New Products
Not a new product per se but a forum for many is the forthcoming dual-track event: The World Electronics Expo and the Robot Gizmo & Gadget Show. This new event will feature the latest from the world of electronics. Categories will include gaming, audio, digital imaging, emerging technologies, home networking, home theater/audio, in-vehicle technology, wireless and the Robot, Gizmo and Gadget Show. Both members of the trade and the general public will experience close up the machines of the future and how they will affect our lives. The show will be held June 18–20, 2009, at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Is open source right for your company? A new resource from O'Reilly may help you decide. Dubbed Open Source in the Enterprise and written by Bernard Golden, this O'Reilly Radar Report is for CIOs, IT managers and business owners who want to make smart decisions about deploying open source. The study not only outlines open source from a business perspective, but it also presents three action plans to help companies effectively increase its use. Downloadable in PDF format, both individual and five-user site licenses are available.
“Intelligence is wasted on problems that themselves have been caused by an excess of intelligence”, says author Gunter Dueck in his new book Lean Brain Management from Springer. This satirical book seeks to transform society to minimal intelligence everywhere possible. For example, after 30 minutes of “Googling”, any human can talk intelligently on any topic. With this book, Dueck presents a radical suggestion for world improvement. The desire to laugh about the consistent economization of intelligence eventually will hopefully segue into a collective rude awakening. In keeping with the theme, the book is written in an easy-to-read fashion. It contains no self-doubt whatsoever.
While your desktop PC is greedily gulping 114 Watts of power, the newly released CherryPal C100 cloud computer will do the same work with 98% less—only 2 Watts. CherryPal, Inc., says that its new creation has no moving parts, contains 80% fewer components, is highly secure and runs a customized version of Debian. No maintenance is required, as most information is processed and stored off-site in the so-called CherryPalCloud. The CherryPal also offers a new single software layer technology, which collapses the operating system and browser into one layer. The single layer makes the CherryPal exponentially faster, says its maker, and it virtually eliminates the risk of bugs or viruses for the user. The CherryPal sports Freescale's MPC5121e mobileGT processor, 256MB of DDR2 DRAM and a 4GB NAND Flash-based solid state drive.
The IT appliance sector is having its own Cambrian explosion, fueled in part by the newly released Vyatta Series 2500 Open Networking Appliance line. The line of networking appliances is “designed to meet the connectivity, security and protection demands of medium to large enterprises”. The Vyatta 2501, the first appliance available in the series, offers tightly integrated routing and security features and broad interface support, up to 10Gbps. It further includes the Vyatta Community Edition 4 software (routing, firewall, VPN, VoIP QoS and so on), several LAN and WAN options, two onboard Gigabit Ethernet ports and one each PCI-X and PCIe expansion slots.
In news for the HPC crowd, Interactive Supercomputing, Inc., recently upgraded Star-P, a software application for accelerating and managing HPC workloads across clusters and supercomputers. Star-P is an interactive parallel computing platform that allows scientists, engineers and analysts to create algorithms and models on their desktops using familiar mathematical tools, such as MATLAB and Python, and run them instantly and interactively on parallel computers with little or no modification. The new version adds support for the SGI Altix line of blade servers, Platform Computing's LSF workload management software and large scale-out workloads.
MindTouch bills its Deki (formerly Deki Wiki) as an open-source enterprise collaboration and integration platform that helps information workers, IT professionals and developers collaborate and connect disparate enterprise systems and data sources. With Deki, businesses can connect and mash up the application and data silos that exist across an enterprise—including legacy systems, CRM and ERP applications, databases and Web 2.0 applications. Adapters are available for widely used IT and developer systems, such as SugarCRM, Salesforce, LinkedIn, MySQL, VisiFire, WordPress and more.
Enriching the vast MySQL ecosystem is the new ExtSQL, short for Extended usage statistics for SQL. The product is designed to provide DBAs with a simple tool for monitoring database activity by individual user, database, host or even connection. Software Workshop asserts that present SQL monitoring tools allow only gross monitoring at the server level. ExtSQL provides extra detail, including historical data, and makes it available from the command line. The ExtSQL server is designed to be a drop-in replacement for an existing mysqld or postmaster executable.
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