This year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference is still a couple of months away, but the vendor has already provided an ample sneak peek into what’s in store for attendees of the show. The OpenWorld 2013 , and while Oracle is keeping a lid on specific news announcements slated for OpenWorld, a careful combing-through of the show’s hundreds of planned sessions can produce some good guesses about what will be on offer. Here’s a look. of version 12c of its flagship database. The release’s most-hyped feature is multitenancy, which allows many “pluggable” databases to reside inside a single host database, providing simplified management and upkeep. Database 12c will be featured in a number of OpenWorld sessions aimed at developers and administrators, but the most significant database news may come from the keynote stage. On a recent earnings call, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on an upcoming version of the database that incorporates in-memory computing. Further details have been scarce and indications are that Ellison’s announcement took people inside Oracle itself by surprise.
Tech earnings this week highlighted the importance of mobile communications to IT, as companies including Apple, Samsung, Facebook, AT&T and Texas Instruments reported mixed results for the quarter ending in June. Apple and Samsung earnings underscored competition in the mobile market. Reporting Tuesday, year over year to $35.3 billion, while profit declined 22 percent to $6.9 billion. The lack of a new hit product, competition from Android-based devices and sagging sales overseas, particularly in China, hampered earnings for the quarter. Apple sales in China declined 4 percent year over year. The overseas results indicated a problem other IT companies face. “The continued recession in Europe and slowing growth in China will offset improvements in the US, Japan, and some emerging markets,” according to Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels, in a recent forecast for IT sales this year.
Bitdefender has released a Windows application designed to help users secure sensitive Web-browsing sessions, especially when they shop or bank online. The application is called Safepay and a free version is available to home users. The application provides users with what Bitdefender calls a “hardened” Web browser that runs inside an environment protected by several technologies designed to prevent man-in-the-browser, phishing, packet sniffing and other types of attacks. It can be installed on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 8, 7 and Vista and on 32-bit versions of Windows XP. When run, Safepay will open a “secure desktop”—a secondary work environment that is separate from the regular desktop—and will launch a custom browser created by Bitdefender.
Dell has started shipping its thumb-size PC called Project Ophelia to beta testers and is preparing to ship the final product in the coming months. Ophelia looks much like a USB stick and it can turn any screen or display with an HDMI port into a PC, gaming machine, or streaming media player. The thumb PC runs on the Android OS and once it is plugged into an HDMI port, users can run applications, play games, watch streaming movies or access files stored in the cloud. The final product will ship during the next fiscal quarter, which runs from August through October, a Dell spokesman said in an email. The device has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless connectivity options. Priced at about $100, Dell hopes Ophelia will be an inexpensive alternative to PCs, whose shipments are falling with the growing adoption of tablets and smartphones. With more data now being stored in the cloud, Dell hopes the idea of a keychain PC will catch on, especially for those who do most of their computing on the Web.
The U.S. will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor responsible for leaking documents revealing classified government surveillance programs, according to a recent letter from attorney general Eric Holder. The charges Snowden faces in the U.S. do not carry the death penalty, and the U.S. will not seek the death penalty even if Snowden were charged with additional death penalty-eligible crimes, Holder said in the letter, which was sent to Russian minister of justice Vladimirovich Konovalov and obtained by CBS News. The letter was dated July 23. The U.S. attorney general’s office declined to comment immediately. Snowden is currently thought to be residing at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. Last week he in Russia in an effort to avoid prosecution by the U.S. government, which has indicted Snowden on charges related to the leaks.
The Pictures subreddit is one of the most popular on Reddit. It's where users post funny, quirky, unique images for people to laugh over, ponder, and pass around. But navigating the interface and individually opening each link, then closing it to move to the next one, is time-consuming and tedious.
(with Rogers Connect Market Research) has taken an in-depth look at how small businesses feel about their future prospects and how they’re approaching the complex issue of corporate branding. One of the most interesting insights from the study is the question of what Web-based tools small businesses are using to help build their brand. Fifty-two percent of the companies surveyed said they had built a company website, the highest percentage reported on any item in the survey. Following that, a variety of social networking tools filled up the bulk of the remaining survey items. Facebook took second place, as expected, with 35 percent adoption from small businesses. Surprisingly, LinkedIn was close behind, with 33 percent adoption. Twitter, in the fourth slot, merited only 19 percent of small businesses supporting it. This is an interesting development because Twitter and Facebook have long since been considered the two (and only two) “essential” brand-building networks. While LinkedIn has experienced a resurgence of late, it is still widely regarded as mainly of importance to job seekers and very large enterprises. To put it another way: No one looking for a plumber turns to LinkedIn.
If you're going to do just one thing in your life, you're best off doing it really, really, well. You might even be rewarded for it if it's something other people like. JPEGmini ($20, free feature-limited demo) does one thing—further compresses JPEG pictures to save you disk space—and does it quite well. If you're a photo hound, you'll like it, and you might want to reward the company so you can use it. JPEG is a compressed format, but the amount of compression applied is variable and optional, ranging from slightly to extremely lossy. Most camera devices use a very mild amount of compression, producing relatively detailed images that are much smaller than uncompressed (raw) files, but still much larger than they need to be for general use. This is generally wise, as you can't restore detail that's been compressed away, but for most purposes, you can squash JPEG files quite a bit further before you see obvious compression artifacts. JPEGmini takes advantage of the underzealous compression habits of your camera devices to further compact your JPEG files (no other types are supported) while leaving them nearly as detailed. It trimmed my 234.5MB test folder of photos from a RADAR 4G phone and Canon 230SX camera to a mere 134MB, a very nice reduction in space. At 100% zoom, it was very difficult to tell the difference between the original and recompressed photos. Zooming in to the pixelated level, the differences still weren't something to stress over. I created two copies of the photos involved for comparison purposes, as JPEGmini compresses the originals and doesn't create backups. Be sure you don't want the full-scale originals of anything you use it on. Also, once photos have been re-compressed using JPEGmini, that's it: You can't reduce them further by running them through the program again. This is as it should be when a program's purpose is to save disk space while minimizing loss of photo detail.
If you’re lucky, your company has a solid base of customers, revenue is flowing, and business is good. If you take advantage of technology to work more efficiently and market more effectively, though, you won’t have to rely so much on luck. highlights a couple small businesses, and how they’ve taken advantage of technology. One is an auto repair shop owner who switched from writing customer invoices by hand to using an online service. The switch has saved him up to an hour per vehicle over writing out the invoices by hand, and allowed his business from regular customers to spike more than 4000 percent in one year. The second business is a local maker of a craft liqueur who was struggling to find customers. After hiring a social media marketer, and leveraging the power of Twitter to gain exposure for his brand, business has picked up and he now counts one of the local restaurants as a loyal customer. Those are both good examples of small businesses that aren’t normally associated with being high-tech using technology to gain a strategic advantage. It’s not just about using technology, though. It’s about using the right technology, and keeping up with changes that can help streamline productivity or cut costs.
Reddit is full of funny, unique, and quirky videos. Dagfin Parnas's website Reddit TV lets you filter out YouTube videos based on keywords that you specify within certain categories or sub-reddits. The interface then grabs the videos from Reddit, according to the filters you chose. When you choose a video, it appears right there on the same page and you can watch it in its entirety. Then when it is finished, choose another category or sub-reddit and keep going. In essence, provided there are videos available in your desired category or sub-reddit, then you have a neverending video Reddit. If you want to join in the comments on Reddit and vote, you must click the title link above the video. There is no facility to comment and vote on the Reddit TV site. The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.
The truth can be a bitter pill to swallow, but Microsoft's brass is reportedly owning up to its mistakes. say that in an internal Microsoft meeting this week, CEO Steve Ballmer and COO Kevin Turner were blunt in discussing some of the problems that have cropped up in the nine months since Windows 8 launched. "We're not selling as many Windows devices as we want to," Ballmer admitted, according to The Verge, talking about the whole range of Windows-powered hardware, from phones to PCs to tablets. .
I'm an expert at learning things the hard way. ) Having been through this process many times before, I backed up all my data, made a list of the programs I'd need to reinstall, located my Windows DVD, and, because I'm a smart cookie, made a backup of all my drivers. This last is really important, because once you wipe your hard drive and reinstall Windows, your system may have no audio, no Ethernet, no Wi-Fi, and possibly even no USB--all potentially major problems.
Microsoft estimates that 88 percent of botnets running the Citadel financial malware were disrupted as a result of a takedown operation launched by the company in collaboration with the FBI and partners in technology and financial services. The operation was originally announced on June 5. . Microsoft did not immediately respond to an inquiry seeking information about how those computers were cleaned and the number of computers that remain infected with the malware. on June 21 that Microsoft observed almost 1.3 million unique IP (Internet Protocol) addresses connecting to a “sinkhole” system put in place by the company to replace the Citadel command-and-control servers used by attackers.
Indian outsourcer Wipro grew revenue and profits in the second quarter, citing improved demand. At the end of last quarter, Wipro spun out its non-IT businesses such as consumer care and lighting into a separate company, and is now more closely focused on its IT business. On Friday it reported that its revenue was up by 5 percent year-on-year to about 97 billion rupees ($1.63 billion) in the quarter, while profits increased 11 percent from the same quarter last year to 16 billion rupees. The results are in accordance with IFRS (international financial reporting standards). The company has said that its IT services revenue from outsourcing in the next quarter will be up to $1.65 billion. IT services revenue was close to $1.6 billion in the second quarter.
Have you listened to your PC lately? I mean, really listened? If you’re lucky, your PC doesn’t have much to say. But if yours sounds like a box of pots and pans falling down a flight of wooden stairs or a helicopter trying desperately to take off, chances are good that it has a problem. We’ve gathered some of the noises worth worrying about: Just click the audio links in this article to hear a fan on the fritz, for example, or a hard drive headed for disaster. Our first sound comes from a publicly available collection of the . The sounds were compiled by DataCent, a hard-drive recovery company based in Ontario, Canada. These clips may not be as exciting as cat videos, but there are worse things you could do in your spare time than listen to the telltale clunks made by a Western Digital desktop drive with bad heads (the first sound listed on DataCent’s page): With solid-state drives growing in popularity, noisy hard drives are becoming less of an issue. However, the spinning platters that store our dearest digital possessions will be around for years to come—and they are noisy. Whenever you access information from a hard drive or save to it, the mechanical platters inside spin up at insane speeds—between 5600 and 10,000 revolutions per minute—with a tiny magnetic head jumping all over the place. Be sure to defragment your hard drive regularly to minimize the space it has to jump.
When Microsoft released Fresh Paint with Windows 8, the app was justifiably lauded as one of the best experiences on the new OS. On Thursday, Microsoft updated the app with a new palette—but just for Windows 8.1. Specifically, the new Fresh Paint includes watercolor paints, a new set of pencils, new high-end brushes and more realistic “art supplies” for your digital art studio, Microsoft said. If you have a PC, notebook or tablet with Windows 8.1, you can visit the Microsoft Store and download the updated app. Paintings that users create can be shared, saved on SkyDrive, texted to friend, pinned on the Windows Start screen, or used as a background image. Fresh Paint isn't as simple as it looks, Microsoft said; behind the scenes, an incredibly complex physics engine mimics the behavior of real paint, the company said. "One of the things that makes the app so distinctive is how true to real life it is, and this update has brought that home even more," Steve Clayton, the "chief storyteller" within Microsoft, wrote in a . "There are now paint and pencil models that mirror the way real paints, pencils and brushes work with canvas and paper. A new color wheel makes it easier to find and blend the perfect colors. And, if you don’t want to start with a blank canvas, you can insert a photo and go to town with filters and mediums to make it your own original work of art."
Rackspace President Lew Moorman is stepping down from leading the company, he , but will remain on the board of directors of the cloud computing and managed hosting company. Moorman has been with the company for 13 years. He has played an important role in developing OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform that Rackspace and NASA jointly founded three years ago. Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier will add president to his title once Moorman officially steps down in the coming weeks. Cloud watcher Larry Carvalho, an analyst and consultant at Robust Cloud, says he’ll be interested to see what, if any impact, Moorman’s move has on OpenStack. Rackspace is an important member of the open source community, he says, hosting one of the few public cloud offerings based on OpenStack code, and being one of the chief contributors of code to the project. While Rackspace’s support for OpenStack is unlikely to waiver, especially with Napier taking over the executive role, the direction and priorities that Rackspace takes could change with Moorman stepping down. For example, there’s a large debate within the OpenStack community right now about how much compatibility OpenStack should have with Amazon Web Services, which is perhaps Rackspace’s biggest competitor. In the past, Moorman has not been shy about from AWS.
. ) into a personalized portal, a page stocked with news feeds, e-mail notifications, social-network updates, and more. Indeed, OneFeed goes beyond Chrome's default new-tab options, which consist of thumbnails steering you to your most-visited sites or, if you scroll to the next "page," links to Chrome apps. Once installed, you still get the most-visited sites thumbnails, but with the option of dragging them together to create folders (similar to how you do on an iOS device). And there's already a folder of Chrome apps, which saves you have to flip pages to access them.
Cray is building a supercomputer for the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that will deliver petaflops of performance, which could put it on a future list of top supercomputers. The supercomputer is being built as part of a $30 million contract awarded to Cray by the U.K. government’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which funds postgraduate research. The supercomputer will be used for weather, life sciences, aerospace and other research, Cray and EPSRC said in a joint statement. The University of Edinburgh is home to one of the U.K.’s national supercomputing centers. The Cray XC30 supercomputer will offer 5 petabytes of storage, and “100 gigabytes per-second of applications performance,” Cray said. A Cray spokesman declined to provide additional information regarding the components that will be used to build the supercomputer, but said it would provide “petaflops” of peak performance.
Java platform service provider CloudBees has acquired FoxWeave, a provider of cloud-based data integration services, with the intent of adding FoxWeave’s data integration technology to its own growing stack of cloud services. FoxWeave’s technology can be especially useful in aiding developers who are building applications on a PaaS (platform as a service), said Steve Harris, CloudBees senior vice president of products. Based outside of Dublin, FoxWeave was a startup with less than a dozen employees. Founder Tom Fennelly will lead further development of the FoxWeave technology for CloudBees. CloudBees will add FoxWeave’s data migration and synchronization services to the CloudBees portfolio of application services. CloudBees already has a beta of the FoxWeave service available—which has been renamed to Weave Cloud—and plans to offer it as a full-fledged commercial product by the end of September. Pricing has not yet been finalized.
. The tiny media streaming dongle is aimed at consumers and presents a serious challenge for Apple TV, but it’s also a great tool for small and medium businesses. By now, you’re probably aware of the basic details regarding the Chromecast. It’s a small device that plugs in to an HDMI port on a TV or monitor, and it’s able to stream content from services like Youtube and Netflix, as well as music and movies from Google Play, over a wireless network connection. The device can be controlled remotely from an Android or iOS mobile device, or through the Chrome browser on a Windows PC or Mac. That’s all fine and dandy for consumers—although between Apple TV, Roku, game consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii U, or connected TVs and DVD/Blu-ray players, almost everyone can already stream Netflix and other content one way or another. But the Chromecast also has a secret weapon that makes it just as valuable for business use: it can stream any content that can be viewed in the Chrome browser. Businesses that are more Google-centric will get more value from this feature than others because Gmail, Google Docs, and other Google services essentially run from within the Chrome browser. Businesses that don’t depend on Google can still use it, though. Microsoft files like Word documents and PowerPoint presentations can be saved in HTML format and viewed through Chrome.
Oracle is continuing to crack down on companies it claims are providing support services for its products in an illegal fashion. Last week, Oracle sued IT services providers Terix and Maintech, alleging they have “engaged in a deliberate scheme to misappropriate and distribute copyrighted, proprietary Oracle software code” in the course of providing support for customers using Oracle’s Solaris OS. Terix and Maintech officials have “falsely told unwitting end users they are authorized to access and distribute Solaris Updates to the end users and/or that the end users are entitled to perpetual support on [Solaris], including to receive Solaris Updates, based on their original purchase on the hardware on which the operating system was installed,” adds Oracle’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. But Oracle, “and Sun before it, have long required customers to purchase an annual support agreement to receive that support,” according to the complaint.
Five men from Russia and Ukraine have been indicted in New Jersey for charges they conspired with each other in a worldwide hacking scheme targeting major corporate networks that compromised more than 160 million credit card numbers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced. The men allegedly attacked the networks of several companies, including Nasdaq, 7-Eleven, JCP, Dow Jones and Hannaford, the DOJ said. Companies reported $300 million in losses from the attacks, the DOJ said in a press release. Charged in an indictment unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey were Vladimir Drinkman, 32, of Syktyykar and Moscow, Russia; Alexandr Kalinin, 26, of St. Petersburg, Russia; Roman Kotov, 32, of Moscow; Mikhail Rytikov, 26, of Odessa, Ukraine; and Dmitriy Smilianets, 29, of Moscow. Drinkman and Kalinin allegedly specialized in penetrating network security and gaining access to the corporate victims’ systems, while Kotov allegedly specialized in mining the compromised networks to steal data, the DOJ said. The defendants hid their activities using anonymous Web-hosting services provided by Rytikov, while Smilianets allegedly sold the information stolen by the other conspirators and distributed the proceeds of the scheme to the participants.
For U.S. cloud providers, already working to beat back a wave of overseas policies they say tilt the playing field in favor of home-grown competitors, the revelations of the National Security Agency’s PRISM electronic surveillance program have only made conditions in foreign markets tougher. The media accounts of the program based on leaks by former contractor Edward Snowden have created a perception that the U.S. government has unlimited and direct access to data stored on the servers of companies like Google and Microsoft, experts said on Wednesday at a policy talk here at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a D.C. think tank. “The PRISM disclosures are damaging, and I think I’m prepared to speculate extremely damaging to commercial firms that have offered cloud and related kinds of services, and that do or would benefit from efficient cross-border data flows,” says Philip Verveer, the former U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy at the State Department. Already, domestic cloud providers have been hampered in their overseas expansion, particularly in Europe, by a deficit of trust among businesses and consumers who worry about how their data will be handled when it resides in the cloud. The long-held suspicion that the U.S. government will be able to freely access foreign users’ data under the PATRIOT Act has been fueled by foreign cloud companies and some state officials, who have pressed for cloud protectionist policies that would limit the flow of data outside the country, effectively requiring foreign providers to operate data centers locally.
IBM is searching for a buyer for its Intel-based SystemX and BladeCenter server hardware units. The move is a part of a larger trend in technology, and should be viewed as proverbial “writing on the wall”, but it’s way too premature to say server hardware is dead. Virtual servers and cloud services have taken the wind out of the sails of server hardware. The boom times of companies buying racks and racks of hardware to fill data centers have been replaced by smarter tools and more powerful hardware capable of running an entire IT infrastructure from one box. like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. IBM has reportedly engaged in talks with a number of potential buyers, but the leading contender to buy the SystemX and BladeCenter business is Lenovo. Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC business a decade ago, so the two already have a solid history together. The question Lenovo needs to consider is whether or not it’s possible to squeeze profit from server hardware.
If you're a laptop user who's skipped the SSD experience because of the breed's lack of capacity, your drive has arrived—or it will in the first week of August. Samsung's new 840 EVO family of drives will be available in capacities up to a whopping 1TB. And these drives are aggressively priced: $110 for 120GB version, $190 for the 250GB, $370 for the 500GB, $530 for the 750GB, and a mere $650 for the 1TB. Mere is a relative concept, of course, but 65 cents per GB is a new low for retail SSDs. The larger part of the secret behind the 840 EVO's increased capacity is 3-bit MLC (Mulit-Level Cell) NAND which by it's very nature (it stores 3 bits of information) offers a third more capacity than the 2-bit MLC NAND used in most current generation drives. Also helping fit more stuff into less space is the 19nm manufacturing process used to produce the NAND. Samsung for some reason is calling this 10nm-class, or 1x NAND, but they assured us that it's 19nm. Samsung also promises that the 840 EVO will outperform most of the current SSD crop, but the Samsung 840 Pro will remain the company's flagship solid-state drive. To that end, Samsung is treating part of the NAND as 1-bit SLC (Single-Level Cell), which gives it that technology's superior speed and endurance. It's then employed as cache for the rest of the NAND. The technology is called TurboWrite and it's part of the repertoire of the new MEX (up from the 840's MDX) controller used on the EVO. Samsung is also providing a operating system-level driver called Rapid that leverages what Samsung calls today's PC's over-provisioning of memory. In other words, it steals some of your system's RAM and uses it as cache. Beyond that, it uses smarts to adapt to usage patterns over time, rendering the cache more effective.
Not unexpectedly, Microsoft announced the developer version of Internet Explorer 11 for Windows 7 on Thursday, bringing Microsoft's last-generation OS onto its latest browser platform. as part of Windows 8.1. . Microsoft has also provided a new set of F12 tools to analyze the performance of Web sites. The tools track the CPU and memory usage as a user moves around a Web site, with graphs and metrics to identify memory leaks and sections of the site that may consume more resources than expected.
, but I didn't discuss portability. How do you take your passwords with you when you step away from your computer? version of your password manager. A portable program is one that can run on a PC without installation, and thus can be launched from a flash drive.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google Warns Against Large-Scale Guest Posting, Advertorials & “Optimized Anchor Text” In Press Releases Google has quietly updated the link...
Google has quietly updated the link schemes document under their Webmaster guidelines to add large-scale guest posting, advertorials and optimized anchor text in articles or press releases to the list of types of links that violate their guidelines. The new guideline examples that were added to...
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Tumblr Opening At NASDAQ: Source: Tumblr Google’s Lego Station...
A while back, Rand Fishkin of Moz visited Paris for the SMX conference held there. One of the things he mentioned to me was how surprised he was at some of the misconceptions that exist. “Paris doesn’t live up to any of its stereotypes,” he said. “There’s dog crap on...
With the newly updated Google Maps app for iOS out, Google has announced its plans to shut down the Google+ Local app for iOS on August 7th. There’s been no official announcement that I’m aware of yet, but both 9to5 Mac and Mark Traphagen posted a Google email detailing the shut down...
The United Kingdom (to use its short name) is a complicated country, actually made up of four countries across two islands. If you were looking to understand it better, forget Google Maps. That’s because the service has lost the constituent countries of England, Scotland, Wales & Northern...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Yandex Q2 2013 Revenue Up 35% From This Time Last Year Russian search engine giant Yandex released its Q2 2013 financial results today, reporting revenues at RUR...
Russian search engine giant Yandex released its Q2 2013 financial results today, reporting revenues at RUR 9.2 billion or $281.2 million, a 35 percent increase compared to their Q2 2012 report. According to the statement, Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh claimed, “Yandex delivered strong financial...
In this Marketing Guide, learn about the latest trends, opportunities and challenges facing the market for enterprise web analytics, especially considering the explosive growth in social media marketing and analytics. Drawing from interviews with industry leaders and their customers, this report...