The line between car and home entertainment center is getting blurrier by the minute as electronics makers and car companies take to the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 and concurrent Detroit Auto show to strut their stuff. Here’s a sampling of the news. Read more »
Everyone likes to share their predictions for what the future will bring in technology as a new year dawns. But some things seem to manage to stay the same, despite anticipation to the contrary. Here’s where I think the boat won’t rock in 2012. Read more »
Demand for cloud computing continues to increase exponentially as consumers, businesses and government agencies seek to defer the expense of acquiring, operating and maintaining infrastructure and applications to third-party service providers. Likewise, software publishers are finding the cloud computing model an efficient and effective mechanism for delivering their products as a service and as an operational expense to their customers. For independent software vendors, cloud computing is opening up new markets and making their applications more accessible and affordable to scores of new customers. For a multitude of reasons, many ISVs are choosing to forego data center development and are partnering with hosting providers that have the infrastructure, resources and expertise in managing and delivering cloud services. This report provides ISVs with guidance on partnering with hosting companies, establishing criteria for selecting a hosting service, metrics for measuring hosting performance as it relates to cloud services delivered and an understanding of the responsibilities they retain even when outsourcing a large part of their services functions to a third party. Companies mentioned in this report include Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Advocates of the public cloud tend to dismiss private cloud deployments within individual companies, arguing that they are too small to deliver the cost or flexibility advantages of the public cloud. But recent developments in the UK refute that argument. The University Modernization Fund’s Cloud Pilot, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It will be a tough go: Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play. Read more »
John S. Wilson of Policy Diary sees some strong similarities between Google’s mobile operating system Android: They’re both open, free (aside from patent issues), and just a utility. Android means different things to different companies, and ultimately, this could be Android’s downfall into irrelevance. Read more »
Now that Amazon’s highest-end Compute Clusters support Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft-centric customers can use Amazon’s “compute intensive beasts” to run heavy-duty media processing, rendering or computational finance work loads. the move also brings Microsoft more parity with Linux on the Amazon platform. Read more »
Last week Google disclosed the details of its energy consumption, and its data center engineers argued that the leading figure cited to assess how energy-efficient a data center is, power usage effectiveness (PUE), must be continuously measured and averaged over a twelve-month period. This was a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Tech savvy users may be snapping up the $99 HP TouchPad for a reason nobody thought of: You can turn the slate into an Ubuntu Linux tablet with these instructions. The TouchPad will still run webOS, so this solution offers two operating systems for one price. Read more »
Wow.. just like that Linux is 20-years-old. The Linux Foundation as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations has come up with this infographic that includes stats that illustrate the changes in Linux over the years. There are some great nuggets of information in here. Read more »
The growing interest in local food and food safety has spurred a small community of technologically minded entrepreneurs to create a range of food-oriented social applications. Their goal? To open up the food chain from the farm to our mouths and make it possible for consumers, ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Open-source cloud computing project OpenStack turned one this week, and cloud backup provider Backblaze freely shared detailed specifications for a storage device capable of holding 135 terabytes of data. Open-source options for everything from servers and data centers to clouds and application platforms are growing more robust. ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Calxeda, the startup building servers using the same kind of ARM chips used in cell phones, has launched its partner program. Companies such as Eucalyptus, Gluster, Canonical and Opscode lined up Tuesday behind the server company to show their willingness to work with its specialized hardware. Read more »
Red Hat just announced another solid fiscal quarter, continuing a trend of increased operating system and middleware market share that carried on even through the worst of the current recession. According to CEO Jim Whitehurst, customers know that buying Red Hat means “future-proofing” their IT investments. Read more »
The best hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s Silverlight… runs on Linux? Developers of the open source Moonlight adaptation of Silverlight have just brought the ability to utilize GPU processing for 3-D rendering and video playback to the platform, and it apparently performs better than the original version. Read more »
Attachmate, a privately held software vendor, bought Novell, the once-powerful enterprise networking player, for $2.2 billion. The interesting part of this story, however, is not who bought Novell, but who didn’t – namely, VMware. In fact, bitter VMware rival Microsoft might end up with some valuable assets. Read more »
For years, Linux has grown at the expense of expensive Unix like Solaris, but a new study shows Linux gaining at Windows expense for the first time, and not because Linux is cheaper. Rather, survey respondents cite Linux’s “technical superiority,” which may be a hard argument for Microsoft to counter. Read more »
There are a few key reasons why businesses choose open source in the enterprise: control, better quality code, responsiveness and security. But as we discovered in the most recent GigaOM Bunker Sessions event, innovators are embracing new solutions that make the battle for open source as ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Novell has put itself on the auction block, but a deal has been slow in closing. According to sources close to the company, this likely stems from the difficulty of accurately assessing the value of Novell’s patent portfolio in conjunction with its legacy product portfolio and associated business. Read more »
According to web metric firm Net Applications, iOS has passed Linux for third place in worldwide OS market share as measured by web browsing. Today, iOS trumps Linux. Tomorrow, it will be Android over iOS, with Adobe Flash along for the ride. Read more »
Given Apple’s increasingly evident distractedness from Mac OS development as it concentrates more on the mobile space with the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, some are suggesting that Ubuntu captures the traditional “Mac” spirit and vision better than the actual Mac OS does these days. Read more »
On Tuesday afternoon, Elliott Associates, L.P., a hedge fund with a significant position in shares of Novell, placed an unsolicited offer to buy the company for approximately $2 billion. The offer places a high valuation on Novell, and the troubled company must consider it carefully. Read more »
Nokia and Intel have joined to merge the Maemo and Moblin platforms. The merged OS will be known as Meego, and is intended to power pocketable computers, smartphones, tablets and netbooks. It will be hosted by the Linux Foundation, and is an open source platform. Read more »
Intel and Nokia are merging their respective mobile Linux Operating Systems — Mobilin and Maemo — to form a new OS called MeeGo. It will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and target connected devices. And it will be fighting for increasingly limited developer attention. Read more »
Citrix’s announcement that its Receiver software will allow iPad users to run Windows 7 sessions via virtualization has caused predictions that the iPad may have much promise as a business tool. But why stop at Windows? The iPad will reach beyond Apple’s iPhone OS and Windows. Read more »
