At this point, the offering is focused more on businesses than consumers, but the idea is to have these companies or developers create Kinect-based products that will eventually hit the market or be used in the service industry.
The Kinect for Windows SDK is available for download now. Hardware is also shipping, but it will set you back $249; a $149 academic version is expected later this year. At this point, it's launching in 12 countries to start (United States, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom)....
Source: pcmag.com]]>
A high-quality library of third-party apps are a key ingredient to any mobile platform's success, and webOS was often criticized for its poor app catalog compared to the iOS App Store or Android Market. Palm -- the company that originally developed webOS before being acquired by HP in 2010 -- was late in making third-party application tools available, as my colleague Ginny Mies pointed out in August. As a result, webOS never really caught up to its competitors and even devices such as the TouchPad suffered from the webOS app gap....
Source: pcworld.com]]>
Just as the hypervisor did for servers, the storage hypervisor meaningfully improves the utilization of hardware capacity and drives down the costs of application deployment while providing greater business agility.
"IT organizations and builders of cloud infrastructure benefit enormously from server hypervisors, and are now turning their attention to the last bastion of inefficiency, high cost, and clumsiness, which is storage, "said Virsto Software in its product release statement. "These organizations are seeking the benefits of hypervisor for storage."
Virsto for vSphere, and Virsto for Virtual Servers, Hyper-V Edition, 2.0 allows users to improve both the efficiency and the performance of physical storage by up to 90 percent, accelerate virtual machine (VM) storage provisioning and management by over 90 percent, and reduce the cost of storage in virtual environments by up to 70 percent....
Source: serverwatch.com]]>
Applicants must pay $185,000 to be evaluated for a specific gTLD. An obvious one would be, for example, .ibm to be used by IBM. Once approved, IBM then must be the registrar, maintain the whole block, and secure the domain name system. This, of course, creates an immediate monopoly for that single TLD.
Hello, Anti-trust. Hello, ICANN lawsuits.
(Note: It can be argued that all the TLDs are a monopoly of one form or another, by one company or another. For example, Verisign runs .com. It's debatable whether the $185,000 domains will be overseen in the exact same way.)
While I trust IBM with this responsibility, it seriously looks like a disaster waiting to happen with some of the boneheads out there who will try to get weird TLDs approved. This is not trivial and will generate all sorts of vanity TLDs for the rich and powerful. Expect to see .gates, .microsoft, and .dell. ...
Source: pcmag.com]]>
The biggest winner in terms of web servers appears to be the open source nginx server. During the past month, nginx added 6.9 million new hostnames. In total, Netcraft's January 2012 survey found just over 56 million hostnames running on nginx, giving the open source web server upstart a 9.63 percent share.
Nginx has emerged in recent years as a faster alternative to Apache HTTP for those looking for a viable open source web server. In October 2011, the commercial Nginx company behind the open source project raised $3 million in funding to help fuel its efforts.
The survey accounts for both the absolute number of hostnames as well as active sites.
Source: serverwatch.com]]>
"The continued convergence and adoption of open source and commercial ALM tools within cloud development platforms requires new levels of assurance for both performance and security," said Guy Marion, vice president of CollabNet Cloud Services. "Now development teams working on mission-critical projects have access to Git within a highly secure, reliable and enterprise-grade cloud development environment that includes other popular SCM tools, such as Subversion, and leading ALM solutions."...
Source: sdtimes.com]]>
RHEL 6 first debuted in November 2010 and was updated in May 2011 with the RHEL 6.1 release. One of the major changes in the RHEL 6.x series over the previous RHEL 5.x branch is support for cgroups (control groups) to control system resources.
"Cgroups debuted in RHEL 6.0, so the concept isn't new but what is new in RHEL 6.2 is the ability to set capacity limits," Tim Burke, vice president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, told InternetNews.com.
Burke explained that previously the way cgroups worked was with ratios for capacity, for example setting a 40 percent of CPU policy. He noted that the trouble with this approach is that if, for example, there were three virtual guests running on a system, each controlled with a cgroup setting for one-third capacity, if two systems were idle, the third could consume all of the systems resources. With the new ability to specify capacities for I/O rates, CPU cycles and the like, there is now a bounded ceiling....
Source: serverwatch.com]]>
In general, patterns have four essential elements.
The pattern name is a handle developers can use to describe -- in a word or two -- a design problem, its consequences and its solutions. Naming a pattern immediately increases developers' design vocabulary, allowing them to design at a higher level of abstraction. Having a vocabulary for patterns also makes it easier to think about designs and to communicate them and their trade-offs to others. However, finding good names is one of the hardest parts of developing the design pattern catalog.
The problem defines the design problem and its context, and describes when to apply the pattern to it. It might describe specific design problems such as how to represent algorithms as objects. It might describe class or object structures that are symptomatic of an inflexible design. Sometimes the problem will include a list of conditions that must be met before it makes sense to apply the pattern.
The solution defines the elements that make up the design: their relationships, responsibilities, and collaborations. The solution doesn't describe a particular concrete design or implementation, because a pattern is like a template that can be applied in many different situations. Instead, the pattern provides an abstract description of a design problem and how a general arrangement of elements (classes and objects in this case) solves it....
Source: devx.com]]>
In this article, I'll explore the benefits of using a simple text editor,as well as look at the value of various website creation applications available for Linux. Remember, just because there are various web editors available for Linux, doesn't mean that these applications are going to work as expected. I'll shine some light on what's working, what isn't and why.
It All Starts With Graphics
I don't care who you are, at some level you're going to need a decent image editor for web design. Based on my own layman's experience with web design, I've found this to be an unavoidable reality. The good news is that modern Linux desktops offer a few different options from which to choose from.
The first application I turn to is called GIMP. Despite any of the perceived shortcomings reported by frequent Photoshop users, this is a great go-to image editor. Plus, if you haven't tried either application youwon't need to worry about "unlearning" anything Photoshop-related. GIMP allows web developers running a Linux desktop to make nearly any change to an image you can think of with relative ease. And anything that GIMP is missing, can likely be handled by installing the right GIMP plugin.
If you're finding that creating something with vector graphics is better-suited to your web project, then odds are you'll end up using an application called Inkscape. The Inkscape application is useful when you're working up a new graphic without the benefit of an image from which you'd otherwise manipulate. Offering much of the same functionality as Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape offers one critical feature that it's closed source counterparts are lacking - forgoing the hefty price tag. Unlike Illustrator, Inscape offers a 100% free alternative to web designers needing access to decent vector graphics software....
Source: datamation.com]]>
Red Hat is expanding OpenShift with Java build and development tools support to enable organizations to both build and deploy in the cloud.
"Previously you would code and do your dependency resolution in your own data center, your laptop or wherever you are working," Isaac Roth, PaaS Master at Red Hat told InternetNews.com. "Then you would upload the big binary object into the cloud which takes a long time to upload and then that would get deployed by the PaaS."
The new version of OpenShift changes that approach. The JBoss Tools IDE has now been integrated with OpenShift, so it's faster to deploy and easier to setup. Additionally, Apache Maven and the Jenkins Continuous Integration (CI) system are also integrated with OpenShift....
Source: serverwatch.com]]>
Intel has announced its Intel Cluster Studio XE tool suite to serve developers working at the heavy compute capacity coalface in High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster systems. By coalescing cluster management alongside application and data management tools in one software development suite, the company is hoping to capitalize upon its undeniably extensive work in both parallelism and multi-core computing technologies with a view to future-proofing today's systems into tomorrow.
New capabilities in the XE edition release include MPI-enabled thread profiling and correctness checking. There is also an MPI (Machine Profiler Interface) library that scales beyond 90,000 processes and is up to 6.5X as fast as alternative MPI libraries as measured by latency tests.
Given the "state-of-the-nation" reality we see with HPC systems having shifted to multicore nodes, there is now a logical path for these same systems to evolve to mixed multi-core and many-core nodes. As a result, the compute power of the hardware is scaling at approximately twice the rate of Moore's Law; another reality that many programmers (even those using comparatively flexible and agile development methodologies) may not have been anticipating.
Intel appears to be suggesting that HPC computing will affect all computing environments in a sort of "top down" cause and effect motion; the company says that software development solutions and tools must scale to meet developers' needs to utilize newer, faster systems. ...
Source: drdobbs.com]]>
With its JFX project for open source JavaFX, Oracle wants JavaFX to serve as a step to providing the next-generation Java client toolkit. Oracle says JFX would be contributed to OpenJDK, its official open source implementation of Java, and that it seeks patches and early feedback from the community.
"We are not just interested in open sourcing the code, however. We also want to move into an open development model. We already have an open bug database," said Richard Bair, chief architect for client Java at Oracle. The intention is to have an official proposal, or Java Specification Request, involving JFX as part of the Java 9 timeframe. That could be a couple years, with Oracle already pledging to release Java SE (Standard Edition) 8 in 2012. "Our basic motivation for wanting to open-source JFX is to [build] community and ecosystem support and adoption around JavaFX by increasing transparency," Bair said.
Source: infoworld.com]]>
Black Duck Code Sight 2.0, out now, is also the first version of the software to run on Linux servers, in addition to being able to run on Microsoft Windows servers.
Using Code Sight "is like searching on a regular search engine, but the content and indexing is specialized to code. We parse and index the raw source in code-specific ways to identify things like method definitions and classes," said Jim Berets, Black Duck vice president of product management.
Code Sight indexes all the code that is embedded in version control systems or that is otherwise available on an organization's network. It offers an interface for developers to search for chunks of code that they could consult or reuse in their own projects. The company is marketing the software to organizations with code reuse initiatives put in place to save money and time.
Code Sight can index code within many different types of version control systems, including Git, CVS (Concurrent Versions System), Mercurial, Subversion, AccuRev, IBM's ClearCase, and Microsoft's Team Foundation Server. It can be accessed through the Eclipse or the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated developer environments, or with a browser....
Source: infoworld.com]]>
RIM plans to consolidate its PlayBook, smartphones, and even embedded systems under BBX, a single operating system based on the QNX OS, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis told a packed keynote session at the conference on Tuesday. Though the company gave no details about future QNX-based phones or a new version of the tablet, nor a commercial release date for an updated PlayBook OS that it introduced as a beta, attendees were happy to see a firm technology plan.
The BBX OS will be the foundation of the company's software platforms for the future, along with BlackBerry Cloud Services. Developers will be able to choose RIM's native SDK and open source tools, or the HTML5 Web standard and RIM's WebWorks, to build apps on top of that foundation.
Lukewarm sales and lowered prices have been reported for the tablet, along with speculation that the product would be discontinued in the face of competition from Android tablets and Apple's iPad. But RIM stood by the PlayBook on Tuesday, even giving one out to every attendee.
Source: infoworld.com]]>
Developers can integrate the Coverity 5.5 testing suite with HP's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), as well as add it as part of a workflow within Eclipse or Microsoft's Visual Studio suite by using the respective plug-in. Overall, Coverity is positioning its new release as a development testing platform.
Ezi Boteach, VP of Products at Coverity, explained to InternetNews.com that the goal is to provide developers and their managers visibility into what's going on during development.
Coverity's static analysis engine is able to identify many types of coding defects, including use-after-free memory errors. Those types of flaws are particularly troublesome as they can potentially lead to security exploits.
"One thing that is common is when you copy and paste code and you have two variables that are used in a similar way," Boteach explained. "But at some point you want to free one of them, and you make a mistake and free the wrong one and then you continue using it. it's definitely one of the things we find."...
Source: developer.com]]>