Here are today’s top tech news stories. Bitcoin, the underground currency of the Internet, is experiencing speculative growth – there have been a few things pushing up the value of the Bitcoin, including a drug purchasing version of eBay. There are now “High Yield Investment Programs” offering high rates of return, which may or may not be […]
This post by RyanKamauff was first published at CTOvision.com.
The police caught the burglar who broke into Steve Jobs’ empty house in Palo Alto on July 17 and made off with Macs, Apple gadgets, Tiffany jewelry, champagne, a letter to Jobs, and even Steve’s wallet, which the AP says had his driver’s license and a dollar in it.
The thief was reportedly apprehended because he connected a stolen iPad to Apple’s servers and reinstalled the operating system but not before he sold the jewelry to an online dealer in Pennsylvania that he had goggled.
How important is Big Data? How important is structured data? To what extent will they be perceived as the same thing?
My own personal education in big data started a decade or so ago, when I interviewed Paul Saffo of the Instiute of the Future about sensor-based computing. He described a day when ubiquitous sensors would provide amounts of unstructured, critical data into large grid computing systems.
Soon after that, Greg Papadapoulous, a CTO at Sun Microsystems, told me about “spray painting” tiny sensors on walls and anywhere else where the information they gathered could be useful. This was the first I’d heard of real nanotechnology. It sounded like “static telemetry” for lack of a better term.
Concerns about Big Brother were missing from these conversations. This is usually the case, as inventors tend to invent without considering the consequences of having their great new stuff falling into the wrong hands. Or maybe they do consider it, and come to the conclusion that there will always be bad people in the world, but that nothing would get invented if their presence made one stop inventing.
Today, the sensors live among us. They’ve also taken a form in the world of software, as data collectors and Web stalkers, er, trackers. The latter are the true viruses of the cyberworld, it seems.
But are we getting any smarter, or just learning more and more about less and less? Real telemetry, combined with GPS, provides great benefits to the transportation and agriculture industries. RFID data and tracking continues to improve supply chains for even the most worthless crap you want to buy.
More important to our industry, the dawn of massive, unstructured databases seems to pose a clear challenge to traditional enterprise IT departments who’ve built duchies out of large amounts of structured corporate data. It’s also a threat to some of their traditional vendors.
Who doesn’t like traditional Big Data, which focuses on simulating nuclear bombs rather than blasting off real ones, trying to improve weather forecasts, trying to create earthquake forecasts, and tracking epidemics? And who’s not in favor of good air traffic control, high corn yields, and cheap party favors?
But some of this new stuff – the kind that sits on my shoulder online, or watches whether I try to sneak a smoke on a city street somehwere, or once showed the world my car sitting in my driveway – I find obnoxious.
SYS-CON Events announced today that SUSE, a leading provider of enterprise Linux and cloud-based solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
SUSE, a pioneer in open source software, provides reliable, interoperable Linux and cloud-based solutions that give enterprises greater control and flexibility. Decades of engineering excellence, industry leadership, and an unrivaled partner ecosystem power the products and enterprise support that help our customers manage complexity, reduce cost, and confidently deliver mission-critical services. The lasting relationships we build with them allow us to adapt and deliver the smarter innovation they need to succeed – today and tomorrow.
Red Hat has released a public preview of its OpenStack IaaS distribution a couple of weeks after Rackspace got the ball rolling and went production with the open source stuff on its own public cloud.
Red Hat, the third-biggest contributor to the current Essex release, is being a bit more circumspect about it. Its stuff is unsupported at this point.
It says it’s making sure the thing is enterprise-worthy, stable and certified apropos of introducing it as an enterprise subscription product. Whether Essex meets those criteria is reportedly debatable but Red Hat maintains that it will be the “industry’s only enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution.”
Captain’s Log, Stardate 8.5.12: Greetings and salutations from the communications deck of SolarVPS. After exploring wide ranging galaxies all across the Universe, we have managed to track down our Star Fleet Commander, SolarVPS COO Ross Brouse. After skirting through nebula’s and asteroid belts, our commander has something to say about a brand new SolarVPS product, […]
Cloud Replication Services features technology that can mirror your live applications to secondary data centres running Cloud services. Example providers include Allstream, who offer Cloud Replication Services as part of their enterprise IT portfolio. They ask and answer the question about the role of Cloud in BCP scenarios in this white paper, supported by this IDC report. They show […]
Network infrastructure design has never faced more complex real-world demands. Fast, reliable connectivity
is at the heart of business today, whether it is powering global systems, internal operations or customer-facing
communications and services. Private and public cloud applications, complex usage models and scale requirements
that may span literally billions of transactions have sparked a growing focus on scalable, high performance
networks.
Apple is apparently more reasonable than it lets on.
Back in 2010 it offered Samsung a license. Apple estimates that it might have cost Samsung $288 million back then. Now it’s asking $2.5 billion and that’s just in the current case in California.
FOSS Patents calls it “the most spectacular revelation of the ongoing trial.”
Microsoft holds rights to Apple patents that are broader than the deal Apple was willing to cut with Samsung in 2010 but they’re circumscribed by a “no cloning” provision.
Apple’s patent licensing and strategy director Boris Teksler said so Monday in the Apple v Samsung trial in California.
Microsoft’s rights to Apple design and feature patents may derive from a cross-license the companies signed in 1997. Teksler didn’t say if the pact was updated or new, given Microsoft’s coming adventure in tablets, how long it runs or whether money is involved.