Posts by EddieC

If you happen to be in the market for an all-in-one Windows PC, the Compaq 6000 Pro from Hewlett Packard is worth of serious consideration. This well-equipped, dual-core workstation performed well in benchmarks and our hands-on tests, and its integrated graphics circuitry drove a highly demanding single-shooter game smoothly, pegging the dial at a respectable 100 frames per second.Specs & Config Model: HP Compaq 6000 Pro Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (E8400) @ 3.0GHz Chipset: Intel Q43 Express Memory: 4GB 1333 MHz DDR3 SDRAM (dual channel) Graphics: Nvidia GeForce GT320 1GB (dedicated) Display: 21.5-inch diagonal anti-glare (1920 x 1080) Storage: WD 320 GB 7200 rpm 2.5-inch hard drive Optical: LightScribe DVD+/-RW SuperMulti DL Drive Power adapter: 100-240V, 50/60 Hz, 2.0A Wireless: WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n 2x2 mini card Webcam: 1280 x 720 Dimensions: 16.9 in x 21.5 in x 8.7 in Shipping weight: 37.2 lbs OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Warranty: Limited 3 year parts and labor warranty Tech Support: 1-800-334-5144

Design and Features

The Compaq 6000 Pro is built around an Intel Core 2 Duo processor (model E8400) running 64-bit Windows 7 Professional at 3.0 GHz on 4GB DDR3 memory. To test performance, we installed and launched Geekbench 2.1.11 from Primate Labs and were impressed with the results. After running the 64-bit tests multiple times, HP's Core Duo-based all-in-one returned a high score of 4485, comparing favorably with similarly equipped competitor machines we found in the Geekbench …

If you're serious about developing Android apps, there's only one platform to build and test them on, and that's the Samsung Nexus S. Why? Because first and foremost, the Nexus S runs pure Android. Not only is Samsung's Nexus S, released in December, one of the most beautiful phones on the market, and the only one with a curved glass screen, it also contains no add-ons, overlays or UI enhancements of any kind.

Yes, the Nexus S is all Android. There are no carrier-specific or Samsung-specific apps, drivers or features. That means that if your app runs here, it's reasonable to expect that it will run on other devices, as long as those devices don't require any hardware-specific trickery or have body parts surgically grafted on (Sony Xperia Super Bowl ad).

And in the world of mobile-device app building, that is huge. Because the alternative is to build and test on all the specific platforms and devices that you intend to target. Do you have that kind of time? And while targeting Apple devices also gives you the benefit if homogeneity, I hear that Apple's AppStore restrictions are a bit more stringent than Google's for the Android Market.

The Nexus S also is the first phone to ship with Android 2.3, also known as Gingerbread, and both the phone and the OS (of course) were developed with help from Google. I've been using a Nexus S phone since early January and have …

Another Microsoft mobile fail:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/200258/why_microsofts_kin_phones_were_destined_to_fail.html?tk=hp_blg

there are plugins for Firefox that render pages in Firefox using the IE engine. just click a button when on a page to alternate between one engine and the other.

Here are a few:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/ie

It's the kind of logic that's beyond the comprehension of trolls.

Developers Brad Lassey, Alex Pakhotin, Vladimir Vukićević and Michael Wu this week unveiled what they're calling a pre-alpha version of the Fennec browser, better known as Firefox for Google's Android mobile operating system. You can download the code, which as of last week had been tested only on Motorola Droid and Nexus One.

According to a post on Vukićević's blog, developers also should heed the following additional warnings:

• It will likely not eat your phone, but bugs might cause your phone to stop responding, requiring a reboot.
• Memory usage of this build isn't great--in many ways it's a debug build, and we haven't really done a lot of optimization yet. This could cause some problems with large pages, especially on low memory devices like the Droid.
• You'll see the app exit and relaunch on first start, as well as on add-on installs; this is a quirk of our install process, and we're working to get rid of it.
• You can't open links from other apps using Fennec; we should have this for the next build.
• This build requires Android 2.0 or above, and likely an OpenGL ES 2.0 capable device.
• Edit: This build must be installed to internal memory, not to a SD card.

For alpha-user feedback, the Fennec team has created the Fennec Droid Pre-Alpha group on Google, and asks users to post comments and bug reports there. There, you also can track the latest builds, Fennec news and progress …

What's Apple up to now? Yesterday it became public that the company had acquired Siri, whose sole purpose in life appears to be to make Siri, a free iPhone app that helps you find things and make plans. To watch Siri in action, it does look pretty useful. But why did Apple pay as much as $200 million for something that it could get for free at the iTunes store?

Answer? One theory suggests that the technology might help Apple better compete with Google. Here's how it works, according to Siri. Let's say you want to find a romantic Italian restaurant near your office. You simply launch Siri and speak the words into your iPhone. It converts your speech to text and after you confirm, it finds restaurants and then searches for the word "romantic" in multiple reviews for those places. Siri can even make the reservation for you. If you decide you'd rather eat near home, just say "How about near my house?" The program will automatically reapply the previous search with the new location. According to what I've read, the software also lets you ask open questions, such as "What's to do around here today?" To that, it might suggest a movie, night club or local event. And of course, Siri also runs on iPad.

The Siri purchase is just the latest in a series of acquisitions for Apple, which reportedly has about a $40 billion cash reserve …

Sorry, I should have filed in Java section!

Hewlett-Packard today announced updates to Service Test Management 10.5 and Functional Testing 10.0--its quality assurance tools for software testers--that the company says are now better equipped to help development teams find defects earlier and cover code for Adobe Flex/Flash, Ajax, Microsoft Silverlight and other rich client technologies.

New in Functional Testing 10, which is part of Mercury's ever-popular Quick-Test Pro, is the ability to easily test dynamic Web 2.0 applications and features. The update is implemented in the so-called Web 2.0 Extensibility Accelerator, which the company says "provides a Visual Studio-like IDE that accelerates and facilitates the design, development and deployment of HP QuickTest Professional Add-in Extensibility support sets." These support sets "extend the HP Functional Testing Web Add-in so you can test Web controls that are not supported out-of-the-box." Current QTP users can download the update for free.

HP, which acquired the top-selling Mercury software testing tools along with Mercury Interactive in 2006, has the tools as part of its Application Lifecycle Management portfolio, which also includes tools for security, performance and SOA management.

Apple today announced that it will begin shipping iPhones for CDMA networks, such as those offered by Verizon and Sprint, ending a three-year monopoly in the U.S. held by AT&T since iPhone's inception. Once the phones becomes available later this year, iPhone users in the U.S. that don't wish to be stuck with AT&T's network will have an alternative to importing an "unlocked" phone from the black market or learning how to jailbreak the iPhone.

For AT&T, which operates a GSM network, the iPhone has been responsible for much of its growth since 2007 and vaulting it into the leading position in U.S. smart phone sales, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal. The company commands more than 43 percent of America's smart phone users, the Journal said, compared with Verizon's 23 percent. Last year Apple sold 25.1 million iPhones globally, an increase of 83 percent from the prior year, the report said.

One analyst estimates that a deal with Verizon could double the number of iPhone users in the U.S. The CDMA iPhone will be made by ASUSTeK Computer subsidiary Pegatron Technology in Taiwan's.

Nvidia yesterday began shipping the GeForce GTX 480, with double the number of processor cores previously available at 512. The card is intended to to permit smooth playback and editing of 2D or 3D content, including animation, games and videos.

The GTX 480 supports Microsoft DirectX 11, Direct3D and PhysX, Nvidia's real-time physics engine and SDK that came along with its acquisition of Ageia in 2008. Now tailored for Nvidia's CUDA GPUs, PhysX off-loads physics processing tasks from a system's main CPU.

The board uses NVidia's latest graphics processing architecture--called Fermi after nuclear reactor inventor Enrico Fermi--which the company says will provide a platform not just for media producers and gamers, but for high-end modeling applications such as those used in meteorology, geology and medical research.

The GeForce GTX 480, which contains 1.5GB of dedicated graphics memory, is Nvidia's answer to AMD's Radeon 5870 product, which came out in September. Early indications are that GeForce keep pace with the Radeon in one-card tests, but in a two-card test reported in PC World, outperformed by a significant margin. The GTX 480 will cost you a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot and about US$500.

As the world awaits for the release of Apple's Next Big Thing, developers are putting the finishing touches on applications to be ready for iPad's April 3 ship date. And Apple is getting ready too. The company yesterday began accepting submissions for iPad App Store, its online application outlet for iPhone and iPad. According to a report on engadget, the deadline for having apps available on opening day is March 27 at 5:00pm PT; that's 8:00 pm in the Eastern U.S.

If you're on the buying end, you'd better get your order in. Apple opened the gates to pre-orders on Friday, and according to this ArsTechnica story, they're selling at about 25,000 an hour, fast enough to sell through its initial production run by the end of this weekend--almost two weeks before they even hit store shelves.

I'd call it common sense to figure that most iPads sold will be of the $499 (cheapest) variety, but the ArsTechnica story also estimates that perhaps as many as a quarter will include the 3G/GPS option for another $130 plus $29.95 a month for unlimited data transfer. There's also the $50 Verizon MiFi that sets up a mobile WiFi hotspot for up to five computers. But to get that price, you'll have to sign up for two years. It otherwise costs $250.

What has proven to be alien to Apple and Microsoft may be just right for Android. Search giant Google this week announced that it is working with Sony, Intel and computer accessory maker Logitech on technology to bring Web searches and applications to the television. Efforts by Google's predecessors--Apple TV and WebTV--turned in disappointing results.

It's early yet and reports are mixed, but most indicate that Google's Android mobile operating system will for the basis for an Atom-based set-top box built by Sony. Other reports have Logitech developing a remote control for the system. In any event, it appears there will be opportunities for developers to build applications to run on the what some are calling "Google TV," as they now run on Android-based phones. Software running on the box will help users surf the Web on television sets and launch apps, visit social networks and view or listen to content. It's even possible that the technology could some day come pre-installed in TVs and other devices such as Blu-ray players.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month reported that Google was working with satellite service provider Dish Network on set-top box software that allows searches for satellite programming and to create a custom viewing experience. But according to the WSJ video report, it could be years before it's ready for deployment.

Google has a pretty good track record when it comes to trail blazing, but can it succeed where others have …

Thanks for the comments, people. I enjoy reading other opinions, even when they're wrong. :)

Dear Steve Ballmer, I believe it's time to give up development of a mobile operating system. With all due respect to the multi-billion dollar empire you're entrusted with running, the simple truth is that Microsoft is quite bad at developing user interfaces that are friendly and intuitive. Windows 7 is an improvement, but you're far from being out of the woods. What's more, it appears that your guidance, Mr. Ballmer, might be making the problem worse, especially if the things you said recently about your instructions to Windows Phone developers were true.

During a presentation at the Mobile World Congress 2010 in Spain last week, you were quoted as saying: "In a crowded market filled with phones that look the same and do the same things, I challenged the team to deliver a different kind of mobile experience." You did what? Why in the world would you tell developers to give people something other than what they want? Obviously people are buying devices from Apple, Google and others, because they're giving people what they want. So to give people "a different kind of mobile experience" from competitors would logically mean that your mission is to give people what they DO NOT want.

Change for change's sake is not progress; it's just change. Seamlessly integrating with Windows and Office applications is nice, but it's not unique to Microsoft and there are alternatives to Word and Excel that are equally useful. Works like Zune? That's not sweetening the deal. Links …

Last week Toshiba unveiled a series of server-class hard drives that can store as much as 600GB in a 2.5-inch form factor. They're the first products to result from its acquisition of Fujitsu's hard drive business early last year. Set to begin shipping in April, the new MFB series of serial-attached SCSI drives also includes 300GB and 450GB capacities, sport a 6Gb/s interface, and can optionally self-encrypt all data based on the Trusted Computing Group Enterprise Security Subsystem Class specification. Self-encryption can potentially save IT departments hundreds of hours of labor in key management, data retrieval and scrubbing.

The drives also are rated to consume up to 28 percent less power than similar models, and can therefore be packed more densely without concern for excessive cooling requirements. "We do have customers that ask [about power consumption]," said Darryl Riddlespurger president of StoreHouse Technologies, a storage solutions provider in San Diego. "And we would point them to [Toshiba] for their power requirements."

In addition to direct-attached server storage, the drives are intended for storage arrays, blade and rack-mount servers and near-line applications, according to Joel Hagberg, vice president of enterprise marketing at Toshiba. "And for cooling, the ability to improve airflow becomes important. These drives run at less power." This is accomplished by enabling the drive to spin at a slower speed when not in use. Though pricing was not disclosed, the three-platter drives are expected to sell for about US$1 per GB, …

Clarification on the pricing:
A data deduplication license costs $1,000 per TB (physical usable capacity of the repository). Replication for the file server is priced at $15,000, while StorNext Storage Manager – part of the core product used to provide automated data movement – is priced at $35,000. The Distributed Data Mover is priced at $15,000, and Partial File Retrieval costs $36,000.

if you like that, you'll love news from box.net I'll b reporting later today or tomorrow.

Plagued by duplicate files that clog up your system? Quantum, a company once known mainly for hard drives, yesterday unveiled a new version of its StorNext File System that it says optimizes storage efficiency by implementing automatic data deduplication. It's part of StorNext 4.0, Quantum's high-performance sharing and data management platform, which now can also automate data tiering and retrieve partial files based on timecode, for the video editor in you.

Storage analyst Tom Coughlin, of Coughlin Associates, said that for media types, the benefits of deduping would be less significant than, say, those of time-based features. Deduping eliminates repetition of data in storage blocks, thereby reducing demand for storage capacity and network bandwidth for moving data around. "Media professionals are dealing mostly with original content, so there's not much duplication in that," he said. But retrieving just the 15 seconds you need from a 30-minute video? "That lets me move just the pieces of data I need, so I can save time as well as operating and capital expenses by making due with existing resources."

The ability of a file system itself to perform deduplication constitutes a form of data tiering, according to Chris Duffy, NextStor product marketing manager at Quantum. He said that by enabling a "dedupe repository," all files dropped in a particular folder are thereby optimized and can be accessed faster than those not using that folder. "You can call it tiering because you're actually optimizing your primary storage environment."

transfer rates should read GB/s (gigaBYTES) not Gb/s (gigaBITS).

Sorry about that folks!

LSI, three letters that are probably etched on nearly every hard drive controller you've ever owned, as of yesterday emblazon 10 more controllers of SAS, SATA and SSD storage devices. On Jan. 19, the company unveiled a series of new RAID controllers and host bus adapters that double the bandwidth to 6GB/s of four of its MegaRAID cards, increase the number of controllable hard drives to 1024, and deliver a sustained read and write performance for applications that require sequential storage such as video streaming and genomic research as seen in this LSI promotional video.

Cache is King
The LSI 3ware 9750 is a new family of 6Gb/s SATA and SAS RAID-on-chip controllers. The cache on these boards is backed up by an on-board battery, which according to Tom Kodet, LSI's worldwide channel product marketing manager, provides an important measure of data security. "What if data was written on cache and the server locked up or failed? How does one preserve the data in cache?" With most RAID controllers, you don't, and whatever was waiting to be written is lost. And if your application was streaming surveillance video, "those last two seconds of video could be the the most interesting," he said, perhaps revealing what caused the crash in the first place. "With battery-backed cache, the board can be removed with the battery, preserving the data in the cache. When you plug it in to a new server, …

With the release last week of Groovy 1.7, developers using the object-oriented scripting language for Java gained access to anonymous inner classes and nested classes, annotations, SQL and other features that could simplify development when mixing Groovy code with Java. Groovy's Eclipse community yesterday released Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.0, a nearly rewritten plug-in that it says delivers an Eclipse experience the same as when using Java.

"The driving themes for version 2.0.0 have always been to optimize around the common developer actions of editing, building, running and testing code," wrote Groovy language developer Andrew Eisenberg in a post describing the release. To that end, editing is enhanced in the release with support of task tags,javadoc hovers and cross-language refactoring. The tool also offers context-aware editor suggestions and content assist through an extensible inferencing engine. Builds are aided thanks to a "stub-less incremental joint compilation process, [in which] we use a modified Groovy parser that is more recoverable than the standard parser," which Eisenberg said enables the language to be "more stable in the face of partially correct code."

Groovy-Eclipse 2.0.0, according to
release notes, also now supports launching and debugging of applications and scripts, "even for code using transforms such as @Grab," which can be used to insert source files. Version 2 also now fully integrates with JUnit. Groovy is licensed under Apache.

Users of GoogleDocs will soon have reason to celebrate. Google this week announced in a blog post that its free online document collaboration platform will soon store files of all file types, rather than just those it can edit (plus PDFs).

To understand the significance of this news, you'll first need to know a little about GoogleDocs (current users can skip to the next paragraph). If you're doing any document collaboration at all, you know that version control is the key. For example, let's say I create a Word doc and send it via email to Moe. He makes his changes and sends a new document to Larry, who approves Moe's edits and sends his tweaked version to Curly for final approval. But Curly wants to change something I did. So he sends his copy (now the third version of the file) to me for revisions. I then create a fourth version. With GoogleDocs, I simply upload the Word doc into the system (or create it online using the GoogleDocs browser-based word processor). That becomes the one and only copy of the file that everyone can see and edit simultaneously. All previous versions are stored automatically and can be viewed, copied or reverted to. Changes by multiple people toGoogleDocs appear in real time. It's quite marvelous. And it's even more useful if you're also using Gmail.

Until now, editable document types had been limited to text, spreadsheets and presentations. The free service permits storage …

If you're a whiz at Web design and have time to enter a contest, you could be one of three finalists to have your team flown to the MIX10 conference Las Vegas, where you'll collect your US$50,000. The winner also goes to New York City to attend the annual Webby Awards in June. It's all part of this year's PhizzPop Design Challenge, an event sponsored by Microsoft and The Webby Awards to benefit the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

Qualifying proposals are for sites developed with the Microsoft Web Platform and other Microsoft tools that are engaging to parents, charitable givers, media and other site visitors. According to today's announcement of the contest, projects will be judged on the following five criteria:

1. Content and communication plan
2. Structure and navigation
3. Visual design
4. Integration of Microsoft technology
5. Scope of interactivity

"High marks will be given to entries that propose a more visually appealing and interactive site reflecting contemporary design trends, and that incorporate the Web’s best practices in areas such as social media and video," according to the announcement.

Three teams selected as finalists will be flown and put up in Las Vegas for MIX10, Microsoft’s Web designer and developer conference in March, where they will pitch their concepts to a panel of judges. Enter the PhizzPop Design Challenge by Feb. 19, 2010.

palindrome, of course. that too. :)

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein isn't looking to the stars for his comeback strategy. The inventor of the iPod was quoted last week saying he had never used an iPhone and that he doesn't pay that much attention to Apple. Was he kidding? If his strategy for competing with the industry's number one app phone is to ignore it, stock holders ought to have his head.

Don't get me wrong; I love Palm. I have owned and used them since the Palm V and I like my Treo 680 just fine. I also think the Pre is an extremely handsome unit and worthy competitor to iPhone, and now that Palm is signing carrier deals with AT&T and Verizon, it has a fighting chance. But how can a company claim to compete with something if its CEO has never even laid hands on one? And as the "father of the iPod," as the article puts it, it's hard to imagine Rubinstein not keeping tabs on the device some credit with Apple's resurgence in recent years.

By the way, today's date--01/11/10--is an anagram. So if Rubinstein uses numerology to develop a winning strategy for regaining market share, this might be a good sign.

While most eyes this week were trained on Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft was gearing up to speak with retailers at the National Retail Federation's annual Conference and Expo in New York City running tomorrow through Tuesday. The company announced yesterday that it will be demonstrating new products to help retailers differentiate the customer interactions through connected experiences. Microsoft focuses mainly on verticals of distribution, food and drug, general merchandise and specialty retail.

Part of Connected Experiences for Retail, Redmond reportedly will demonstrate self-service retail devices with central management, a digital signage platform for retail and hospitality markets, and a new digital marketing solution built around Microsoft Commerce Server 2009. The company also will demonstrate advances in its business intelligence platform as well as the forthcoming Dynamics AX for Retail, an enterprise resource planning tool that helps to connect consumer behavior, store activities and e-commerce systems to provide intelligence into operations end to end for "better insight and control of key business processes," the company said.

With the release yesterday of Intel's Core series of high-performance, power-efficient processors, makers of space-constrained, mobile and other embedded devices now have a new low-cost option for their designs. The multi-core CPUs, dubbed Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7, incorporate Intel's Hyper Threading technology for fast program execution, a DDR3 memory controller and high definition graphics processor. About 200 embedded designs based on the new parts are reportedly available or soon will be.

"These processors will enable more powerful high performance computers in the embedded space," said Eric Heikkila, director of embedded hardware and systems at VDC Research Group. "When these processors are sold into the embedded market, it will most likely be into embedded systems in benign environments that are running high bandwidth applications," such as those used in communications and networking systems, and in military and aerospace applications.

In an e-mail interview yesterday, Heikkila said the proliferation of Hyper threading, Intel's simultaneous multithreading technology, is likely to accelerate the adoption of multicore parts, for which programming is complex. Hyper Threading was previously available only in Atom, Pentium 4, Xeon and the 45nm i7 processors. "Often times in applications where multicore processors are deployed, some of the cores are sitting idle because programmers simply don’t know how to utilize them all at once," he said. "But multicore processors are still used because that’s what Intel and AMD are selling." As multicore processors become mainstream, programmers won't have much choice but to learn …

Intel tomorrow will officially unveil a pair of dual-core mobile processors with its Hyper threading technology, adding to its x86 line a low cost chip with performance akin to that of the company's i7, Pentium 4 and Xeon parts. The Core i3 and Core i5 processors, demonstrated by Hewlett-Packard and others at CES 2010 in Las Vegas through Sunday, also incorporate graphics functions on board, saving power and cost by eliminating the need for a separate graphics package.

In a benchmark report published yesterday, the two-core i5 661 processor outperformed a quad-core Athlon II 640 running at 3GHz.With on-board graphics turned off, the i5 can overclock "well beyond 4GHz," according to the report. A six-core version is expected in the next few months. Formerly code-named Clarkdale for desktops and Arrandale for laptops, the Core i3 and Core i5 are the first processors available using Intel's 32nm process.

Only the i5, which is equipped with a feature called Turbo Boost, can automatically overclock to 2.26GHz based on processing and power efficiency requirements. The integrated GPU still uses a portly 45nm die, and will only work when used in a system that's also equipped with Intel's new H55 or H57 chips. The new chips also include a DDR3 memory controller. Loaded laptops built around the a Core i5 chip are expected to initially sell for around US$900, while i3-based machines will go for about $700.

The Android has landed. 17 percent of people in the U.S. currently planning to buy a smartphone within the next three months are considering one that runs Google's mobile OS, while 20 percent indicated that iPhone would be their choice. That's according to a report released yesterday by analyst firm comScore. The survey, conducted in November, polled 2,300 people.

What will be the next app phone you buy for yourself? Will it be one you most like to use yourself, or the one that you plan to write apps for? Perhaps it will be both. Two years ago, the answer on most people's lips was, of course, "iPhone." And it remains so today, but outwardly similar "all touch" phones are now running Android, BlackBerry, PalmOS and Windows. While Google's star appears to be rising and RIM loyalists remain loyal, fortunes of Palm and Microsoft in the mobile arena appear to be on the wane. Only 3 percent said they were considering a Palm Pre or Centro. The the AT&T Tilt, which was the only Windows Mobile device to make the list, was thought of by 2 percent of respondents.

The 17 percent preference figure for Android includes the Verizon Droid (8%), the T-Mobile MyTouch (5%) and T-mobile's G1 (1%); there also was an "other Android" category. The single most desirous device was the BlackBerry Pearl (18%), followed by the iPhone 3GS (14).

If you've ever remotely operated one computer from another, you've used desktop virtualization. It's been built into Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for years, but recent moves by Red Hat could signal that it's about to go mainstream. The Linux company late last week announced that it was opening the source code for SPICE, the Simple Protocol forIndependent Computing Environment it inherited along with its acquisition of virtualization tools maker Qumranet in 2008.

Once proprietary, SPICE is the transport protocol used by Qumranet's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the open-source hypervisor for Linux that has been part the kernel since version 2.6.20. In a statement announcing the move, Red Hat said that opening the protocol's source code to partners and the open source community is intended to "expand the development of the protocol in an effort to help break down barriers to virtualization adoption."

Indeed, for compute-intensive applications that require powerful hardware, deployment options can be somewhat limited. But with a tool that enables computations to take place on a powerful, remote system, deployment of the app's user interface can provide adequate performance even on the thinnest of clients. To learn more, take a look at Spice for Nubies, a 12-page PDF that does a pretty good job of explaining the technology in layman's terms.

Thanks to new firmware (v.1.3) released last Thursday, Dell's Lifecycle Controller now works with system management tools from BMC and Microsoft. Most reports that followed Dell's Thursday announcement focused on the speed and capacity of its EqualLogic storage arrays, not on the software used to manage them. While improvements to 10Gb (from 1Gb) and 768TB (from 540TB) are significant, the real news in my humble opinion was again in the software.

"We now have all the drivers for Dell server hardware right on board," said Anthony Dina, director of solutions marketing at Dell. "You don't have to go to the Web, to the CD or anywhere" when using BMC's BladeLogic or Microsoft System Center to deploy and configure PowerEdge servers. The drivers have been present in Dell's own administration tool--Infrastructure Manager--since March. What's new is the integration with third-party tools. "Some operations folks like to deploy servers using BladeLogic or System Center, [and now they] have a faster way of doing it with Dell servers than they did previously." When asked, Dina said Dell currently has no plans to integrate with HP's OpenView.

Infrastructure Manager virtualizes discreet devices such as drives, arrays, RAIDs and controllers into a single virtual storage pool, explained Dell senior manager Travis Vigil. This allows them to be managed as a single entity. "As you grow and put in hardware, EqualLogic firmware virtualizes it across arrays," simplifying administration, optimizing performance by automatically balancing load across different RAID types. The tool now has the the …

Even Microsoft is sometimes faced with the decision of whether to "buy or build." This time it chose to buy. With the acquisition of Opalis Software announced yesterday, Redmond in one stroke takes a major leap in data center process automation. And it couldn't have come at a better time. Major announcements by
Dell and EMC last week put Microsoft behind by at least six months when it comes to IT automation; according to reports, it will be mid-2010 before we see a Microsoft-branded solution.

Opalis's flagship is Integration Server, which automates data center processes--such as those for provisioning a server or other network resource--so as to reduce the human errors that the company claims are the cause of 80 percent of infrastructure downtime. The idea is to bestow Microsoft's System Center with the ability to automate processes normally documented in the data center's "run book." System Center contains modules for managing configuration, data security, operations and virtual machines. Opalis Integration Server also would introduce integration with enterprise management systems from BMC, CA, HP, IBM, NetIQ and VMware.

Opalis, has become a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary, and its operations will remain in Toronto. Though financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, a the 451 Group had the figure at around US $60 million.

Tired of parsing all the source code involved in building mobile apps? Or perhaps the approval process for Apple's App Store is getting you down. Or maybe you're an aspiring commercial developer in search of the next must-have platform to tap. If you think Android might be the one, then a new tool from Google is worth a serious look.

App Inventor, a tool under development at Google, makes building apps for Android as easy as putting together a child's jigsaw puzzle. First announced on July 31, App Inventor is a drag-and-drop environment that appears to require only the most basic knowledge of how applications work. Acting as building blocks for applications, puzzle pieces are shaped based on their functionality, and their ability to connect and interact with other components.

Now in alpha testing at a number of universities, App Inventor is expected to be available to the public sometime in 2010. In the meantime, you can learn to use it thanks to this University of San Francisco professor's tutorial. In the introduction, computer science professor David Wobler explains the six components of an Android app, which are: visual components, non-visual components, events, behaviors, event handlers and variables.

App Inventor consists of two main components, Wobler explains. The Component Designer lets you select visual components such as buttons, text boxes and the like, and non-visual components like interaction with sounds or external services. Once the …

According to a Search Software Quality survey of 492 IT professionals, 22 percent struggle most with requirements gathering. Yet the same group said they spend less than 12 percent of their time doing it. Not so at LSI Corp., which probably made some of the storage silicon in the computer you're using right now. "During development phase, we take an idea to 10 choice customers and ask what they think," said Steve Hochberg, senior director of high performance computing at LSI. "We ask where the requirements are going in two years and whether [our idea] meets them. 'Are we headed in the right direction?' "

LSI customers include supercomputing centers at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge national laboratories, and Hochberg said the customer meetings usually involve high-level directors there. "He's got a doctorate in engineering, electrical engineering and maybe one in physics," he said, and the value such customers bring to the requirements gathering phase is immeasurable. "This person, in one head, has the ability to tell us how to construct controller boards and do power efficiency. So we allow them to be uniquely involved in the process."

But customer involvement doesn't end there. The roles of the ALM project manager and his team must adapt to incorporate customers during development, testing and pre-deployment phases. "The last time we released a product," Hochberg said, "we sold a petabyte of storage into Oak Ridge about 12 months prior to it being generally available …

What if you had access to the millions of tweets that flow to and from Twitter users every day? Perhaps you'd build something like PostRank, which amasses them along with other data from social media sites to trackcyber-reaction to posted articles. Or maybe you would filter them by demographic and figure out a way to sell targeted banner ads.

The sky's the limit, so you might want to start noodling. According to Twitter platform director Ryan Sarver, speaking this week at the Le Web conference in Paris, access to its data stream is about to get easier. On Wednesday, Sarver revealed Twitter's plans to open the "firehose," the data stream of tweets that until now had not been generally available. Still, the company said that upwards of 50,000 applications had been built using the existing Twitter API. For comparison, Facebook claims about 10 times that many. The move will take place sometime next year.

Sarver also pledged to communicate more with developers about its intentions, will launch a new developer Web site within the next few weeks, and is planning a developer conference in San Francisco some time in 2010. For more information about the so-called "Chirp" conference, enter your email address at the Chirp Web site.

After a swirl of rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire music-streaming service Lala, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the companies had reached a deal. Exact terms were not disclosed.

Lala, a four-year-old private company, offers a terrific Web-based music streaming and download service that lets you listen to any song for the first time for free, and as many times after that for $.10 per song. Unlike with iTunes purchases, you never own the file. Instead, you buy the right to stream it from any browser at any time, even from mobile devices.

But here's where it gets really good: Songs you already own through your iTunes purchases also become yours to hear through Lala AT NO EXTRA COST. So in a way, Lala can be used as a kind of iTunes backup. Sign up for free and transfer your iTunes libraries and play lists right over. I know several people (including me) who would have benefited from such a backup after their hard drive crashed. If you've paid the $.10 for streaming and you decide to buy the song outright, you pay just $.79 more to download an MP3, which isn't encumbered by DRM yet still compatible with iTunes (and Windows Media Player).

There's been lots of speculation about what Apple is up to. After signing up today and sampling Lala, I think the most logical move would be, as Technologizer's Harry …

I would start here:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhone101/Articles/00_Introduction.html

Intel has confirmed reports that it will not release its next-generation graphics processor widely known as Larrabee as a discreet GPU. Instead, most reports indicate that the company will move ahead with its many-core processor as a design and development platform aimed at graphics rendering and high-performance computing.

The idea behind Larrabee was relatively simple: combine a bunch of Pentium-class processor cores with coherent cache, add some SIMD vector and texture sampling units, and tie them all together with x86 instructions and write extensions where necessary. Viola! A super-fast general purpose CPU that's programmable with C/C++ and performs graphics processing too. Problem was, Larrabee was too slow. Initial performance figures were about a fifth of where they needed to be to compete with AMD and NVidia, according to Wikipedia. It also was widely reported that demonstrations given at IDC in September were unimpressive.

The news comes just weeks after the late-November revelation that IBM would not advance its Cell processor, found in Sony's PlayStation3. It's been rumored that Larrabee was under consideration by Sony as next in line, but I guess that rumor is now laid to rest.

Larrabee appears to have caused confusion right from the start. Intel's plan to produce a graphics processor first surfaced publicly in early 2007, amid media speculation and reports of a conflicted marketing message.

Smaller, bigger, faster. The more time that goes by, the bigger the number of bits they squeeze into smaller places for less money. And always faster than before. This time it's Samsung, with news today that it has begun volume production of flash memory that's more than three times faster than previous versions in a 30-nm die, which it claims makes it the world's smallest.

In a separate announcement, the Korean giant said it is now producing the world's first 3-bit, multi-level-cell NAND flash chips using its 30-nm process. The circuits will be initially used to produce 8GB microSD cards, the company said, but can also be used for USB memory devices and products storing 32GB and higher.

Toshiba started shipping similar parts under the SanDisk brand earlier this year, but those are made using a 32-nm process. While 2 nm might not seem like much, it can make a big difference to microSD cards, which are commonly found in cell phones and other handheld devices. And a thinner die allows more memory to be crammed into the same space without using more power, according to claims. And then there's the bragging rights--Samsung now holds the rights to the smallest footprint. At least for now.

This is a bit off topic, but times are tough and money is money. There's an opportunity to earn between US$10 and $20 an hour working for the U.S. Census Bureau for the 2010 population count. And after seeing number of hits that "Craigslist: Developer's Jobs and Other Jobs" generated, I thought this might also strike a chord.

Several hundred thousand temporary jobs are up for grabs all over the country, with flexible hours, paid training and job-related travel reimbursement. I looked into the pay where I live, and it's $18 an hour. Find out how much they pay in your area using this interactive map.

There are several qualifications. Since you're reading this, you've already met one of them. You must also be able to speak and write English. You must be a U.S. citizen or permanent legal and documented resident, at least 18 years of age, have a valid social security number and driver's license, and pass a background check (would you want an inked up ex-con knocking on your door?). They'll spend four days training you, for which you'll be paid. And you also have to pass a test. But don't worry, they pretty much give you the answers by providing you with this Practice Test for Field Employees (pdf). They also say that your chances of landing one of these jobs are probably better if you're bilingual. Read more about it on the 2010.Census.gov …

Has your server's memory reached its 192GB limit? Last week a company called Netlist was demonstrating a new RDIMM technology that it claims can double per-CPU memory capacity without doubling the cost and without replacing any other hardware. At Supercomputing 09, the high performance computing industry's annual conference, Netlist showed off its so-called HyperCloud 16GB DRR3 RDIMMs elevating a machine to 384GB of memory per CPU.

Set to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2010, HyperCloud RDIMMs also will be available in 4GB and 8GB versions, and according to Paul Duran, director of business development for Netlist, work interchangeably with today's standard parts. "They are essentially plug-and-play with the JEDEC standard with no issues," even when they are installed on the same channel, and require no bios changes, he added.

The technology employs proprietary logic that Duran said appears to the CPU as two physical ranks of memory (the maximum), but actually contains four, allowing dual socket servers to be populated with as many as 24 16GB RDIMMs. Duran said that vRank also helps performance. "The CPU is tricked into thinking it has a single load, therefore it will run at 1,333 [million transfers per second] when you have four DIMMs populated per channel." In today's systems, the CPU supports 1333 MT/s only when populated with one DIMM per channel, he said. With two, it decreases to 1067 MT/s and with three it drops to 800. Doing the job …

You know you've established your brand when its name becomes a verb (for example to 'Google' something). A company called PostRank might hope the same holds true for adjectives, as in "What's your PostRank?" The company hosts an ingenious service that tracks the millions of Web postings that appear every day and ranks them based on the tweets, Diggs, reddits, and other linkback activities that follow.

These activities, which the company refers to as "engagements," are a better indicator of the value of a piece, according to PostRank co-founder and VP of development Jim Murphy. "We're looking at what people do, as opposed to what people say. And that's an important difference" he said in a phone interview yesterday. "We're not asking you what is good or bad content--and to vote up or down. If I use delicious, where I'll save a bookmark that I want to refer to later, we record that as an interesting engagement." PostRank has agreements with 18 major social networks, and looking to add all the time, Murphy said.

Founded in 2007 as AideRSS, the company started by developing a way to qualify the huge number of articles fed into RSS readers every day. "The engagement generated by each story has a ranking function that we plug into [RSS] readers. So of these 500 themes, which generate let's say 700 or 800 stories a day, [we present] the 50 you really need to look at," based on how many other people …

With its release on Monday of the first public beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 RC2, Microsoft also was touting features introduced in the second beta of Visual Studio 2010. Expected in March, Redmond's next IDE will simplify development of new applications and modification of existing ones to take advantage of its high performance computing platform, according to claims. Windows Server HPC 2008 is currently scheduled for release late summer, 2010.

"The topic of making serial code into parallel code continues to be very complex," said Ryan Waite, product unit manager for High Performance Computing at Microsoft in a phone interview yesterday. He said there are two new tools in the product for doing that, one for code that uses the Messaging Passing Interface standard on many HPC systems, and another for SOA. "We provide support for both tightly coupled computing code that uses MPI and MPI-like communications patterns, and a lot of these parallel types of codes that use more of a service-oriented programming model."

The second VS2010 beta is packaged with the forthcoming .NET Framework 4 beta 2, which Waite said also provides HPC support. "The great thing about Visual Studio 2010 is that we've abstracted some of the concepts for writing parallel code. So instead of you having to have to have a PhD in computer science to make sense of writing parallel apps, We've made it so that a lot of the concepts that are difficult for developers …

While most reporters and bloggers today are trumpeting the fine showing by chip-maker AMD in the semi-annual list of the world's Top 500 Supercompting Sites, for me the real news is what AMD has planned for next year. In the first quarter of 2010, AMD is scheduled to begin shipping a processor that will include not only 12 cores, but also the vastly expanded memory bandwidth to support them.

Code-named Magny-Cours, the processors will offer four channels for DDR3 memory, twice that of its 6-core Opteron top-performer, which by the way powers what is today considered the fastest supercomputer in the world. AMD further boasts this week that five of the top 10 systems on the November list have AMD inside. DDR3 doubles the transfer rate of DDR2, effectively quadrupling bandwidth when available over four channels instead of two.

"A processor with four memory channels and 12 cores will be a very appealing option for film rendering and virtualization of high performance computing," said John Fruehe, director of business development at AMD's Server and Workstation Division, in a confidential group phone briefing Friday. It will be a natural, he said, for the types of things being done in the film industry, where Intel has a stronghold.

But the news isn't all upside; all of AMD's new processors, starting with the Magny-Cours, will require all new system hardware. However, AMD says that the socket infrastructure will support its 16-core processors coming in 2011 and beyond.

Microsoft this week acquired Teamprise, a division of SourceGear that built tools to give developers access to Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server from systems running Linux, Mac OS X and Unix.SourceGear's flagship SourceOffSite provides remote access to Visual SouceSafe, Microsoft's version control system.

Teamprise comes in three forms. The Plug-in for Eclipse allows developers source control, bug tracking, build and reporting operations from within their current Eclipse environment or Eclipse-based IDE. Teamprise Explorer does the same but can can stand alone. There's also the Command-Line Client automated builds and other scripting situations.

Updated to version 3.2 in March, Teamprise was given a complete command-line feature set, support for building projects with Maven and a single sign-on for Linux and Mac OS X with Kerberos authentication. All three modules at that time also gained support for HP-UX on IA64. Teamprise is now at version 3.3, which according to release notes, is a maintenance release.

Microsoft said in a statement that Teamprise functionality will be integrated into the Visual Studio product line beginning with Visual Studio 2010.

The BlackBerry Developer Conference concluded yesterday, but not before Research in Motion had the chance to unveil enhancements to its BlackBerry Application Platform, which now supports OpenGL ES, a subset of the desktop graphics API specification for embedded systems. Useful for development of 3D games development and other graphics, it's standard equipment on phones based on Android and Symbian OS, and is among several of iPhone's graphics libraries.

RIM also announced the release of BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, a free suite of tools it says simplify the design of custom interfaces, illustrations and animations for devices running BlackBerry OS 4.2.2 or higher. The suite, which replaces the Plazmic Content Developer’s Kit, can import Photoshop files and includes access to a home screen layout, fonts, icons, message list colors, cursors and dialog boxes, the company said.SVG graphics can be created using BlackBerry Composer, for adding illustration and animation to buttons, backgrounds, web sites and BlackBerry apps. On devices running BlackBerry OS 5.0 and higher, developers also can add ringtones and transition between screens by zooming, sliding, wiping and fading.

Also this week in separate announcements, Research in Motion said it will add a Java GUI builder to its Eclipse-based development environment, announced the ability to use Adobe Flash and Creative Suite authoring tools to target BlackBerry devices, and unveiled new services slated for 2010 that will let applications be aware of their geographic location and push content …

You don't have to have lived in Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties to achieve self-awareness in San Francisco. BlackBerry developers are gathered in the city this week for the annual BlackBerry Developer Conference, taking place now through Thursday. Among the top stories is a new service platform from Research in Motion that will enable developers to build location-aware applications that can include advertising, collect payments or generate other location-based activities or services. Maybe a text message will inform you as you walk past the Red Victorian Hotel that its Peace Cafe just received a shipment of tie-dye shirts, for example.

Making it possible will be BlackBerry Advertising Service, which will allow ads to be integrated with applications, to generate revenue and to make mobile advertising easier, the company said. Set for availability next year, the service will include access to advertising networks such as those managed by Jumptap and 1020 Placecast and to geographic information systems such as those managed by Navteq. It also will be possible, the company said, for ads to tie directly with BlackBerry features such as making a call, adding to the calendar or contact database or accessing BlackBerry's App World. Of course, reporting will include impressions, clicks, conversions and integration with the Omniture Web analytics system (acquired last month by Adobe).

One service available now only to top-tier developers is the BlackBerry Push Service, which next year …

If you're not yet among the percentage of the population people using Mozilla's Firefox browser, which by one count stands at 47.5 percent, perhaps the anniversary of its launch will give you cause. Yesterday was Firefox's fifth birthday, and its market share with co-leader Internet Explorer by many counts continues to grow while Microsoft's continues to shrink.

First released on Nov. 9, 2004, Firefox is now used by more than 330 million people worldwide, according to Mozilla.org, which itself reports Firefox market share at 24.7 percent, according to October 2009 numbers from netapplications .com, which researches market share. In fact, the organization in an Oct. 5 report cited that Firefox had increased its market share by four percent in a single month (September, 2009) based on a trend the firm began following with the June release of Firefox 3.5.

That's right, free. And if it's free, it's for me. Software promoter MacHeist is my new best friend, and for the next five days is giving away nanoBundle, a package of six Mac OS X applications including the highly-rated Twitterrific, which normally sells for US$15. In all, $154 worth of applications for your Mac OS X (10.4 or higher) for nothing. Nada. Gratis. Free, as in beer. But tap it while you can; the keg runs dry this Friday the 13th.

In addition to Iconfactory's Twitterrific, which is also available for iPhone, the nanoBundle includes two word processors (one of which is not fully unlocked), a cool looking game called Hordes of Orcs, a screen sharing utility called TinyGrab, and ShoveBox, a clever-looking utility that I intend to try out immediately. The tool, which normally sells for $25, provides a "box" into which you drop items that are important but cannot have your attention now. A URL you accidentally came across, someone's resume attachment, a picture of that used car you're selling. Shove them in the box for later action, or send them to your iPhone.

NanoBundle isn't the first MacHeist. Back in March MacHeist drew attention for offering an even larger bundle of apps worth more than $900 retail for just $39. The response was reportedly mixed, with some in opposition asserting that the software was being given away for too little. The move even spurred a group of independent developers …