Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Intel, Oracle Head For 'The Cloud'


CEO Paul Otellini
discusses plans for the public and private cloud at OpenWorld 2008.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Intel and Oracle, which have partnered for 15 years, are heading for the cloud, Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2008 Tuesday.

"Today Intel and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) are announcing that they're taking the enterprise aspect of cloud computing and driving it outwards," Otellini said. The two will work on security and flexibility for migration between private and public clouds, and on industry standards for this migration.

Earlier in the week at OpenWorld, Oracle announced that it has partnered with Amazon to let customers deploy and back up its applications in the cloud.

Otellini also unveiled some of Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) other plans, bringing other Intel executives on stage to elaborate. These include a new toolset to help C++ developers learn about parallel programming, and details of when products based on forthcoming Nehalem chip will ship.

By tackling the migration between private and public clouds, Intel and Oracle are going head to head with VMware, whose vCloud initiative, announced last week at VMworld 2008 in Las Vegas, will do the same thing. Oracle has its own hypervisor, (define) based on the Xen open source hypervisor.

Enterprises can now license Oracle's Database 11g, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager over Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It also introduced a secure backup module for Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3).

Oracle is itself leveraging virtualization heavily within its own infrastructure, and recently announced its VM Templates suite, which combines Oracle Database 11g, Enterprise Manager 10g, Siebel CRM 8 and Enterprise Linux, with all the applications preinstalled and preconfigured.


To elaborate on his announcement about working with Oracle, Otellini brought out Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel's software solutions group. "Most of our datacenter customers are already using virtualization in their infrastructure behind the firewall; we want to help them take it out into the public cloud," James said.

She added that Intel has added several features in its CPU and chipsets to ensure the best performance for virtualization, and "we're delighted to see Oracle's getting a 17 percent performance improvement on the Oracle virtual machine using the hardware features we've put in."

The move to multicore
Turning to parallel computing, James said that, within the next couple of years, all Intel's processors will be multicore, and, to help C++ developers prepare for this, Intel has come up with a new set of tools for C++ developers called Intel Parallel Studio.

Intel will run a beta trial for most components of Intel Parallel Studio from November through May 2009.

Intel's Otellini also announced that Intel will go into production in the fourth quarter with the Nehalem chip for desktops and workstations. It will offer a product for database servers which will be available from its hardware partners in the first quarter of 2009, he added.

Nehalem was the code name for the processor when it was in development, but it's official name is the Core i7.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

A little bit of Oracle Open World

Charles Phillips @ OPN Forum, OpenWorld, 20 Sep 2008

ORACLE - NETAPP PARTNER RELATIONSHIP











NetApp is a leading vendor of innovative storage and data management solutions that help organizations around the world store, manage, protect, and retain their data. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, NetApp is a member of the NASDAQ-100 and ranks on the Fortune 1000.

For more than a decade, Oracle and NetApp have been collaborating and sharing the same vision. We focus on developing solutions that help you reduce the costs of managing and storing information.

Joint Initiatives
Oracle and NetApp believe that technological synergy is critical to minimizing the complexity of integrated enterprise solutions. To ensure the greatest possible interoperability, we collaborate closely on product integration, including performance testing, product validation, and joint development.

NetApp SnapManager® for Oracle creates a framework that empowers Oracle DBAs to easily perform database backups, restores, and other storage-related tasks without requiring storage administrator involvement.

With NetApp FlexClone™ technology, SnapManager® for Oracle can create instantaneous copies of databases that use no additional physical space until changes are made.

NetApp FlexVol® offers true virtualization that allows you to pool storage resources automatically, enabling you to add or shrink storage to meet the dynamic needs of your enterprise. Plus, you get the added benefit of improved performance and higher utilization, resulting in greater flexibility.

NetApp SnapLock®
, NetApp’s unified storage architecture and the Oracle Databaseprovide an ideal platform to implement an information lifecycle management solution that provides cost-effective tiered storage, data migration, archiving, and compliance.

NetApp Lifetime Key Management and Oracle Advanced security provide you with extensive yet easy-to-manage data protection which enables you to secure data at rest and in transit while helping you address your privacy and compliance requirements.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

I'm a PC ad made on a MAC!


Priceless!


The new microsoft ad campaign includes photos in their website made on a mac!


Hilarious!

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Must-See Products At Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle Open World.
More than 43,000 Oracle partners and customers will converge on San Francisco this week (and occupy every hotel room north of SFO airport) to attend Oracle OpenWorld 2008. There they can check out the latest news from the world's second largest software company about its database, middleware and application software.

Attendees can also check out what's hot from the more than 400 exhibitors on the show floor at the Moscone Center. Dozens of vendors, service providers and other companies in the Oracle ecosystem are expected to announce new products and services and we've collected 11 of them here to offer a taste of what Oracle OpenWorld attendees can expect.


To Infiniband And Beyond
Voltaire will showcase its Grid Director 2004, a 20 Gbps-DDR InfiniBand switch populated with InfiniBand ports and new 10-Gigabit Ethernet and storage gateways. Voltaire says it's the first switching provider to announce full Infiniband support for Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g. The company said companies can increase the performance of their applications by as much as 50 percent over Ethernet-based configurations.

Change For The Better
Need to reconfigure your Oracle E-Business Suite applications? Newmerix is showing the latest version of Newmerix Automate!Change, a comprehensive, integrated change management system for creating and executing reusable change workflow templates for Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The new release includes Unix remote command execution, SFTP file transfer and command line execution. With the solution users can create workflow templates through Oracle Forms Customizations and Personalizations and Oracle Framework Customizations. Newmerix said it's the only change management software that spans the entire change management lifecycle for Oracle EBS applications.

Pillar Of Oracle Society
Pillar Data Systems will announce customized profiles for Oracle database and application environments for its Axiom storage system. The profiles help IT centrally manage data storage within Oracle environments and improve system performance and uptime. The new product is tightly integrated with Oracle 10g and 11g databases, Oracle virtual machines and the Oracle Unbreakable Linux operating system.

Palm Reader
Having problems with "shoulder surfers," those people who hover around you while you're typing your password? At Oracle OpenWorld Fujitsu Computer Products of America will be showing off its new PalmSecure LogonDirector that uses a person's unique palm vein pattern for security. The technology embeds highly accurate biometric identification technology in a mouse that uses near-infrared light to capture a person's palm vein pattern. That generates a unique biometric template that's matched against a palm-vein pattern record stored in an encrypted repository.

Cutting Through The Haze
DBA's trying to figure out the contents of a database often feel like they're lurching about in a fog. Quest Software will be showing a new release of its Foglight Database Performance Analysis software that offers real-time analysis for diagnosing and tuning Oracle instance and application workloads. A new WebView component provides Web-based access, enhanced alerting and streamlined administration. Quest will also be showing a new release of its Toad for Data Analysis query and reporting tool with native support for the Sybase database and the ability to reverse-engineer SQL queries.

Say 'Yes' To Noetix
Noetix will be showing Noetix Views for Release 12, a new version of the vendor's report development software for Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 applications. The tool automatically creates business views of the database underlying the applications. Also on the show floor will be a new release of Noetix Generator that populates Business Objects, Cognos BI and Oracle BI reporting tools with data from Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise data.

Special Delivery
F5 Networks will be showing a new application delivery networking system for Oracle's Siebel 8 CRM application the company is scheduled to formally debut Sept. 29. The system includes Viprion Application Delivery Controllers (pictured) and WAN optimization devices specifically tuned for Siebel CRM. The F5 solution ensures successful deployment of Siebel apps across the network.

No Gridlock Here
GridApp Systems will be showing Clarity 4.7, the next generation of the company's flagship database management system. New capabilities include the ability to automate operational and administrative tasks surrounding Oracle database upgrades, enhanced Real Application Clusters scaling, and more tools for day-to-day DBA tasks such as rotating logs, checking backups and inspecting audit logs.

Pumping (Application) Iron
Foundry Networks will be demonstrating ServerIron Software release 11.0, a new version of the software that runs the vendor's ServerIron line of application delivery and traffic management switches (pictured). A major enhancement is IPv6 support, including IPv6 management and IPv6 pass-through traffic handling. Other key enhancements include an improved graphical user interface for application management and monitoring, and TCP SIP server load balancing.

Special Delivery II
Zebra Technologies, which develops specialty printing and automatic identification solutions, will announce the Enterprise Connector Solution that allows direct label printing from ERP systems such as Oracle's. The product uses a PC-based graphical user interface for creating label designs the system converts into the Zebra Programming Language. The ZPL commands are used to generate the labels as the ERP system processes transactions.

Change For The Better II
Embarcadero Technologies will be showing off its new Embarcadero Change Manager 5.0 tool for managing changes in database configuration, schema and data. The new release provides developers and database administrators with new capabilities such as advanced schema to compare and alter functionality, configuration auditing, and data compare and synchronization features. The product comes in personal, standard, professional and ultimate editions and now supports the Oracle 11g, SQL server 2005 and 2008, Sybase 15 and DB2 9.5 databases.

Friday, September 19, 2008

With Microsoft in Sight, Cisco Buys Jabber

With Microsoft in Sight, Cisco Buys Jabber

Cisco said this morning it would buy instant messaging service Jabber for an undisclosed amount. The deal is another move by the networking company into the collaboration space — this time highlighting the importance of presence awareness and interoperability in collaboration. It follows nicely with Cisco’s buy of PostPath and WebEx acquisition earlier this month, as well as its Cisco CEO John Chambers has been pretty vocal in its desire to go after three hot markets: collaboration, virtualization and video.













Doug Dennerline

From Cisco’s press release:

“Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs,” said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group. “With the acquisition of Jabber, we will be able to extend the reach of our current instant messaging service and expand the capabilities of our collaboration platform. Our intention is to be the interoperability benchmark in the collaboration space.”












Jabber is based on Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), the same protocol being used by several open-source IM implementations. Services like Twitter use XMPP. Jabber also operates with Google Talk, and with the AIM Gateway from Jabber, it can be used to communicate with AOL users. Jabber also communicates with users of Microsoft Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.


















Yesterday, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior told that the company believes collaboration to be a $34 billion business, and emphasized the move away from selling only networking gear. Services are a crucial part of the that strategy and a robust presence platform is one of the essential services in offering real-time collaboration that Warrior highlighted in her keynote. And for those keeping score in Microsoft/Cisco showdown, Jabber is way more compelling that what I’ve seen demonstrated in Microsoft’s unified communcations efforts through SharePoint.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

HTC Touch Diamond

Is this a business phone or just a 'goody'?







Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Address



STAY HUNGRY STAY FOOLISH.....

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1-2 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 2 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 3-1 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 3-2 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 4 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 5-1 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 5-2 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together Part 5a

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together Part 5b

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 6 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 7-1 of 7

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 7-2 of 7

Steve Jobs on Microsoft

Larry Ellison on Microsoft

Announcing Oracle Database 11g

Oracle VM installation

Friday, September 5, 2008

Logos Today

Today there are many corporations, products, services, agencies and other entities using an ideogram (sign, icon) or an emblem (symbol) or a combination of sign and emblem as a logo. Resultingly, only a few of the thousands of ideograms people see are recognized without a name. It is sensible to use an ideogram as a logo, even with the name, if people will not duly identify it. Currently, the usage of both images (ideograms) and the company name (logotype) to emphasize the name instead of the supporting graphic portion, making it unique by its letters, color, and additional graphic elements.

A logo (Greek λογότυπος = logotypos) is a graphical element, (ideogram, symbol, emblem, icon, sign) that, together with its logotype (a uniquely set and arranged typeface) form a trademark or commercial brand. Typically, a logo's design is for immediate recognition, inspiring trust, admiration, loyalty and an implied superiority.

The logo is one aspect of a company's commercial brand, or economic or academic entity, and its shapes, colors, fonts, and images usually are different from others in a similar market. Logos are also used to identify organizations and other non-commercial entities.


Ideograms (icons, signs, emblems) may be more effective than a written name (logotype), especially for logos being translated into many alphabets; for instance, a name in the Arabic language would be of little help in most European markets. An ideogram would keep the general proprietary nature of the product in both markets. In non-profit areas, the Red Cross (which goes by Red Crescent in Muslim countries) is an example of an extremely well known emblem which does not need an accompanying name. Branding aims to facilitate cross-language marketing. The Coca-cola logo can be identifed in any language because of the standards of color and the iconic ribbon wave.




Some countries have logos, e.g. Spain, Italy, Turkey and The Islands of The Bahamas, that identify them in marketing their country. Such logos often are used by countries whose tourism sector makes up a large portion of their economy.

Color


Color is important to the brand recognition, but should not be an integral component to the logo design, which would conflict with its functionality. Some colors are formed/associated with certain emotions that the designer wants to convey. For instance, loud colors, such as red, that are meant to attract the attention of drivers on highways are appropriate for companies that require such attention. In the United States red, white, and blue are often used in logos for companies that want to project patriotic feelings. Green is often associated with health foods, and light blue or silver is often used to reflect diet foods. For other brands, more subdued tones and lower saturation can communicate dependability, quality, relaxation, etc.
Color is also useful for linking certain types of products with a brand. Warm colors (red, orange, yellow) are linked to hot food and thus can be seen integrated into many fast food logos. Conversely, cool colors (blue, purple) are associated with lightness and weightlessness, thus many diet products have a light blue integrated into the logo.















Dynamic logos.
In 1898, tire manufacturer, Michelin, introduced the Michelin Man, a cartoon figure who was presented in many different ways, such as eating, drinking, and playing sport. By the early 21st century, other large corporations such as MTV, Google and Saks Fifth Avenue had also adopted dynamic logos, that change over time and from setting to

Logo design

Logo design is an important area of graphic design, and one of the most difficult to perfect. The logo (ideogram), is the image embodying an organization. Because logos are meant to represent companies' brands or corporate identities and foster their immediate customer recognition, it is counterproductive to frequently redesign logos.

Examples Due to the design, the color, the shape, and eventually additional elements of the logotype, each one can easily be differentiated from other logotypes. For example, a box of Kellogg's cereals will be easily recognized in a supermarket's shelf from a certain distance, due to its unique typography and distinctive red coloring. The same will be true when one is at the airport looking for the booth of the Hertz Rent-A-Car company. The logotype will be recognized from afar because of its shape and its yellow color.










Some well-known logos include Apple Inc.'s apple with a bite out of it, which started out as a rainbow of color, and has been reduced to a single color without any loss of recognition. Coca Cola's script is known the world over, but is best associated with the color red; its main competitor, Pepsi has taken the color blue, although they have abandoned their script logo. IBM, also known as "Big Blue" has simplified their logo over the years, and their name. What started as International Business Machines is now just "IBM" and the color blue has been a signature in their unifying campaign as they have moved to become an IT services company.






















































































There are some other logos that must be mentioned when evaluating what the mark means to the consumer. Automotive brands can be summed up simply with their corporate logo- from the Chevrolet "Bow Tie" mark to the circle marks of VW, Mercedes-Benz and BMW, to the interlocking "RR" of Rolls-Royce each has stood for a brand and clearly differentiated the product line.

Other logos that are recognized globally: the Nike "Swoosh" and the Adidas "Three stripes" are two well-known brands that are defined by their corporate logo. When Phil Knight started Nike, he was hoping to find a mark as recognizable as the Adidas stripes, which also provided reinforcement to the shoe. He hired a young student (Carolyn Davidson) to design his logo, paying her $35 for what has become one of the best known marks in the world (she was later compensated again by the company).
Another logo of global renown is that of Playboy Enterprises. Playboy magazine claims it once received a letter at its Chicago, Illinois offices with its distinctive "bunny" logo as the only identifying mark appearing where the mailing address would normally be written.

Corporate identities today are often developed by large firms who specialize in this type of work. However, Paul Rand is considered the father of corporate identity and his work has been seminal in launching this field. Some famous examples of his work were the UPS package with a string (replaced in March 2003) IBM, and NeXT Computer.
An interesting case is the refinement of the FedEx logo, where the brand consultants convinced the company to shorten their corporate name and logo from "Federal Express" to the popular abbreviation "Fed Ex". Besides creating a shorter brand name, they reduced the amount of color used on vehicles (planes, trucks) and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in paint costs. Also, the right pointing arrow in the new logo is a subliminal hint of motion.

Logos in subvertising

The wide recognition received by the most famous logos provides the brand's critics with the possibility of meme-hacking, a process also known as subvertising, turning the marketing message carried by the logo (either in its pristine form, or subtly altered) into a vehicle for an alternative message, frequently highly critical to the brand in question. An example is the AdBusters' corporate flag, a U.S. flag with the stars replaced by major corporate logos.

Virtually all distinctive design elements related to brands or logos can become subjects to subvertising. The best-known organizations subverting established logos and brands are ®™ark and AdBusters.

Monday, September 1, 2008

Building a community network

Here's a discussion request mentioned on a blog from a business contact of mine;

Sunday the 31.of Augustus 2008,

QUOTE;
Building a community network
Over the last couple of days I had a discussion per e-mail over the fact that I do not accept people to be a contact if they hide their contacts for me. We respect each others opinions on this but I did want to take the time to write about this.

The facts. I am on Linkedin and have a growing number of business contacts. Partly business partners and partly people I know from the open source community. In my opinion people building a network should consider to share the people they know. It's part of the idea of building a social or business network.

I took a closer look at my list and found that some people have adjusted their setting and are not showing contact anymore. This worries me. I even wonder if these people should use business networks like Linkedin.

Maybe some of you can start a discussion on this and let me know where I can read it?

Geplaatst door Hans W... op zondag, augustus 31, 2008


My consideration is;
That even when you would personally know all the people within your network on for example on LinkedIn, there would be people within your network not willing to be noticed by all of your other/new connections.

Is it possible to personally know all of your contacts? In several occasions I was asked to introduce a person(A) via a person I knew(B), to one of my connections(C) on LinkedIn. The person(C) to which I introduced the original person(A) to, could choose to accept or not. If he would accept the invitation it would be a person(A) he wouldn't know personally. As a result this person(A) who was introduced in this new network of people would be capable to see all of the connections from the other one(C).

Would all of the connections from person (C) like this? To my experience often they don't.

As a result I used the possibility within my personal settings to close viewability on beforehand to share all of my contacts. My choice is to open my contacts details to people on request....Meaning if someone within my network of 870 people would like to get in contact with people with certain skills or within certain industries, countries, regions, etc...the are free to ask me, in order for me to find the ideal contacts on request.

Feel free to react in this.....we will appreciate all reactions.

Many thanks in advance and have a nice day.