Deluxe Electronic Countdown Game

Countdown was the first ever show on Channel 4 when it launched in November 1982, and since then has built up a cult following.
In the show, contestants score points by forming the longest words, reaching the targets in the numbers games, and being the first to solve the nine-letter Conundrum.
And now you can play the game at home, with this Electronic Countdown game which emulates the popular show.

Play the three famous games - word, number and conundrum - exactly as on the TV show.
For the words rounds, the game will select random letters according to the players' choices of vowels and consonants.
For the numbers rounds, the game emulates CECIL ("Countdown's Electronic Calculator In Leeds") by generating a three digit number for contestants to reach from a selection of numbers also chosen at random.
The final conundrum round is achieved using the games internal database of words from the Oxford Dictionary of English.
The large 3-line LCD display makes play easy for all to see, and 15 separate LED lights act as the countdown.
Also includes hall of fame feature, fast intuitive entry system, high quality sound effects (taken from the TV game show) and Countdown theme tune.
Suitable for 1 or 2 players (or teams). Includes batteries.

Z28 Chevrolet Camaro LS1 V8 Sports Coupe

Z28 Chevrolet Camarore LS1 V8 Sports Coupe

The MK IV Chevrolet Camaro retained the same layout as the very first Camaro's back in 1967, 2-doors, 2+2 seating, rear-wheel drive, choice of V6 and V8 powerplants, and available in both coupe and convertible forms (the convertible was introduced in 1994).
The fourth-generation Chevrolet Camaro debuted for the 1993 model year on the previous generation Camaro platform.

Z28 Chevrolet Camarore LS1 V8 Sports Coupe

The MK4 Camaro featured the 5.7 L (350 cid) LT1 V8 engine that had been introduced in the Corvette one year earlier, as well as an optional six-speed manual transmission. The 1998 model year was refreshed and revised with both exterior and engine changes. Replacing the LT1 was GM's all-new 5.7 L (346 cid) LS1 which had been introduced with the Corvette C5.
The Camaro is to return in 2009 however as a retro styled sports coupe.
The fourth-gen Camaro would last up through the 2002 model year, at which point production was stopped due to slow sales.

VeriSign Sells Mobile Messaging Unit

VeriSign continues to streamline its operations and has sold its European mobile messaging business to Sinon Invest Holding for an undisclosed amount.

VeriSign had purchased the mobile messaging company in 2006 from 3united Mobile Solutions for more than $65 million. The messaging business employs about 100 people, and it has been rebranding into Mobile Messaging Solutions, or MMS. The company said it will continue to work on mobile commerce, SMS, and mobile content products.


There also will be a strategic shift to target new markets, executives said. The messaging company has a strong footprint in Austria, but it will expand its presence to Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The company also will continue to target large communications and media companies, but there will be a stronger push to service smaller players.

"We will shortly be launching some special mobile applications to the market that will also appeal to smaller companies which previously had no access to the possibilities of mobile marketing and its adaption to consumers for reasons linked to costs or know-how," said Harald Weinberger, the CTO of MMS, in a statement.

This is the latest move by VeriSign to sell off its noncore assets, as the company said it wants to focus on its core businesses of Internet infrastructure, domain registry, online security, and identity protection. Last October, the company sold its remaining share of the mobile content company Jamba/Jamster to News Corp. for $200 million, and it's in the process of selling as many as 12 noncore divisions.

But that doesn't mean VeriSign won't be active with acquisitions if the right opportunity presents itself, as the company recently purchased security specialist Certicom for about $72 million.

Find out what else is happening in the mobile messaging space with an independent analysis from InformationWeek. Download the report (registration required).



source: informationweek

Microsoft Argues UAC Isn't A Vulnerability

One of the criticisms of the User Account Control under Windows Vista is that its warning prompts are annoying.
Microsoft on Thursday moved to clarify what it characterized as "misconceptions" about its Windows User Account Control, a security feature introduced in Windows Vista to control the privilege level at which software can operate.

Last month, Microsoft published a blog post explaining changes to the way UAC will work under Windows 7. It said the company's forthcoming operating system would have fewer UAC warning prompts and offer users greater control over UAC.
One of the criticisms of UAC under Windows Vista is that its warning prompts are annoying.

In the past week, Windows bloggers Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng have published several posts claiming that UAC is flawed because the effort to make UAC less annoying makes it more vulnerable to being disabled by malware.

On Thursday, Microsoft's Jon DeVaan, senior VP of the Windows Core Operating System Division, published a blog post to address UAC's detractors.

"The first issue to untangle is about the difference between malware making it onto a PC and being run, versus what it can do once it is running," he said. "There has been no report of a way for malware to make it onto a PC without consent. All of the feedback so far concerns the behavior of UAC once malware has found its way onto the PC and is running. Microsoft's position that the reports about UAC do not constitute a vulnerability is because the reports have not shown a way for malware to get onto the machine in the first place without express consent."

DeVaan also tried to convey that UAC under Windows 7 will be more functional than under Vista because it will offer users more settings. In Vista, he said, there were only two choices: never being notified and always being notified. To avoid the annoyance of constant notification, Windows users couldn't dial down the volume; they had to set UAC to never notify them about system changes. And this prevented UAC from informing users about risks.

Because UAC in Windows 7 includes four notification options, DeVaan expects it will prove more functional.

DeVaan concludes his post with a plea for understanding. "While we cannot implement features the way each and every one of you might wish, we are listening and making a sincere effort to properly weigh all points of view," he said. "Our goal is to create a useful, usable, and secure Windows for all types of people."



source: informationweek

Ubuntu Gaining Corporate Credibility, Canonical Survey Finds

Ubuntu appears to be gaining greater acceptance among both smaller and larger businesses as a growing number of IT shops are deploying the open source operating system as part of mission-critical applications.

In a joint survey conducted by Canonical, caretakers of Ubuntu, and market researcher RedMonk, approximately 7,000 respondents said they were using the server-based version of the operating system in many mission-critical applications involving the Web, databases, and mail.

Stephen O'Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk, said he wasn't particularly surprised that Ubuntu was gaining credibility among business users.

What was unexpected was the wide range of workloads it has become an integral part of.

Ubuntu "is far from being relegated to a niche role. The distribution is now being leveraged for a variety of enterprise tasks going all the way from the mundane to the critical," O'Grady said.

What has made the server-based version of Ubuntu more appealing to a wider range of business users, according to O'Grady and Ubuntu officials, is a broader mix of standard open source components and more widely popular components than its archrivals Red Hat and Novell. The fact Canonical has focused on making the installation of these components easier hasn't hurt either.

"I think we have pulled together some of the best components that are available out there and have worked on making them easier to install. Our goal is to have business embrace the best of open source at the core of their businesses while also having their choice of proprietary applications that can run on top of it," said Steve George, Canonical's director of corporate services.

While Red Hat and Novell remain the market-share leaders among server-based open source distributors, O'Grady believes Ubuntu is beginning to establish significant mindshare among users. He said the company will look to further strengthen its server-based offering sometime this spring, when it's expected to deliver an updated version, code-named Jaunty Jackalope, which will feature support for virtualization technologies.


source: informationweek

Google Latitude Spurs Privacy Backlash

Google's new Latitude location-sharing service "could be a gift to stalkers, prying employers, jealous partners, and obsessive friends," Privacy International warned Thursday.

Google introduced Latitude on Wednesday. It's a new Google Maps feature that lets users share location data with friends, using either a mobile phone or Google Gears-equipped computer.

Google knows well that it has a privacy problem, exemplified by its quixotic campaign last summer to avoid adding a link on its home page to its privacy policy. It uses sensitive data to make its products better and to figure out how to personalize ads and search. Too much privacy threatens Google's business model.
Its competitors know this, too, which is why Microsoft and Yahoo have been engaged in a game of data-retention one-upmanship.

To dispel anticipated privacy concerns, Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering on Google's mobile team, tried to reassure potential Latitude users that Google designed the service so that users are in control. "Fun aside, we recognize the sensitivity of location data, so we've built fine-grained privacy controls right into the application," he said. "Everything about Latitude is opt-in. You not only control exactly who gets to see your location, but you also decide the location that they see."

Nonetheless, Privacy International said it had identified "a major security flaw in Google's global phone tracking system." The group's choice of such sinister terminology -- "phone tracking" sounds scarier than "location sharing" -- to describe Latitude hints at its history of antagonism with Google. In 2007, Simon Davies, director of the organization, wrote an open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt accusing the company of spreading rumors that the group was in the pocket of Microsoft and demanding an apology.

In the letter, Davies denies that Privacy International has a vested interest in attacking Google and says that the group has been critical of Microsoft, Amazon.com, and eBay, too. He speculates that Google's disparagement of his organization arose from its poor ranking in the group's 2007 Internet privacy survey.

Privacy International concedes that Google had made some effort to address privacy concerns. But it considers these safeguards useless "if Latitude could be enabled by a second party without a user's knowledge or consent."

As the organization puts it, the "danger arises when a second party can gain physical access to a user's phone and enable Latitude without the owner's knowledge."

Broadcom Adds Wireless Drivers To Android

Broadcom said Thursday it has included software to control its wireless combo chips in the standard Android platform.

Many smartphones have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM capabilities, but some still use separate chips to utilize these technologies. Broadcom has the largest portfolio of wireless chips that combine the three technologies on a single silicon die.

Integrating drivers for its chips directly into the Android platform should make it easier for handset manufacturers to have devices that feature strong multimedia and data applications.
The move also will give Broadcom an advantage over its rivals, as it could save cell phone manufacturers on integration costs.

"Two of the most exciting trends in the handset industry are the growing popularity of Android and the transition to combo chips for connectivity," said Chris Bergey, director of Broadcom's embedded WLAN line of business, in a statement. "As a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance, we are committed to advancing the Android platform by contributing our software and facilitating greater access to our combination chips in the open source community. We expect a plethora of products and applications to evolve from the connected Android platform in the not-so-distant future."

Future Android handsets could benefit from this move from a design perspective as well. While the T-Mobile G1 has been relatively well-received, many said the somewhat-chunky exterior wasn't very appealing. By using combo chips, cell phone manufacturers could create sleeker Android handsets that may appeal to the casual consumer.

While the G1 is the only Android-powered handset available now, there will be a plethora of smartphones utilizing Google's mobile operating system by the end of the year. Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and HTC are all expected to release multiple devices on various carriers this year.

For enterprises, keeping mobile devices functioning without interruption and giving customers the service they expect are paramount. InformationWeek has published five important steps on this topic. Download the report here (registration required).

Fixing Linux: What's Broken And What To Do About It

Despite the fact that it's been around since 1991, Linux remains a work in progress. It's not perfect, nor does anyone pretend it is. The places where it needs the most immediate improvement are also a matter of debate: what's crucially important to some is only marginally important to others.

Still, there's no question that there are key areas where Linux is lacking -- not just missing individual features, but things that are actively dysfunctional and which need immediate attention. I'm going to run down several major areas where Linux, as an operating system and as a platform, needs work.
The software that goes into a Linux distribution is dealt with in chunks called "packages" -- whole applications, support libraries for apps, programmer's tools, and so on. Firefox and OpenOffice.org, for instance, are present in most every Linux distribution's software repository as package sets.

Package Management

The way packages are managed within any individual distribution is entirely up to the maintainers of that distribution. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) uses its own RPM system, the Debian distributions have their own .DEB format; and so on. Within the context of any one distribution, this isn't a problem: if you're using only Red Hat or Debian, odds are you obtain the software you need from that distribution's repository and are done with it.

This is one of the many fragmentation problems that makes it difficult for commercial software vendors to offer their products for Linux. No one package format will do the trick across distributions -- not without hassle, anyway.

To that end, potential program vendors have three choices: 1) devote time and effort -- and money -- to ensuring that their program installs, runs, and stays cohesive on a variety of distributions (maybe just Red Hat, Ubuntu, and SUSE to keep things simple); 2) make their programs available in a given distro's repositories; or 3) provide source-code packages so that the user can compile the code on any target platform.

Option #3 is pretty much out of the question for any proprietary software vendor. #1 multiplies the amount of work involved to get any given program out the door -- not to a degree that makes it wholly unfeasible, but it does add more work. That leaves #2, which has the advantage of making applications immediately available to the user of any given distribution, and cuts down on the amount of work needed by an end user to get something installed.

Because the demand for commercial apps on Linux is relatively slender right now, the problem isn't as pronounced: most people just get their offerings from their local repository. In the long run, though, if commercial apps take root on Linux, it will become that much bigger an obstacle to making Linux a platform for same, especially where downloading apps freely from the Web is concerned.


source: informationweek

HP Blurs Data Center Lines With Server/Switch

Hewlett-Packard today released an embedded server blade that fits into higher-end ProCurve switches and a combined virtualization and network management technology. The new products blur the lines among the roles various vendors and devices play in the data center.

The server blade, the Open Network Ecosystem Services zl Module, is HP's answer to Cisco's Application Extension platform, which can run Cisco or third-party Linux apps on Cisco Integrated Services routers. ONE's initial apps include a co-developed Microsoft/HP network security and identity server, MacAfee network security, Avaya unified communications, F5 application acceleration, and Riverbed WAN optimization.

The program is open, meaning that anyone who wants to run an app on the services module (whatever the operating system) can do so. "ProCurve ONE is all about removing complexity," Matt Zanner, worldwide director of data center networking for HP ProCurve, said in an interview. "If the customer is interested in tying apps closer to the network infrastructure, they shouldn't be limited by whatever the vendor is offering or by the limited scope of the network provider's given partner program."

HP's been successful with low-end switches against Cisco in recent years, but its success here is predicated on HP's formidable data center sales team being able to sell IT managers on its higher-end switches partially by playing up HP's server expertise. HP may soon come up against another move by Cisco, which is expected to soon announce its own new server, code-named California, but HP hopes to push the envelope, too. "There's a lot of work going on between ProCurve and the other businesses within [HP's technology systems group] to make sure HP as a whole can deliver better, faster, stronger, more integrated solutions over time," Zanner said.

The ONE module isn't simply a repackaged HP server blade, but HP did leverage server components and expertise to build it. It includes an Intel Core 2 Duo chipset, 4 GB of memory, and a 250-GB hard drive. Future plans include introducing virtualization, new form factors, and closer coupling with management. The ONE module lists at $5,995 and fits into ProCurve's 5400zl and 8200-series switches.

HP's also announcing ProCurve Data Center Connection Manager, which automatically provisions network and server resources based on policies and helps data center managers and network managers work together on the deployment of networked computing resources. It's a smaller subset of some of the data center automation tools found in HP's Opsware products.

Data Center Connection Manager helps automate some of these policies and procedures that would typically be handled manually and separately by network and server admins through features like a digital inventory of defined network connections and the policies associated with those connections. "It ties together provisioning and managing," Zanner said. DCCM will be available in April.

source: informationweek

Google Claims Data Center Energy Savings

Thanks to cool weather and ongoing efforts to optimize its data centers, Google reports that its data center energy efficiency improved during the fourth quarter of last year.

In October, Google claimed that its data centers use "nearly five times less energy" than conventional data centers to power and cool servers.

On Tuesday, Google announced further improvement in its data center efficiency metric -- Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE.

PUE is a measure of total facility power usage divided by power consumed by IT equipment. With a PUE of 2.0, for example -- a typical industry figure -- for every watt consumed by servers, an additional watt is required to cool the equipment and to distribute power. Using less power for cooling and overhead brings the PUE number closer to 1, which represents perfect efficiency.

In the fourth quarter, "our average power and cooling overhead in these facilities was 16%, bringing the overhead for the trailing 12 months to 19% (down from 21% a quarter earlier)," said Urs Holzle, Google's senior VP of operations, in a blog post. "For comparison, a recent EPA report put the overhead of the average enterprise data center at 100% or higher" (PUE of 2.0 or higher).

Google's quarterly energy-weighted average PUE fell to 1.16 from 1.22 in the third quarter. As a point of comparison, Sun Microsystems in April said that its data center in Santa Clara, Calif., had achieved a PUE of 1.28.

Microsoft in December discussed plans for its Generation 4 Modular Data Center, which the company hopes will deliver an average PUE of 1.125 by 2012.

While Google's energy efficiency is widely admired, some see spin in the company's numbers. For instance, Google explains on its data center efficiency Web page that "we only show data for facilities with an actual IT load above 5MW, to eliminate any inaccuracies that can occur when measuring small values."

The author of the Tech Hermit blog, who doesn't identify himself but claims to have spent his career working in data centers, suggested in October that Google's statistical selectivity is a way to eliminate numbers that would make the company's average PUE worse. He argued that Google's numbers are further skewed by the company's decision not to include in its measurement of hardware power usage things like electrical losses in a server's power cord.

Google plans to disclose further information about its data center energy usage at the CeBIT Conference in Germany in March, Holzle said.

sourc: informationweek

Cisco Outlook Misses Expectations; May Cut Jobs

John Chambers said the company would continue a cost-cutting process that could result in a loss of 1,500 to 2,000 jobs.

* Sees Q3 rev down 15-20 pct, below expectations
* May cut 1,500-2,000 jobs but no plans for mass layoffs
* Fiscal Q2 revenue $9.1 bln, market expected $9.0 bln
* Q2 EPS ex-items $0.32, beats market's view of $0.30
* Shares down 4 pct on Q3 outlook

NEW YORK - Cisco Systems Inc Chief Executive John Chambers forecast a far sharper drop in current-quarter revenue than Wall Street had expected, and said the network equipment maker may cut up to 2,000 jobs as economic weakness spreads.

The forecast Wednesday pushed Cisco shares down 4 percent in after-hours trade, overshadowing its stronger-than-expected quarterly results. It also dragged down Nasdaq and Standard & Poor's 500 index futures, suggesting some turbulence could hit the tech sector Thursday.


Chambers told analysts on a conference call that he expects revenue in the current, fiscal third quarter to fall 15 percent to 20 percent from a year ago. That compared with the average analyst forecast for a 10.5 percent fall to $8.8 billion.

He said economic weakness had spread beyond the United States and Europe, with revenue from emerging markets falling 11 percent in the fiscal second quarter ended Jan. 24.

Low visibility in the current economic environment meant it was one of the most difficult periods in his career for making financial forecasts, Chambers said.

He said the company, which ended the quarter with more than 67,318 employees, would continue a cost-cutting process that could result in a loss of 1,500 to 2,000 jobs.

Chambers said Cisco was not considering mass layoffs at this time, but he warned that it may become necessary depending on the economy. The CEO said he considered job cuts of 10 percent of workers as a mass layoff.

Cisco's results and outlook are closely watched as an early indicator of changes in technology spending. The company is one of the first in the tech sector to report results that include most of January.

LONG-TERM GROWTH

Tighter credit and a hazy economic outlook has made it harder for companies to invest in big-ticket technology items such as Cisco's routers. A Cisco CRS-1, for example, costs around $500,000 to $1 million.

Cisco and other network equipment makers have said until recently that growing use of the Internet, particularly online video, would help shelter them from the recession.

But sluggish consumer spending has hit U.S. phone and cable service providers much harder than many had expected. Top U.S. phone companies AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc have said they are trimming capital spending in 2009.

Net profit in Cisco's fiscal second quarter fell to $1.5 billion, or 26 cents per share, from $2.1 billion, or 33 cents a share. Profit excluding items fell to 32 cents a share from 38 cents, exceeding the market's average forecast of 30 cents a share according to Reuters Estimates.

Revenue fell 7.5 percent to $9.1 billion, the first year-on-year decline since 2003, as the economic downturn forced companies to cut back on technology spending.

Wall Street analysts on average had expected revenue of $9.0 billion, according to Reuters Estimates. In November, Cisco forecast a 5 to 10 percent year-on-year decline.

Chambers said that assuming the economy returned to a normal growth rate, Cisco was keeping its long-term target for annual revenue growth of 12 percent to 17 percent.

Cisco shares fell 4.4 percent to $15.14 in extended trade after closing at $15.84 in regular Nasdaq trade. Before the quarterly outlook, its shares had risen nearly 2 percent on the stronger-than-expected results. (Additional reporting by Sinead Carew and Robert MacMillan; editing by Richard Chang and Tiffany Wu) (ritsuko.ando@thomsonreuters.com; +1 646 223 6084; Reuters Messaging: ritsuko.ando.reuters.com@reuters.net)

resource: informationweek

Vodafone Sees $14.9 Billion In Sales

The world's largest cell phone provider has yet to be damaged by the staggering economy, as Vodafone said it had recorded about $14.9 billion in sales last quarter.

The mobile operator beat industry expectations with this revenue, and it was helped by exchange rates, the company said. Vodafone had good results in Italy, Germany, southern Africa, India, and the United Kingdom.

The company also saw service revenue rise 27.9% in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East areas, with record customer growth in India. The company said its 289 million customers were using their phones more, as there was a 10.3% rise in minutes used.



Verizon Wireless, of which Vodafone owns a significant portion, was also a bright spot as it saw service revenue rise 12.2% and data revenue go up 49.4%. The carrier is now the largest U.S. cellular phone service provider following the $28.1 billion acquisition of Alltel, and it continues to court smartphone users with the release of handsets like the Samsung Omnia.

Vodafone also benefitted from the release of the first touch-screen smartphone from Research In Motion, as the BlackBerry Storm sold well in the U.S. and U.K. markets. With its apt browser and multimedia capabilities, the Storm also drove data revenue.

"In the context of the current economic environment, we have continued to implement our strategy, with an emphasis on customer value, mobile data, enterprise, and fixed broadband," CEO Vittorio Colao said in a statement. "This has driven increased usage, 25% organic growth in data revenue, and over 280,000 fixed broadband additions in Europe."

Vodafone said it has made good progress in its cost-cutting measures, which should save the company more than $700 million by the end of the 2010 financial year. This restructuring will be widespread, and Vodafone said it would lead to an unnamed number of job cuts.


source: informationweek

IBM Offers To Move Laid Off Workers To India

Big Blue wants to help redundant U.S. employees relocate to developing markets, according to an internal document.
The climate is warm, there's no shortage of exotic food, and the cost of living is rock bottom. That's IBM's pitch to the laid-off American workers it's offering to place in India. The catch: Wages in the country are pennies-on-the-dollar compared to U.S. salaries.

Under a program called Project Match, IBM will help workers laid off from domestic sites obtain travel and visa assistance for countries in which Big Blue has openings. Mostly that's developing markets like India, China, and Brazil.



"IBM has established Project Match to help you locate potential job opportunities in growth markets where your skills are in demand," IBM says in an internal notice on the initiative. "Should you accept a position in one of these countries, IBM offers financial assistance to offset moving costs, provides immigration support, such as visa assistance, and other support to help ease the transition of an international move."

The document states that the program is limited to "satisfactory performers who have been notified of separation from IBM U.S. or Canada and are willing to work on local terms and conditions." The latter indicates that workers will be paid according to prevailing norms in the countries to which they relocate. In many cases, that could be substantially less than what they earned in North America.

IBM has laid off more than 4,000 workers in the United States since the beginning of January, according to an employee group. The company has confirmed layoffs but won't comment on specific numbers.

A spokesman for Alliance@IBM, a workers' group that's affiliated with the Communications Workers of America but which does not have official union status at IBM, slammed the program. "IBM is not only offshoring IBM U.S. jobs but they want employees to offshore themselves through Project Match," said the spokesman.

An IBM spokesman said the program shouldn't be seen in that light. "It's more of a vehicle for people who want to expand their life experience by working somewhere else," said the spokesman. "A lot of people want to work in India."

In addition to India, China, and Brazil, IBM is offering to relocate redundant U.S. workers to a number of other developing markets, including Mexico, the Czech Republic, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates, according to the notice, which was obtained Monday by InformationWeek.


source: informationweek

Dell Adding Virtualization Software To PowerEdge

Dell will offer Xsigo Systems' input/output technology as an option for Dell PowerEdge servers and storage products.

The Xsigo I/O Director is a software dashboard that lets IT pros manage I/O resources across multiple servers and storage products. Configuration changes are executed in software rather than hardware, which the vendor says provides more flexibility than physical I/O ports by enabling the deployment of resources on an as-needed basis. Director operates over IP and Fibre Channel.

Xsigo claims its technology can help overcome I/O performance problems caused by running a lot of virtual machines on one server. Solving the weakness makes virtualization more useful for both production servers and end-user applications in the data center.



source: informationweek



Beyond I/O, security is an area that still needs improvement to make virtualization more valuable to businesses.

Nevertheless, virtualization has reached a "tipping point" in the data center. This year, slightly more than half of businesses are expected to have at least two years of experience implementing the technology, and 45% of servers are expected to be virtualized, according to Forrester Research.

According to Xsigo, its I/O infrastructure, when compared with traditional server I/O, offers 30% less power consumption; 70% fewer I/O cards, cables, and switch ports; and predictable I/O bandwidth to applications via hardware-enforced quality of service.

Pricing for the Xsigo system starts at $30,000. More information is available on Dell's Web site.

PHP Vendor Zend Names Co-Founder As CEO (2)

The second-most-popular programming language on the Web is Microsoft's .Net, with Sun's Java third. Other scripting languages, now often called dynamic languages because they compile at runtime, come next, such as Perl, Python, and CGI.

Gutmans said he and Zeev Suraski took Personal Home Page, a simple scripting language created by Rasmus Lerdoff, and wrote a new parser for it, producing the 3.0 version of PHP in 1997. It would go on to become a language that was a favorite of Web site application developers. It powers 20 million sites and has a base of more than 5 million developers, according to information on the Zend Web site.



Gutmans has worked closely with Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM to make sure PHP interfaces to their databases and other products. PHP itself is in the hands of large and broadly based open source project at www.php.net. He's a member of the Apache Foundation and sits on the Eclipse open source programmers workbench board of directors.

"PHP development has always been very focused and Web-specific," Gutmans said. It's a language that can be used by both hobbyists and professional developers. Part of Zend's added value to PHP is the Zend Engine, which takes byte code from the PHP parser and runs it as compiled code, in a manner similar to the Java Virtual Machine. Compiled code runs faster than straight scripting language code, which must go through an interpreter at runtime. Scripting languages, including PHP, are able to deal with a wider variety of data types than Java and combine functions involving different types of data more easily than more structured languages.

PHP Vendor Zend Names Co-Founder As CEO (1)

Zend Technologies, supplier of a PHP integrated development environment and a PHP application server, has turned to a company co-founder as its new CEO.

Andi Gutmans, formerly CTO and senior VP of R&D and negotiator of alliances, has agreed to take the top post.

He replaces Harold Goldberg, who came to Zend two years ago from a post as senior marketing manager with BMC Software. Goldberg was hired to lead Zend in a new, more business-oriented direction. He has left to pursue other opportunities, a company spokesperson said.

"Zend is at an inflection point, with its participation in Eclipse [an open source programmer's workbench] and its large customer base," Gutmans said in an interview. In today's economy, he said, Web site builders "are looking for a lower-cost solution. PHP is the less-expensive alternative to Java."



Mark Burton, a former executive VP of sales at MySQL AB, was named Zend's executive chairman. Cameron Lester, a Zend director, said in an announcement of the change: "Gutmans' vision and execution skills have played a key role in guiding the company's strategy and have supported HP's phenomenal growth. ... With Andi's appointment as CEO, we are now confident that Zend has the leadership team in place to accelerate the execution of its growth strategy."

Lester is a partner at Azure Capital Partners, a VC backer of Zend, along with Index Ventures. Zend is still privately held and doesn't report revenue. Gutmans said in an interview that if MySQL AB still existed as an independent company, Zend with 140 employees, would be "nipping at its heels" revenue-wise. "MySQL was a slightly bigger private open source company," he said. Sun Microsystems purchased MySQL for $1 billion last April.

Zend sells the $399 Zend Studio, an integrated development environment for PHP, and offers commercial support for the tool. It also sells by annual subscriptions starting at $1,500 the Zend Platform, an application server for PHP apps. Both generate revenue as PHP has become the most popular language in which to develop Web applications. Gutmans said more than one-third of all Web apps are written in PHP. "We call it the Visual Basic of the Web," he said. PHP applications run on a Web server, with the output generated as HTML Web pages.


source: informationweek

Google News Now Available For Any Web Site

Despite the resentment many media companies feel toward Google for thriving while they decline, the search giant isn't deaf to the agony of dwindling ad revenue or of audiences migrating online.

In a move that may throw a bit more revenue toward distressed news organizations, Google on Tuesday said that stories culled from its news aggregation service, Google News, can now be embedded on any Web site.



"The world is a quickly changing place and it's getting harder and harder to stay on top of the news," said Google's Adam Feldman in a blog post. "With this in mind, we've just released a Google News-based element for Webmasters and developers. This makes it easy to integrate headlines and previews from Google News into any Web page, and for newspapers to reach new audiences across the Web."

Google is providing an online form that it's calling a NewsShow Wizard to help site owners generate the HTML code required to embed Google News on their Web pages. The generated code displays a slide show of Google News headlines based on chosen keywords. Here's an example of how it works using the keyword "teleportation".
Google News is one of the most popular news sites, along with Yahoo News and AOL News. Google does not generate revenue from Google News directly, but it generates revenue for the publishers of the stories that it aggregates by sending visitors who click through Google News links to their news sites. This makes Google News an important strategic partner for online news organizations. Though online publishers may dislike their growing dependence on Google News for referral traffic, they stand to gain if making Google News embeddable brings more visitors to Google News and thence to their sites.

Google has avoided placing ads on Google News in part to avoid claims that it's trying to profit from copyrighted content, a common complaint against a variety of Google's services. The company has maintained that any service that increases Internet usage benefits it indirectly, but syndicating Google News slide shows to Web site publishers also could increase visitor engagement, leading to more exposure for any Google AdSense ads on the site.

source: Informatinweek

NYSE and BIDS Trading Scan for Blocks in Light and Dark Pools (3)

Tabb said the NYSE is trying to get the floor back into the business of matching trades. "The liquidity on the floor has been fairly block-oriented. The problem isbecause most of the flow now is algorithmic, they can't interact with the stuff," says Tabb. "So the floor brokers have to put orders into reserve and use algorithms. They wind up getting lots of little fills and they're not as effective as if they traded larger blocks," explained Tabb. "They're trying to make the floor more relevant," said Tabb, adding they're trying to reconstitute the block business on the floor of the exchange. "And in this environment, folks are looking for ways to reconstitute order flow. Now whether the genie is out of the bottle and algorithms will completely eliminate the desire for any type of block," is the question, Tabb said. "The question is will it succeed and I think we'll know that in a couple of months," said Tabb.


In a conference call reviewing dark pools trends in 2008, Joe Gawronski, president and COO of Rosenblatt Securities, an institutional broker dealer that is an NYSE member, noted that exchanges are interacting more with dark pools and he expects this trend to continue in 2009.

"A particularly intriguing example of this convergence is the New York Block Exchange," said Gawronski, noting that it integrates its own block orders with the public and reserve order books of the NYSE. "It's the first time anyone has delivered on the powerful concept of marrying block discovery with a primary market that discovers prices rather than executing everything at the midpoint of the NBBO." Gawronski added NYBX merits watching in 2009.

sumber: http://www.advancedtrading.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213001260

NYSE and BIDS Trading Scan for Blocks in Light and Dark Pools(2)

Instead of executing stock at the midpoint or at the inside, a key benefit is that NYBX is aggregating liquidity across multiple price points, said Mecane. This allows someone who might be willing to pay more to buy stock across several price points, he said. If someone is willing to pay up five cents to get 50 million or100 million shares done, NYBX could aggregate liquidity across multiple price points in an exchange environment. For example, if there was an order to buy 20,000 shares at 10.02, and the NYSE has sell orders of 10,000 at $10 and 10,000 at 10.02, NYBX would aggregate the two trades on the sell side in order to pair them off against the buy side, said Mecane. Under Reg NMS, NYBX has an obligation to first take out the best prices available on other exchanges, before it could print at any price level outside of the prevailing market.



Operated as a facility of the NYSE, NYBX is jointly owned by the NYSE Euronext and BIDS. Tim Mahoney, CEO of BIDS Trading, said that people should think of NYBX as a middleman or aggregator between either BIDS orders or NYBX orders and NYSE liquidity. "It's a fully electronic mechanism that keeps track of the liquidity that's available in both venues and decides when a stock should be traded," said Mahoney. In addition, traders can place criteria on the order, such as a minimize size known as the minimum triggering volume (MTV).

BIDS is open to all broker dealers, investment managers, hedge funds and algorithms, allows access to NYBX liquidity by allowing subscribers to opt-in on an order-by-order basis. But according to TABB, while BIDS was set up to be very block"oriented the majority of the flow became algorithmic. "They're trying to get back to the block focus," said the analyst.

Mahoney, a former buy-side trader, said the idea is to serve the portfolio manager whose point in life is to outperform the market or peers. He offered the example of a portfolio manager who has an idea to invest 3 percent of the assets in a particular stock and has to trade 10-to-15 million shares. "If the average size is 200 shares, it's very hard to act quickly and take advantage of an opportunity in the public market," said Mahoney. The industry's response has been to create dark pools, said Mahoney. In fact there are 40-plus dark pools and they account for only 9 percent of the volume. While the idea of controlling information is critical, said Mahoney, he suggested that what is missing is the ability of the floor brokers to expose their reserve orders to the public market.


source: http://www.advancedtrading.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213001260

NYSE and BIDS Trading Scan for Blocks in Light and Dark Pools (1)

A new block-trading venue launched by the New York Stock Exchange that links BIDS Trading's dark liquidity with the NYSE's public, reserve and hidden order flow, could boost the Big Board's share of large orders.

But the jury is still out since the system just launched last Thursday and brokers and institutions need to get connected and will need to be certified that certain order types work. "You have to have a system up and running before you'll get a specific user to pay specific attention to your system," said Tim Mahoney, CEO of BIDS Trading in an interview.

New York Block Exchange, known as NYBX, is a joint venture between NYSE Euronext and BIDS Holdings L.P., an alternative trading system (ATS), owned by 11 of the largest broker dealers.



"I think the unique aspect of it is linking the exchange to an independent dark pool, " says Larry Tabb, co-founder and CEO of TABB Group. While a lot of dark pools are connected to each others, said Tabb, "The way they are connected here is a little bit different. They're not trying just to match up dark flow. It's not all the algorithms linking the NYSE and BIDS together. It's not just the streaming order flow washing through BIDS' order book," said Tabb. "This is a way to link together reserve flow and hidden order flow, which tends to be bigger flow," said Tabb.

This is also part of a move to bring back the block trades to the NYSE. In the 80s and 90s, block trades of more than 10,000 shares were more than 50 percent of the NYSE's volume. "They were matched upstairs and crossed on the floor," notes Tabb. In recent years with the average order size shrinking to 200 shares, institutions have flocked to dark pools to seek anonymity and minimize the risk of moving the market. Today block trades are about 23 percent of the NYSE's volume, according to published reports.

"It's a way to increase the fill rates on the NYSE, encourage people to post more orders and to post larger orders and also create more block liquidity," said Joe Mecane, EVP for U.S. markets at NYSE Euronext referring to NYBX in an interview. One of the differences that NYBX may have over other darks pools is that "most dark pools are semi-insulated, said Mecane. They tend to transact within their own pool, though there is some activity between then," he acknowledged. "Second, they tend to be focused on the inside price and at the midpoint. Those two factors make it harder to actually line up the two sides of the trade, said Mecane.


Source: http://www.advancedtrading.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=213001260