May 10

Canonical unveils new ‘Unity’ desktop environment at Ubuntu Developer Summit | Ubuntu

By admin MobileOS, OS, Ubuntu, cloud computing, operating systems & collaborative tools No Comments »

Previews ‘Ubuntu Light:’ an implementation of Unity Targeted at OEMs for ‘instant-on’ computing

Ubuntu Developer Summit, La Hulpe, Belgium, May 10, 2010: Canonical today unveiled a new desktop environment called ‘Unity’ at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Belgium. Unity will be the desktop environment for Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition, released in October 2010, and is available today to developers building applications for the netbook environment.

Unity is designed for netbooks and related touch-based devices. It includes a new panel and application launcher that makes it fast and easy to access preferred applications, such as the browser, while removing screen elements that are rarely used in mobile and netbook computing.

In parallel, Canonical announced Ubuntu Light, an implementation of Ubuntu that is based on Unity and intended for the dual-boot ‘instant-web’ market. This pared-down version of Ubuntu features chat, IM, browser and media player applications and is aimed at PC manufacturers seeking an ‘instant-web’ experience that complements Windows on consumer PCs.

Ubuntu Light distinguishes itself by connecting the user to the web, with a running browser, in under 10 seconds. The product includes a media player and tools to integrate with Windows to access music files, photos, etc. This is a new market for Ubuntu and research into the requirements for this market drove many of the design principles for Unity.

PCs equipped with Ubuntu Light offer users immediate access to the web and personal content – photos, music and documents. For mobile users, or simply for cases where the simplified interface of Ubuntu is more appropriate, Ubuntu Light saves time associated with a full Windows boot and login. Ubuntu Light can be used on a standalone PC or notebook without Windows, but it is particularly designed for dual-boot environments, where it is installed alongside Windows and presented as an option at boot.

More here

May 06

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes!!

By jeromewagner cloud computing, hardware, insights, storage No Comments »

Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes

• Massive figure equal to a million million gigabytes

The growth in digital content last year alone was enough to fill 75bn Apple iPads. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Every man, woman and child on the planet using micro-blogging site Twitter for a century. For many people that may sound like a vision of hell, but for watchers of the tremendous growth of digital communications it is a neat way of presenting the sheer scale of the so-called digital universe. The explosion of social networking, online video services and digital photography, plus the continued popularity of mobile phones, email and web browsing, coupled with the growing desire of corporations and governments to know and store ever more data about everyone has created an unprecedented amount of digital information and introduced a new word to the nerd lexicon: a zettabyte.

Research published today estimates that the so-called digital universe grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes – a petabyte is a million gigabytes – or 0.8 zettabytes. That is the equivalent of all the information that could be stored on 75bn Apple iPads, which would equal the digital output from a century's worth of constant tweeting by all of Earth's inhabitants.

By way of stark contrast between the output of present day humanity and its pre-digital predecessor, experts estimate that all human language used since the dawn of time would take up about 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form, which is less than 1% of the digital content created since someone first switched on a computer.This year, the planet's digital content will blast through the zettabyte barrier to reach 1.2 ZB, according to the fourth annual survey of the world's bits and bytes conducted by technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC. A zettabyte, incidentally, is roughly half a million times the entire collections of all the academic libraries in the United States.

via Goodbye petabytes, hello zettabytes | Technology | The Guardian.

Apr 30

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Features | Ubuntu

By admin MobileOS, OS, it-management, media-tools, training No Comments »

Browse the web

Ubuntu includes Mozilla Firefox – for fast, safe web browsing. You can also choose alternative open-source browsers from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Create professional documents and presentations

OpenOffice.org is fully compatible with Microsoft Office and has everything you need to create professional documents, spreadsheets and presentations. OpenOffice.org is easy to use, packed with the features you need and completely free.

Get free software

The Ubuntu Software Centre gives you instant access to thousands of free open-source applications. Browse software in categories including: education, games, sound and video, graphics, programming and office. Software is easy to find, easy to install and easy to remove.

Email and chat

Get chatting with Empathy. Quickly integrate your chat accounts from Yahoo, Gmail, MSN, Jabber, AOL, QQ and many more. Evolution Mail provides easy, intuitive email.

Social from the start

New in 10.04. Read and update your social networks instantly. Ubuntus new Me Menu lets you access your Facebook and Twitter accounts and more straight away. Connect to your chat channels and make updates through a single window. Being sociable has never been so easy.

Buy music while you listen

New in 10.04. Ubuntus new music player includes an integrated store, so you can buy and download new tracks with just a few clicks. And thanks to Ubuntu Ones file-sharing magic you can store your music online and listen to it from other computers and music players. Ubuntu works with most music and media players.

View, store and edit photos

Ubuntu is ready for all your gadgets. Connect your phones and cameras to download your pictures. You can organise your photos with F-Spot and use popular tools like Picasa, Facebook and Flickr. For advanced photo editing, find a free application from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

Mobilise your digital life!

All Ubuntu users get a free Ubuntu One account. Ubuntu One allows you to store all kinds of files online so you can access them anywhere. Store bookmarks, contacts, music and pictures. Take everything everywhere with Ubuntu One.

Make, play and edit video

Watch all your favourite content from YouTube, iPlayer, and MSN Player. Play your own videos with Movie Player or use Pitivi to edit your videos.

Start fast with Ubuntu

Ubuntu loads quickly on any computer, but its super-fast on newer machines. After loading, opening a browser takes seconds, unlike other operating systems that leave you staring at the screen, waiting to get online.

Choose from hundreds of free games

The Ubuntu Software Centre offers hundreds of games, including puzzles, adventures, tactical challenges and more. All free to choose and free to use.

Accessibility

At the core of the Ubuntu philosophy is the belief that computing is for everyone and access should be free and complete whatever your economic or physical circumstances. Ubuntu is one of the most accessible desktop operating systems around.

via Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Features | Ubuntu.

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Apr 29

SOA Infrastructure | Progress Software

By admin 24x7 Management And Support, SOA No Comments »

Embrace the Value of SOA with Smart SOA Infrastructure

Progress products are built with your need for integration and interoperability in mind, and provide the foundation for managing loosely coupled business processes so the processes can seamlessly bridge computing, organizational, geographic, and semantic boundaries. With our SOA Portfolio products, you can deploy a practical SOA that can scale over time with the growth of your business.

Enterprise Service Bus

Progress® Sonic ESB® provides flexible integration and re-use of business applications within an SOA. It connects, mediates and orchestrates services wherever they are deployed. Sonic ESB eliminates brittle point-to-point integration and provides a robust, event-driven architecture that can evolve, scale and extend throughout the enterprise.

Enterprise Messaging

Progress® SonicMQ® is a standards-based enterprise messaging system that delivers the industry’s highest levels of performance, reliability and availability.

SOA Management

Progress® Actional® SOA Management provides end-to-end visibility and control across a distributed, multi-vendor SOA environment.

Business Process Management (BPM)

Go beyond ordinary business process management (BPM) with Progress® Savvion and rapidly create and optimize process-driven solutions and efficiently manage daily work with real-time visibility into business processes.

Data Interoperability

Progress® DataXtend® Semantic Integrator (SI) simplifies the creation, maintenance and governance of common-model based data services in an SOA. It ensures semantic consistency across the multiple, complex, and ever-changing data models in a service-oriented architecture.

Mainframe Integration

Progress® DataDirect Shadow is a comprehensive mainframe modernization toolset, eliminating the complexity and enhancing the performance of mainframe integration within more modern SOA initiatives.  Shadow streamlines connectivity to mainframe relational and non-relational databases such as Adabas, IMS DB, and VSAM.

Complex Event Processing

Progress® Apama® monitors fast-moving events, detects patterns, and takes action — all within milliseconds. Apama's integrated dashboards provide business insight based on changing operational data in an event-driven SOA.

Registry/Repository

Progress partners with best-in-class SOA registry / repository vendors. Sonic ESB integrates with standards-based SOA registries to locate and invoke Web services. SOA registries leverage Actional for lifecycle SOA management, augmenting registry service metadata with Actional's runtime data on service usage, performance, and interdependencies.

Delivering the Business Agility that Successful SOA Infrastructure Requires

To deliver the business agility promised by SOA infrastructure requires technology that can truly cross the boundaries of and connect today's distributed organizations and heterogeneous systems – quickly, seamlessly, and reliably. Progress focuses – as no platform vendor can – on the cross cutting concerns in SOA. Progress also has the hands-on implementation experience to reduce the risk of SOA projects while delivering the available business benefits. And the Progress practical SOA approach, represented in the new SOA Maturity Model, enables companies to get started on SOA today and break it down into achievable projects that progressively deliver greater and greater business benefits. In fact, a practical path to SOA success and ROI.

An Open Dialog About Building an Agile SOA Infrastructure

SOA has become the preferred approach for companies who want to deliver business agility and complete visibility to information and processes across the enterprise. Subscribe to the informative Integrated Infrastructure Blog to help your enterprise realize the true potential of SOA.

You should also network with the SOA community by joining the SOA Infrastructure Group on Facebook.

via SOA Infrastructure | Progress Software.

Apr 23

BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartography

By admin infosthetics, insights, other, uncategorized No Comments »

BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartograpy [bbc.co.uk] is yet another example of a BBC television series which focuses on matters concerning data visualization. It is another proof how visualization is becoming an interesting feature in popular press.

While the online video clips are restricted to people living in the UK (snif), foreigners are still able to explore a couple of compelling example projects, such as a NASA Map of the dark side of the Moon, Phillippe Bourcier's map of the movement of data on the Internet, the most complete map of the universe, a map of social conversations on blogs, next to a whole section dedicated to historical maps. The last episode even delves inside the world of political and satirical maps.

People living in the UK are welcome to make the rest of us jealous, and describe the quality of the series in the comments section below.

In the meantime, others have the chance to marvel at YouTube's surprising top search results of the query “beauty of maps”.

via BBC The Beauty of Maps: Seeing the Art in Cartography – information aesthetics.

Apr 15

BCS Service Management Specialist Group

By admin communication-standards, industry best practise, it-projects, proffesional bodies, uncategorized No Comments »

BCS Logo

BCS Service Management Specialist Group

Subject: Multi-sourcing – How Ready Are You?

Date: Monday 10 May 2010

Time: Registration & refreshments at 18:00 with talks commencing at 18:30. Finishing around 20:00 followed by wine, finger food and informal networking.

Venue: BCS, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

See http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf

for directions.

Speaker: Daniel Jones, Partner at TPI

Synopsis:

Many organisations today are working with multi-sourced IT services; some have arrived at this state through disjointed sourcing activities whilst others have set out with the strategic objective of working with best of breed providers, spreading their risks by avoiding lock-in to a single supplier and at the same time realising IT cost reductions. The rise of Business Process Outsourcing, cloud based services and globalisation are all contributing to pressure for adoption of multi-sourced IT services.

A new approach is required for end to end governance and performance management that enables organisations to realise their objectives in a multi-sourced model. This talk sets out risks and challenges that accompany Multi-sourcing, and proposes the approaches necessary to achieve the intended level of service performance and the planned financial outcome. Examples from both Public and Private Sectors will be explored.

About Daniel: A graduate of the London Business School, Daniel has spent over 20 years in consultancy, application development and IT services in senior roles for a number of major service providers and working with clients in the Media, Pharmaceuticals, Retail, Financial Services, Pharmaceuticals and Public Sectors. Prior to joining TPI he was the Managing Director, Civil Government and Healthcare at EDS, responsible for the delivery of BPO and IT services to a portfolio of clients, many of them operating with multiple suppliers. He is currently responsible for TPI’s Public Sector business.

Registration: This event is free to current BCS members and £15.00 (+VAT) for non members.

please use www.bcs.org/events/registration to register for this event.

Apr 15

Psion’s new take on internet business | Business | The Guardian

By admin MobileOS, cloud computing, design concepts, hardware, insights No Comments »

Psion is encouraging its customers to adapt its products and then share that knowledge with everyone online

Richard Wray

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 April 2010 19.34 BST

A Psion Series 5 electronic personal organiser, 1999 vintage. The Organisers were a big hit with gadget fans in the 1980s and 1990s. Photograph: David Sillitoe

Next month one of the more venerable names in British technology will start field tests of its latest device: the product of a complete overhaul of the company and another test case for a new way of doing business spawned by the internet.

The newest handheld computer from Psion is based on individual modules which resellers and buyers can configure and even add to, to meet their specific needs. Rather than relying on the traditional one-size-fits-all model – or its expensive alternative, making bespoke products for each customer – Psion is actively encouraging its customers to adapt its products. It is also encouraging its customers to then share their experiences and get involved in research, development and after-sales care, by using the internet.

“We opened up an online community and customers and partners [resellers] are starting to talk to each other,” according to John Conoley, Psion’s chief executive. “At first, frankly, it was frightening. We are in there too and we are learning, we make mistakes and get flamed occasionally … but at other times you see a customer with a problem and one of our resellers – often from a completely different market – will chip in and deal with their issue.”

The idea of using the internet to interact with all users of a particular product or service is becoming increasingly popular in business, with executives talking about “mutualising” their operations. For many companies it makes financial, rather than purely philosophical, sense.

Mobile phone company GiffGaff – funded by O2 – gives money to users who help others with their technical problems, saving on customer support costs.

via Psion’s new take on internet business | Business | The Guardian.

Apr 08

iPhone OS 4 unveiled, adds multitasking, shipping this summer

By admin MobileOS, communication-standards, operating systems & collaborative tools No Comments »

By Paul Miller posted Apr 8th 2010 1:43PM

Breaking News

Just a bit more than a year after we first laid eyes on iPhone OS 3.0, Apple is back with the latest big revision of the OS that powers the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.

iPhone OS 4 is shipping this summer iPad in the fall, and the developer preview will be out today. iPhone 3GS and new-gen iPod touch will get all the features, but some features wont make it to the iPhone 3G, original iPhone, and older iPod touches. The biggest new feature is multitasking, which Apple says is going to be the “best” implementation in the smartphone space, though its obviously not the first.

App switching is activated by double tapping the home button, which pulls up a “dock” of currently running apps, and Apple claims it can do this without hurting battery life or performance for the front app.

Unfortunately, this multitasking wont be available for devices older than the 3GS and new iPod touch. Multitasking is just one of seven different new “tentpole” features, including Game Center, enhanced Mail, and more…

via iPhone OS 4 unveiled, adds multitasking, shipping this summer — Engadget.

Apr 01

Mapping an Envelope’s Route

By admin design concepts, it-projects, online tools, uncategorized No Comments »

In the line of one of Google’s previous April Fool Day proposals, this design concept might actually become feasible. “Google Maps Envelopes” maps the course of snail mail on the envelop itself. The project further proposes people would be able to send these envelopes through the GMail interface.

via Mapping an Envelope’s Route – information aesthetics.

Mar 30

Data Centre Specialist Group – Measuring Up? Metrics and your data centre

By admin green-it, industry best practise, insights, ngo, proffesional bodies No Comments »

In the quest for metrics that describe what we do in the data centre and how efficiently we do it, we’ve nailed PUE which despite it’s shortcomings has been adopted as the first simple metric to describe the inefficiency in getting power from the utility feed to the IT equipment.

So what’s next? PUE is not and cannot be the end of the story. What do we need to define and describe next as PUE only gets us so far? Is it data centre or IT productivity? There have been many attempts to describe the “useful work” done by a data centre, but those that have tried know it is far from a simple problem. We’ve seen DCeP, CUPS, CADE, DPPE and others trying to do so but none have quite hit the mark.

We are right now at a turning point in our industry, following our last event we (Intellect and DCSG) have begun discussions with DECC (Department for Energy & Climate Change) on data centres as an industry establishing an industry wide Climate Change Agreement (CCA) as an alternative to being penalised within the Carbon Reduction Committment (CRC).

Establishing a CCA requires the industry to define and measure its productivity in some way so the metrics we agree and define to measure ourselves will make a significant difference to our future as a sector, certainly from a regulatory perspective within the UK initially and then further afield.

But what metric will be most useful for measuring the productivity your data centre? Or are we all on the wrong path? What’s the best way of demonstrating to your manager\CIO\board that your data centres are as efficient as they can be and delivering value for your business?

Come along to the latest DCSG Event to listen to the options from the industry’s leading figures on what they this is the best way to proceed. The evening will be split into two parts with the second half of the evening giving way to a panel discussion and debate. As is the norm with DCSG events, the audience normally have just as much (if not more!) to say than the panelists!

Always interesting, insightful and surprisingly entertaining this is a DCSG Event you shouldn’t miss!

This Event will be run in association with the Green Grid EMEA.

via Data Centre Specialist Group – Measuring Up? Metrics and your data centre.

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