- Google's take on the AOL deal
- The FTC's CAN-SPAM report: Propaganda in the U.S.A.
- Open source ESB makes strides
- Salesforce.com outage is a warning to the enterprise
- AccuRev shines on Eclipse
- Microsoft WinFX preview is offered
- Santa IM worm leaves virtual coal
- Microsoft updates server code
- Two new podcasts at InfoWorld.com
- AOL back from the dead
December 27, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Much of the controversy surrounding the stake Google took in AOL is based on concerns that Google will give AOL content preferred placement in its search engine. And this should be an issue people are concerned with: rigging search queries means Google could no longer be a trusted source.
In its Official Google Blog, Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience, posted a response to the rumors swirling around Google and AOL, including preferential search returns, content indexing and banner ads.
Here is the link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/about-aol-announcement.html
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 27, 2005 09:59 AM
December 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
The FTC's CAN-SPAM report: Propaganda in the U.S.A.
Propaganda isn't just for dictatorships anymore. Following on the heels of the recent revelation that the U.S. government planted upbeat, pro-American articles in Iraqi newspapers comes another episode of propaganda, this time a little closer to home.
This week the Federal Trade Commission released a report to Congress championing the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
The summary of the 116 page report was more cautious than some of the pages deeper in, where the lines drawn between CAN-SPAM's enactment and a reduction in spam volume and consumer annoyance with spam were presented dangerously close to cause and effect.
Everything I've heard and seen written about CAN-SPAM has been quite the opposite of what the FTC claimed this week. Many others feel the same.
The report isn't necessarily all lies, but it does seem to be propagandist and self serving in its love for CAN-SPAM. The report calls CAN-SPAM "effective" on a number of levels in shielding consumers from spam. It even calls the roundly criticized opt-out provisions effective.
The report does acknowledge that anti-spam technologies have become "more effective and more broadly deployed" in the same two-year time frame as CAN-SPAM's existence, but it gives far too much credit to CAN-SPAM for the gains against spam since 2003.
The report says that the volume of spam is "leveling off." This may be true, depending on who you talk to. Anti-spam technology vendor MX Logic has reported that 68 percent of e-mail traffic it scanned in 2005 was spam, down from 77 percent in 2004.
But another anti-spam vendor, Postini, reported a higher number: currently 88 percent of the 500 million messages it processes each day are junk. That number is up from 85 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.
According to Andrew Lockhart, Postini's Senior Director of Marketing, less spam is getting into email inboxes, but "no one should misunderstand that less spam is being sent," he said.
The lower rate of spam is due to spam protection at the ISP and corporate level, he said.
"The percentage of what's out there being total garbage is increasing," Lockhart said. "The CAN-SPAM act is not why people are receiving less spam. The reason why is that [anti-spam] technology is being deployed."
Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, agreed with the FTC's findings that the percentage of spam is indeed going down, but he doesn't credit CAN-SPAM.
"The CAN-SPAM law, in my opinion, has had virtually no impact on the reduction in the percentage of spam," he said.
Rather than legislation, the more difficult work of changing the economics of spam through technology, is where real gains against spam are being seen, he said.
Strides are being made using reputation analysis to stop spam at the connection level, he said.
"If you can stop 99 percent of spam, spammers either have to crank up volume 100 times or they have to get out of business," he said.
Furthermore, in its report the FTC claims that "compliance with CAN-SPAM by top online marketers is high" This fact, combined with technological advances, show "there is reason to believe that legislation and technology together are helping to solve the spam problem," the report states.
No, not true.
According to MX Logic and numbers quoted by Osterman, only 4 percent of unsolicited commercial e-mail complied with CAN-SPAM in 2005.
CAN-SPAM is a good law to have on the books, allowing prosecution of the few spammers caught and giving legitimate marketers publicly agreed upon rules to follow.
But don't give CAN-SPAM credit for reducing spam or for less consumer irritation. My email inbox is barraged with a lot less spam than two years ago but I give credit to anti-spam technology not CAN-SPAM.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on December 22, 2005 04:27 PM
December 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Iona Technologies and ObjectWeb on Thursday said the Celtix open source enterprise service bus (ESB) now compares favorably with commercial ESBs, based on a milestone that has been reached.
The milestone, called Milestone 3, covers transport support, specification compliance and usability. Celtix is intended to provide an open source Java ESB runtime for use in SOA.
"The Celtix community has delivered robust JMS (Java Message Service) support and this, combined with the other features made available in Milestone 3, gives end users a powerful and cost-effective ESB to support their SOA and other integration projects," said Carl Trieloff, director of open source programs at Iona, in a prepared statement released to the press.
Also featured in Milestone 3 is an implementation of HTTP 1.1 and Servlet Transport support, SOAP 1.1 headers and additional support for WS-Addressing and JAX-WS (Java API for XML Web Services). Additionally, command line tools for WSDL-to-Java and Java-to-WSDL conversions are featured, and the Celtix configuration infrastructure is complete.
Celtix also sports a multiple licensing approach that backs both the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) and the EPL (Eclipse Public License).
Posted by Paul Krill on December 22, 2005 03:46 PM
December 22, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Salesforce.com outage is a warning to the enterprise
The outage at Salesforce.com earlier this week should serve as a reminder of why the enterprise should and usually does take a conservative approach when it comes to going live with new technologies and more importantly to working with fledgling startups.
To call Salesforce a startup might be a bit over the top but certainly they are new enough that they are just now building a second mirror-image data center on the east coast, as reported by Stacy Cowley in her story "Week of crashes highlights on-demand peril."
What's the lesson here? Look for SaaS [Software as a Service] providers to go back to basics by aligning themselves with more of the data center heavy hitters like IBM and AT&T who can be used to put their customers minds at ease.
Security and service level agreements that can be backed up by using companies who know how to run a data center is the only way SaaS will continue to grow and to capture more of the Fortune 2000 companies.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on December 22, 2005 11:09 AM
December 21, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Software configuration management (SCM) vendor AccuRev has joined the Eclipse Foundation as an Add-In Provider member, the company said on Wednesday.
In aligning with the open source tools organization, AccuRev said it plans to further its support and influence on open source standards for the SCM industry.
"The Eclipse vision of an open, comprehensive, development environment for best-of-breed toolsets is one that benefits our mutual customers, and something we want to continue to support," said AccuRev President Lorne Cooper, in a prepared statement released to the press.
AccuRev has a plug-in for Eclipse that allows developers to utilize AccuRev SCM functionality without leaving the Eclipse IDE. The company plans to offer expertise in distributed, parallel development.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 21, 2005 02:35 PM
December 20, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft WinFX preview is offered
Microsoft this week released a December Community Technology Preview (CTP) for the WinFX managed APIs. The CTP is available for public review.
WinFX features the Windows Presentation Foundation presentation subsystem, formerly known as "Avalon;" the Windows Communication Foundation Web services platform, which had been called "Indigo," and Windows Workflow Foundation, for building workflow-enabled applications. WinFX is planned for inclusion in the upcoming Windows Vista OS.
Also featured in the CTP is "Cider," which consists of UI designer tools planned for the proposed "Orcas" version of the Visual Studio development tool platform. Cider leverages Windows Presentation Foundation.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 20, 2005 04:25 PM
December 20, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Santa IM worm leaves virtual coal
A new worm exploiting Santa Claus is making its way around the IM networks of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. The worm, called IM.GiftCom.All, tries to get unsuspecting users to click on a link to a Santa Claus Web site.
Because the links appear to come from trusted contacts, IM worms can be particularly effective in duping users into opening malicious files.
In the case of IM.GiftCom.All, the offending link can install a rootkit payload on the user's computer, according to IM vendor IMlogic.
The rootkit is usually named gift.com and it hides on the user's system, where it attempts to shutdown desktop antivirus software and starts collecting the infected user's information for broadcast over the Internet, according to IMlogic.
Infected users may also spread the worm by unwittingly sending the Santa Web site URL to people on their buddy list.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on December 20, 2005 02:28 PM
December 19, 2005 | Comments: (0)
In addition to introducing a new Community Technology Preview for the planned Windows Vista OS on Monday, Microsoft also released an updated build of Windows Server "Longhorn" code, company representatives confirmed.
The Longhorn code was distributed in a private beta program. Longhorn Server is intended to focus on security, manageability, interoperability and compatability. Policy-based networking, operational efficiency and delivery of connected applications also are goals of the release.
Microsoft is targeting 2007 for the general release of Longhorn Server.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 19, 2005 04:51 PM
December 19, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Two new podcasts at InfoWorld.com
We added two podcasts to the content InfoWorld.com provides.
I'll be bringing you the top stories each morning, as well as opinions and commentary on relevant tech topics with The InfoWorld Daily podcast. It's the audio companion to my InfoWorld Daily blog. Here is today's cast: http://akamai.infoworld.com/podcasts/IFW_Daily_12-19-05.mp3
Security guru and Zero Day author Victor Garza, too, joins the ranks of podcasters, with his Zero Day Podcast: 30 Seconds to Zero. For a sample of Garza's cast, here is his take on holiday parties and prioritizing: http://akamai.infoworld.com/weblog/zeroday/archives/podcast/IFW_ZeroDay_Garza_005.mp3
I'd be interested in hearing what you think about these new podcasts. Write in and tell me what you like, or what you don't, at tom_sullivan@infoworld.com. Or, post comments below.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 19, 2005 11:54 AM
December 16, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Once given up for lost after being crushed by Microsoft in the early Internet wars, AOL managed to hang on and is now a hot property.
Google reportedly is ready to pay $1 billion for a share in AOL, outmaneuvering Microsoft, IDG News Service says.
When AOL changed its business model from selling dialup Internet access to offfering paid online advertising, it became a major player in the tough turf war taking place on Internet platforms.
It's instant messaging product also gained widespread popularity at a time when any successful Web-based application is in demand by the likes of Google and Yahoo.
"AOL is the leader in various technologies and services in which Google isn't a significant player," Guzman & Co. financial analyst Philip Remek said. "Just by working (more closely) with AOL in this fashion Google will learn and gain capabilities that would have been more difficult to develop on its own."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on December 16, 2005 05:03 PM
December 15, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Former company director admits theft of trade secrets
Mehdi M. Rashidi, a former Director of Imaging and Diagnostic Systems at BioGenex Laboratories, pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco to misappropriating trade secrets from his former employer, U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan said.
Rashidi worked at the laboratories, located in San Ramon, Calif., from 1998 until he resigned on Sept. 2, 2004. Before resigning, Rashidi received a job offer from Lab Vision Corp., a competitor of BioGenex, the U.S. Attorney's office said.
Rashidi admitted that he took the original engineering notes of a BioGenex engineer, which he knew contained confidential information about the design and specifications of the Nirvana I-4000, an automated Staining System product that BioGenex intended to produce, the U.S. Attorney's office said. He was also aware that BioGenex considered the information in the notes to constitute trade secrets.
Rashidi can receive up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on December 15, 2005 04:49 PM
December 15, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Sun urges Open Document Format adoption
Enterprises, state governments, federal agencies and others should follow the lead of the state of Massachusetts and adopt Open Document Format (ODF), a Sun president said on Wednesday afternoon.
Acknowledging that others have yet to follow Massachusetts's lead, Piper Cole, Sun vice president of global government and community affairs, said a wait-and-see approach is being taken. "[Others have not adopted ODF yet] because Massachusetts is first and I think everybody is watching to see," what transpires, Cole said during a meeting between Sun executives and the press.
Massachusetts's decision was based on a massive analysis of what training and other requirements would be if it adopted ODF, according to Sun.
ODF is being positioned by Sun and companies such as IBM as a global document format. It is being rivaled by Microsoft's Office Open XML format. Simon Phipps, Sun chief open source officer, said he has no idea what it will take to get Microsoft to establish an invariant, multilateral baseline for a document format. But Sun has high hopes for ODF.
"If we can get to where [ODF is] widely used, wonderful things will happen," said Tim Bray, Sun Web technologist and a co-inventor of XML.
ODF has been used in Sun's StarOffice office productivity suite, which Cole acknowledged has been a bit difficult to use in previous incarnations. "StarOffice used to be pretty klugey, but it's gotten a lot better," she said.
Microsoft's planned Office 12 suite, for its part, features a different user interface and a previously undocumented file format, Phipps said. "Migrating to Office 12 will involve user retraining," Phipps said.
A Microsoft executive, meanwhile, said that two open document formats are better than one.
-- By Paul Krill, blogging live from Sun's offices in San Francisco.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 15, 2005 08:40 AM
December 14, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Version 1.0 of the Ruby on Rails open source Web development framework was released this week.
Billed as being optimized for programmer happiness and productivity, the technology features a full-stack framework for building database-backed Web applications. It has been popular with AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML) developers.
Specifically, Ruby on Rails is the Ruby programming language running on the Rails framework, said Jeremy Kemper, a developer of Ruby on Rails. Although available in previous incarnations, the platform in its 1.0 release is intended to be a mature platform. It features enhancements in areas such as AJAX, database migrations and automated deployment, Kemper said.
"I'd like to emphasize the maturing of the platform," Kemper said.
"What we have with 1.0 is kind of solidifying the vision of what Rails is and giving people who are developing [with the technology] a stable target," Kemper said.
The impact of the technology has been broadening, according to Kemper. "Whole companies are basing their Web strategies on Rails," Kemper said. Ruby on Rails is available free via the open source MIT license, said Kemper.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 14, 2005 02:31 PM
December 13, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Eclipse is set to release Web tools
The Eclipse Foundation, in conjunction with vendors such as BEA Systems, is set to release to release the Eclipse Web Tools Platform within a week, according to sources familiar with the announcement. The Eclipse Web Tools Platform is an open source software development project to provide tools for building J2EE-based Web applications. BEA and companies such as IBM have been involved in the project. The Web Tools Platform was described by one source close to the announcement as "the most important part of Eclipse for J2EE developers because it has all of the tools that are important for building Web applications." These tools include JavaServer Pages (JSP) editors, code generation tools and other facilities.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 13, 2005 03:53 PM
December 13, 2005 | Comments: (0)
A conversation with Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris
I had lunch this week with Parker Harris, nominally the executive vice president, Technology, at Salesforce.com, but more importantly the co-founder of Salesforce.com.
Our discussion ranged from executives at Salesforce once considering a name change to Workforce.com to two of the company's latest technologies, AppExchange and Sandbox.
As far as Workforce.com goes, Harris said they thought the name might be more emblematic of what the company was trying to be rather than using the name Salesforce which has of course a much narrower definition. But, they quickly realized that they had developed a brand value around the name Salesforce.com that couldn't easily be changed.
I also questioned what is for me a contradictory message coming from Salesforce as they market both AppExchange and Sandbox.
AppExchange, if you recall, has hundreds of SaaS third party providers who in a sense have been pre-approved to work with theSalesforce.com platform.
So, if you need an ERP component, or a sales force automation component specific to your industry, you can download it off the AppExchange and you know it's going to work.
Sandbox, is a mirror image of the production environment used for testing. Customers can use it to customize an application, have employees train on an application and according to the press release, "deploy new on-demand applications."
Yet Salesforce.com says if it is an AppExchange application you don't have to test it. You know it runs.
Well which is?
Harris says Sandbox will reassure the enterprise that a new AppExchange application runs but they don't need it. Rather, it is more for customization and training.
I wonder.
I decided to tweak the nose of Harris and by extension Salesforce.com by saying I thought it ironic, I avoided the word hypocritical, for Salesforce to promote the concept of companies trusting them with their family jewels, CRM, while at the same time building rather than outsourcing, a $50 million data center to run their operations.
Harris smiled and said it was a good question. But his answer may have left something to be desired.
Harris explained that they needed to run the data center themselves in order to insure quality of service such as uptime and performance.
But isn't what is good for the goose good for the gander as they used to say? Why doesn't Salesforce trust someone if they are asking to be trusted?
One InfoWorld colleague, however, added that the buck has to stop somewhere and the data center was as good a place as any to draw the line in being responsible for customer data.
Harris added that the $50 million goes to provisioning the data center with the hardware. The building itself and the communications network is actually co-located in an existing data center. There's one on the West Coast and another on the East Coast.
Finally, Harris talked a bit about the future. It seems Salesforce is looking at new areas such as working with VARs to create and offer industry specific versions of Salesforce. More about this next time.
Lunch was over and it was time to go. I never got to see if Harris left a big tip or not.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on December 13, 2005 03:44 PM
December 13, 2005 | Comments: (0)
IBM on Wednesday plans to unveil development tools that utilize the Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM) specification, pronounced "wisdom," for systems management.
WSDM, which was approved as an OASIS standard on March 9, enables use of Web services to build management applications. It applies a common management interface across an environment and allows management software from different vendors to work together, according to IBM.
Available on the company's alphaWorks site for emerging technologies, the tools are being offered for free use for 90 days. Tools, which are part of the IBM Autonomic Integrated Development Environment, include the following:
* IBM Autonomic Manageability Endpoint Builder, for building WSDM interfaces for resources such as printers, servers and applications. The software is available as a plug-in to the Eclipse open source tools platform. IBM's autonomic computing initiative has involved development of self-managing systems.
* IBM Autonomic Manageability Endpoint Simulator, for simplifying the development of autonomic systems by connecting resources with autonomic management applications.
* IBM Autonomic Task Manager for Administrators, a spreadsheet-based environment for composing system management tasks for Web-based consoles. A plug-in allows the tool to communicate with WSDM resources.
IBM plans to incorporate WSDM technology into products delivered by its WebSphere, Tivoli and IBM Systems groups during the next 12 months. The company also plans to have demonstrations on alphaWorks that show WSDM in action.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 13, 2005 01:31 PM
December 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)
An open source project promoting SOA is afoot at Apache.
Implementations of runtimes for the newly announced Service Component Architecture proposal are being floated at Apache and featured in the organization's Tuscany project. SCA was unveiled last month with the goal of simplifying development of SOA.
"The point of SCA is to produce a simple programming model for SOA and Tuscany is [intended] to give people an open source runtime that they can build SOA components on Java, in C++," and enable these components to work together, said Paul Freemantle, a participant in Apache. He also is a co-founder and vice president of technology at WSO2, a Web services software platform company.
Tuscany is about simplifying SOA via an open source mechanism, that being the Apache model, Freemantle said.
Tuscany presently features Java and C++ implementations of SCA as well as a Java implementation of the related Service Data Objects technology, said Ed Cobb, vice president of architecture and standards at BEA Systems. BEA is participating in SCA, Tuscany and Apache.
Tuscany is in early, incubation status at Apache. The project focuses on service composition and authoring, said Cobb.
"Tuscany is really about kind of the next generation of SOA," Cobb said. Tuscany is likely to extend beyond SCA, said Kenneth Tam, principal technologist BEA.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 12, 2005 05:23 PM
December 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Google Calendar said to be close to launch
Rumors have been swirling for awhile that Google is preparing an online calendaring and scheduling service. Many blogs and news outlets predicted it would hit last week, but several search related industry events that were thought to be launchpads came and went without a Google announcement.
More buzz is hitting this week, so I'm keeping a close watch on the Google Blog. Already, I'm getting competitive response e-mail pitches from vendors. I'm guessing the news might arrive Tuesday.
As was the case with other pre-launch Google services, clues about the calendaring service are popping up on the Web. The link calendar.google.com redirects to Google's homepage, and hints are also surfacing through Gmail and Google Maps about a possible calendar tie-ins.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on December 12, 2005 10:44 AM
December 12, 2005 | Comments: (0)
JBoss's Fleury pans SOA proposal
Marc Fleury, the brash founder, chairman and CEO of open source software vendor JBoss, has harsh words for the recently announced Service Component Architecture (SCA) proposal put forth as an SOA initiative by vendors such as IBM, BEA Systems and Oracle.
Saying Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and JBoss were left out of the process, Fleury in his blog says SCA is a "de facto closed standard." He also notes it is being done outside the Java Community Process (JCP).
"That right there should be a warning flag as far as the adoption of this technology goes. Guys and gals, this is a declaration of war on standards and you shouldn't bank your future on closed proprietary formats," Fleury writes.
A source close to the SCA plan has said it would be submitted to an industry standards body such as OASIS for consideration as an industry standard. Sun, for its part, has indicated a willingness to work with the SCA proposal while being disappointed that it would not be submitted to the JCP.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 12, 2005 10:37 AM
December 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Semantic Web eyed for life sciences data
The Semantic Web is getting a boost in the life sciences arena.
The Semantic Web involves a concept in which data from multiple sources and ontologies can be integrated into a single information space. Experiment design automation (XDA) software vendor Teranode, which focuses on software for life sciences, plans to collaborate with Science Commons to build a neurology repository for the Semantic Web.
Called Neurocommons.org, the project will provide a free repository of neurology-related data, tools and pathway knowledge for use by public and private researchers. Science Commons is an effort launched to promote the free flow of scientific information.
Teranode believes life sciences represents an ideal test case for the Semantic Web because life sciences data comes from a variety of sources, including brain images, robot-arrayed gene chips, machines sorting materials cell-by-cell and gene sequencers.
Science Commons will use the Teranode XDA infrastructure for Neurocommons.org. All content will be available in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format, allowing for participating foundations to use a shared repository of research.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 9, 2005 04:24 PM
December 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Adopt Open Document Format now for temporary competitive advantage - Gartner
Microsoft's move toward making its Open XML file format an open standard will take at least a year to complete, giving an edge to the Open Document Format for Office applications spearheaded by Sun Microsystems, Gartner says.
"Enterprises seeking an open document format do not need to delay current projects until they evaluate the Microsoft specification," Gartner analysts wrote in a research note.
Microsoft's announcement that it will submit its Open XML document to the Ecma International organization for standardization work may very well stall momentum gained for the Open Document Format in the long run. The Open Document Format was approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) in May 2005 and submitted to the ISO in September.
"Microsoft's moves will likely stall that trend," Gartner analysts wrote. "The Massachusetts state government, for example, had previously made a highly publicized decision to adopt Open Document and drop the Microsoft Office formats, but may now be considering a broader range of options in its approach to this issue."
Gartner says there is no need to wait for Microsoft.
"The Open Document specification's richness will meet many needs, but documents created with it will not necessarily be interchangeable with applications that can process the Microsoft specification," gartner analysts wrote. "Gartner believes the Ecma specification will not appear before 1Q07. Adopt the OASIS format if you can exploit XML now for significant business advantages."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on December 9, 2005 03:46 PM
December 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
BEA, Mercury collaborate on SOA
BEA Systems and Mercury Interactive are collaborating in an effort to deliver predictable business outcomes in SOA initiatives.
Products involved in a new alliance between the companies are intended to solve application performance issues and detect memory leaks for users of BEA's JRockit Java Virtual Machine and WebLogic application server. Through the arrangement, the Mercury Diagnostics Profiler will be bundled with JRockit and WebLogic Server.
Additionally, BEA's JRockit Mission Control diagnostics toolset will be distributed to Mercury Diagnostics customers. BEA also will use Mercury application management and application delivery offerings, such as Mercury's Diagnostics and LoadRunner products, as the preferred performance management solution for critical situations and proofs of concept, the company said.
BEA is offering Mercury Diagnostics Profiler with WebLogic Server 9.0 and JRockit JVM downloads at no additional cost. Mercury plans to ship BEA's Mission Control Suite diagnostic toolset as part of the Mercury Diagnostics offering in the first quarter of 2006.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 9, 2005 02:39 PM
December 09, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Sellers on eBay have hawked some strange items over the years, everything from a sandwich bearing the likeness of the Virgin Mary, to human organs, to water from a cup Elvis reportedly drank from.
Joining the list: On Wednesday evening someone tired to sell information about a newly discovered vulnerability in Microsoft's Excel application, according to a piece in The Sydney Morning Herald. By the time eBay removed the auction item on Thursday, the bid price had reached $60.
According to the SMH article, the auction posting said that the flaw was discovered on December 6 and had been reported to Microsoft, but was not generally available to the public.
Posted by Cathleen Moore on December 9, 2005 12:53 PM
December 07, 2005 | Comments: (0)
SAP is dismantling its business applications at a fevered pace to recreate them in an SOA environment, Frank Gens, IDC's senior vice president of research, reports in his blog from SAP's Analyst Summit in Las Vegas.
"A core message was that the re-architecting of mySAP for SOA is steadily moving ahead," Gens writes.
"One-third of SAP's application developers, and one-half of current R&D investment, are focused on decomposing SAP's existing applications and recomposing them as web services on NetWeaver," he writes. "Thus far, Peter Zencke's team has implemented roughly 300 services; by the end of 2006, that number will be in the low thousands - about 10 percent of what will ultimately be a repository of about 30,000 services. The first services being implemented are the highest-leverage ones."
Posted by Jack McCarthy on December 7, 2005 03:26 PM
December 06, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Looking to promote its NetBeans open source tools platform, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday announced the NetBeans WorldTour program, for distributing NetBeans software worldwide.
The initiative features 10 global developer events to be held in places ranging from Canada to South Africa. Developers will be offered a chance to experience the NetBeans IDE and witness demonstrations of the Project Matisse GUI builder and the NetBeans Collaboration Module for collaborative development. The GUI builder is part of the planned 5.0 version of NetBeans. The events are being organized around Sun Tech Days events.
As part of the program, Sun has developed the NetBeans WorldTour CD program, providing developers with a free NetBeans software CD that features the NetBeans IDE, Sun Java System Application Server 8.1 Platform Edition and the NetBeans Mobility Pack and Profiler. Developers must first register with the Sun Developer Network. NetBeans has been a rival to the more dominant Eclipse open source tools effort.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 6, 2005 12:31 PM
December 05, 2005 | Comments: (0)
ESB news: Sonic, Cape Clear make moves
Looking to clear up industry confusion over what, exactly, is an enterprise service bus (ESB), Sonic Software, which pioneered this product category, on Monday released a document that the company believes settles the matter.
"By putting out a comprehensive definition of ESB, what we're bringing is kind of a new level of clarity to the definition," said Hub Vandervoort, Sonic CTO. The document defines the specific machinery - elements that make up an ESB and how that machinery is used across the lifecycle, he said.
According to Sonic, an ESB provides mediation, control and the ability to connect resources that are both Web services-based and legacy in nature. "That definition is out there but again that definition can be accomplished in a variety of ways," Vandervoort said.
Of course, Sonic attempting to define ESB for the industry does seem a bit opportunistic, given the company's bread-and-butter offering is an ESB. Sonic has sold an ESB since 2002 while others, such as BEA Systems, joined the fray later.
Also on Monday, ESB provider Cape Clear Software announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling. As a plug-in member of Eclipse, Cape Clear plans to continue to build tools to extend Eclipse, the company said. Cape Clear will work on the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, which is intended to simplify development of Web-centric applications.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 5, 2005 12:09 PM
December 05, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Testing the truth of Wikipedia
As a free, online community-driven encyclopedia -- and one that, in some ways, is considered the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world -- Wikipedia has become a reasonably trusted information source. But should it be trusted so easily?
No, it should not, according to some people. Take John Seigenthaler Sr., for instance. Wikipedia has an entry for him that says he was thought to be involved in the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, according to a story on The New York Times.
Not only that, but that description of him remained on Wikipedia for months, from May 2005 until September 2005. It has since been removed and a correction posted to the entry for John Seigenthaler Sr.
Still, the problem remains that the Wikipedia screeners cannot keep up with the entries pouring in, The Times reported.
Here is a link to the full story.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on December 5, 2005 07:44 AM
December 02, 2005 | Comments: (0)
BEA official: New SOA spec won't go to JCP
Sun Microsystems might not like it. But the newly announced Service Component Architecture specification put forth this week by a number of major vendors is not likely to make its way through the Java Community Process (JCP), for amending the Java programming language. The specification is intended to boost development of SOA.
Sun was not a party to this week's announcement because the company prefers the JCP, said Tom Goguen, Sun vice president of software marketing. "We strongly believe in the JCP process and that's how we should be driving standards really for all of the Java community as opposed to a subset of the community," Goguen said.
But Bill Roth, vice president of BEA Systems's BEA Workship Business Unit, said SCA will not be submitted to the JCP because it encompasses more than just the Java community. BEA has participated in development of SCA.
"We will not submit it to the JCP. That's not under consideration," Roth said.
For its part, Sun has expressed intentions to work with the SCA initiative.
In other matters, Roth also said BEA in the first quarter of next year plans to release its BEA Workshop 3.0 developer platform, featuring support for the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3 specification. EJB 3 focuses on building complex applications that talk to databases, Roth said.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 2, 2005 04:52 PM
December 02, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Word, Excel eyed for software-as-a-service plan
Microsoft's software-as-a-service offerings, unveiled last month, may eventually include access to applications like Word and Excel, according to Sam Ramji, director of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team. Currently, Microsoft hosted services include infrastructure components such as Microsoft Operations Manager. But there have been a number of requests from Microsoft partners to add applications such as Word and Excel; these requests have been passed on to the Office Live team, Ramji said earlier this week.
Posted by Paul Krill on December 2, 2005 04:11 PM
December 02, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Will citizen journalism put me out of a job?
I have to thank Charles Cooper at Cnet for his thoughtful article, Wikipedia and the nature of truth, for moving me to write this piece.
Perhaps because blogging is essentially a high tech phenomenon, high tech appears to be one of the first industries to be enthralled with the idea of citizen journalists.
Admittedly because politicians lie to us regularly, on both sides of the fence, blogging has also quickly been catapulted into the forefront of the political debate.
I have no argument with the right to express any opinion but I am concerned when those opinions replace the facts.
Imagine an online so-called "newspaper" that has as its staff only blogging citizen journalists who have an interest in the subject matter they write about.
After all, doesn't a software engineer know more about metadata, the enterprise service bus, and master data management than some reporter with a BA or MA in journalism and a minor in English Lit?
Yes, they do know more technically. However, unlike reporters who view remaining neutral as the golden rule of journalism, tech experts often have an ax to grind and a point of view to promote.
The result is that the reader, if diligent, would have to become the reporter sorting out fact from fiction. In other words doing the job reporters were hired to do.
This is the job of a reporter whether they work for the Washington Post or InfoWorld, a trade publication. Reporters are counted on to listen to both sides and present the facts.
Spend an hour sometime with a Mac user, an open source devotee or someone who believes that the Amiga got a raw deal, and you will quickly understand why you need a disinterested third party, even if he or she knows less about processor gate arrays and object oriented programming.
The truth is I'm not really worried about my paycheck. But I am worried about an attitude that has less and less respect for what journalists are supposed to do and instead is willing to accept one side of the story because it is coming from a regular guy, a citizen, a blogger, just like you and me.
If you read history, the French Revolution is a good starting point, or fiction such as Animal Farm by George Orwell or Lord of the Flies by William Golding, you might see that the idea of so-called citizens calling the shots while having a certain visceral appeal can be a very dangerous concept to embrace.
Posted by Ephraim. Schwartz on December 2, 2005 10:54 AM
December 01, 2005 | Comments: (0)
The long and winding road to a major Microsoft release is well known to IT managers, and now Vista looms on the horizon.
Jeremy Kirk, of IDG News Service, says this time Microsoft will be under intense pressure to deliver Vista on schedule as managers begin to consider software and hardware upgrades.
Microsoft has said it has not determined when it will release Vista to manufacturers, but has said it is on track for the general availability of Vista in the second half of 2006, Kirk wrote.
Yet within about two years, the desktop business in the enterprise is going start to undergo long-term challenges, David Bradshaw principal analyst at Ovum, told Kirk. The high cost of running heavy desktop clients may begin to appear less attractive as less expensive, thin-client configurations gather momentum, Bradshaw said.
Posted by Jack McCarthy on December 1, 2005 04:20 PM
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