Darryl K. Taft

Microsoft announced the three official versions for the upcoming release of Windows: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro and Windows RT. In an April 16 post on the Windows Team Blog, Brandon LeBlanc, a Windows communications manager at Microsoft, laid out details on the three versions of Windows 8, which actually turn out to be four […]

For the first quarter of 2012, IBM is expected to show gains in software and high-end servers, according to a forecast by an industry analyst. IBM will report its Q1 2012 financial results on April 17. In an April 16 note to investors, Shaw Wu, an analyst with the investment firm Sterne Agee, said he […]

Oracle has come down on the wrong side of an advertising watchdog organization over misleading advertising claims, prompted by complaints from rival IBM. The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus has recommended that Oracle discontinue certain pricing and comparative performance claims for the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 computer system. The NAD, […]

Scalable Scala emphasizes scalability—this means large development teams, large code bases and large numbers of CPU cores. Adapting to a multicore and distributed computing world, the Typesafe Stack pairs Scala with an industrial-strength implementation of the Actor concurrency model, called Akka. Functional Scala is also a functional language. Inspired by the long tradition of functional […]

Big Data: The New Natural Resource Big data is the digital convergence of structured data found inside databases and unstructured data flowing from new sources like social networks, mobile device sensors, radio-frequency identification (RFID), smart meters and financial systems. Big Data Is a Growing Sector The digital universe will grow to 2.7 zettabytes in 2012, […]

IBM (NYSE: IBM) continued on its shopping spree for analytics expertise with its acquisition of Varicent Software, a provider of analytics software for compensation and sales performance management solutions.The acquisition advances IBM’s efforts to drive analytics capabilities into the hands of front-line employees, particularly in the area of sales, where many organizations still rely on […]

In yet another sad sign of the troubled times for Research In Motion, popular mobile ISV YouMail has just announced it has delivered its last update on the BlackBerry platform. Ironically, the BlackBerry was the first smartphone platform on which YouMail started doing app development, driving much of its early growth, and it is currently […]

Backers of the OpenStack open-source cloud platform have joined forces to announce the formation of the OpenStack Foundation. On April 12, 19 technology companies announced their plans to become Platinum or Gold members of the OpenStack Foundation, an independent and long-term home for OpenStack, the open-source cloud operating system. AT&T, Canonical, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, […]

Amazon Web Services has introduced a new service for developers, Amazon CloudSearch, which delivers the power of the Amazon.com€™s search technology to every developer. In an April 12 blog post, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, said Amazon CloudSearch eliminates a key pain point for developers: searching for data, information, documents or even code. Vogels said […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. €” SOASTA announced that its CloudTest functional and performance-test platform is now available as a service of VMware€™s Cloud Foundry platform as a service (PaaS). SOASTA announced its news at a VMware Cloud Foundry one-year anniversary celebration here. SOASTA officials boasted that CloudTest is the first and only test automation service available […]