A decade ago, European countries leapt out of the gate to take the lead in the radical open source movement -- none more so than France -- and left U.S. developers in the proverbial dust. Through policies and high-profile projects, the French Republic for years has been advocating for all open source all the time, in government and education.

And France is not stopping: This summer, an economic commission set up by French President Nicolas Sarkozy recommended tax benefits to stimulate even more open source development.

[ See? who won InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Awards -- and what you can learn from these winners. ]

Today, France is arguably the most fertile ground for open source development in the world. The well-known and respected OW2 Consortium for open source middleware has its roots there. Giant corporations, such as France T?l?com, have embraced open source whole-heartedly.

The fruits of this labor reveal a lesson that U.S. developers would do well to take note: Everyone prospers when working together under a single, shared technology vision.

Benefit 1: A focus from the outset France's future grip on open source looks particularly strong, as it courts the next generation of open source developers. French authorities, for instance, handed out 175,000 open-source-software-equipped memory sticks to high school students last year. Technical universities have made open source their top priority, and some offer advanced degrees.

"All students in France use open source," says Bertrand Diard, CEO and co-founder of Talend, a French pioneer of open source data integration software. "A lot of universities in the U.S., except probably MIT, use traditional tools like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP." As a result, open source talent is more prevalent in France, Diard says; development is faster, and software quality is higher because French developers aren't distracted by proprietary and competing technology. "The culture of open source is more advanced here."

So what should U.S. developers, IT managers, and business execs learn from France's open source experience? "Change your vision," says Marc Sallieres, CEO at Altic, a French open source integrator.

Benefit 2: Uniting technology for the good of many The capability to pull together various open source parts to create a single, unified platform may be France's most important open source benefit. It's what led to the amazing feat of government, education, and industry coming together to foster an environment for leading-edge open source development.

Miguel Valdes, co-founder of the Bonita Project, which has developed an open source workflow system, believes French open source developers have a better understanding than their U.S. counterparts about reusing code and integrating with other systems. "France is definitely the good place to be when working around open source," says Valdes, a Spaniard living in France. "The French social model was appropriate for innovators and entrepreneurs to start working on alternative solutions [to proprietary software], fostering the creation of new projects in which a good mix of experienced professionals and skilled computer science students work together."

Put another way, French open source developers have played a major role in laying the groundwork on how to aggregate six, seven, or more open source projects into a comprehensive platform, says Massimo Pezzini, a Gartner analyst.

Benefit 3: Liberation leads to creativity It's not surprising that open source aggregation and integration skills have developed rapidly in France and spread elsewhere in Europe. "In the U.S., open source projects tend to be narrow and only for leading-edge organizations, whereas in Europe they're mainstream," Pezzini says, adding that France leads the way, followed by the Nordic countries. "European organizations have a business opportunity to combine multiple [open source] point projects into solutions for virtual private networks, SOA enablement, business intelligence," and so on, he says.

Consider the French word for open source, logiciel libre, meaning "free software" in the sense of "free as in speech, not free as in beer." Logiciel libre could easily be the rallying cry of the global open source community. Freed from the shackles of narrow point products, secretive software components and forced workarounds, French open source developers are encouraged to experiment creatively and liberally.

Recognizing the advantage of such effective creativity when applied across the entire IT spectrum, French universities are in the forefront of teaching open source to the new generation of developers and IT managers. "The key [for the U.S.] is to introduce more support for open source in universities and colleges," Pezzini says.

An open-source technology has been launched to help developers using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 find duplicated code in their software projects.

Called Clone Detective for Visual Studio, the product allows developers to analyze C# projects for source code duplicated elsewhere. These duplicates can lead to inconsistencies and indicate poorly factored code, according to the Clone Detective Web page at Microsoft's CodePlex site for open-source projects.

Version 1.0.0.0 of Clone Detective for Visual Studio was released on August 16 under an Apache 2.0 license.

"Duplicated source code can be an indicator for quality problems," said project coordinator Immo Landwerth. "Having the same algorithm spread across the whole application in slightly different variations will lead to increased maintenance effort, which ultimately may result in inconsistencies."

Among the reasons for code duplication is "lazy" developers who only know how to cut and paste, Landwerth said. Other reasons could include architectural constraints and methodology issues.

While currently limited to C# code, the next release will add capabilities to examine Visual Basic .Net and C++ code, Landwerth said. The integraton between Clone Detective and Visual Studio was developed by Landwerth and colleague Thomas Dallmair in cooperation with Technical University of Munich.

"Clone Detective makes it easy for developers to perform a clone detection and visualize the existing clones. However, in some cases, the source duplication cannot be easily removed (e.g. the cost of removing the clones outweighs the costs of keeping them due to heavy design change requirements)," Landwerth said. "In this case, Clone Detective helps by reminding you that a given portion of code is duplicated (by a purple bar in the code editor). So if you make changes to it you should review the other occurrences and make sure you keep your application consistent."

Clone Detective leverages the university's ConQUAT (continuous quality assessment toolkit) tool for clone detection.

The next version of Clone Detective will be able to find "fuzzy clones," said Landwerth. "Fuzzy clones are clones that are almost identical but not token by token. This will allow you to find existing inconsistencies in your code base," he said.

Separately in the Visual Studio realm, TeamExpand this week is offering timesheet-tracking software for Visual Studio.Net software development teams. Functioning with the Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server) application lifecycle management server, TeamExpand's commercial release of its TX Chrono timesheet application allows project managers to submit and analyze timesheets.

The Web-based application features a set of notifications and reporting capabilities lacking in TFS, TeamExpand said. TX Chrono offers workflow and TFS compatibility to make software development activities more predictable and visible, the company said. Bug fixes are included as well.

TX Chrono offers:

*Automated notifications and alerts on projects, individuals and activities. * Timesheet submission and approval. * Individual and non-standard schedules. * Non-standard working hours per day or week. * Separate billable and non-billable tasks. * Custom timetables. * Advanced reporting.

TX Chrono is licensed at $15 per seat each month. A 30-day free trial version is available at this Web page.

LG Electronics will launch in October a netbook-class laptop PC based on Intel's Atom processor that also includes 3G wireless, it said Wednesday at the IFA show in Berlin.

The X110 will include an HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) cellular data modem that should be compatible with the newer 3G networks now being rolled out by most major carriers around the world. HSPA is typically capable of download speeds of several megabits per second, and the latest versions of the evolving technology also offer megabit-per-second uploads.

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In addition to 3G, the machine supports 802.11b/g wireless LAN and has a wired Ethernet connector.

The X110 is based on the same 1.6GHz Atom processor that many of its competing devices use and has a 10-inch WSVGA resolution (1,024 by 600 pixels) screen that, if it wasn't for the 3G, would place it very close to competing netbook PCs.

LG has decided to go for a conventional hard-disk drive in the X110 and will offer models with either 80GB or 120GB of capacity. Some netbooks use faster solid-state disks based on flash memory chips, but they typically offer much lower capacity.

It runs the Windows XP Home operating system.

The machine will be available in several colors, including white, pink, or silver. LG didn't announce the price.

Cisco is buying PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, for $215 million and plans to add those capabilities to its on-demand Web Ex Connect collaboration platform.

PostPath makes PostPath Server, an e-mail and collaboration server the company touts as a replacement or supplement to Microsoft Exchange.  An archiving edition of the software is available to store e-mails in a less cumbersome fashion than Exchange does with its journaling of old e-mails. The company also offers a version of PostPath Server for VMware.

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Cisco plans to put the server in the cloud and sell an e-mail and calendaring service to its customers. "Our 'cloud-based' delivery model offers our customers rapid deployment and compelling economics," says Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group (CSG).

PostPath is all about requiring no middleware to interoperate with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Active Directory, ActiveSynch and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, among other applications. But it also promotes itself as a Linux-based replacement for Exchange that gets around some of the Microsoft platform's shortcomings, including larger data stores and higher performance in terms of how many hits per minute the platforms can handle.

Cisco bought WebEx last year to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, including instant messaging, team spaces for collaboration, wikis and document sharing.

Privately held PostPath was founded in 2003.

Cisco says it expects to close the deal by the end of October and add PostPath's 67 employees to its Collaboration Software Group. CSG is part of Cisco's recently established Software Group that oversees the IOS network operating system, network and service management, unified communications, policy management and SaaS offerings.

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Microsoft loyalists could be forgiven for feeling a little smug after all of the publicity over outages and lost e-mails at online services run by archrivals Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail.

Microsoft, it turns out, isn't invulnerable. Some users of Microsoft's Office Live Small Business have also reported intermittent e-mail outages, according to interviews and postings at discussion forums for the Web service, which is used by more than a million small companies.

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Through a spokeswoman, Microsoft acknowledged Tuesday that a "brief isolated" e-mail outage occurred last Friday.

But at least one user says he was told by Microsoft technicians that some of his e-mails were permanently lost.

"Outages you can understand, but the outright loss of data? They should be ashamed of themselves, being the biggest computer company in the world," said Joe Reilly, owner of Marine Wireless Internet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Reilly said he is a paying customer of Office Live Small Business, which he uses to host his tech firm's Web site and provide his e-mail, through which he gets important messages, such as customer payment confirmations.

Reilly said he "became suspicious" when he did not receive "my usual 20-30 e-mails" on Monday morning. Confirming through his self-testing that e-mails were not being delivered, Reilly said he talked to Office Live's technical support, who told him that the service was "experiencing some issues."

First launched in 2006, Office Live Small Business is a service that allows small firms to design and host their Web sites, run their e-mail, an e-commerce store, Web advertising campaigns and more from a single service. Some of the services are free and some are provided for a fee.

E-mail for Office Live Small Business users is provided through Windows Live Hotmail.

The spokeswoman confirmed that Office Live Small Business and Hotmail customers were hit by a two-hour outage early last Friday afternoon.

"We are sorry to hear about this customer experience and are doing everything we can to help the customer restore his emails," she wrote in an e-mail. "This incident only affected a handful of customers and to our knowledge all customers' emails are being restored."

Not according to Reilly, who said he was reassured on Monday that mail would "trickle through in the next few hours." When that didn't happen, Reilly called back, and was told there was an "extended server outage" and that some customer e-mails had been permanently lost. After demanding a written confirmation, Reilly said he was referred to Microsoft's legal department.

Another Office Live user, Russ Bellew, said he has also experienced recent "intermittent outages," though he hasn't permanently lost any e-mails as far as he knows.

Microsoft had a much larger outage that affected multiple Windows Live services, including Windows Live Mail, back in February.

For now, the recent outage appear less severe than that incident or the problems affecting MobileMe and Gmail.

Relaunched this February, Office Live Small Business competes with services from Yahoo and others.

It is different from Office Live Workspace, an online document storage and collaboration service that competes with Google Apps.

Reilly says that while he's disappointed with Office Live Small Business, he doesn't plan to switch. "I'm kind of stuck with them," he said.

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Hackers are claiming they have kidnapped children in a bid to infect PCs with a Trojan Horse virus, says Sophos.

The security firm is warning users that e-mails entitled "We have hijacked your baby" are being sent to Web users around the globe. As well as asking for a $50,000 ransom for the "release" of the child, the messages also contain an attachment supposed to be a photograph of the child. Instead the file actually contains a Trojan horse that will steal personal information.

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"Receiving or reading these widespread emails themselves does not mean you are infected, but if users open the attachment they will be infecting their Windows computer, they will give hackers an open door to take control and steal information," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"There's no other way of putting it -- this attack is sick. Hackers have no qualms about exploiting a family's natural instinct to defend its most vulnerable members," added Cluley.

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U.S. companies are pulling back hard on IT spending as the economic downturn continues, a new study by ChangeWave Research has found.

ChangeWave surveyed 1,947 people involved with IT spending in their organizations. The survey was conducted Aug. 11-21. Eighty percent of those surveyed were located in the U.S., along with small percentages in Canada and other countries.

Thirty percent overall reported that third-quarter IT spending was lower than previously planned, an increase of three percentage points since ChangeWave's May spending survey. Meanwhile, only 12 percent spent more than planned.

In addition, 29 percent said spending will drop or even cease in the fourth quarter, a 5 percent increase over the last study. Thirteen percent plan to spend more.

"Thus, the brief period of stabilizing we picked up in May has given way to another major leg downward," ChangeWave director of research Paul Carton wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "In fact, you have to go way back to the middle of the last recession (August 2001) to find a ChangeWave survey projecting this big of an IT spending downturn."

Higher energy costs stood as a top factor for the spending slowdown, cited by 35 percent of respondents.

ChangeWave's findings show a turnaround is not imminent; 39 percent of respondents predicted IT spending in their companies would not rise until the second quarter of 2009 or beyond.

Oracle has developed prebuilt integration software for its CRM On Demand product and the on-premise Siebel CRM, providing customers with a single view of their CRM data, the company announced Wednesday.

Companies can benefit from a hybrid approach to customer relationship management, because the on-demand model allows companies to more easily add new users, while enabling data from both systems to be analyzed at once, Oracle said. The integration software employs Oracle's Application Integration Architecture framework and Fusion middleware. Pricing was not disclosed.

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Oracle's news release on the product stressed its benefits for customers. But the vendor's real goal is to fend off competition from Salesforce, which has based its entire strategy on pushing the benefits of on-demand software, analysts said.

"This is how you sell against Salesforce," said analyst Bruce Richardson of AMR Research. "You talk about that as a dead-end silo while selling end-to-end business processes."

"I don't think it will lead to an increase in demand for Siebel," he added.

Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research largely echoed Richardson, while noting that Salesforce offers Salesforce to Salesforce, a means of integrating with fellow Salesforce customers, and also has strong capabilities for tying into systems such as Siebel.

" I expect this is a strategy by Oracle to keep its Siebel customers from looking outside of the barn," he said.

On the whole, Oracle has taken a cautious approach to on-demand software. During an earnings conference call in May, CEO Larry Ellison told analysts that while the company has been selling on-demand products for nearly 10 years, it only recently began making money at it.

"The entire industry has to get better at making money selling on-demand ... That's what we're focused on before we scale the business," Ellison said at the time.

Salesforce's stock dropped sharply following its recent quarterly earnings report, which saw the company beat analyst expectations for revenue but also indications that business is slowing down.

The IEEE has completed 802.11r, a standard that lets Wi-Fi devices roam quickly between access points, improving the performance of VoIP on enterprise LANs.

The IEEE 802.11 standards were originally defined with single access points in mind, but in offices multiple access points are needed. Devices can move from one access point to another, but it takes around 100ms to re-associate, and several seconds to re-establish authenticated connections using 802.1x.

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The new standard, 802.11r, known as Fast Basic Service Set Transition, allows the network to establish a security and QoS state for the device at the new access point, before it roams between the two, so the transition can take place in less than 50ms - the standard required for voice roaming.

The IEEE has been working on 802.11r for four years, and the concept has been solid since 2005, but the standard was formally approved and published by the IEEE this summer.

Till now, vendors have either used lower security options on Wi-Fi VoIP (using WEP encryption for instance) and put VoIP traffic on separate VLANs to protect the rest of the network, or implemented technology close to the eventual 802.11r standard.

Other vendors, including Meru and Extricom, has built networks where there is no roaming because all the access points are on the same channel.

IEEE 802.11r could open up a bottle-neck in enterprise Wi-Fi VoIP installations, and should allow VoIP certification to move ahead. Although the Wi-Fi Alliance, delivered a VoIP brand, known as Wi-Fi Certified Voice-Personal in June, this has had limited success, and the Alliance is expected to follow up with a Voice-Enterprise brand, including 802.11r, in 2009.

Cisco and Meru branded enterprise-grade equipment under the Voice-Personal brand, but other business Wi-Fi companies have shunned it.

"We primarily address the enterprise market, so we would certainly look for voice-enterprise when it comes out," said Roger Hockaday, Aruba's director of marketing EMEA.

"[Voice-Personal certification] is for low range stuff and SME equipment," said Alistair Mutch, worldwide business development director for Wi-Fi switch vendor Trapeze (now being acquired by Belden). "We have not submitted to the low end one as we felt it was really not worth it."

Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

The popularity of low-cost PCs around the world is driving "explosive growth" for SSDs (solid-state drives), Samsung said Wednesday as it announced three new models of the device.

SSDs are made from NAND flash memory chips and are used to store software, songs, pictures, documents, and other data on computers. The drives hold several advantages over common HDDs (hard disk drives), including being speedier, lighter, quieter, and using far less power.

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The market for low-density SSDs will grow by 57 percent per year annually until 2011, due mainly to brisk demand for low-cost PCs, Samsung said.

The company said it will start mass producing three new low-capacity drives -- 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB SSDs -- next month. The storage drives are each about 30 percent smaller than 2.5-inch HDDs, a small size normally used in low-cost PCs and netbooks, or mini-laptops.

The new SSDs will also run faster than older-generation SSDs made for low-cost PCs, Samsung said, because they include high-performance SATA II (serial advanced technology attachment) controller technology inside.

Samsung's latest SSDs can all read data at 90MBps, while writing at speeds varying from 70MBps for the 32GB SSD, to 45MBps for the 16GB SSD, and 25MBps for the 8GB SSD.

These speeds mark an improvement over the company's first SSDs aimed at small devices, which were launched in 2006. Those devices, 32GB and 16GB SSDs, could read at 57MBps and write at 32MBps.

Samsung is the world's largest memory chipmaker.

The most popular style of low-cost PC on the market today that use SSDs are mini-laptops, or netbooks, such as the Eee PC by Taiwan's Asustek Computer.

The devices are a new style of mobile PC that weigh less than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), sport 7-inch to 10-inch LCD screens, carry long-lasting batteries, and connect wirelessly to the Internet. They generally cost far less than the average notebook PC as well, between $199 to $599.

Global netbook shipments are forecast to reach 8.02 million this year and then more than double to 18.3 million units in 2009, according to Taiwan's Market Intelligence Center (MIC).

Acer, the world's third-largest PC vendor, has said it expects to ship 5 million to 6 million of its Aspire one netbooks this year, while Asustek has forecast Eee PC sales at 5 million this year.

An experimental extension to Mozilla Firefox lets people substitute simple text commands for complex Web tasks such as putting links to maps in e-mail messages.

On Tuesday, Mozilla Labs released its first version of Ubiquity, which is related to software called Enso that was developed at a small Chicago company called Humanized. Mozilla hired three executives of Humanized in January, and Aza Raskin, the former president of that company, introduced Ubiquity 0.1 in a Mozilla Labs blog entry on Tuesday. Raskin is now head of user experience at Mozilla Labs.

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Ubiquity is designed to help ordinary people create something like mashups and to do it on a personal basis instead of in the form of a public Web page. The commands that users type in Ubiquity, such as "map" and "e-mail," find resources on the Web and can gather information from those sources in one place.

For example, someone inviting a friend to dinner could highlight the name of the restaurant, type "map," and instantly call up a Google Map showing the location of the restaurant. The user could then edit that map and place it in the body of the e-mail message. Similarly, typing "yelp" and the name of the restaurant would bring the text of reviews from Yelp.com right into the message.

In an interview, Raskin compared it to a search engine, except that Ubiquity users type in what they want to do instead of what they want to find.

Other commands that are already available include "defi," which brings up a definition for a highlighted word; "trans," which translates any highlighted text; and "twit," which takes the highlighted text and puts it up on Twitter.

It's easy to create new commands, so average users can do it without advanced Web development skills, according to Raskin.

"You don't have to wait for a developer to think of a user case. ... You can do it for yourself," Raskin said.

Users who created commands for Ubiquity can post them on the Web and allow others to subscribe to them for free.

Ubiquity may or may not be added as an extension to Firefox. Mozilla Labs is designed to be an open test environment for new ideas, with participation by anyone, in which some ideas will graduate to use in Firefox and others won't, Raskin said.

-- Additional reporting by Elizabeth Montalbano in New York.

It's a typical business scenario. Several people on a project have to create a set of documents: a report in Microsoft Word, a budget spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, the final presentation to the board using Microsoft PowerPoint. One person writes the draft, and wants input or changes from other project participants. So far, so good. But that's when productivity-not to mention disk space-heads down a rat hole.

All too often, people share documents by sending the files around in e-mail. Everyone involved adds his own changes (using revision marking, if the leader is lucky), and then e-mails back that unique file. The project leader has the unenviable job of incorporating all those changes, or there's a flurry of confusion when everybody waits for Jane to finish with the file so Joe can add his own text. And never mind that the security of your document is practically nonexistent as well; what would you do if your competition happened to latch on to your latest and greatest project description? Or your sales presentation for a key client? As a byproduct, the team creates huge attachments (often with no consideration given to file size-and PowerPoint files can reach 40MB in a hurry).

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It's terribly inconvenient -- especially when there's a better way. And it takes only a few moments to learn.

In short: keep the Microsoft Office documents on a network drive to which all participants have access. Microsoft Office manages access to the files, far better than you can. If Jane has the file open when someone else attempts to bring it up, Microsoft Word will say that the document is in use (by Jane) and give Joe the option to open it as read-only (which sometimes is all that's needed) or to be notified when the file is unlocked again. (Unfortunately, none of the options include "automatically send Jane an e-mail message to tell her to hurry up already," but that cattle-prod technology has not yet been perfected.)

The benefit: Everyone works on one version of the file, so it's impossible for things to get out of sync. Your e-mail inbox (and mail server ) isn't stuffed with contradictory versions of important documents. And, since-presumably-your network servers are backed up on a regular basis (far more so than are most users' laptop computers), the documents may be more secure as well.

The downside: It requires the document editors to be connected to the office network and to be logged into the VPN. That's not especially helpful for mobile executives who imagine that the best time to work on a PowerPoint presentation is on the flight to the board meeting . Those individuals need to think ahead, and to grab a copy of the latest version from the server before they leave on their trip.

This may sound like a "Well, duh!" tip-unless you didn't know it already. I've watched too many otherwise savvy business staff blithely send huge files in e-mail-a dozen times a day.

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Private information stored in Apple's iPhone and protected by a lock code can be accessed by anyone with just a few button presses.

The iPhone, like most mobile phones, can be locked with a four-digit code, but where other phones in their locked state only permit calls to emergency service numbers such as 911 (in the U.S.), 999 (in the U.K.) and 112 (throughout Europe), a locked iPhone can be used to make a call to any number.

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However, that's not all you can do with a locked iPhone running the latest version of Apple's software, 2.0.2.

Pressing the emergency call button at the unlock screen, followed by two taps on the home button, takes you to the iPhone's private 'favorites' page without the need to enter the unlock code. If the owner of the phone has favorite entries in their address book containing URLs, e-mail addresses or mobile phone numbers, then those entries can be used to launch the browser, mail application or SMS (Short Message Service) software, and gain access to private Web favorites, e-mail messages, and text messages stored in the phone, again without entering the unlock code.

The security flaw, revealed by a member of the MacRumors.com forum, came as a surprise to an Apple spokeswoman in London, who said she would look into the matter.

One way to avoid such unauthorized access to e-mail messages or Web favorites would be not to add e-mail addresses or URLs to favorite address book entries.

Apple pushed version 2.0 of its iPhone software as being more enterprise-friendly: some businesses had been reluctant to adopt the first version of the iPhone because it did not adequately protect corporate information stored in the device.

China has stepped up investment in its homegrown Godson microprocessor and hopes to build its first petaflop-class supercomputer using the chip in 2010, one of the country's senior engineers said on Tuesday.

China made a decision 20 years ago not to invest in microprocessor development, and it was only in 2001 that it reversed course and began to make a serious effort in this area. As a result, its technology trails far behind that of world leaders like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, and IBM.

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But China has now made a long-term commitment to Godson and since 2006 has increased funding for it "quite a lot," said Zhiwei Xu, CTO of the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The country still lags behind its international rivals in chip development but is doing its best to catch up, he said in a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California.

China has produced four Godson processors, the latest being the Godson 2f. It struck a deal last year with STMicroelectronics to manufacture and sell the chips, and they are now used by 40 companies in set-top boxes, laptops and other products, Xu said. The commercial name for the chips is Loongson.

Next month China will complete the design of a new version of the chip, the Godson 2g, which integrates more functionality on the silicon. Next year it hopes to include graphics capabilities on the same silicon as the main processor, much as AMD and Intel are doing today.

China is also hard at work on the Godson 3, which is aimed primarily at servers and will be the first Godson to use a multi-core design. A version of the chip due in 2009 will have four general-purpose cores, and four specialized cores for tasks like scientific computing. The general-purpose cores will run at 1GHz and be similar to those on the Godson 2, Xu said.

China hopes the Godson 3 will allow it to build a high-performance computer in 2010 that can perform at one petaflop per second, Xu said. That would match the IBM system based on an advanced Cell processor that led this year's Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Asked after his speech if the goal is realistic, Xu said, "it's possible, but it will be hard." Besides developing the system, China will have to find markets to sell it to, he noted. The U.S. is skittish about buying Chinese equipment for government-related work for security reasons.

Godson's use in PCs has been held back by the fact that it is based on a MIPS core, as opposed to the x86 design used by Intel and AMD. To run Windows it has to use translation software to achieve x86-compatibility, and the Godson loses a lot of its native MIPS power in the process.

The Godson 3 adds new instructions that speed the x86-to-MIPS translation by a factor of 10, Xu said. "Our goal is to eventually reach 80 percent of the native MIPS performance," he said. "Right now we are at 40 percent, so we have a long way to go."

Tom Halfhill, a senior analyst at In-Stat, said the goal of a petaflop computer in 2010 might be realistic. "Why would they set a target they don't think they can achieve? That would only embarrass them," he said.

Halfhill was given an overview of the Godson in Beijing about two years ago. China was developing applications to run on Godson PCs, he said, including productivity software based on OpenOffice.

With its huge population, China can become a significant player in the microprocessor market even if it sells only domestically, he said.

"What China wants to do is develop its own technologies so that its manufacturers aren't dependent on paying licenses and other fees to other countries," he said.

Fujitsu is developing an eight-core version of its Sparc64 processor, which should give a performance boost to the Sparc Enterprise Servers that Fujitsu jointly develops with Sun Microsystems.

Fujitsu's Takumi Maruyama mentioned the chip briefly at the end of a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California, Tuesday but he provided few details, including when the processor will ship.

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It will succeed the four-core Sparc64 VII processor released in servers from Fujitsu and Sun in July. The Sparc Enterprise Servers use Fujitsu's chips and Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. The companies develop the systems together but market and sell them separately.

The eight-core processor is code-named Venus and will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process, Maruyama said, a step up from the 65-nanometer process used for the quad-core Sparc64 VII.

It will have an embedded memory controller and offer peak throughput of 128Gflops (floating operations per second), he said. He said it is being designed for the age of "petascale computing."

"I hope I can tell you more about it at Hot Chips next year," Maruyama said.

The chip will be likely be welcomed by Sun, which confirmed in a separate presentation that its own Rock processor won't ship until the second half of 2009, about a year later than originally planned.

Rock is a 16-core processor that Sun has billed as a dramatic step forward in chip design. It will be able to address very large amounts of memory and uses innovative data "pre-fetching" techniques to achieve high levels of parallelism.

Sun says the chip will offer lightening-fast performance for databases and other enterprise applications. However, the newness of the design may have contributed to the chip's delay, which Sun disclosed earlier this year.

With its new JavaFX technology for rich Internet applications, Sun Microsystems hopes to leverage the strength of the Java development base and Java's ubiquitous presence on devices to make a strong run in a race it has entered very late -- and where Adobe Systems and Microsoft have a huge head start.

If this competition were a race between Olympic runners, it might be broadcast like this:

"In Lane 1, we have Adobe with its Flash and attendant Flex technologies, downloaded millions of times and popular on high-profile sites like YouTube."

"In Lane 2, it's AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the popular RIA technique used in countless Web sites."

"In Lane 3, its up-and-comer Silverlight, backed by software giant Microsoft and used by NBC's prominent Olympics Web site."

"And in Lane 4, we have Sun's JavaFX used by Web properties such as -- well, it's still in development."

[ The InfoWorld Test Center rates the preview version of JavaFX as promising but not yet competitive with Flash and Silverlight. See why. ]

Sun believes JavaFX has a strong chance because it doesn't see there being just one winner. "This isn't the type of market where only one technology is going to win," says Jacob Lehrbaum, senior product line manager for JavaFX. But Lehrbaum acknowledged the course will be tough: "Clearly, we do have to compete for developer mindshare."

Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond thinks Sun has a shot, especially in the burgeoning market for applications running on mobile devices: "I think Sun has the opportunity to catch up very quickly in that space."

"I would say that the JavaFX platform looks very good. It has a lot of potential," said Andres Almiray, a software developer at Oracle. "It probably should have been announced three, four, five years ago," Almiray said. "The good thing is that it's finally here."

An anonymous blogger identified only as "geekycoder" lauded the technology: "Technically, JavaFX enables me to leverage [the] Java skill set and Java technology that I am more comfortable with to deliver a compelling RIA solution. Because synergy between JavaFX and Java is excellent and the fact that JavaFX is built on the Java platform means that I can ensure that I have one of the best and supportive platforms to work in. In addition, JavaFX will enable me to be more productive in making it easier and quicker to create RIA solutions," for Web 2.0.

The JavaFX road map First revealed at the JavaOne conference in May 2007, JavaFX still is a work in progress. The official JavaFX Web page describes the project as "a powerful client technology for creating rich Internet applications with immersive media and content across the multiple screens of your life." It features the JavaFX Script scripting language for building rich Internet applications for desktop, mobile, TV, and other consumer platforms.

"JavaFX Script, the language of JavaFX, doesn't replace Swing, the core Java GUI toolkit, but provides an alternative way of programming that hopefully will bring Java technology to the masses," according to geekycoder.

A preview version of a software development kit for JavaFX for desktop applications, supporting Windows and Macintosh, was released late last month. Further deliverables are planned. JavaFX for Desktop 1.0, featuring a profile for desktop and browser deployments and a general-release SDK, is due this fall. JavaFX for Mobile 1.0, adding mobile support, is planned for spring 2009 release. TV support also is planned.

The JavaFX runtime is to be distributed with the Java VM. Licensing plans for device manufacturers also are to be revealed next spring. When manufacturers license Java Micro Edition, they will get the JavaFX mobile runtime.

JavaFX offers plug-in capabilities similar to Flash and Silverlight, but it also has a standard runtime -- the Java Virtual Machine -- to run applications outside a browser, Lehrbaum said. Other plug-in technologies will let developers use existing tools such as NetBeans or design tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator with JavaFX.

Why Sun thinks JavaFX will catch on With JavaFX, Sun looks to build on the presence of Java on more than 2 billion handsets. Lehrbaum acknowledges that Java has been difficult to use, so those Java-based phones don't offer the kind of rich Internet experience found on Apple's iPhone, Palm's Palm OS, or Microsoft's Windows Mobile. He claims that "JavaFX takes that momentum and the advantages we have with Java but makes it much easier to create rich interactive and immersive experiences."

For example, JavaFX Script offers a declarative scripting language for developers to build interfaces in the way that they think about them, Lehrbaum says. "It matches the way they think about interfaces in their head and is very intuitive," he says.

JavaFX also revives the notion of client-side applets, which had been envisioned as the big win for Java in the mid-1990s. (Instead, Java took root as a dominant server-side technology.) With JavaFX, developers could build applet widgets for information access or a stock ticker.

To enable the applets revival, the Java Standard Edition SE 6 Update 10 release, due this month, will let developers write a single version of an application and run it on the desktop or in a browser. Lehrbaum claims the update will also make applet loading faster. JavaFX, meanwhile, makes it easier to build rich immersive experiences for such applets, he adds.

What early users think of JavaFX The Java SE 6 Update 10 and JavaFX do in fact solve deployment issues for Java, says Jim Weaver, president of Java trainer jMentor, such as letting a Java or JavaFX application begin executing before the entire Java Runtime Environment has been downloaded.

Weaver describes JavaFX and the update as a "one-two punch." The update enables rich client Java to become a reality, Weaver says, whereas JavaFX Script provides the necessary simple scripting language.

JavaFX compiles down to byte code and runs anywhere the JVM runs. "You can use any Java classes within JavaFX," Weaver says. "You can leverage your Java skills with JavaFX."

"The platform promises a lot of new APIs and new abstractions to make the harder things simpler and the simpler things very easy," says Oracle's Almiray. For example, APIs and libraries take care of establishing the correct order of a drawing on the screen, he notes. JavaFX Script does offer some features not in Java, such as data-binding into the language, Almiray says. But he notes that some Java features -- such as annotations, generics, and inner classes -- are lacking in JavaFX. Almiray expects that JavaFX will succeed in the mobile arena, but says it will be tough to compete with Flex in rich Internet applications.

A muddled open source message JavaFX initially was proclaimed to be a fully open source effort. But Sun has backed away from that stance. An FAQ page on a Sun Web site this spring reported that tools such as the compiler, runtime engine, player, and tools currently under development would not be open source.

The compiler, however, has been made open source, as have parts of the graphics libraries and some tools.

Sun plans to clarify its open source strategy for JavaFX with the Desktop 1.0 release, Lehrbaum says.

Google is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them.

The company has already run public tests on its search-results pages that contain up and down arrows next to listed links, as well as buttons that allow users to append comments to results.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

"At this point, I can't say what we expect from this feature; we're just curious to see how it will be used," wrote Ben Gomes, a Google Distinguished Engineer, in the company's official blog on Tuesday.

A screenshot of one of these test pages also shows "x" buttons next to results to apparently remove them from view, although this isn't addressed by Gomes.

Should Google decide to incorporate these as default features, the change would be a significant step by the company in giving people power to interact with its search-results pages.

There are a number of customization and personalization options that Google grants to users who open a Google account, such as keeping a log of their search and browsing activity via a service called Web History, as well as bookmarking and annotating site links with a service called Notebook.

However, in this test, the new functionalities apparently would be available to any user, not just those who are signed in to their Google accounts. The screenshot resembles a test described in a Google Labs Experimental Search page , although the experiment requires users to sign in to their Google accounts. It is not currently listed on the main Experimental Search page and is described as probably available for only a few weeks, so it is not clear whether it's still available for testing.

Google has often been criticized for having a search engine that depends too much on mathematical algorithms while giving little room for users to offer feedback and contribute to the process of rating, ranking and evaluating results. These knocks have become more and more common as the popularity of Web 2.0 services has grown, since they all champion the building of user communities.

As a reaction to the Google approach, a variety of search engine projects have emerged over the years that attempt to give people more participation, such as Jason Calacanis' Mahalo , Yahoo's Delicious social bookmarking service and Jimmy Wales' Wikia Search .

At Wikia Search, for example, anyone, whether registered with the site or not, can add, delete and rate search results, as well as edit the content of a search result URL by modifying its headline and description. In true wiki fashion, changes are reflected immediately and don't go through an approval process, counting on the community to police itself and establish, at least in theory, its collective wisdom.

Google declined to comment further about Gomes' posting. "Unfortunately, because the examples he provides are still only experiments, we cannot talk in length about how they work. If we end up rolling out this experiment for all users, we would definitely be able to talk in more detail. Right now we are experimenting with a number of factors so we can't really explain how the final product would work," a Google spokeswoman said via e-mail.

Thus, it's not known whether Google would factor the rearranging of results by users into the overall computation for ranking results for those specific queries. It's also not clear whether search result comments would be made available to anyone to read.

In the posting, titled " Search experiments, large and small, " Gomes presents several other examples of public tests that Google has run on its results page.

Unlike the test to re-rank and comment on results, which is visually prominent, others are subtle and hard to notice, such as slightly varying the amount of white space between one result and another, or making a symbol look more or less thick.

The bottom line, wrote Gomes, is that "we test almost everything, even things that you would think are so small that we could not possibly care -- nor could they possibly matter. In fact, small changes do matter, and we do care."

Microsoft has updated software that verifies whether a copy of Windows is genuine in its Windows XP Professional edition, making it similar to the notification in Windows Vista and thus more persistently visible to users.

In a blog posting attributed to Alex Kochis, a Microsoft director of product marketing and management, the company said it made the changes to the Windows Genuine Notification (WGA) alerts for XP Pro because it is "the product edition that is most often stolen."

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Now when a version of Windows XP Pro is found to be pirated or counterfeit, the next time a user logs on to the system, the desktop screen background will be black, replacing whatever custom desktop may have been set by the user. This will reappear every 60 minutes, even if a user resets the screen's background. Previously, this was not a part of the WGA notification for Windows XP Pro.

Another new feature of the alert system is to put the PC into "persistent desktop notification" mode, with a banner at the bottom of the screen informing the user that the copy of Windows is not genuine. The notification is translucent and users can interact with any objects underneath it; however, it will continue to appear on the screen until a user installs a genuine copy of Windows.

Microsoft said the update to WGA also simplifies the installation of the alert system on Windows XP Pro. In addition, the company has improved its ability to detect non-genuine copies of Windows.

Users have had mixed reactions to the WGA program, which Microsoft launched two years ago as part of an aggressive program to eliminate counterfeit and pirated versions of Windows. While some think it's a good way for Microsoft to prevent use of non-genuine Windows software, others found the program irksome and an intrusion, particularly when it would peg systems they knew to be genuine as pirated or counterfeit.

The program even at one point was thought to be acting like spyware by sending information from people's computers back to Microsoft. However, Microsoft said it only provides information about whether the copy of Windows is genuine, not any other information about the user or the PC.

Microsoft first distributed WGA only to users of Microsoft's download services who wanted to install add-on software, excluding security releases, for Windows XP. Eventually, it became an automatic part of Microsoft's update services and then was built directly into Windows Vista as the company developed that OS.

Alcatel-Lucent is delivering a new family of Gigabit Ethernet switches that fit into its architecture for blending data, voice and wireless connectivity and are designed for small and midsize businesses.

OmniSwitch 6400 comes in six models that can be stacked so a single logical switch supports a maximum of 384 ports. Individual chassis support 24 and 48 ports, and can support either unpowered, Power over Ethernet or fiber ports. (Compare access switches .)

[ Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The switches support routing information protocol (RIP) and intermediate system to intermediate system (IS-IS) and could be used in branch offices as the local switch as well as the WAN router, Alcatel-Lucent says.

The switches support high availability so if one control module on a stacked array fails, a secondary control module takes over with no loss of data or network connectivity. If the backup module fails the switches continue to function based on their existing address and route tables.

Security on the switches includes denial-of-service protection and 802.1s port authentication as well as Access Guardian, an Alcatel-Lucent feature that enables setting access rights for groups of user. The switches can work in conjunction with a separate Alcatel-Lucent application called Quarantine Manager that can reset the virtual LAN assignment for a port generating suspicious traffic to quarantine the device from the rest of the network.

The switches can be managed individually via browser-based element management or under Alcatel-Lucent's OmniVista management platform. They can also be managed by the company's Service Aware Manager for carriers that use the devices as customer premises equipment.

The company claims the switches consume 40% to 50% less power than comparable Cisco 2960 and 3560 switches.

Prices for the OmniSwitch 6400 series switches range from US$2,000 to $5,200.

The Mac clone maker sued by Apple Inc. last month fired back today with a countersuit charging Apple with restraint of trade, unfair competition and other violations of antitrust law.

Psystar Corp., a Doral, Fla.-based seller of Intel -based computers, said it has filed paperwork with a San Francisco federal court answering Apple's July 3 lawsuit and replying with one of its own.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

"We're alleging restraint of trade, among other things," said Colby Springer, one of three lawyers from the firm of Carr & Ferrell LLP representing Psystar , in a press conference held at its Palo Alto, Calif. offices today. "We're going to let the court decide."

Springer said the countersuit accuses Apple of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, in particularly for tying its Mac OS X operating system to its own hardware in the end-user licensing agreement (EULA). Because the EULA bars users from installing the OS on non-Apple hardware, Springer said, it's unlawful restraint of trade.

"Apple makes a good operating system, we don't deny that," said Springer. "This is about bringing Leopard [Mac OS X 10.5] to the masses."

Rudy Pedraza, the president and co-founder of Psystar, said somewhat the same thing. "It's not that people don't want to use Mac OS X, but they're not open spending an exorbitant amount of money for something that's essentially generic hardware."

Psystar, which has sold Intel-based OpenComputer desktops starting at $555 since April, and OpenServ servers since June, was sued by Apple last month on the basis of the Mac OS X EULA. In the lawsuit, Apple charged Psystar with copyright and trademark infringement, breach of contract and unfair competition because the Florida firm preinstalled its operating system on systems.

One expert in intellectual property (IP) litigation said last month that an Apple victory would probably put Psystar out of business, since if victorious, Apple would demand Psystar recall the machines it's sold to customers. At the time, Carole Handler, a partner in the IP department of Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon, predicted Psystar would play the antitrust card .

In an interview earlier this month , Springer hinted that Carr & Ferrell's defense would include antitrust elements.

Today, Springer denied reports that Psystar was pirating or modifying Apple's software. "Every single copy of the OS is a purchased copy," said Springer. "Despite the allegations that there's a'master disc,' that's not the case. And allegations that Psystar has somehow modified [Mac OS X's] code to run on non-Apple systems, that's also not the case.

"There is no modification of any proprietary code of Apple's," Springer claimed. Psystar, however, has modified some of the open-source code that ships with Mac OS X, Springer acknowledged, but maintained that any modifications were under the licenses of each open-source component.

Pedraza, who spoke publicly about the case for the first time, echoed Springer. "We purchase copies of Mac OS directly from Apple or from an Apple authorized dealer," he said.

When asked if the countersuit cited any specific precedent in Psystar's favor, Springer responded: "No specific precedent, but we wouldn't be filing this if we didn't believe we could support it."

Psystar's countersuit asked for unspecified damages, which, if the case reaches trial, would be set there, Springer said. "We're not trying to shut down Apple," he said. "What we want to do is provide an alternative to Apple's hardware."

Apple already faces antitrust charges in a lawsuit first filed in 2006 over tight links between the iTunes music store to iPod players. That case, which is seeking class-action status, is similar to Psystar's, said Springer, in that both allege illegal tying.

Also at the press conference, Pedraza said that Psystar was working on a mobile system able to run Mac OS X, although he declined to provide details of the potential notebook.

Apple officials did not respond to a request for comment on the Psystar countersuit.

Instant messaging (IM) has become an increasingly useful business tool for modern corporations. Data from a Forrester Research survey suggests that 71 percent of businesses will invest in real-time messaging this year.

For many organizations, however, IM security is still a nascent topic. Given the phenomenal increase in IM adoption and the business difficulty of limiting the usage strictly to internal use, organizations are beginning to explore security capabilities that support instant messaging and other real-time communication applications.

[ Read more about workplace IM and security in Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog. ]

To choose an appropriate IM security product, organizations should follow these four steps:

1. Determine the types of IM-related risks and threats that are relevant to your organization.

For example, if IM is used strictly inside the corporation, the threat of SpIM (instant messaging spam) may not be relevant, but archiving or data leaks may be. This step helps you narrow down the set of security requirements. In a typical enterprise deployment, you should consider products that support real-time virus scanning, deep content inspection and SpIM prevention.

2. Determine whether traffic logging and content archiving are important to you.

Compliance and legal needs drive logging and archiving. Look to products that offer either native support for archiving or integration with third-party storage products. FaceTime Communications provides integration with EMC's Centera for IM archiving, while IMlogic, a Symantec company, offers its own archiving product. A bonus capability here is archive search and management.

3. Determine what IM usage policy is relevant to your organization.

It's quite common to have a policy that states that IM communications are blocked for certain groups but permitted for others. Some policies may dictate whether to allow public IMs and file transfers and whether to allow external parties to use your corporate IM. These policies will determine whether you need inline filtering or passive monitoring .

4. Determine any fine-grained controls for IM filtering.

Examples of such controls include filtering based on user identity, IP address, file attachment type and embedded URLs. One customer of FaceTime is an organization with 180,000 users, of whom 12,000 are deemed "regulated employees." It's extremely important for this company to monitor and archive the communications of those regulated personnel and at the same time use a lighter approach for others. The cost of doing otherwise would be prohibitively expensive. For fine-grained filtering, consider products that offer expressive policy definition and configuration and integration with user directories.

Instant messaging is a major enabler of real-time business communication that connects workers across multiple locations . As IM becomes increasingly critical to business operations and progressively converges with other communication platforms, you should include it as an integral part of your content security framework.

Chenxi Wang is a principal analyst at Forrester Research, where she services security & risk management professionals. Download a complimentary copy of Forrester's recent report on IM security.

In a survey of its experts, Forrester Research unveiled last week what its analysts believe are the hottest roles in IT.

The survey is directed at CIOs and is meant to help them determine who they should either "hire, cultivate or rent." For IT workers, it may be a way to insure a long and successful career in IT.

[ Worried about your tech job moving abroad? See InfoWorld's special report on offshoring yourself and working overseas. ]

Analysts were asked to analyze the hot roles within their own coverage areas by incorporating such data as drivers, demand, and influence of roles.

Forrester put 16 such roles in categories designated "hot, very hot, extremely hot, hottest."

What's hot Rather than classifying jobs by title, the report identifies hot areas by job description -- that is, the function within IT.?

Six IT roles are identified as hot: account manager, desktop virtualization expert, mobile operations devices expert, service manger, business process analyst, and storage director.

Account manager: Acts as the interface between IT and the business; includes initiating projects, IT planning, project monitoring.

Desktop virtualization expert: In this role, an IT worker would oversee the implementation of desktop virtualization. Moving from desktop to datacenter also requires knowledge of back-end infrastructure operations.

Mobile operations and devices expert: Responsibilities include wireless networks, the interface between IT networks and carrier networks, knowledge of devices, and a level of knowledge about compliance regulations as they affect mobile security.

Service manager: Defines services IT offers, monitor SLAs and business continuity.

Business process analyst: Must be able to understand business process requirements and reinterpret these requirements into specifications for a technical staff.

Storage director: Responsible for all parts of storage including staff and infrastructure.

What's very hot Enterprise application strategist: In charge of long-term application strategy for the enterprise; must define ongoing and future business processes.

IT planner: Prioritize and manage IT investments and integrate IT plans with business plans and forecasts.

Network architect: Design network solutions on a micro and macro level, oversee quality assurance and testing before network is put in production.

Enterprise project manager: Define project management superstructure or framework, manage outsource providers, and provide hands-on management of large projects.

What's extremely hot Data/content-oriented business analyst: Responsible for designing components for the creation, classification, and access to unstructured data.

Business architect: Define business processes, integration, and technology needed to support the processes.

Enterprise architect: Manage the governance of enterprise architecture, including processes, data structures, and deployment of enterprise-wide applications.

Vendor management expert: In charge of pre-and-post contract management.

What's hottest Information/data architect: Must have the ability to describe and monitor an organization's approach to shared information, create enterprise data model and related artifacts; may include the design of data marts and warehouses.

Information security expert: "define, implement, and oversee risk management and compliance policies."

The Forrester analysts also found five attributes that prospective candidates who would like to fill one of the above roles should have:

* Local knowledge of the business industry or region. * Cross-discipline knowledge; understanding both management practices and customer groups. * Those willing to take on high-risk roles that, if successful, will have a major impact on the business. * Limited external supply; that is, while an outsourcer may be willing to supply 500 coders, the benefits of finding you a half-dozen enterprise architects is not worth their while. * Consistency with technology, vendor, or industry direction, meaning rapid changes in technology; an example is how mobile put a higher demand on real experts who have domain-specific knowledge.

Nvidia's Tegra system-on-chip will allow portable devices to play high-definition video for more than 10 hours, an engineer from the company told the Hot Chips conference on Monday.

Nvidia announced the Tegra series in June, introducing the Tegra 600 and 650 chips and folding the previously announced APX 2500 cell phone chip into the same line. The chips take Nvidia beyond its base of graphics processors and up against Intel's Atom platform. The 600 and 650 can be used with hard disk drives and are designed partly for MIDs (mobile Internet devices), an emerging category of pocket-sized computers that is also in Intel's sights with Atom.

[ See related stories: "Arm takes aim at Intel in small Internet devices" and "Intel has a chip, but where are the MIDs?" ]

"Power really is the challenge," said Michael Toksvig, a distinguished engineer at Nvidia, who spoke at the conference taking place this week at Stanford University. Advances in lithium-ion battery technology only extend the amount of power from one charge by about 5 percent per year, so the rest has to be made up with device efficiency and power management, he said. In high-definition video playback, a Tegra chip's power consumption is well below 200 milliwatts, he said. The chips, based on an Arm core, are as small as 12 by 12 millimeters for the APX 2500.

The video capabilities of the chips approach home entertainment levels, according to Nvidia. The top-of-the-line Tegra 650 can decode 1080p video, the highest resolution commercially available on widescreen TVs, at 24 frames per second. The resolution can be as high as 1,680 by 1,050 pixels, so a pocket-sized device made with this chip could be plugged in to a TV using HDMI (High-definition Multimedia Interface) to play a high-quality movie, Toksvig said. The Tegra platform can decode the MPEG-4, H.264, and VC1 formats. With a peak bit rate as high as 20Mbps, the quality approaches that of Blu-ray DVD, he said. (A DVD would probably still be needed for storage of the movie, he added.)

The Tegra 600 can play 720p video at 30 frames per second and 1,280-by-1,024 resolution. The APX 2500 cell phone chip can handle the same quality with a lower resolution of 854 by 480. In addition, it can play nine hours of continuous TV broadcast over mobile systems such as DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting - Handheld), according to Nvidia.

A Tegra-based device could also deliver more than 100 hours of MP3 music or five hours of 3-D game play, or spend weeks in standby mode without running out of power, Toksvig said.

The Tegra platform is still in its infancy, however. In one demonstration of sending a 720p movie trailer from a prototype pocketable computer to a widescreen TV, Toksvig wasn't able to achieve the full resolution and frame rate. He said sample chips are hard to come by because Nvidia is concentrating on helping major vendors get the chips into devices for sale during the end-of-year holiday season.

Tegra chips should appear first in personal media players and later in other products, such as MIDs and navigation units, with mid-range and high-end cell phones probably coming in 2009, Toksvig said.

Greenplum and Aster Data Systems, two startups involved in large-scale data analysis, announced this week that their products will support MapReduce, a programming technique originally developed by Google for parallel processing of large data sets across commodity hardware.

Software developers tend to be more comfortable with languages such as Java and C++ than the database language SQL, said Mayank Bawa, co-founder and CEO of Aster, maker of a cluster database system that splits workloads into multiple discrete tiers.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

"Most developers struggle with the nuances of making a database dance well to their directions," he wrote in a blog post. "Indeed, a SQL maestro is required to perform interesting queries for data transformations (during ETL processing or Extract-Load-Transform processing) or data mining (during analytics)."

Enter MapReduce, the goal of which was to provide a "trivially parallelizable framework so that even novice developers (a.k.a interns) could write programs in a variety of languages (Java/C/C++/Perl/Python) to analyze data independent of scale," Bawa wrote.

Meanwhile, Greenplum, maker of a database it says can scale to a petabyte of information, said this week that a MapReduce framework will be part of its dataflow engine as of September.

The twin announcements brought a nod of approval from one close observer of the database world.

"On its own, MapReduce can do a lot of important work in data manipulation and analysis. Integrating it with SQL should just increase its applicability and power," wrote Curt Monash of Monash Research, on the DBMS2 blog.

"MapReduce isn't needed for tabular data management. That's been efficiently parallelized in other ways," he added. "But if you want to build non-tabular structures such as text indexes or graphs, MapReduce turns out to be a big help."

Of all of the ongoing expenses needed to keep corporate IT running, network-related costs are perhaps the most unwieldy. New technologies, changing requirements, and ongoing equipment maintenance and upgrades keep IT staff on their toes and money flowing out the door. But there are ways to manage network costs.

The problemAccording to Aberdeen Group, network costs continue to rise steadily. In 2008, for example, network spending is expected to increase slightly more than 5 percent over 2007. Telecom management industry association AOTMP of Indianapolis, Ind., backs that up, estimating that spending for voice and data services alone averages $2,000 to 3,000 per employee.

[ Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. And discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The biggest area for steady cost growth is the ever-expanding network, either as a result of physical expansion or a general thirst for connectivity. In the first case, a new branch office could require replication of the security infrastructure through technology like a point-to-point VPN connection. The network may need to add a MPLS (multiprotocol labeling service) to provide that branch office with a wide-area, high-speed connection. And those expenses are in addition to the cost of routers, switches, and network appliances that the branch office may need.

Internally, the "need for speed" is driving the increase of network costs. More and more devices, either in terms of number of ports for network access or the number of network-connected devices per employee, is increasing.

One growing trend is the shift from standard PCs to mobile PCs in the corporate world. Over the next five years, Forrester Research believes corporate America will reach an inflection point where traditional PCs are eclipsed by mobile PCs.

"Now you have a device that perhaps needs a port or wired drop at the desk and may also need to be supported on a wireless network, so the number of means by which employees can connect to the network drives the size of the network in terms of end points of connectivity," explains Chris Silva, an analyst with Forrester Research of Cambridge, Mass.

Other factors also are contributing to spiraling network costs. Aberdeen Group, for example, found that companies expect to increase their bandwidth by 108 percent on average over the next 12 months and expect to increase the number of business-critical applications running on their networks by 67 percent.

The growth of wireless networking is also increasing IT costs. As companies begin to replace all or part of their networks with Wi-Fi networks to take advantage of newer technologies like 802.11n, they are spending liberally.

And don't forget the hidden costs: As new devices enter the network and new network end points are developed, network management becomes more complex and expensive. For example, you might have your core wired network infrastructure from Vendor A but overlay a wireless network from Vendor B, which creates two separate management consoles. And as more employees connect to the network via devices like BlackBerrys and phones, the IT staff must manage and secure these network-connected devices as well.

Clearly, companies must do what they can to manage network costs. AOTMP, a telecom consultancy based in Indianapolis, found that developing a strategy to manage network expenses was the top telecom network initiative for companies in 2008, with reducing spending for telecom services and improved asset and inventory management services rounding out the top three.

Reducing network costsThe first step in controlling network costs, says Aberdeen analyst Began Simi, is to take the network's pulse. That means understanding exactly where the network's performance bottlenecks are and how efficiently the network is performing.

"Throwing more bandwidth and money at the problem even though you don't understand the bandwidth consumption per application or network location can be expensive," he says.

There are automated network monitoring tools available to measure these metrics. Both sophisticated products from vendors like Cisco Systems and NetQoS and free tools like PRTG Network Monitor and pier can provide a lot of value, such as reducing bandwidth and server performance bottlenecks and avoiding system downtime.

Once you understand what's going on in your network, there are many methods companies can use to reduce costs or prevent them from rising further.

One method is to consolidate the physical network infrastructure by finding ways to make the switch that's at the core of the network perform more functions; by doing so, you can reduce the number of appliances and bolt-on solutions your network uses. Many networking vendors like HP and Cisco are making inroads in this area.

Virtualization is a key part of network consolidation. By setting up the network infrastructure to be delivered from a pool of shared resources, those resources can be used more efficiently across a network fabric, explains Peter Fetterolf, a partner at Network Strategy Partners, a Boston consultancy. Virtualization can improve network resource utilization, efficiency, and agility, helping lower the total cost of ownership.

What's more, virtualization leads to reduced overhead in areas like power and cooling; real estate; supervision, maintenance, and personnel; and telecom services, he adds. And consolidation of service capacity in a single location creates more predictable demand patterns that permit better utilization, while overhead costs are spread over more productive assets such as systems administrators per server and network managers per network element.

Another part of consolidation is adopting technology that allows the IT staff to manage both the wired and wireless network from a single platform via APIs or other types of application integration tools. Most of the major network vendors are battling to provide functions like these, but third-party vendors also can help.

"That means taking one network management console and managing not only just the flow of data bits and bytes, but managing the VPN service, the WAN optimization tool and other things in the network," Silva says. "You want to consolidate your different management interfaces and consoles into one virtual single pane of glass management, where everything is on one screen."

And don't forget about what you already have in place. It doesn't make sense to invest in more technology if you're not maximizing the value of the investments you have already made, Silva says. For example, you may have spent a lot on a wireless network and mobility technology, but if the network hasn't been configured properly to use the technology, you're wasting money. If built correctly, the network can probably support technologies like voice over wireless LAN or VoIP, for example.

"Most often, you can squeeze more value from what you already have by using the same infrastructure with different overlay technologies to get more return on the investment that's already been made," he says. "So in addition to serving data, that $200,000 investment in a wireless LAN can also work toward cutting down the monthly cellular bills of an organization because that network can also support voice. And the same template can be applied for supporting things like video, using the WLAN for asset or employee tracking and presence-enabling unified communications systems."

And examine the vendors and technologies you are using for best value. If, for example, you have relied on Cisco Systems to develop your entire network, expenses could get very high very quickly. "There are a lot of different ways to build a network, and there are a lot of different options. They are all worth exploring," Fetterolf says. And once you have done that, don't be shy about pitting vendors against each other, he adds.

Finally, it can also make sense to look beyond the four walls of your organization for cost savings. Outsourcing network management, for example, can save significant money in some cases. In a recent study, Aberdeen Group found that organizations that outsourced network management reported an average savings of 26 percent as compared with previous spending.

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