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iPad 3 Coming In March

Mellisa Tolentino — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:24:44 +0000

Apple’s known to reveal new products at their trademark events, typically taking place in the first quarter. And according to AllThingsD, the company is not holding an event this month. But they will be holding one in March, where they will launch the iPad 3.

Soures claim that the event will happen during the first week of March in San Francisco, presumably at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Apple’s preferred location for big events such as this.

The iPad 3 is “a device similar in form factor to the iPad 2, but running a much faster chip, sporting an improved graphics processing unit, and featuring a 2048×1536 Retina Display — or something close to it,” said the report.

Apple denied Samsung Galaxy 10.1N ban, again

Apple’s appeal to ban Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1N is once again denied by the German court. If you recall, Apple sued Samsung, accusing the Korean manufacturer of blatantly copying the iPad with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The Samsung tablet was subsequently banned from being sold in Germany. So Samsung did the next best thing: they redesigned the tablet and called it the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1N. Apple wasn’t happy with that–they believed that Samsung just changed the name but it’s still the same infringing device, but German courts do not agree with the iPad maker.

Last week, the Munich Regional Court rejected Apple’s request to ban sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone in Germany and today, the Dusseldorf Regional Court rejected Apple’s bid for an emergency ruling.

“The Galaxy Tab 10.1N now sufficiently differs from the form Apple has registered as a design right,” the court said in a statement. “Apple’s iPads and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1N now are two competing products of equal value.”

What makes the 10.1N different from the original Galaxy Tab are: the silver boarder surrounding the tablet, in landscape orientation it doesn’t have any physical buttons on the left and right side but have speakers on both sides located on the silver boarder, still on landscape the power and volume buttons are on top as well as the port for a headset, and the mic and power port are located at the bottom.

Apple Calls For Help

Apple has always been the aggressor in filing court cases but with consecutive court losses, especially the one against Motorola Mobility, they’re getting frustrated and now asks for help.

According to Mac Observer, Apple wrote a letter to the EU’s European Telecommunications Standards Institute pleading for it to set guidelines for how patents that cover industry standards are licensed. Apple’s legal team claims that the lack of licensing standards led to lawsuits that could’ve been avoided if there were guidelines set.

“It is apparent that our industry suffers from a lack of consistent adherence to FRAND principles in the cellular standards arena,” Apple’s intellectual property boss, Bruce Watrous, said.

“This common base, as between two negotiating parties, should be no higher than the industry average sales price for a basic communications device that is capable of both voice and data communications,” Watrous added.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has not commented on Apple’s letter.

Apple Supplier Got “Swagged”

According to a report from 9to5mac, Foxconn, the controversial supplier in the tech industry, was hacked by a group going by the name of SwaggSec. The hackers released a dump of Foxconn internal information, including a mail server login/password dump and logins to various online procurement sites and Intranets in retaliation to the horrid working conditions at Foxconn factories.

SwaggSec addressed a letter to Foxconn, it’s quite long but here’s the first part, it kind of summarizes what they want to tell Foxconn.

## Hacking Today for an Entertaining Tomorrow.
Users of Cyberspace,
So Foxconn thinks they got ‘em some swagger because they work with the Big Boys from Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple? Fool, You don’t know what swagger is. They say you got your employees all worked up, committing suicide ‘n stuff. They say you hire chinese workers ’cause you think the taiwanese are elite. We got somethin’ served up good…real good. Your not gonna’ know what hit you by the time you finish this release. Your company gonna’ crumble, and you deserve it.

But Foxconn isn’t the only one that’s been targeted. Protesters are planning on making Apple Stores their venue for their rally against the working conditions in Foxconn. They want better working conditions for the workers laboring on their beloved iDevices. Yeah, the protesters are Apple users. Think of it this way, these fanbois don’t want the Foxconn scandal to tarnish Apple’s name because they love their iDevices so much. Either way, Apple will come out sparkling.

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Appcelerator Extends Titanium Platform with Cocoafish Buy

Kristen Nicole — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:01:15 +0000

Appcelerator, the maker of the Titanium mobile app development platform, has acquired Cocoafish in the latest move to expand the functionality of its offering. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cocoafish offers developers 25 cloud-based features they can add to their apps via APIs. These include things such as a status updates engine for users, as well as admin options such as account management, storage and so forth. It’s used by services like photo sharing site Linea, and it’s easy to see why Appcelerator deemed it a good fit for its growing portfolio.

Cocoafish’s code will be promptly integrated into its new owner’s portfolio. It will be plugged into Titanium in Q1 and released into general availability early next quarter, along with a standalone version with usage-based plans.

“Nearly all of our developers and customers have been manually adding cloud service functionality to their mobile applications since we launched Appcelerator’s Titanium Platform three years ago,” explained Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “Cocoafish is by far the most complete mobile cloud solution, and combined with the Titanium Platform, Appcelerator is delivering everything a developer needs to build rich, connected applications.”

The company says that over 1.5 million developers are using its service today – which seems to correspond with some statistics recently released by the International Data Corporation. The firm analyzed this particular job market and discovered that demand for user-interface developers stands out along with several other roles, further validating Appcelerator’s latest investment to some extent.

This marks Appcelerator’s first acquisition since its latest round of funding, and its third acquisition in the past twelve months. Appcelerator’s on a role, building out its ecosystem to better accomodate the expanding needs of developers that must make their own appeal to multiple platforms including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian, and emerging standards like HTML5.

Cocoafish is a particularly good fit for Appcelerator, given their existing goals around offering an extensive marketplace with resources served up to developers “a la mode” style.

“We’ve proven we can take great technology and people and integrate them into our company and ecosystem in a way that benefits everybody,” Haynie says. ”We’re certainly growing very fast organically, but sometimes there’s an opportunity to define great technology and I think that’s the case with all three of our acquisitions. They’ve been very complimentary, adding something we didn’t have in terms of the team and the technology.”

Contributors: Maria Deutscher

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Google’s “Drive” to the Cloud is Keen on Storage

Mellisa Tolentino — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:04:10 +0000

Google seems to have everything. What started as a search engine evolved into something that offers everything you need in cyberspace, like Gmail and GTalk for communication, GoogleDocs for school or work, web apps to help and entertain you, Chrome to interface with it all, GoogleTV for a socially connected entertainment experience, Google+ for social networking, and a lot more products and services that help keep our lives fun and interesting. But they’re still missing one important service: cloud storage.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Google was supposed to launch a cloud storage service back in 2007 called “G Drive” but did not push through with it. That hesitation left the door open for Dropbox and other consumer storage products and since then, they have been offering free and paid cloud storage and file sharing for personal and business use.

Since then, a lot of other companies came up with their own cloud offerings, even Apple launched iCloud, but like all their products, it’s for exclusive use on Apple devices. This leaves Google trailing far behind competitors, but the WSJ report stated that Google will soon be launching their own cloud service dubbed Drive in the coming weeks or months.

According to WSJ’s unnamed sources, Drive is a response to the growth of Internet-connected mobile devices like smartphones and tablets and the rise of “cloud computing,” or storing files online so that they can be retrieved from multiple devices.

The Drive will store photos, documents and videos on Google’s servers accessible from any web-connected device to be easily shared. If a user wants to share a photo or video from their phone or computer to friends, they would just upload the file to Drive then share the link to friends who can view them without having to download the file.

Drive is akin to Dropbox in the sense that it will offer free and paid versions for both personal and business use, but Drive is said to be priced cheaper than Dropbox.

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A Closer Look at the Implications of EMC’s VFCache: Join the Live Discussion

Bert Latamore — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:32:30 +0000

Tomorrow at noon EST (9:00 A.M. PST) the Wikibon community will convene in a Peer Incite titled “Squinting through the Glare of Project Lightning” meeting to discuss the implications of EMC’s announcement of VFCache, aka “Project Lightning”, a unique PCIe server flash card implementation intended to work with EMC storage arrays. The meeting is fee and open to interested parties and can be accessed either by dialing into the conference call or by watching the live video feed on SiliconAngle.tv. Audio and video recordings will be available online after the meeting.

VFCache is EMC’s answer to Fusion-io and other startups that have been gaining traction among online and cloud services. However, unlike their products, it is a read-only cache that stores a copy of heavily used data from the storage array onto the server, where applications can access it over the PCIe bus, reducing latency by orders of magnitude.

Unlike the Fusion-io and other competing PCIe flash products, which are flash-only systems, VFCache is designed to be integrated with EMC storage arrays, which are either all disk or hybrid disk-flash systems. And while the focus of Fusion-io has so far been on leading-edge big data analysis systems, EMC seems to be focusing on the traditional business market and specifically on its existing business customers.

The hour-long Peer Incite will be led by Wikibon CTO David Floyer and will explore the following questions:

What is Project Lightning, and why does it matter?
How is the storage hierarchy evolving, and where does Lightning fit relative to the competition?
How will the role of spinning disk change as a result of flash generally and Lightning specifically?
How should practitioners view Lightning, and what actions should they take to maximize value?

Interested parties may also subscribe to the free Peer Incite e-Newsletter, which will carry several short articles by Wikibon experts analyzing the implications of VFCache by registering on the Wikibon Web site.

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Massively Multiplayer Online Games as a Model for Business Collaboration

Kit Dotson — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:22:21 +0000

Video games aren’t just a wave of the future; they’re the current reality for millions of players who take to their consoles and PCs every day. The video game industry is the fastest growing entertainment market on Earth right now and we’re constantly seeing new innovations extend from it that effect as-yet-unknown markets. One of those regions that video games could really bring some insight is to that of social collaboration, especially games that rely heavily on a multitude of players interacting socially.

Michael Hugos has published an article at CIO Blogs addressing just this question: how can we look at massively multiplayer online (MMO) games as models for business collaboration?

His example game is actually quite brilliant. EVE Online is one of the best-known sandbox MMO games ever produced, run by CCP Games headquartered in Iceland, this MMO has been at the center of a great deal of controversy because it broke the mold for a game played by and for players. In its science fiction environment, players are given all the tools they need to build a career from a multitude of actions that affect other players from resource gathering, hauling, trading, playing with the internal stock market, or even fighting wars as a mercenary.

The high fidelity model of social interaction with a corporate and resource model, however, isn’t what makes EVE Online perfect for looking at how MMOs could be an excellent model for business collaboration. It’s how the game allows players to communicate and pay attention the current status of what they’re working on in relation to everyone that they’re collaborating with. In many ways, the heads-up-display (HUD) and user interface of EVE Online generates a sort of near-technological telepathy between players working together in a corporation to get things done.

Essentially, EVE Online—sometimes chided as being “spreadsheets in space”—envelops a gamified approach to logistics and resource management.

Hugos presents this in his article and I’d like to expand on it,

Business intelligence and analytics software has something to learn from games and from MMOs in particular. MMOs use well designed heads-up displays that combine data analysis with group collaboration capabilities. This is illustrated below in screenshots showing two of the heads-up displays used by players flying spaceships in a battle. Note how they use moving 3D displays to present information from real-time data feeds provided by the game.

In addition to the moving 3D displays in the center of the screens, notice the other information shown around the edges of the screens. There are dials and readouts with relevant data, and thumbnail displays showing their status and the actions of other players they are collaborating with. To supplement these visual displays, players also communicate with each other moment to moment using text messages via chat features and Internet-based voice messages that can be directed to individual players or the entire group through headphones and microphones.

What makes MMO games engaging and interesting to players often can be boiled down to entanglement and immersion. If what a player does has an impact on the world that they’re playing in, and they can see the fruits of their labor (and that labor is not intense) they feel rewarded by the experience. What I’ve just described may even be seen as the benefits of working for a real-world company, making an impact on that company’s outcome, and providing some sort of tangible labor.

With the advent of the mobile phone and apps that allow for close collaboration we’ve moved closer to having on-demand communication with colleagues through the day. With the introduction of gesture-detection we’ll even be able to bring intense amounts of data into an immersive format with 3D displays (the peripheral relevant data that Hugos refers to.) Video games even present a way to collect vast amounts of behavioral and active big data and democratize massive small-actions by a multitude of people into organized work—directed by a person with an interface that could allow them to direct that work it would become the next-gen of human resources.

While games like EVE Online may feel like “spreadsheets in space” and to some may become a second job (being CEO of a corporation in a video game can be quite stressful) these sorts of social and technological interaction provide keen insights into how we can engage workers, management, and executives in the businesses of the future.

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Groupon Acquisition Amidst First Earnings Call After IPO

Mellisa Tolentino — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:15:02 +0000

Adku, the stealth startup company founded by ex-Google employees working on big data for e-commerce, announced on Monday that it has been acquired by Groupon, the behemoth daily deals/group buying company. With the acquisition, the three co-founders Ajit Varma,Carlos Whitt, and Jesse Shieh will be moving to Groupon’s Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto, California.

“Such strong product technologists and engineers add great value to the development team we’re continuing to grow in our Palo Alto office,” Groupon spokeswoman Julie Mossler told the Chicago Tribune.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Downside of an Acquisition

These days, startups either go big, fail or get acquired by larger companies. If a company is acquired, it can either be because of their technology or what they are offering, or because they have outstanding employees that would be a great addition to the buying company. And that’s what Groupon is doing. Instead of pirating or hiring just their desired employees, they go and buy the whole company.

There’s a plausible explanation for this: a person might be performing very well because he is comfortable with the people he works with, and taking that person out of his comfort zone could be crucial to his performance. The downside of an acquisition is the acquired company almost always gets shutdown, and only select employees stay on board.

Last year Groupon acquired OpenCal, the online appointment scheduling and booking site, as well as Campfire Labs, the startup company that gave us Slice, the web-based service that lets users “slice” friends into groups, working with existing social-media sites like Facebook to offer features such as chat, calendar, etc. And earlier this year, Groupon acquired Mertado, the company that creates “shopping experiences that build bridges between content, commerce, and community. Of the three acquisitions, OpenCal is the only one continuing operations. Mertado and Camfire Labs, along with Slice, have been inaccessible to users, and Mertado will be shutting down on February 28, 2012.

First Earnings Call

Today, Groupon will have their first earnings call after they went public last November. Analysts are expecting sales of $473 million, triple the amount from a year ago, with a 2011 revenue amount of roughly $1.6 billion. Groupon’s market value is at $15 billion.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason must be sweating bullets by now, because he is faced with the daunting task of delivering an awesome first earnings call, convincing investors that their company is here to stay, and not just a fad that people will soon forget. More importantly, he’ll have to demonstrate that the company is making money.

Groupon recently announced a new marketing strategy, Clicky, the Clickable Value-Wheel that lets users spin the wheel and score potential discounts from the available choices. It is tied up with Facebook to broaden their reach. That is just an example of Groupon’s marketing strategy and we’d like to believe that it’s working, taking on new subscribers and maintaining their current subscribers.

Still, a lot of people will probably unsubscribe to their service in the long run, and Groupon has to face this reality. How many people unsubscribe from their service every month? How many new users sign up every month? Of their total subscribers, how many of those actually use the service? Will merchants continue to participate in group-buying deals? These are just some of the questions that investors would probably want to ask Groupon.

“We remain concerned that merchants are wary of the longer-term impacts of offering steep discounts through Groupon and other daily-deal sites,” Jordan Rohan of Stifel Nicolaus wrote. “But it is hard to predict when that wariness will create a real drag on fundamentals.”

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Big Money Data: What’s A Trillion Dollars Look Like?

Kristina Farrah — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:37:57 +0000

Though world has yet to know a trillionaire, I think there’s little harm in picturing the many things that a trillion dollars can do. And why not? It’s true that the world has always talked about money in 10 digits, but that’s about to change. In order to make sense out of the global financial mess, we will need the help of three more zeros, hitting the trillion dollar-mark.

Thinking of a trillion dollars makes me dizzy. That’s a lot of numbers past your traditional nine-digit calculator. As a comparison, the bills making up a trillion dollars laid end to end would reach the sun–it will take 32,000 years to exhaust all of them should you spend a dollar per second. If you convert them to pennies, they would weigh as much as 2,755,778 Argentinosauruses, the world’s largest known dinosaur.

But apart from the absurd semblance, here’s an infographic from Mint that looks at what a trillion dollars can actually do in contemporary times (because it would probably cost about a trillion dollars to lay a trillion dollars worth of bills into outer space). According to Mint, one trillion dollars is enough to run the federal government for 103 days, or fund every military of every NATO country combined. It can also pay for every US military intervention since 9/11, and equals the market value of all stocks traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Where’s our money really go?

Speaking of money, where does it all go? Why is it so great? A piece by Adam Crowe aims to make sense of it all. He talks about what money really is, the money supply, how the money crisis expands and the infamous credit crisis. Crowe’s article also involves complicated factors such as easy credit, house booming, mortgage securitization, market saturation, lowered loans and more.

Gas and auto can be considered one of the biggest industries in the world. In this infographic by personal finance site Bundle, Nicholas Felton makes a follow-up of his previous graphic about America’s spending on food and drink, and talks about gas and auto expenses this time around. Bundle says that “the average household spent $5,477 on gas and auto expenses last year…an amount which accounts for about 14.5 percent of daily spending. That’s more than we spend on groceries or utilities, and more than we spend on travel, entertainment, clothes and shoes, and hobbies — combined.”

Using data to earn money

Enough of crises and expenditures, let’s take a look at how to earn money by forecasting financial markets. Investors consider economic and fundamental factors a great deal to pin point investment opportunities. At the end of the day, however, the price of assets will depend on two factors: supply and demand. If you have a good grasp of how price assets shift, you can understand the fluctuation of prices and the market as a whole. This infographic by Simit Patel of Informed Trades demonstrates the exchange rate of Euro vs. US dollars, and is an effective material in forecasting financial markets.

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Oracle Delivers R Enterprise, Data Mining Inside Exadata 11g

Jeff Kelly — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Oracle announced today that R Enterprise users can now run the popular statistical programming language against large volumes of data directly inside the Oracle Database 11g, including the Exadata Database Machine.

The capability is part of the newly launched Oracle Advanced Analytics for Big Data offering, which bundles Oracle R Enterprise and Oracle Data Mining together for deployment inside the database. The result is the ability to perform complex analytics on significantly larger data volumes than previously possible, said George Lumpkin, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Management for Data Warehousing.

Until now, Oracle R Enterprise and Data Mining users extracted and analyzed only as much sample data as their client machines’ memory could support. Now, users will still interact with the analytics software packages using familiar tools and scripts on their laptops and desktops, but the compute processing and storage will take place at the database layer. Other Oracle database users can then reuse the resulting models as well.

Today’s release comes less than a month after the debut of the Oracle R Connector for Hadoop and Oracle’s Big Data Appliance, which bundles Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution with the Oracle NoSQL database and also includes an open source R distribution. R users can now port analysis easily between Hadoop/NoSQL environments and Oracle 11g, said Vaishnavi Sashikanth, Vice President of Development at Oracle.

R users exploring unstructured data in Hadoop to determine price changes for insurance policy holders, for example, can easily send the results to the more structured 11g environment to populate downstream applications, she said.

Results from Oracle Advanced Analytics can also be viewed from the Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite and from the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine.

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Guest Post: Unshackling Your Data-driven Web Apps

John Furrier — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:05:58 +0000

Written by Ines Sombra, Data Engineer, Engine Yard

It is so easy to start a fight. Ask your friends whose legacy is more timeless: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. If you’re watching a soccer game, declare that Cristiano Ronaldo is highly overrated. Or, if you’re at a database conference, tell those relational database types that Web apps don’t all need to conform to ACID principles (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability).

Yes, the fur will fly. But you’ll have broached a topic that urgently needs more attention. The fact is, the evolution of application design has not kept pace with the explosion of data. In today’s “connected era,” in which billions of devices are now generating, collecting, analyzing, and sharing massive volumes of data with each other, a company’s ability to innovate is largely dependent on its ability to process all this data in a timely fashion. And one frequent obstacle to innovation is the long-standing notion that only ACID-compliant databases will satisfy the stringent requirements of data-driven Web apps. The time has come to investigate other options.

The Limitations of ACID

ACID means that database changes are “all or none” (atomic), that any change or read doesn’t interfere with others (isolated), that the result of any change is a new database state that remains fixed (durable), and that any transaction performed will take the database from one consistent state to another. These guarantees come with certain performance costs, and applications that don’t require all properties of ACID can afford to trade off some of them for higher throughput. Such applications often include those that index large numbers of documents, serve pages on high-traffic websites, or deliver streaming media. In these cases, maintaining the integrity of a transaction is secondary to completing a request as quickly as possible.

Strict adherence to ACID also leads to an increased amount of development work as the database load grows larger and the volume of data increases. Techniques such as sharding (horizontally partitioning your data using a hashing algorithm) have emerged over time to address the complications of manipulating large amounts of data, but these solutions unnecessarily influence application architecture and don’t solve the underlying problem. For example, if you’re “lucky” enough to have “big data,” and you need to change the schema, a migration could still take months to run!

Nathan Hurst’s guide to NoSQL Systems

Beyond ACID

The ACID vs. non-ACID debate is not going to be settled here and now, nor does it need to be. The purpose of this article is simply to point out that there are alternatives to ACID, and that the time has come to explore them. Why now? Several methodologies, practices and technologies have gained enough traction to encourage us to look beyond ACID-only data stores. Here are a few of them:

● Widespread adoption and validation of agile development methodologies, fostering rapid innovation and an iterative approach to feature development.

● Mature development frameworks that enable developers to connect alternative data stores more easily. This also means that projects are more likely to use different types of data stores depending on technical requirements.

● Service-oriented application design – data stores and application logic are increasingly decoupled in modern architectures, with applications developed as a collection of functional modules connected via APIs.

● The vast amounts of data gathered by social platforms – and most applications today have a social component – can often be represented more efficiently using a non-relational schema.

● Non-relational databases have matured with the guidance of early adopters and companies whose businesses would not be possible without them. Companies have also emerged to provide commercial support and development for these technologies.

The New Breed of Databases

Thanks to the open source movement and the accelerating pace of commercial development, there is no shortage of non-relational, distributed databases. Of course, each database has advantages and disadvantages, as well as specific use cases.

Before we delve into specific examples, let’s be clear about one key point: it’s a mistake to assume that non-ACID datastores make absolutely no guarantees. They simply provide a different set of them. These guarantees are governed by the “CAP Theorem,” which essentially states that you may choose any two of the following three:

● Consistency: all nodes have the same view of the data.

● Availability: every request to a non-failing node returns a response.

● Partition tolerance: system properties (consistency or availability) hold true even when the system is partitioned.

For example, you can choose to have consistency and availability, while sacrificing partition tolerance. Or choose availability and partition tolerance, so processing can continue even in the case of network failure, but decide to forgo a consistent view of your data.

An excellent summary of this concept, along with this very intuitive and useful visual guide to Non-ACID systems, has been developed by Nathan Hurst and others.

An Overview of the Current Players:

The list below summarizes key characteristics and use cases of some of the most popular non-ACID datastores.

● Riak is a Dynamo -based NoSQL database designed specifically for extreme distribution, fault tolerance and scalability. It shines in applications where even seconds of downtime are unacceptable. It has no single point of failure, scales simply and intelligently, and makes data highly available for use in read and write-intensive Web applications. Commercial support is available from Basho.

● Redis, sponsored by VMware, is an open source, disk-backed, in-memory data store written in C. It is a datatype server, so it provides highly optimized operations on sets, lists, arrays, etc. Redis is extremely fast and easy to set up; it may not be best for large databases, but it’s a great choice for rapidly changing data with a DB size that fits in RAM.

● MongoDB is a document-oriented database written in C++. It provides schema-free databases that store JSON documents in binary format. It is extremely popular and remarkably easy to get running. MongoDB offers automatic failover when replicated in a set, and its single-master, low-concurrency read performance benchmarks are impressive. MongoDB is a good choice for read-heavy applications where all data fits in RAM. Commercial support is available from 10 gen.

● CouchDB: Another open source, document-oriented store, CouchDB is written mostly in Erlang and is designed for local replication and horizontal scaling across a wide range of devices. Like MongoDB, CouchDB is easy to use, but it has a more robust replication model and greater data consistency guarantees than MongoDB.

● Membase/CouchBase: CouchBase Server is the result of a Memcache company and a CouchDB company joining forces. In its Membase mode, it is optimized for storing data for highly interactive Web applications. It provides a high-speed distributed key/value store that is extremely performant and very easy to set up. In its Couchbase mode, it offers the same data persistence, clustering, and flexible replication modes of CouchDB. Commercial support is available from Couchbase.

● Neo4j is a popular open source database that is optimized to represent graph relationships. Implemented in Java, it is an embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than tables—meaning that operations that traverse a network are fast. Neo4j is developed by Neo Technology, a startup based in Malmo, Sweden and Menlo Park, CA.

● Cassandra is a column-based DB designed to handle very large amounts of data spread out across many servers with no single point of failure. Cassandra is a NoSQL solution initially developed by Facebook to power its Inbox Search feature.[1] An industrial-strength DB, it is best for write-heavy applications. Cassandra can be a bit cumbersome to set up and manage, but commercial versions make this task easier. Commercial support is available from DataStax and Acunu.

● Hadoop is an open source software framework with an entire ecosystem of tools, languages and knowledge. Inspired by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers, Hadoop is best for heavy analytics and processing of vast amounts of data. It is extremely mature and battle-tested. Commercial support is available from Cloudera, HortonWorks and MapR, among others.

Simplifying Exploration of New Database Options

Without question, ACID is an essential requirement for certain types of applications and will continue to find usage. But there is an increased understanding of the potential of non-ACID databases and the opportunities they provide in improving performance in Web applications that don’t require transactional guarantees.

As the evidence continues to accumulate regarding the benefits of non-ACID databases, it’s important to ask yourself, as part of your requirements analysis, whether one of these databases might be a better tool for the job at hand. You should also consider whether a combination of tools is the best solution, mixing ACID and non-ACID data stores as appropriate.

Learn More: Suggested Reading and Upcoming Events

For additional discussion of the topics covered in this article, please read the following publications and blogs.

● Alex Popescu’s myNoSQL: http ://nosql .mypopescu .com /

● NoSQL Tapes: http ://nosqltapes .com /

● Basho’s video resources ( http ://basho .com /resources /videos / ) The basho speakers are fantastic. You’ll always learn something new from them.

● InfoQ NoSQL presentations. Great collection at /a>

● 10gen’s videos and presentations: http ://www .10 gen .com /presentation s

● Kristóf Kovács NoSQL comparison http ://kkovacs .eu /cassandra -vs -mongodb -vs -couchdb -vs -redis

In addition, the following events and meetups are highly recommended:

● Boundary tech talks (great place to learn about distributed systems): http ://www .meetup .com /Boundary -Tech -Talks /

● Riak Meetup: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Riak-Meetup/

● MongoDB Meetups: http ://www .meetup .com /San -Francisco -MongoDB -User -Group

● Cassandra Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Cassandra-User-Group/

● HBase: http://www.meetup.com/hbaseusergroup/

● SF Graph DBs: http://www.meetup.com/graphdb/

● Couchbase: http ://www .meetup .com /The -San -Francisco -Couchbase -Meetup -Group /

{Editors Note: This is a guest post by Ines Sombra, Data Engineer, Engine Yard.

Ines Sombra is a data engineer at Engine Yard, where she and her team are investing heavily in solutions that help customers create, deploy and scale Big Data Web apps. Ines is a co-organizer of the Dallas Ft. Worth Big Data group and a member of RailsBridge in San Francisco. }

Guest Post: Unshackling Your Data-driven Web Apps is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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Symantec Code Leak Happens Where Sidewalk Ends in Law Enforcement Sting Attempt

Kit Dotson — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:47:23 +0000

The source code stolen from Symantec in 2006 has been waiting in limbo for the past month as part of a hostage negotiation between the hacker Yama Tough and a persona invented by law enforcement officials to attempt to get the hacker to reveal themselves. This story first began to unfold back in January when it was discovered that Symantec had lost old source code (ancient in terms of software development) and that it was about to go onto the Internet.

Negotiations ended recently with the 1.27 gigabytes of source code released Monday night, claimed to be source from Symantec’s PCAnywhere. The company also makes Norton Antivirus, they warned users to disable PCAnywhere until they patched it (which happened earlier this month.) Thus, this leak may have little to do effect on the market altogether.

What really looks interesting about this is the saga of the sting and the involvement of law enforcement.

It all starts with a persona generated by law enforcement under the pretense of being a Symantec staffer offering $50,000 to not release the code. This started a month-long drama with the hacker Yama Tough, part of the Anonymous hactivist collective and also a member of the now notorious Lords of Dharamaja.

“You won’t believe it but Symantec offered us money to keep quiet,” YamaTough wrote on Twitter. “And quess what they couldn’t make it over 50k for the whole range of their src shit, therefore the show starts as of tuday.”

Of course we know now that the supposed Symantec staffer, “Sam Thomas,” is really a false identity used to attempt to lure the Lords of Dharamaja out and get them to reveal the code and perhaps set themselves up for arrest. The entire conversation that Yama Tough had with who they believed to be Symantec had been with law enforcement.

Over the weeks, a protracted negotiation for the $50k amount began to draw out. While the amount had been agreed upon YamaTough and cohorts would not accept it in small increments over time, they wanted it all at once in a lump sum or not at all. The hacker offered a Liberty Reserve account for the extorted money, refusing to accept PayPal transfers (possibly because of how easily it could be traced or stopped.) During the negotiations YamaTough revealed suspicions by accounting a belief that Symantec was working with the FBI.

We know now all of this had been for naught: the code is now leaked onto the Internet via BitTorrent.

Symantec is still poring over the leaked code. They still maintain that the code is way out of date, and a spokesperson for the company has stated that they believe that the recent patches will protect customers.

“We’re able to say with high confidence,” said Cris Paden of Symantec to Forbes, “any type of cyber attacks generated by this attack would have old characteristics and look like an attack from 2006 that can easily be stopped using current versions of our solutions. Our customers are protected.”

The saga may be over with the leak of the code, but the next step will be the cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and the Lords of Dharamaja. Symantec has told the media that the cannot comment on what they know about any evidence revealed or the strategy of law enforcement.

“As to what happens next,” Paden says. “We’re not really sure.”

For those curious, the entire e-mail chain between YamaTough and the false Symantec employee persona is available on Pastebin.com.

Symantec Code Leak Happens Where Sidewalk Ends in Law Enforcement Sting Attempt is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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