Darryl K. Taft

Hortonworks, a leading contributor to Apache Hadoop, has announced a new offering to help enterprises quickly get the hang of working with Hadoop and other projects in the Hadoop big data ecosystem. Presented as a free 2GB download, the new Hortonworks Sandbox is a self-contained virtual machine with Apache Hadoop preconfigured. It is essentially a […]

As the company predicted, Objective-C won TIOBE’s Programming Language Award for the second consecutive year. The TIOBE Index measures the popularity of programming languages. The award is given to the programming language that gained most market share in 2012. According to TIOBE, the market share of Objective-C is 3.37 percent higher than it was in […]

IBM is expected on Jan 22 to report solid results for the fourth quarter of 2012, according to a financial analyst following the company. Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu, who offered a preview of IBM’s quarterly results based on triangulating data points from its peers, supply-chain checks and currency calculations, said he anticipates IBM will […]

Microsoft recently announced a series of products and services that help outline its Cloud OS vision. In a Jan. 15 press briefing, Microsoft described how customers and partners can capitalize on cloud opportunities with System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the new Windows Intune, and Windows Azure services for Windows Server. These products help […]

IBM has expanded its distribution strategy and has authorized two national distributors—Ingram Micro and Tech Data—to sell IBM Power Systems and enterprise-class storage products in the United States. The move represents an expansion of existing relationships IBM has with the two companies, and they join distributors Avnet and Arrow in this space, effectively doubling IBM’s […]

ObjectRocket has announced the launch of its easy-to-use, scalable MongoDB database as a service (DBaaS). The company built its MongoDB cloud service from the ground up. Indeed, unlike most MongoDB services built on top of shared infrastructure, ObjectRocket’s platform is specifically architected to provide a fast, predictable MongoDB environment. ObjectRocket provides 24/7 customer support for […]

The Object Management Group (OMG) board of directors has adopted the Automated Function Point (AFP) specification, which is a way of measuring the size of IT application software. The Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ) led the push for adoption. AFP provides a standard for automating the popular function-point measure according to the counting guidelines […]

Big Data Big data analysis and intelligent decision making are coming to the car. Ford is researching the use of real-time sensor data—radar and camera-based—that can help evaluate external factors affecting driver attention, including traffic congestion, and thus limit potential distractions, such as an incoming phone call. Upgradeable, Customizable Hardware Ford’s OpenXC research platform looks […]

Deliver Like Facebook Facebook leads its industry because it delivers improvements to its site daily. Replicating this strategy is recommended, and easier to do now that the software tool stack can match that velocity. Even if companies are not building a software as a service (SaaS) offering, products can still rapidly evolve internally without being […]

ActiveState, a provider of tools and platform as a service (PaaS) solutions for a variety of programming languages, has announced its new Stackato Partner Program. The program pairs ActiveState’s PaaS technology, Stackato, with infrastructure technologies and services. The first group of partners in the new Stackato Partner ecosystem includes cloud infrastructure provider Cloudscaling, cloud-development services […]