Dell and Scali have opened an EMEA HPC validation center in Scali's facilities in Oslo, Norway called the Cluster Expert Center (CEC) so customers can do pre-sales design, validation and testing in a controlled environment. Dell has an Application Solution Center in Limerick in Ireland that it says can also be brought into play ... (more)

Flashback to '04: Gosling Says "Open-Sourcing Java Could Promote Interoperability"

"There's been a lot of churn lately over open letters from IBM and others calling for Sun to open source Java," wrote James Gosling last week in his java.net blog.  "Rather than try to respond to everyone individually, I'll try to respond to a pile of questions here," he continues. Specifically, he responds to five: 1. "Some have asked why IBM is sending open letters, rather than talking to us directly: asking if this isn't rather kindergarten-ish." Gosling's answer: Well, yes: it does appear that way.   2. "Some have asked what IBM would get if Java were open-sourced: doesn't IBM already have the source?" Gosling's answer: Again yes, they do have the source. It's also true that anyone can get the source. The major restriction is that if folks want to redistrubute their changes, they have to pass the test suite. Which means that about the only thing that they could... (more)

The Silverado Rules for Open Source Success

With the success of companies like MySQL, JBoss, Cygnus and SleepyCat, open source software has introduced major changes to the way corporate IT adopts new technology. Yet open source business practices have a long way to go before the industry as a whole is fully embraced by CIOs. At the Open Source Think Tank, a panel of ten CIOs declared that the patchwork quilt of licenses and business practices among open-source vendors is a major barrier to enterprise adoption of open source. CIOS believe that vendor standardization on a simple and commercially attractive business model will help drive broad corporate acceptance of open source software. After attending the Open Source Think Tank held in February, 2008 at the Silverado resort, I am convinced that a best-practices model is emerging for enterprise open-source software vendors. In honor of the think tank event, I am... (more)

Don’t be Freetarded

Of the many sins that Silicon Valley practices, none are more dangerous or prevalent than the sin of smugness. Savio Rodrigues has a good posting entitled Microsoft will prevail in the face of Freetards. His point is that Microsoft is learning from and adapting to the open-source movement, while the open-source movement is so enamored with "free" that they are not paying enough attention to the total cost of ownership from a customer's perspective. Let's be clear - the free part of open source is a great innovation and worthy of a few minutes of self-satisfaction. The aftermath of the Y2K bubble was the erection of enormous barriers around IT to prevent tem from trying anything new that would cost the company money. Free provides a "frictionless" entry point for new technology products into the corporation after finance barred the door. Free also enables technology se... (more)

The State of WordPress 2008: Awesome Growth

Today at WordCamp, a User and Developer 1-day conference for the WordPress blogging platform, Founder Matt Mullenweg announced impressive growth figures and reaffirmed Automattic’s focus on fixing some of WordPress’s biggest weaknesses. The theme for the “State of the Word”, Mullenweg’s yearly keynote, was “Strong,” and growth from both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (their hosted and self-hosted platforms, respectively) sure show it. Here are the stats for WordPress.com over the last year: Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats 120-160 million unique visitors Two million new blogs created 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million) This growth is also seems significant versus WordPress.com’s main competitor, Typepad. Comscore numbers put US numbers at 20.9M uniques for WordPress.com agains... (more)

Jitterbit: An Open Source Project That Bridges Data Gaps

Jitterbit, a service that helps companies bridge and integrate data from different sources, has released a new 2.0 version of its software along with a new pricing model that it hopes will make it more appealing to businesses and consumers alike. Jitterbit is an open source project that allows users to efficiently use and modify data from multiple sources that may not typically communicate directly. While the company is partially targeted towards the enterprise market (which often handles such issues when dealing with SaaS applications like Salesforce), it also strives to appeal to smaller scale, consumer operations. The new version of the software allows users to utilize a drag-and-drop interface to generate functions that will collect data from one input and modify it elsewhere, without having to enter any code. For example, I could use Jitterbit to collect the... (more)

TechCrunch50 LiveStream: Day 3

We’ll be streaming TechCrunch50 here Monday through Wednesday so everyone can see the conference’s demos for themselves as they happen. You can also find our written coverage of the conference here and coverage from other news outlets below. We’re blogging TechCrunch50 Live in a FriendFeed Room Source: VentureBeat Rinen Keeps Things Pure at TechCrunch50 Source: Internet News Startups pitch new tools for business Source: InfoWorld TechCrunch50: Help for Multicore App Development Source: PC Magazine PC Magazine Source: TechCrunch50: Talk to the Dead with Virsona TechCrunch50: Startups Get Schooled Source: Information Week Fitness Gadget Aims to Help Users Lose Weight Source: New York Times: Bits TC50: Yammer launches as a Twitter for businesses, unless you want the open-source version Source: VentureBeat TC50: Live-blogging the Peter Thiel interview Source: VentureBeat TC50: Adv... (more)

SocialText 3.0 blends Facebook, Twitter, and the Enterprise

SocialText 3.0 is (or will be in the near term) an enterprise mashup of Facebook, FriendFeed, enterprise microblogging, and the wiki. If you were to take any one of these constituencies - social networking, conversation aggregation, Tw*tter, or vanilla wikis and the leveraged sites the technology has produced - you might not think of SocialText as a major player or competitor with the exception of the enterprise wiki space. But add these together and get out ahead of both the market and the logical expansion plans of larger players, and SocialText 3.0 may have something hard to disrupt. In recent weeks, we’ve seen enterprise Twitter clones appearing from many companies both big and small. The central conceit of these apps is integration with business processes inside the corporate firewall. In most cases, the services leverage the Twitter use case: semi-public SMS-le... (more)

[ANN] Release BaseX 5.5

Dear all, we are glad to announce version 5.5 of BaseX, a native XML Database. The major changes are as follows: - the XPath 1.0 implementation has been removed. - XQuery now supports all former XPath optimizations and numerous others (index access, path and FLWOR rewritings based on database statistics, etc.) - Improved, sequential and index-based XQuery Full-Text 1.0 support. - Enhanced TreeMap visualization with new layout algorithms and text thumbnails. BaseX is open-source. It is developed by the DBIS Group at University of Konstanz. Please find more information (Downloads, Documentation) at  http://basex.org/ Best wishes, Christian ___________________________ Christian Gruen Universitaet Konstanz Department of Computer & Information Science D-78457 Konstanz, Germany Tel: +49 (0)7531/88-4449, Fax: +49 (0)7531/88-3577 http://www.inf.uni-konstanz.de/~gruen ... (more)

Working with Project Management Software – Who Is Managing Who?

Managing projects is not an easy job and in most cases the manager would greatly benefit from the use of a dedicated software. Starting from this necessity project management tools were created. But the main problem is if these tools are a real help for those that are using them or it is just a loss of time. It is a well-known fact that computers became a necessity in our lives by simplifying our work. Increased computational speed, huge memory and lack of fatigue are the main reasons why computers have so much success. Let’s admit it: in certain aspects robots are better that humans. So why not use them for such purposes? It is obtained an increased execution speed and accuracy. But all these come with one cost: time. Someone has to lose some time to teach computers how to do the job right. So a project manager and his team can ease their work using specialized ... (more)

Oracle Announces Oracle(R) VM Template Builder Enabling Faster Application Deployment for ISVs and End-Users

REDWOOD SHORES, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 08/12/09 -- Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) News Facts Today, Oracle announced Oracle® VM Template Builder, an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux "Just enough OS" (JeOS)-based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM. Now, end-users and ISVs have the option to develop their Oracle VM Templates by using these JeOS-based scripts directly or via the graphical Oracle VM Template Builder. Oracle Enterprise Linux JeOS is a version of the same Oracle Enterprise Linux that is backed by 24x7, global enterprise-class support. It has been tailored specifically to facilitate the creation of Oracle VM Templates for production enterprise use, with reduced disk space requirements, industry leading reliability and protection against security vulnerabilities. Oracle VM Templates are v... (more)