WebSpherePower Magazine

SCO says Linux a copy of Unix

SCO chief executive Darl McBride claims that Linux is a copy of Unix, which is contradicted by the open-source community and apparently runs counter to other SCO testimony.

SCO sued IBM in 2003, claiming that the IT giant had used copyright code from the Unix operating system which SCO sold, and later extended this suit to other Linux vendors. However, last August, Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix. A four-day court case is now determining Novell's claim for up to $20 million in royalties from SCO, which declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

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Red Hat should be only Linux distro

One Oracle exec said there should be only one Linux distribution--Red Hat--and claimed there will be no fragmentation of that code base.

In an interview with the Linux Foundation recently, Oracle's chief corporate architect said Oracle Unbreakable Linux is not a product but a support program and he believes that there ought to be only one Linux distribution--his rival's code base.

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OpenSolaris, NetBeans updates

Sun Microsystems is kicking off this JavaOne week with a host of news regarding its OpenSolaris operating system and NetBeans integrated development environment.

Company officials made the announcements May 5 at Sun's CommunityOne Developer Conference, which essentially is a prelude to the JavaOne event that runs May 6-9 in San Francisco.

At CommunityOne, Sun and the OpenSolaris community announced the availability of OpenSolaris, in a distribution that had previously been known as Project Indiana. OpenSolaris is based on the Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration.

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SAP, IBM still chummy

Executives from IBM and SAP said the two companies won't fall out even though they now compete head-on in the market for BI (business intelligence) software, with their respective purchases of Cognos and Business Objects.

SAP provides such a big chunk of business for IBM Global Business Services that the two sides are unlikely to disrupt their close partnership, said Don Mettica, an official from that unit, during a panel discussion at SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando this week. "We see this space continuing to grow," he said.

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Create secure Java applications

This is the second in a two-part tutorial series on creating secure Java-based Web applications using Rational Application Developer, Data Studio and Rational AppScan. In Part 1 you developed a Java Web application with Rational Application Developer, and then deployed the application on WebSphere Application Server with Java Server Pages (JSP). This tutorial shows you how to scan the Wealth application created in Part 1 using Rational AppScan to discover and fix all known Web security vulnerabilities. It also shows how to re-scan your application and generate reports.

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Donofrio, Zeitler to exit

Two of IBM's most senior executives, technology strategy chief Nick Donofrio and hardware chief Bill Zeitler, will retire later this year, an IBM memo showed on Monday.

Chief Executive Sam Palmisano announced the retirements in an email to employees obtained by Reuters. Bob Moffat will take Zeitler's job as Senior Vice President and Group Executive, Systems and Technology, overseeing computer and microchips and keep his current role focused on IBM's supply chain.

A variety of executives will take on roles from Donofrio, whose title is Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology, Palmisano said. Spokesman Ed Barbini confirmed the moves and said the change was normal as, traditionally, executives retire around age 60. Zeitler would be 61 and Donofrio 63 when they retired, he said.

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CEOs battle to keep pace with change

The IBM Global CEO Study, the largest study of chief executives ever conducted, reveals a dramatic increase in the number of global business leaders who see important change ahead, and also highlights how the ability to absorb and manage change is widening the gap between winners and losers in the global economy.

CEOs reported a surprising level of optimism about change as an opportunity to build new competitive advantage. Overall, 83 percent of surveyed CEOs expect substantial change in the future, an increase of 28 percent in just two years. However, CEOs report their ability to effectively manage change is increasing at a far slower pace.

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David's cure for insomnia

For those of you who happen to be awake at 4am Rocky Mountain time, David will be broadcasting on the 50,000 watt radio station KOA-850AM, doing the after-midnight show with Rick Barber and talking about White House email and the Mexican theft of White House BlackBerrys. Just so you know, in order to do this at 4am Rocky Mountain time, David's got to be conscious and lucid at 6am Florida time.

If you know our fearless leader, you know he's definitely not a 6am kinda guy, so the only way this is going to fly is stay up and do the show before going to bed. In any case, if you happen to be up at 4am and located pretty much anywhere on the western side of the US (50,000 watts reaches a long distance at night), you can tune in. You can also listen via their Web feed, should you be in a different part of the world. David promises to do his best to keep you awake throughout the full hour.

And, if you're mature and sleeping, like all good people should be at that hour, we'll post the download link sometime in the next day or so when it makes it online.

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Sun to cut up to 2500 jobs

The US computer firm Sun Microsystems has reported an unexpected three-month loss and announced plans to cut between 1500 and 2500 jobs. It blamed costs relating to its takeover of the Swedish software firm MySQL as well as disappointing orders from US customers. The job cuts represent up to 7.5% of Sun's total workforce of 33,500.

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Create and deploy Data Web Services

Data Studio, the new unified tooling platform for IBM data servers, provides a feature that allows easy exposure of database operations as Web services, also known as IBM Data Web Services. This tutorial series will show how Web services created with DWS can be deployed on IBM's WebSphere Application Server and how WebSphere Application Server enhanced features in terms of security, transaction capabilities and more, can be leveraged to turn your Data Web Service application into a powerful, secure, and reliable enterprise Web service.

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Military computer contractor convicted of ID theft

A former U.S. military contractor has pleaded guilty to exceeding authorized access to a computer and aggravated identity theft after he was accused of selling names and Social Security numbers of 17,000 military employees, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Randall Craig, 41, of Houston, pleaded guilty Friday to both counts of an indictment returned in April by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Craig acknowledged selling information contained in a military database to a person he believed to represent a foreign government, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The person who purchased the names and Social Security numbers from Craig was an undercover FBI agent, they said.

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IBM, Google collaborate on cloud

Google and IBM committed to working more closely on cloud computing Thursday at IBM's Business Partnership Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. The companies said they were extending a joint research project that started last October.

"Cloud computing is the story of our lifetime," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said. "Eventually all devices will be on the network."

He was joined onstage by IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, who said the relationship marks a new avenue for Big Blue. "It is the first time we have taken something from the consumer arena and applied it to the enterprise," he said.

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FINDING LOTUS IT JOBS IN A CHALLENGING ECONOMY
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Clustering WebSphere Commerce V6.0

This tutorial takes you through step-by-step instructions for installing WebSphere Commerce V6.0 with a remote IBM HTTP Web server and a remote DB2 database. You will create a WebSphere Commerce instance and publish one of the sample stores. You will also learn about the installation process and how to configure a WebSphere Commerce system.

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Migrate WASCE apps to WAS

A new tool available from alphaWorks can help you migrate existing J2EE V1.4 applications from Apache Geronimo-based IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition V2.0.x to IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1.

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SCO trial begins

More than four years after filing a lawsuit about alleged misuse of the Unix operating system, the SCO Group will get its days in court, beginning today in Salt Lake City.

The defendant will be Novell, which SCO sued in 2004. SCO also had filed a lawsuit over Unix in 2003 against International Business Machines Corp.

SCO's lawsuit against IBM claims the company had violated an agreement by inserting Unix code into Linux, a free "open source" computer operating system distributed by IBM that competes with proprietary Unix.

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Validating performance in a J2EE application

This tutorial shows you how to tune a typical J2EE application for performance by analyzing database usage and by using the Rational Application Developer Java Profiler to identify costly operations.

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Indian techies snubbing US jobs

Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology so called "IITians" told Evalueserve that India was fast catching up with the US for the range and quality of career prospects. Between 1964 and 2001 the number of IITians staying in India was 65 percent but this jumped to 84 percent between 2002 and 2008.

The survey of 667 IITians found this was being fuelled by shifting attitudes, between 1964 and 2001 60 per cent believed developed countries offered the best employment prospects but this fell to 51 per cent between 2002 and 2008, with 49 per cent believing India now offered better opportunities.

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Six phases of a technology flop

There's a saying that greatness doesn't happen overnight. Well, the same can often be said for great flops. Technology flops go through their own stages, from promising new technology to overhyped beast to oblivion. Here's a look at the six stages of technology flops, using the rise and fall of push technology as an example.

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The 10 hottest IT jobs

Through analysis of some recent employment studies and interviews with IT professionals and recruiters, Baseline Magazine determined the hottest IT positions today. Here is the list from Baseline Magazine.

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Contest slammed for encouraging hackers

Anti-virus companies are angry at a planned new event at a major security conference in the US.

Called Race-to-Zero, the contest will invite visitors to the Defcon hacker conference to find new ways of beating anti-virus software.

Contestants will get some sample virus code that they must modify and try to sneak past the anti-virus products.

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Wage gap narrower for women in IT

Statistically, men make more money than women do for doing the same job. It's called the "wage gap" and it is considered one of the last bastions of gender inequality in the workplace.

The wage gap hit its all-time low in 1973, when women could be expected to earn 56.6 percent of what a man would earn for the same work, according to the U.S. Women's Bureau and the NCPE (National Committee on Pay Equity). This was a decade after the Equal Pay Act of 1963 made it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who held the same job and did the same work. (The percentage was 58 percent in 1963.)

In 2007, women could expect to be paid 80 cents on the dollar across all occupations, an improvement of less than half a penny per year, with numbers even further depressed among minorities: 64 cents per dollar for African-American women and 52 cents for Hispanic women.

IT professions faired better than most in 2007. Computer support specialists appeared closest to closing the wage gap, with women earning 87 percent of what men did in the same occupation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers beat the national average in other categories, including computer and information systems managers and computer programmers (85 percent) and database administrators, computer scientists and systems analysts (84 percent).

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Schwartz sees end to blogging

Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz rightly gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others. But pretty soon the novelty of his methods will wear off, he predicted.

"At some point the word 'blogging' will be anachronistic," Schwartz said at the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. "I communicate."

And he predicted, in effect, that the rest of the executive world will catch up. "Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O'Reily Media chief Tim O'Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."

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HPC here to stay

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz said high-performance computing is alive and well, noting that he sells Sun gear to newer Web 2.0 companies that ask for large multiprocessor systems to scale their businesses.

Schwartz, easily the most prominent C-level executive blogging for a major high-tech company, made his comments April 25 at the Web 2.0 Expo.

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Oracle closes BEA deal

Oracle said Tuesday that it closed its acquisition of BEA Systems following European Commission approval.

In a statement, Oracle president Charles Phillips BEA will help the company's vision of a "a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure" and provide "a series of complementary and well-engineered middleware products."

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IBM Uncages Cheetah 2 Data Server

Less than a year after unleashing its "Cheetah" data server, IBM is set to release a new version of its software with enhanced availability.

IDS(Informix Dynamic Sever) 11.5, code-named "Cheetah 2," builds on the failover-recovery capabilities of its predecessor by now supporting full read/write transactions across all nodes. The last version of IDS only supported reads on secondary nodes, the company said. The latest version of IDS will be available worldwide beginning on May 6.

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IBM acquires InfoDyne

IBM announced it has acquired InfoDyne Corporation, a privately held software company based in Park Ridge, Illinois. InfoDyne is a leader in high-speed platforms and data feed connectors which combined with IBM's WebSphere technology will help clients extend transactional integrity to low-latency environments. Financial details were not disclosed.

InfoDyne provides software that is designed to enable today's highly competitive trading firms and other venues to process exploding data volumes at microsecond response rates. InfoDyne's market data delivery platform and rich feed handler portfolio take data from hundreds of sources and deliver it in a standardized format, helping customers to control escalating data feed costs.

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Reiser conviction may kill ReiserFS

Software developer Hans Reiser was found guilty today of first degree murder in the death of his wife in late 2006, a conviction that carries up to 25 years in prison and a possible death sentence for the Reiser4 file system.

ReiserFS (File System) is incorporated in the Linux kernel and is used in many top Linux distributions, although EXT3 has succeeded it a the leading file system. The Reiser4 open source project, the successor to ReiserFS also conceived by Hans Reiser, continues to be developed and supported by a group of open source programmers. In an e-mail interview over the weekend, Edward Shishkin, a top developer of Reiser4, said work continues on the file system but the fate of the open source project long term is uncertain.

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Breaking news: White House BlackBerry devices stolen by Mexican govt official

Looks like our own David Gewirtz was right in his concerns. Here's a breaking news report on the subject:

ZATZ Publishing today announces that national security concerns published by David Gewirtz, ZATZ Editor-in-Chief and the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? have been proven true in a particularly tangible and unfortunate example.

Today, Fox News reported that Rafael Quintero Curiel, lead press advance person for the Mexican Delegation was caught stealing six or seven BlackBerry devices belonging to White House staffers who were attending meetings between U.S. President George W. Bush and Canadian and Mexican leaders in New Orleans this week. Unfortunately, Quintero Curiel was caught after the devices had been in his possession for some time.

That's the equivalent in strategic U.S. government information of about 28,000 printed pages of data, or seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels. And that's per BlackBerry. Given today's incident, that's seven times seven complete sets of all seven Harry Potter novels.

Read the full text.

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Best practices and patterns for aggregation

Part 1 and Part 2 of this three-part series introduced you to the new aggregation capabilities in IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus V6.1. Now learn the best practices to follow when using the new aggregation capabilities. This article, the third and final installment in the series, describes four core patterns that you can apply to different business scenarios to design the majority of aggregation mediation applications.

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IT labor shortage or not, gaps remain

The debate over whether there are sizeable IT labor shortages in the United States is challenging and complex. There has been plenty of discussion on H-1B visas, a purported lack of computer science graduates and a cry from the human resources industry that many jobs in technology simply cannot get filled.

Nearly one in four CIOs polled by Robert Half International in a recent survey said finding skilled IT professionals is their greatest staffing challenge. It's gone so far that major company heads like Bill Gates of Microsoft have urged the U.S. government to increase the number of H1-B visas to help fill gaps.

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Crazy about recruitment

Considering how hard most solution providers will tell you it is to find IT talent, they would be crazy to launch recruiting side businesses.

Well, call them crazy, but a small group of solution providers in recent years has done just that. Though playing headhunter wasn't exactly in their original business plans, these solution providers have tackled recruitment as another service for their customers. The providers are featured in a story titled "For Hire" in this month's eWEEK Strategic Provider.

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Enhance WebSphere Service Registry

Learn how you can use Apache Lucene and the Spring Framework to create a keywords plug-in to add full-text search to WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.

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Manage service availability dynamically

Learn how to dynamically manage service availability using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository V6.1 service life cycle governance model to describe the status of a service and WebSphere ESB's endpoint lookup mediation primitive to query the registry for this information and select the appropriate service endpoint dynamically at run time.

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IBM launches iDataPlex server

IBM on Wednesday outlined its entry to be the hardware vendor of choice among Web 2.0 companies with a server dubbed iDataPlex.

Big Blue calls the iDataPlex a new server category designed to be one of thousands crammed into a data center. IBM claims iDataplex uses less than 40 percent less power, can use a liquid cooled wall to run at room temperature, has a small footprint so you can double the number of servers in a rack and uses Linux and other industry standards. IBM's iDataPlex is designed as a rack system.

The technology giant unveiled the server at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco so it can pitch a lot of potential customers, but it could appeal to a lot of enterprises too.

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IT failing at being Green

Despite industrywide marketing spin espousing politically correct intentions to make data centers more environmentally sound, few IT system managers actually have any specific plans in place. Furthermore, most IT managers give their operations failing grades in reducing energy consumption, a new industry study reported.

Lack of funding and operational resources--at least in this year's budgets--were the reasons most often cited in the new research conducted in February and released April 24 by the BPM (Business Performance Management) Forum.

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New way to hack Oracle

Security researcher David Litchfield has released technical details of a new type of attack that could give a hacker access to an Oracle database.

Called a lateral SQL injection, the attack could be used to gain database administrator privileges on an Oracle server in order to change or delete data or even install software, Litchfield said in an interview on Thursday.

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Plan for disaster recovery

Disasters happen to businesses of any size. They can take a variety of forms--ranging from fire and flood to janitorial accidents. Consultant Dave Sobel, CEO of Evolve Technologies, explains how you should plan for what is probably inevitable.

Every small and home-based business owner should resolve to implement a workable disaster recovery plan to divert looming IT failure and potentially permanent data loss. With some simple advance planning, it's possible to avoid mistakes that can lead to data collapse, which could stop your business in its tracks. How can your company prepare its IT infrastructure?

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MySQL to remain open source

Marten Mickos, head of Sun Microsystems' database group, says MySQL will remain an open-source product.

After several days of blog posts and headlines, the dust that kicked up over Sun Microsystems' commitment to keeping MySQL open source seems to have settled.

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Goodwin chats with Channel

At the Cisco Partner Summit in Honolulu recently, Channel Insider Editor Sara Driscoll discussed the data center, the skills crisis and SMBs with Keith Goodwin, Cisco's senior vice president of the worldwide channel, in the latest edition of Changing Channels.

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Serena's Mashup Exchange

Serena Software will announce the launch of its Serena Mashup Exchange at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco.

The Serena Mashup Exchange is an online marketplace for accelerating the creation and use of what the Redwood City, Calif., company calls business mashups.

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