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IBM launched a set of new Power7 systems that deliver up to four times the energy efficiency and twice the performance of the previous generation of Power systems and some of the current crop of competing systems. The new Power7 systems are designed to manage the most demanding emerging applications, ranging from smart electrical grids to real-time analytics for financial markets. The new systems incorporate a number of unique technologies for the specialized demands of new applications and services that rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real-time.
In partnership with the state of Montana, tech vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, NextIO and Nice have created the "Big Sky" system, the cornerstone of the new Rocky Mountain Supercomputer Centers. The 3.8-teraflop system, powered by IBM's System p and System x servers and running Microsoft's Windows HPC Server 2008, is designed to fulfill Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer's vision of using technology to be the economic engine that revitalizes the region, which some until now have called "The Great American Supercomputing Desert." The goal is to grow the system to 20 to 25 teraflops, and should demand exceed the RMSC's capacity, workloads can be spilled over to IBM's Computing on Demand cloud computing center.
Facebook turned 6 years old Feb. 4. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg proudly told the world that the leading social network now has more than 400 million users. To celebrate the birthday, Facebook also began rolling out changes to the homepage. Though currently visible to only 80 million of the site's users worldwide, the changes are significant signs that the company is looking to improve the site's search and overall usability. See some of the changes, which will be rolling out to all users over the coming weeks, in this eWEEK slideshow.
Apple has been touting its iPad since it was first announced a few weeks ago. But after the hype wears off and we take an honest look at the iPad, we quickly find that there are some major flaws with the company's tablet device that it just doesn't want us to know about. When a consumer picks up the iPad expecting a top-of-the-line experience, they might be surprised to learn that it can't quite provide that. They might be even more upset when they find out that the iPad isn't as appealing as Steve Jobs wants the world to believe. So before you pick one up, let's take a look at what Apple doesn't want you to know about the iPad.
Super Bowl XLIV is upon us, with the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints ready to battle at the Sun Life Stadium in Florida for the Lombardi trophy on Feb. 7. Millions will be glued to their televisions and radios for the big event, but nearly as many could be glued to their smartphones: either to catch scores while on the run, or else fill out their Super Bowl experience with stats and commentary.
The following apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch can help round out your Super Bowl experience. Some will provide real-time updates from the year's biggest game, while others let you do a little (virtual) football-playing yourself. The best part: no annoying 30-second commercials.
The HTML5 specification is the much-discussed, much-anticipated follow-on to HTML4, which has grown a little long in the tooth for the kinds of Web applications developers are creating today and aspire to create in the future. HTML5 will enable a whole new class of Web applications that support multimedia content and offline capability without the need for proprietary plug-in technology.
HP EliteBook 8440w hits 14" mark with powerful combination of processor and management extras including power reporting along with quick access to the web and Outlook without full machine boot up.
Whether a Saints or Colts fan, everyone can agree that a high-definition, beer-soaked and burger-filled Super Bowl party is close to a patriotic duty. However, the Super Bowl is about more than chips and dip, overhyped commercials, and overblown halftime shows. There’s the game, of course, but also the opportunity for you to show off to your friends the latest gadgets and gizmos to make your party the one to remember, whatever the outcome of the game.
Apple's iPad has the potential to help bring tablet PCs truly mainstream, offering consumers a 9.7-inch LED backlit glossy multitouch display with a 1,024-by-768 resolution. While much of the buzz following Apple's Jan. 27 unveiling of the device has focused on its ability to show movies and e-books, a number of potential business applications also exist for a screen that size.
Apple has claimed that some 140,000 apps will be available for the iPad through the App Store when the device is released in two months, and developers are likely already seeing how they can transfer their existing iPhone apps to this new format. The following apps, designed for business use and already popular on the iPhone, are ones that could likely find even greater use by being ported onto the iPad.
Dell, Sony and Gateway all introduced new PCs during the first week of February, each emphasizing more personalized features, pricing respectful of IT budgets—as Dell phrased it—Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system and a boost of power from the latest Intel processors. The Dell Latitude 13 and Precision M6500, for mobile enterprise users, will arrive in the coming weeks; the Sony Vaio E Series of notebooks, in fun colors for consumers, can be preordered before their March arrival; and the new Gateways—an FX, DX and SX Series of desktops for homes, gamers and dorm rooms, are now available for purchase.
Hewlett-Packard, like any Tier 1 IT supplier, listens to what its customers—and potential customers—say. Back in July 2008, the company introduced its first portable data center product, the 40-foot, 22-rack, railcar-sized POD (Performance-Optimized Datacenter) because that size was the one most potential customers were interested in at the time. At a cost of $1.2 million apiece, only the largest enterprises could afford one. On Feb. 2, 2010, HP introduced a half-sized alternative to the big one—a 20-foot POD that might fit budgets better with a price tag of $600,000. The company claims that there's a lot of interest in this smaller-sized portable IT system that can operate anywhere there is power or some kind of coolant, as needed. This eWEEK slide show reveals some of the details of what's in the box.
SAP Feb. 2 launched to public beta 12Sprints, a collaboration environment geared to help knowledge workers share enterprise application data and discuss it in a virtual forum, which is provisioned by invite only. XMPP-powered chat and document sharing are available, and SAP has already created extensions for Scribd, Evernote and UserVoice, letting users post documents and Web annotations to share with colleagues and leave feedback in a comments section. This platform could serve as an alternative to Google Wave for some businesses. To see a live tour of 12Sprints, click on this YouTube video, and check out this demo.
When Google reported in January that it had been the victim of a cyber-attack, it sparked what has turned out to be weeks of discussions and investigation. But what has become yet another entry on the list of cyber-security incidents between the United States and China began with a vulnerability in Internet Explorer.
The December attack against Google turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. More than 30 enterprises are believed to have been impacted by what has since become known as "Operation Aurora." At the center of Aurora is the IE vulnerability, which Microsoft had known about since September.
Here, eWEEK looks at how the attack unfolded, including key events in the ongoing controversy between the United States, Google and China. eWEEK also looks at what enterprises can do to help prevent similar incidents.
Data storage systems provider Sepaton is a steadily growing company that might have the fastest backup software in the business: Its virtual tape libraries (VTLs) have been clocked backing up petabytes of data at up to 34.5TB per hour, among the fastest rates benchmarked. The Marlboro, Mass., company produces disk-based virtual tape hardware and software—including high-end data deduplication appliances—for large enterprises and small to midsize data centers. Jay Kramer, Sepaton's vice president of worldwide marketing, has been a sought-after industry analyst, consultant and event organizer. He offers eWEEK his take on disaster recovery points that all enterprises should consider.
Microsoft has focused on making a number of Bing features more robust over the past few months, offering more information and charts in specific categories such as nutrition. By incorporating data from computational engine Wolfram Alpha, Bing now offers detailed nutritional information on a wide variety of foods; in addition, the search engine now offers a “Recipes” tab that gives the ingredients, directions and nutrition for dozens of consumables.
Microsoft evidently hopes that features such as increased nutritional information will help distinguish Bing from Google, its primary competition and the current search-engine market dominator. Bing-related nutrition and recipes also help augment Microsoft’s forays into health care IT. The following images show just what Bing has to offer with regard to what’s on your plate.
Apple's iPad captured the hearts and minds of Apple fans and critics alike Jan. 27. Google, whose Android and Chrome Operating System platforms are intended to run in a variety of form factors, isn't letting Apple and its newfangled machine have all the fun. Pictures of what a tablet computer running Chrome OS looks like have surfaced on Google's Chromium open-source Website. Take a stroll with eWEEK through the high-resolution pics to see a rough user implementation of what could be in the pipeline from PC makers this year or the next.
We've only known about it for a few days, but already the iPad is making us wonder what kind of experience it will offer. One of its most compelling features is its ability to run iPhone applications without any changes being made to the original application. In other words, all 140,000 apps that already work on the iPhone and iPod Touch will work with the iPad when it's released.
But out of that group of 140,000 applications, there are far fewer than we would really like to see on the iPad. It's not that many of those applications are awful, but some certainly stand above the others as programs that would be ideal for a tablet computer. Realizing that, we've sifted through the App Store to find 10 applications that we just can't wait to see on the iPad. Some are fun, others are designed for productivity. But in either case, they would be ideal for any iPad user.
Let's take a look:
When the earthquake devastated Haiti Jan. 12, Google sprang into action, launching satellite imagery from Google Earth and Google Maps to help the world see how the quake leveled the island. To do this, Google relied on high-resolution imagery from the GeoEye-1 satellite. Google and satellite maker GeoEye have enjoyed a fruitful partnership, with Google using GeoEye-1 imagery for the 2009 presidential inauguration, views of the pyramids in Egypt and images showing urban expansion in China. On Jan. 25, Google added a new "GeoEye Featured Imagery" layer in Google Earth. Learn more about the Google-GeoEye relationship in this eWEEK slide show.
Over the next seven months, Intel will install solar panels at eight locations in four Western states that will generate about 2.5 megawatts of power. The project calls for installing the solar panels on the roofs of Intel buildings at all the sites except one. The installations are part of a larger power conservation initiative that Intel kicked off in 2001. Since that time, Intel has invested more than $30 million and has saved more than 650 million kilowatt hours using a variety of different renewable energy sources, including wind, solar, water and biomass. Intel officials say they not only want to reduce their own company's carbon footprint, but also are investing in companies that are developing clean technology products. Intel has invested more than $125 million in more than a dozen of these clean tech companies, including $10 million in five companies in 2009. The following slides illustrate what the new solar installations will look like when completed.
Apple's iBookstore joins the App Store and iTunes Store to provide applications and content for the iPad. The iWork applications Numbers, Pages and Keynote further help to differentiate the Apple iPad from Amazon Kindle and other book reader devices. Apple CEO Steve Jobs claims that between Apple iTunes, App Store and now iBookstore, 125 million credit cards are enabled for one-click shopping on Apple devices, a big motivator for application development in the Apple world. Here’s a look at some of the applications as shown during the iPad launch event on Jan. 27, 2010.
After nine months of jumping through legal hoops, Oracle on Jan. 27 closed its $7.4 billion deal to buy Sun Microsystems. The world's second-largest software company wasted no time explaining to everybody what it is going to do with its newly acquired hardware, software and services businesses. It staged a full-day press and analyst briefing on that very same day to do just that. Since the companies have been working together since the 1980s, many of their products are already integrated; however, some new ones are not and will take some time to put together. More difficult will be the integration of some 27,000 Sun employees into the Oracle culture, one that, in some ways, is very different from Sun's. Following are photos of some of the highlights of the Jan. 27 event.
Google Jan. 25 launched its extensions gallery for the stable version of Chrome for Windows, bringing 1,500 extensions to the masses. Extensions are programs developers create that let users customize the Web browser to hook into third-party applications or send readers alerts. eWEEK posted a cross-section of Chrome extensions here last month, including the Google Wave notifiers, Gmail mail checker and other apps to make Chrome more useful. Here are some more Chrome extensions to help you improve your productivity online, including the just released Google Voice extension for Chrome. Check them out here!
With the usual Apple drama and anticipation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the new iPad tablet that his company is banking on to set the design standard that will make the tablet a must-have device for the technically savvy. Here's our first hands-on look at the device Jobs thinks will create a new category of mobile computing devices and make consumers forget about all earlier tablet and e-reader designs.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, the long-awaited, much speculated tablet computer, Jan. 27 in San Francisco. Jobs positioned the tablet as a new way of accessing the Web for work and play, allowing users to leverage their iPhone applications on a larger platform and at greater speeds. eWEEK provides a walk-through of the new product, which will be available in a Wi-Fi version in March and with Wi-Fi and 3G service from AT&T in April. Apple said the 16GB Wi-Fi-only model starts at $499. Users can pay $599 for a 32GB Wi-Fi-only model, or $699 for a 64GB Wi-Fi unit. These models will ship in March from the Apple Store and retailers. Consumers who opt to buy an iPad with Wi-Fi and 3G will pay $629 (16GB), $729 (32GB) and $829 (64GB). These will be available in April with prepaid data plans from AT&T.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was busy in 2009, picking on companies it believes crept a little too close to people's privacy comfort zones. The EFF took on Google over the Google Book Search deal and the Google Latitude mobile social networking application, among other topics. As we go deeper into 2010, Tim Jones, the EFF's activism and technology manager, said the EFF has several concerns on its action list, which it plans to revisit in December 2010 to see what transpired over the course of the year. eWEEK walks through these issues in this slide show, mixing up the EFF's original order for some consistency.
The advent of the Apple tablet and the rash of tablet releases in early January at the Consumer Electronics Show generated a lot of questions (again) about the viability of the tablet form factor. In the enterprise, I think the tablet is DOA. There's more to like about tablets from the consumer side, but what I really want is a "couchlet." Here's my vision for the device that would make my home tech life heaven on earth.
When Steve Job takes the stage on Wednesday to possibly unveil a tablet computer, most will be wondering why they should pick up Apple's multitouch device over anything else on the market. In order to convince them, Jobs will need to talk about all the device's specs. He will need to highlight some of the finer points. And most importantly, he will be required to prove to his customer base that his tablet is the computer they really want.
But what features will provide users with that value proposition? Aside from a usable touch interface, the device will need to sport some of Apple's better applications, as well as extras, like wireless Web connectivity. Those are just a few of the many options Apple might pack into its upcoming device. Here is a look at the features that could make their way into Apple's tablet.
Meet Bredolab. Bredolab represents what Fortinet calls a simplified botnet—a "loader" that simply connects to a remote server to report and receive files to download and execute. Fortinet has linked Bredolab to an innovative new spam engine called Webwail as well as an uptick in the growth of attacker services focused on cracking CAPTCHAs. By circumventing CAPTCHA protections, spammers can sign up for legitimate Web e-mail accounts to send out spam, making it harder for security vendors to block their messages.
Fortinet Threat Researcher Derek Manky predicts more Web engines like Webwail will be developed, driving a growth in CAPTCHA-solving services. Here, eWEEK looks at Webwail and Bredolab, and shows what could be a new security threat: loaders sold as services to buyers looking to distribute malware.
The release of the Motorola Droid, Nexus One, and other devices running the Google Android operating system has irrevocably changed the smartphone landscape, and led more developers to consider creating both free and paid applications for Android Market, Google's mobile application store. While questions remain about how robustly Android Market can challenge Apple's App Store, developers have been building thousands of applications for both business use and entertainment.
The following Android applications are some of Android Market's most popular, and allow both office workers and road warriors to do everything from editing documents formatted for a smartphone, to getting real-time stock quotes and weather updates, to listening to a little music or checking their Facebook updates during their downtime.
With the new year just under way, predictions for 2010 are commonplace. However, Gartner is going a few years farther into the future, taking a look at the major computing trends that will continue developing as far out as 2015. And given what we see today, those predictions shouldn't come as a surprise. For example, as virtualization and cloud computing grow, fewer businesses are going to see the need for owning their own hardware. In addition, it won't take long for mobile phones to outpace PCs in sales. Social media will also be an increasingly important factor, with a rapidly growing Facebook leading the way. Green IT is a growing concern for both IT vendors and their customers as well.
Sure it's deathly cold outside, and trekking to work through the freezing wind and crusty snow isn't doing you any favors. However, you'd be surprised at how quickly your winter blues can melt away when you've got the right application. With that in mind, here's a list of eight iPhone and iPod touch apps to help you see the sunnier side of things.
Firefox 3.6—the latest version of the open-source Web browser from Mozilla—is only a small point update, but it does have some interesting new capabilities that make upgrading worthwhile. These new features include Personas, which are essentially browser themes that can be easily deployed and managed; improved HTML 5 video support; and enhanced capabilities for managing browser plug-ins.
Jitterbit 3.0 is a slick data integration suite that makes quick work of piping together disparate data sources and applications. Jitterbit 3.0 is available in a freely downloadable, open-source licensed community edition, which can serve well for small integration projects. The product is also available in a subscription-based version that adds features for managing larger projects. Check out this slide gallery below for a look at Jitterbit 3.0 in action, and be sure to read eWEEK Labs' full review here.
Microsoft announced on Jan. 19 that it would take its Bing Maps Silverlight site, which offers flashy additions such as Streetside and Enhanced Bird's Eye, out of beta mode. As part of that transition from beta, Bing now includes two new features: Destination Maps, which let a user render a particular map in a stylistic manner (including "European," "Sketchy," "American" and "Treasure Map"), and Local Events, which shows what's happening nearby a location on a particular day. The following slides run through those two new features, as well as a few other Silverlight-only tweaks to Bing Maps.
VMware View 4 pushes virtual desktop delivery with its PCoIP, a new protocol that enables support for multiple high-resolution monitors and responsive end-user interaction.
There was no way to avoid it. "Star Trek" jokes abounded at IBM's Lotusphere event held Jan. 17 to 21. Actor William Shatner, who portrayed Capt. James T. Kirk in the original television and movie series, opened the show with a chat about Lotus collaboration, and IBM executives closed the show by unveiling Project Vulcan. Vulcan is a forthcoming collaboration platform that will combine the Lotus Notes portfolio with IBM's social software and Cognos business intelligence applications. IBM officials also introduced IBM Lotus Notes applications for iPhone and Android devices, improvements to Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr, and a bolstered partnership with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion, which is using Lotus Connections.
During the past 10 years, several key software development trends laid the foundation for application development now and into the future. Here is a look at 10 of the hottest application development trends from the past decade, including dynamic languages, open-source software, team development and the Web as a development platform.
Microsoft started off 2010 by offering the "enhanced Bing Health search experience," designed to return data from multiple sources in response to health-related queries. Typing in hospitals, diseases or terms such as "weight loss" will often trigger a results page that collates everything from lists of medical centers to chemistry diagrams. Microsoft hopes making its results pages more robust will allow it to compete more directly against Google, which continues to dominate the search-engine market. During his keynote address at the 2010 CES in Las Vegas, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said one of Bing's goals in 2010 would be to "understand user intent and anticipate what users are really looking for." Bing's health results are an indicator of Microsoft's thinking in that direction.
Each month, eWEEK editors name new or newly updated enterprise-class products that we think should be on IT professionals' radars-products and services that promise to create efficiencies as well as competitive advantage. This month, eWEEK recommends checking out 3PAR's Autonomic Groups, Black Box's Veri-NAC family of access control products, Zenoss' Zenoss Enterprise 2.5, Sophos' Endpoint Security and Data Protection 9, Vorex's Vorex 2.5, Greenview Data's Greenview Data Encryption Service, SailPoint's IdentityIQ 4.0, WatchGuard's WatchGuard XCS, Splunk's Splunk 4 Free, Gideon Technologies' SecureFusion, Xerox's Phaser 6140, KnowledgeTree's KnowledgeTree 3.7 and Knowledge Tree CP, Fortify's Fortify on Demand, BP Logix's Process Director 1.0, Motorola's MC3090-Z RFID reader and TmaxSoft's OpenFrame 6.0.
When it comes to tablet computers, all the talk surrounds Apple's iSlate, a tablet that, so far, is the subject of speculation and rumors. In fact, there is no indication that Apple will even release the product. But that hasn't stopped some pundits and consumers from calling it a product that could revolutionize the computer market. After all, if Apple releases a product, it typically changes things up.
But Apple isn't alone in its supposed desire to build a new touch tablet designed to make a user's simpler computing needs—Web browsing, checking e-mail, using basic applications—just a little better. That said, all those "other" products haven't received the limelight they deserve because of the huge shadow Apple's product is casting.
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eSlideshows 
