AppZero Session at Cloud Expo Did you ever have the invisible dream?  I don't like it.  It's the one where I have "the answer" to a big problem (usually involving giant, malevolent aliens) but everyone walks right past me because I'm invisible. I had that feeling yesterday reading James Urquhart's blog titled, "Application packaging for cloud computing: A proposal". He'd written a series of posts considering deployment and operations in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. Looking at the impact of cloud computing on the use of virtual machines and operating systems, Urquhart wrote, "The very heart and soul of software systems design is being challenged by the decoupling of infrastructure architectures from the software architectures that run on them." Yes.  Exactly what I've been saying.  Exactly what AppZero does in ... (more)

"It All Depends on What the Meaning of 'Open' Is," Says Sun's COO

Sun's president and COO has done it again. He's bitten off, and publicly chewed, another of technology's thorniest questions - the very meaning of the word "open" as in source. "Granted, I seem to spend a disproportionate amount of my time defining things," Schwartz writes in his latest blog at blogs.sun.com, "but it seems like a lot of industry rhetoric right now depends upon redefining history and vocabulary." Schwartz points out how much discussion of terms like "open systems," "open source," and "open standards," there has been over the past 30 years, and says he'd like to add "some refinements" to the current debate. This he promptly does by saying that "the definition of 'open' that matters most is the one experienced by a customer or end user - 'openness' is defined by the ease with which a customer can substitute one product for another." He continues: "Only... (more)

LaCie Introduces File Access and Sharing for Families

PARIS -- (Marketwire) -- 11/06/12 -- Today LaCie announced an all-new network storage solution that connects the entire family to their music, movie and photo files. The LaCie CloudBox stores files in a single location so family members can easily share them with friends, and access them from anywhere on any device. ONE-PLUG, ONE-CLICK SETUP The LaCie CloudBox makes setup worry-free thanks to its two-step set-up process. Simply plug the LaCie CloudBox into a power outlet and connect the Ethernet cable into a router. The LaCie CloudBox does the rest with no software to install. In just a few minutes, the LaCie CloudBox will appear on the user's Mac® or PC just like a connected device. SHARE WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS With the LaCie CloudBox, all files are stored in one place, enabling convenient file access and sharing. The CloudBox includes UPnP™ capability so Dad can ... (more)

Cvent and CEO Awarded Two Stevies at American Business Awards Ceremony

Cvent (NYSE:CVT), a leading cloud-based enterprise event management platform, announced today that CEO and founder Reggie Aggarwal was honored with a gold Stevie award in the Executive of the Year category for computer software companies in the U.S. This was the top honor in a pool of finalists that included CEOs from TIBCO and Epicor, and the second year in a row where he has won. Past gold Stevie honorees include CEOs from Amazon.com, Ford Motors and ESPN. Cvent also received the silver award in the software division of the Company of the Year category, with a list of finalists that included Marketo, ExactTarget and SciQuest. Past silver Stevie winners include Red Hat, SAP and Overstock.com. Under Aggarwal’s leadership, Cvent has grown from a two-person startup to a 1,300-employee publicly traded company. In addition to its leadership in the software, meetings a... (more)

The i-Technology Right Stuff

Related Links: Wanted: 19 More of the Top Software People in the World Sung and Unsung i-Technology Heroes Who's Missing from SYS-CON's i-Technology Top Twenty?" Our search for the Twenty Top Software People in the World is nearing completion. In the SYS-CON tradition of empowering readers, we are leaving the final "cut" to you, so here are the top 40 nominations in alphabetical order. Our aim this time round is to whittle this 40 down to our final twenty, not (yet) to arrange those twenty in any order of preference. All you need to do to vote is to go to the Further Details page of any nominee you'd like to see end up in the top half of the poll when we close voting on Christmas Eve, December 24, and cast your vote or votes. To access the Further Details of each nominee just click on their name. Happy voting!   In alphabetical order the nominees are:   Tim Berner... (more)

The Top 250 Players in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem

In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded rou... (more)

After Ubuntu, Windows Looks Increasingly Bad, Increasingly Archaic, Increasingly Unfriendly

My recent switch to a single-boot Ubuntu setup on my Thinkpad T60 simply floors me on a regular basis. Most recently it's had to do with the experience of maintaining the software. Fresh from a very long Windows 2000 experience and a four-month Windows XP experience along with a long-time Linux sys admin role puts me in a great position to assess Ubuntu. Three prior attempts over the years at using Linux as my daily desktop OS had me primed for failure. Well, Ubuntu takes Linux where I've long hoped it would go - easy to use, reliable, dependable, great applications too but more on that later. It has some elegance to it - bet you never heard that about a Linux desktop before. There are many night-and-day differences between Windows and Ubuntu and, for a guy that does 80% standard office tasks and the rest of the time I'm doing Linux admin tasks, it was nearly all i... (more)

Linux.SYS-CON.com Exclusive: Linus Discloses *Real* Fathers of Linux

Related Links: Linus Torvalds Isn't the "Father of Linux" "Ok, I admit it. I was just a front-man for the real fathers of Linux, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus." Thus begins a characteristically Torvaldsian e-mail to LinuxWorld News Desk sent by Linus Torvalds in response to our invitation to comment on the sensationalist claims this morning that he isn't, after all, the inventor of Linux. "They (for obvious reasons) couldn't step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the computer bug, and had been developing a series of operating systems on their own during the off season. But when they started with Linux (which they originally called Freax - they do feel like outsiders, you know, and that's a whole sad story in itself), they felt that they could no longer just let it languish in obscurity. They started to look for a front-man, and since Santa Claus is fr... (more)

SCO CEO Posts Open Letter to the Open Source Community

In an open letter to the OS community, Darl McBride writes: 'The most controversial issue in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property. This battle is being fought largely between vendors who create and sell proprietary software, and the Open Source community. My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we filed a lawsuit against IBM alleging that SCO's proprietary Unix code has been illegally copied into the free Linux operating system...' Read the full letter here: The most controversial issue in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property. This battle is being fought largely between vendors who create and sell proprietary software, and the Open Source community. My company, the SCO Group, became a ... (more)

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers." Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed. What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX? Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! 1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX? 2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?  3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business se... (more)

Linus' Top Ten SCO Barbs

Kevin Mack's Top 10 Linus SCO quotes [thanks to Dee-Ann LeBlanc for the link] 10. Not About IP"None of the SCO accusations have anything to do with IP rights; they're all about contracts between IBM and SCO. All the IP rights blathering by SCO was just that -- blathering"9. Custody Battle"SCO is claiming parenthood of that child and now wants to make money off the earnings of that child. Even though SCO has refused to undergo the technical equivalent of DNA testing, and even though my (and other people's) DNA is probably all over Linux." 8. Lottery "We have to sadly decline taking business model advice from a company that seems to have squandered all its money (that it made off a Linux IPO, I might add, since there's a nice bit of irony there), and now seems to play the US legal system as a lottery." 7. Copyright Law"So . . . when he attacks the GPL as being somehow ... (more)