Veteran Linux provider SUSE announced the availability of SUSE Cloud, an automated cloud computing platform that enables the rapid deployment and easy ongoing management of an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private cloud. SUSE describes SUSE Cloud as the first enterprise-supported private cloud solution powered by OpenStack, which includes contributions from 3,300+ developers at 180 companies and enjoys broad industry support and a vibrant community. The solution integrates seamlessly with SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager, allowing enterprises to rapidly deploy, adapt and manage applications and workloads across private and public clouds. Additional SUSE Cloud features include the ability to leverage existing infrastructure, optimize licensing costs, improve the speed and accuracy of delivering services to the line of business and take advantage of a high level of support, among others.
Working with office documents on a mobile device always has been clunky at best. In an effort to make handheld computers truer replacements for desktops and laptops, software house SoftMaker has brought forth a new innovation in the form of SoftMaker Office Mobile 2012, a full-featured office software app suite designed for smartphones and tablets running Android. Going beyond document viewers, SoftMaker Office Mobile includes three separate office applications: the TextMaker word processor, the PlanMaker spreadsheet and the SoftMaker Presentations presentation package. Each app, says SoftMaker, is fully functional and capable of interoperating with Microsoft Office documents with no loss of layout or formatting including advanced items, such as charts, calculations, transitions and animations. Advanced office functions, such as tracking document changes and adding annotations, spreadsheet calculations and charting, presentation slide transitions and animations and PDF creation, also are included. Cloud-based services include Save to Dropbox and Save to Evernote, which expand functionality for document sharing and collaboration regardless of location.
The target audience for Denim Group's ThreadFix—an open-source software vulnerability management tool—is mainly mid-size companies unable to afford the half a million it typically costs for a full testing suite. The company says that ThreadFix gives enterprise developers the ability to review a single comprehensive security profile of their applications. Furthermore, ThreadFix can operate at the same time that software development is occurring and creates Web application firewall virtual patches, which protect the applications during remediation. By using tools the developers already know and love, the security team can work with the development team by using the language they speak. At the same time, the security team has a platform to manage the resolution process that is, says the Denim Group, light-years better than the Excel spreadsheets typically used for this effort.
GrammaTech's flagship product is CodeSonar, a static-analysis tool that performs a whole-program, interprocedural analysis on C/C++ code. The solution, now in version 3.8, identifies complex programming bugs that can result in system crashes, memory corruption, concurrency errors and other serious problems. The new version is six times faster with fewer false positives due to a combination of new models for C/C++ libraries, making it much easier to analyze projects with millions of lines of code. The speedup was achieved, notes GrammaTech, by parallelizing the analysis engine to take full advantage of multicore processors. On an eight-core machine, analysis times are said to have been reduced by 85%. Improvements to the analysis engine empower developers to pinpoint defects faster and with greater precision. Improvements to the user interface make it easy for developers to understand and analyze very large projects, including those developed by complex software-development organizations.
Announcing new books like Brian Evans' Practical 3D Printers: The Science and Art of 3D Printing is dangerous. Now we'll never get you out of the basement. Should you decide to sequester yourself in pursuit of 3-D-printing guru-dom, you will find yourself fully armed with everything you need to know. In case you are not yet aware, a 3-D printer is a device you can either buy or (oh so much more fun) build to make parts, toys, art and even 3-D images captured by a sensor or modeled in software. The book takes readers beyond building the printer to calibrating it, customizing it and creating amazing models with it, including 3-D printed text, a warship model, a robot body, windup toys and arcade-inspired alien invaders. Readers also will explore the different types of popular 3-D printer models like the MakerBot, the whiteAnt RepStrap and RepRap printers. Other topics range from finding and creating 3-D models, including using Google Sketchup, creating a 3-D model from a 2-D image, the printer toolchain, creating multipart models and meshes, and upgrading both the mechanical and electronic parts.
The technology we create, peddle and service in today's Brave New World presents once unthinkable possibilities, both for better and for worse. In order to get the jump on the downside risks, sneak a peek at Kord Davis and Doug Patterson's new book Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation. The O'Reilly published tome provides a framework for productive discussion and thinking about ethics and Big Data in business environments. With the increasing size and scope of information that Big Data technologies can provide business, maintaining an ethical practice benefits from a common framework of understanding and vocabulary for discussing questions about coherent and consistent practices. The approach involves developing a set of terms and concepts, considering ethical principles useful in meaningful business discussions, and then exploring and comparing several overall views on data handling to help inform the development of an ethics-based data strategy. The focus is to enhance effective decision-making in business rather than legislate what ought to be done with data.
In today's distributed environments, many enterprises feel constrained by traditional data management methods and are looking to the cloud for solutions. One fine cloud-based option is Attunity CloudBeam, a recently announced data-replication SaaS solution for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3). Attunity says that the service provides replication and synchronization of Big Data stored in S3 across AWS cloud regions to enable business-critical initiatives, including disaster recovery, backup and data distribution. The new Attunity CloudBeam service is designed to ensure that information availability in the cloud is quick, reliable, easy-to-use and affordable for AWS customers. The service provider cites the fact that organizations can configure cloud systems properly to be ready to go when needed but never pay for any services until they're actually used. Other key features include parallelized and elastic data transfer to maximize use of bandwidth, configurable scheduling to ensure predictable information availability, optimized data transfer for moving large objects and large numbers of objects, delta replication using comparative snapshot technology, fast set up with “Click-2-Replicate” configuration, and no server or appliance setup required.
The role of Codethink's Baserock Embedded Linux is to enable silicon chipset and board vendors—not to mention Original Device Manufacturers and Systems Integrators—to keep pace with the rapid development of Linux and dramatically reduce product development cycles. Baserock, just elevated to v1.1, is an open-source Linux build system for the development of embedded, industrial or bare-metal server-based Linux systems. This new release provides virtual machine images for developers and a sample base image to demonstrate a Baserock-produced small system image. The OS also delivers the proven benefits of continuous integration (CI) to Linux system development, which heretofore were available only to developers of server and Web-based applications, says Codethink. CI, adds Codethink, makes it easier to develop Linux-based systems and to integrate system components. Baserock source code is available for building on 64-bit x86 and ARM systems. Virtual machine binaries are available for 64-bit x86 machines. Through native compilation of software and images, Codethink asserts that Baserock provides a robust and highly efficient build environment that is as closely aligned to upstream development environments as possible.
