsure the University would continue down this path with respect to further virtualisation in the centres.

Both Microsoft's Hyper-V and Xensource are understood to be being considered as alternatives, given the University's reliance on Unix, Linux and Windows systems.

County said he is also actively exploring cloud computing.

"If you want to provision something that isn't critical it doesn't always have to be in your own data centre," he said.

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Security experts uncover first ever SMS virus

The company's Q1 2009 Security Threat Summary charted the first ever SMS virus, and a rise in social networking exploits during the first quarter of 2009.

F-Secure described the SymbOS/Yxe worm as the most significant threat to emerge over the period. Although mainly confined to China, the potential remains for similar attacks elsewhere around the world.

The worm spreads by sending an SMS promising a 'sexy view', with links to a malicious site prompting the user to download the malware. It will then use the victim's contact list to spread.

"Sexy View is the first text message worm ever. It's also the first mobile phone worm that circumvents the signature checks that are meant to secure the latest smartphones," said F-Secure chief research officer Mikko Hypponen.

"And the motive behind it seems to be to collect information for mobile phone spamming purposes. Mobile phone spam is already a big problem in some parts of the world, and eventually it will be an issue everywhere."

Meanwhile, social networking sites have become an increasingly attractive target for online fraudsters, as the number of users grows ever larger, warned F-Secure.

"When you get a message via Facebook from a friend, you tend to trust the message to be real," said Hypponen. "And when people follow a 'funny link' to a video and are prompted to 'update' their player, they easily fall for these attacks."

F-Secure highlighted the Koobface worm, which spreads through Facebook stealing user credentials, as one of the most high-profile threats over the period.

The first quarter of 2009 was also dominated by Conficker. The malware's complex code and sophisticated understanding of how to subvert security software is a sign of things to come, according to F-Secure.

Security firms warned today that Conficker may be about to launch a major attack.

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AMD offers discounts on Opteron upgrades

The AMD Opteron Upgrade Programme covers the 2000 series and 8000 series dual-core and quad-core Opteron chips, and enables customers to receive a discount of up to 35 per cent on the purchase cost of newer drop-in replacements.

AMD business development director John Fruehe explained in a blog post that the company designs its processors with the ability to upgrade in mind.

"In August 2006 we introduced the Socket F1207 to the world, initially with dual-core AMD Opteron processors. Later Barcelona, our first quad-core processor, was also able to plug into those sockets. Today's Shanghai processors also fit in those sockets as well," he wrote.

The company's upcoming six-core Opterons, codenamed Istanbul, will also fit the same infrastructure and will be part of the upgrade programme, AMD said.

Fruehe claimed that upgrading is a simple process and delivers an immediate boost. "In 15 minutes you can go from dual-core Rev F processors to the latest Shanghai quad cores, giving you up to 200 per cent more performance," he said.

AMD partners such as Rackable Systems and Cray are already reaping the benefits from this program, according to the firm, because it provides a route to fast and seamless upgrades in the data centre.

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Obama's open data era 'coming soon'

The U.S. may be close to making it easier for application developers to tear into government data as early as next month on its new Web site, data.gov.

Meanwhile, the Web 2.0 era of data openness will get a boost next week by the availability for download of campaign and lobbying data collected by a private group.

The Center for Responsive Politics, best known for its OpenSecrets.org Web site, has been standardizing, cleaning and organizing campaign and lobbying data on its Web site. It now intends to allow anyone to download compressed CSV text files of its data without charge beginning sometime next week.

It is the center's hope that application developers will take the data and merge, combine and otherwise mash it up with other data sets to reveal new associations and patterns in lobbying and campaign activities.

"We are hoping that putting this data in more hands has a greater impact," said Massie Ritsche, the center's spokesman. The group is calling the new approach an "open data" model.

The center's goal is similar to the approach President Obama's new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, intends to take. Kundra plans to make federal data similarly available for the same purpose on data.gov.

As late as last Saturday, there was a message on the data.gov site announcing that it would launch in late May, but it has since been replaced with a less definitive message: Coming Soon.

One of Obama's first acts as president was to issue a memorandum to all federal department heads that he wanted a government that was transparent and participatory. There are questions about how willingly or quickly the government will be in converting data into open formats, but one area expected to get a lot of attention will be lobbying activities, (especially among IT vendors) around the massive stimulus plan.

U.S. agencies already make much of their data available online and have built their methods and approaches for searching through that data. The approach that the Obama administration intends to take is to make the underlying data available in standard formats, and in doing so, harness private sector creativity and technical acumen to make the data available in new ways.

Private groups are already acting in advance of the unveiling of data.gov to stimulate discussion about how the government should collect and organize its data. The Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that is pushing for transparency is, for instance, suggesting methods for achieving openness.


The foundation this week unveiled designs for forms and search templates as a means to more quickly disclose the activities of lobbyists.

John Wonderlich, the foundation's policy director, said the federal government will collect and organize the data in a way that will help developers. Wonderlich said the group has "pretty strong hopes" that the needs of developers will be well-served.

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Cisco taps VMware for data centre blade play

Best known for its network infrastructure kit, Cisco today unveiled its Unified Computing System (UCS), which combines separate networks for carrying data, storage and server cluster traffic into a single unified fabric, and sees the introduction of Cisco blade server hardware.

Cisco's servers are based on new Intel Nehalem chips that have yet to be officially announced but are widely expected to be available within the next month or two.

The servers will fit into an eight-bay chassis designed to take seven blades and one of Cisco's Nexus switches.

Pricing has not been announced.

The other element of the architecture is a unified network fabric based on 10 Gigabit Ethernet and supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet for connecting storage.

Together with virtualisation technology from VMware, the platform is intended to turn data centre infrastructure into a more scalable and flexible environment for delivery of IT as a service.

Martin Niemer, group product marketing manager for VMware Infrastructure, said that VMware has been working with Cisco for the past three years on the project, which integrates the UCS with VMware vCenter Suite for management.

However, despite this partnership, customers buying into Cisco's platform will be able to use other virtualisation software such as Microsoft's Hyper-V.

"Ultimately, it's up to customers what virtualisation platform they use," Niemer said.

Cisco also announced support from BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic and Red Hat.

As part of the VMware agreement, Cisco will become a VMware Authorised Consultant partner, able to resell VMware's ESX and VI products along with its own hardware.

The move puts Cisco in direct competition with experienced and long-established server vendors such as HP and IBM, and has already drawn flak from others within the industry, who perceive it as an attempt by Cisco to lock customers into its own platform.

"IBM and HP offer open low cost solutions, have decades of experience delivering such solutions, and it will not take customers very long to see through Cisco's 'my way or the highway' tactic," commented Vikram Mehta, chief executive at Blade Network Technologies.

Ovum analyst Tim Stammers said Cisco is as much about system management as it is blade servers and virtualisation.

"If Cisco's customers have to buy their blade servers from HP or Dell, then the door is open for either of those two to offer their management tools to customers, or to tailor their blades to work better with those tools," he said.

"Moving into more direct competition with those players - and with other systems management players such as IBM and BMC - is a price that Cisco cannot avoid paying unless it wants to be sidelined in the future."

Stammers doesn't feel the competition will hurt Cisco's relationships with big hardware players. Co-opetition, he says, is "hardly new."

"Cisco is already in competition with HP and IBM on the networking front," he said.

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Google adds Java to App Engine cloud service

Google on Tuesday evening announced a new version of its App Engine application-hosting service that adds multiple capabilities, including an early look at support for the Java programming language.

Improvements are intended to make the App Engine infrastructure available to all developers, ranging from those at startups to IT administrators inside the enterprise, Google said. In addition to Java support, other features in the updated version of App Engine include database import and export, access to firewalled data, and "cron" support, which enables configuration of regularly scheduled tasks to operate at defined times. App Engine is built for deploying Web applications.

Google has been running internal and external applications on App Engine and it has not been without difficulty, said Kevin Gibbs, tech lead for Google App Engine, in a blog post on Tuesday evening.

"Tonight at Campfire One, we released a new set of features -- based on community and internal feedback -- that helps App Engine interface more easily with businesses' existing technologies,"Gibbs wrote. Campfire One features a gathering of developers at company facilities.

Early support for Java includes a Java runtime, integration with the Google Web Toolkit 1.6, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse. Developers can program against Java Data Objects or Java Persistence API. Thus far, App Engine has leveraged the Python language.

Also highlighted in the App Engine upgrade were Google Secure Data Connector, for centrally managed access to on-premise data, and a data import tool to move gigabytes of data into App Engine. Cron support, according to a link to the blog, is geared to the Python language.

"By reducing the administrative headaches that come with scaling and distributing an application, we hope that App Engine will continue to let developers do what they do best: launch services that delight users," Gibbs said.

In the past six months, Google has launched nearly 50 projects and small products on Google App Engine, including Google Moderator, for distributed communities to vote on subjects, Gibbs said.

"In all cases we found it quicker, easier, and more cost-effective to leave the infrastructure to App Engine and the actual product-building to our engineering teams," said Gibbs.

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Yahoo to expand BOSS dev tools, boost cloud research

Yahoo is adding new developer tools to its service for building custom search engines, BOSS, and expanding its efforts to foster cloud computing research in academia.

Yahoo will announce on Thursday that BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) developers can now access content from the company's popular Delicious social bookmarking site, such as saved site links and descriptive tags for these links.

Another new feature is the filtering of results by language, as well as the ability for the BOSS news search component to sort results by date or by a specific date range.

Separately, Yahoo will also announce a partnership with three major universities for research into cloud computing systems and applications.

The schools are the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

They join existing partner Carnegie Mellon University. In the project, Yahoo makes cloud computing resources available to universities so that they can conduct research on large-scale systems and applications.

Carnegie Mellon has been using Yahoo's M45 cluster for more than a year. It has approximately 4,000 processor cores and 1.5 petabytes of disk storage and runs Hadoop, an open source implementation of the MapReduce programming model for processing large data sets in processor clusters.

Yahoo officials have said that the company believes academia will play a crucial part in developing the "next generation" of cloud infrastructure and Web applications.

In July 2008, Yahoo partnered with Hewlett-Packard and Intel for cloud computing research and education. The three vendors at the time said they wanted to help advance the development and adoption of large-scale, data-intensive, Internet-hosted applications and related IT infrastructure.

The initiative with HP and Intel, called Cloud Computing Test Bed, also counts among its participants the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

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Some University to Learning About Facebook and Twitter

A university has to offer master's level teaching students about social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo. The course was held for 1 year at Birmingham City University, who will teach the importance of social networking sites as a tool of communication and marketing. Courses are planned to be held in 2010 to come, and have been advertised in the video website in the university.

However, unfortunately, this course is not free, or have to pay quite expensive, is $ 6,564. This course not only discusses the social networking site, but also a matter of setup a blog and podcast publication. Jon Hickam, pioneering the course said that he has received a good response from students. "Homework is not just for IT geek, but also the laity and all the people. During the course, we will provide information on what can be done with Facebook and Twitter, as well as how the site can be used for the purpose of communication and marketing. This course will teach you how to become a professional in the field of journalism or PR (Public Relation). "Hickman said.

Meanwhile, a student from the same University, Jamie Waterman (20), it is revealed that the course is not only useful and discard the time-course. "In fact all people have the networking site Facebook and Twitter, and blogs, and podcasts. The virtual, all content of the course is still on the basic level, so that it can actually be yourself. All this is just to remove the time and resources university course. "Waterman said.

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Open Jobs After Removing 200 Employees

After this week Google is adding 200 employees in the field of marketing and sales for the third time this year, now Google is still looking for employment for 360 people. Opening of jobs specific to the position of the Google software engineer to a sales and marketing, and one position for the Supply Chain Manager of Foodservices at Google headquarters, California.

Company Internet giant has been doing immediately after the recruitment of 200 employees removed, Thursday. Previously, Google also has to eliminate as many as 100 full-time employees in January, and the second in February, Google's 40 employees to reduce the position radio broadcasting business ad own. Meanwhile, the Google spokesman, Matt Furman, said that Google is a company with a large number of employees of some 200,000 people with a variety of job positions.

Furman confirmed that list jobs in the Google website is now open and the job is still related to the employee removed Thursday. As many as half of the 360 jobs open for Google in the United States, while the rest will be placed in other locations, such as in Ireland and Australia. According to Furman, Google is now doing perampingan since the new head of finance, Patrick Pichette to control costs as the biggest priority.

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Have a Some Virus?

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has trained a little virus to do the researchers, on Thursday (02 / 4) yesterday, who believed that the virus can make more powerful lithium batteries and efficient. The virus is changed to two genes by researchers, who were given the name of the virus MI3, and apat do two things that build a framework that is made from iron phosphate, and then enter into a carbon nanotube electrode to create a small and powerful.

According to Angela Belcher, the leader of the researchers from the same institute, the electrode can make a memory more powerful devices, such as in MP3 player or mobile phone, and more environmentally friendly than battery technology generally. "Users can use the iPod about 3 hours longer than normal iPod battery. We also create a large scale for the car. All of that because there is a battery in which the virus is able to increase the power performance, battery, better than normal batteries. "Belcher said.

Battery technology, including environmentally friendly because it has a virus in it. "We have been developing organism, regulating temperature, and water in which organisms can live. This is a clean technology. "Belcher added. Material forfat iron is not a good conductor, but can make the material more useful when the battery is made in nano-scale, ie, molecular-scale mikroskopik.

Lithium battery is very powerful and lightweight, but they do not release electrons quickly, and virus organisms are able to do so, so that they can provide excessive battery power. This battery technology also can be published if it is ready, add Belcher.

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