IBM: Symphony Downloaded 100,000 Times in First Week
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The company reports that its free rival to Microsoft's Office suite was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release.
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When Amazon introduced S3 a couple of years ago I knew I would useit and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have -- storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It's going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet. I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It's worth repeating here. When I developed Frontier in the late 80s and early 90s my target platform was a modern desktop computer, a few megabytes of RAM, a half-gig of disk, a few megahertz CPU. A system capable of running Quark XPress, Hypercard or Filemaker. It would be used to develop apps that would drive desktop publishing. Later, it was used to generate static websites, then a demonstration of democracy (a multi-author ultra-simple CMS), then news sites, which became weblogs, then blogs, and editthispage.com, Manila, weblogs.com, and that's when scaling became an issue. (Later we side-stepped the scaling issue by moving most of the processing to the desktop with Radio 8.) As we approached then cracked ease of use in web authoring, scaling became an issue, then the issue. A Manila server would work fine for a few thousand sites, but after that it would bog down because the architecture couldn't escape the confines of a single machine it was designed for in the 80s. (Before you say it's obsolete, there still are a lot of apps for single machines. Perl, Python, JavaScript and Java share the same design philosophy.) Same with weblogs.com. It worked great when there was a few thousand blogs. Once we hit 50K or so, we had to come up with a new design. Eventually we were tracking a couple million, and Frontier was hopelessy outclassed by the size of the problem. If only Amazon's database had been there, both Manila and weblogs.com could have been redesigned to keep up. It would have been a huge programming task, but it would have made it economically possible.  Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill.  Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart.  They're going down a road we went down with XML-RPC and then SOAP. There may be some bumps along the way but there are no dead-ends, no deal-stoppers. All major environments can be adapted to work with this data structure, unless I'm missing something (standard disclaimers apply). Their move makes many things possible. As I said earlier, if it existed when we had to scale weblogs.com, we would certainly have used it. One could build an open identity system on it, probably in an afternoon, it would be perfect for that. A Twitter-like messaging system, again, would be easy. It's amazing that Microsoft and Google are sitting by and letting Amazon take all this ground in developer-land without even a hint of a response. It seems likely they have something in the works. Let's hope there's some compatibility.
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IBM&#39;s new top-end Power5-based Unix server has a commanding lead in a performance test of servers running a large database. A $16.7 million configuration of the company&#39;s eServer p5-595 performed 3.21 million
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Creative Technology doubles its number of MP3 player product lines. Also: IBM makes the design of its 'blade' servers widely available & hellip;. Video game publisher Acclaim Entertainment files for bankruptcy & hellip;. and more.
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Aspyr Media has posted an incremental update that squashes bugs, smooths play.
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An early version of the first significant Vista update is released to about 12,000 testers. Meanwhile, a near-final "release candidate" version of Windows Server 2008 is set to be available for download within 24 hours.
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One-inch Microdrive capacity will jump to up to 10GB.
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OCTOBER 18, 2004  - IBM last week completed its lineup of servers based on its Power5 chips by adding high-end pSeries and iSeries models that can support up to 64 processors, double the previous threshold for CPUs.
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Big Blue blames routine maintenance IBMLink, the place Big Blue's mainframe customers go for online support, suffered a weekend of downtime between 8 June and 11 June.â¦
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IBM&#39;S Blue Gene supercomputer, which is still being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has set an unofficial performance record.
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IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Blue Gene/L, which is being installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recaptured the supercomputer speed record that Silicon Graphics' (NYSE: SGI) Columbia system at NASA held for barely a week.
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An IBM supercomputer still under development has set an unofficial new world speed record during testing, the company announced on Wednesday.
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(Source: SEPATON) ESG Lab reviews SEPATON's enterprise-class virtual tape library systems to validate backup/restore performance of over 17TB per hour, dramatically accelerating data protection.  In addition, SEPATON's DeltaStor de-duplication software exceeded company claims of 50:1 de-dupe ratios to help companies mitigate growing disk storage costs. Uncover more "outstanding" results in the full report.
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Movie & video, book, images, software (games & program) and music cataloguer / database. Uses online web services (amazon, imdb, musicbrainz, freedb). Skinnable, highly customizable, reporting. Supports DVD, many audio & video file formats and Audio CD'.   Although I planned on releasing the production version at this moment I have decided against this. At the last moment I decided on changing the working of the online search drastically (see the change log for more information). As this is quite fundamental a second beta came to mind. Please help me testing in this release!   My thanks to the many persons emailing me, posting their issues in the forums and logging their bugs an request at Sourceforge.net!            Presented By     Play PSP Games Online at Thousands of T-Mobile HotSpot Locations Nationwide      Unleash the power of your PSP(r) system through thrilling online gaming against players from around the world.  And now - you can play PSP games online at thousands of T-Mobile HotSpot locations nationwide with six months of complimentary T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi service! www.playstation.com/    Ads by Pheedo
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The number of viruses, worms and other security threats to PCs has now passed the 100,000 mark.
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IBM&#39;s Blue Gene/L became the top contender to the supercomputing throne Thursday as Big Blue announced a new incarnation of the machine can perform 70.
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(InfoWorld) - People apparently are already tuning in to IBM's Symphony. The company reported Wednesday thatÂ its free rival to Microsoft's Office suiteÂ was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release. "To be honest, we were surprised at the speed with which people jumped on this," said Mike Rhodin, general manager of both IBM Collaboration and Lotus Software, in an interview Wednesday. To keep up with the number of people interested in downloading Symphony, IBM tripled the number of download servers it had for the suite of productivity applications in the first few days of its release, he said. At first, users had to sign up for an IBM ID and password and enter identity information to download the first beta of Symphony, a free suite of office productivity applications made available last Tuesday, but users complained that this process was "too onerous," Rhodin said. IBM tweaked the process so now all people need to get Symphony is a valid e-mail address. Because of this, it's been hard to track whether it's consumers or businesses that are downloading Symphony, he said. But IBM is less interested in who is using the software than in getting it into as many hands as possible, Rhodin said. Symphony is based on OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse framework and is meant not only to give consumers and businesses an alternative to Microsoft Office, but also to promote the use of ODF (Open Document for XML), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). "The end goal here is the proliferation of the open standard," Rhodin said. Microsoft Office 2007, which has more than 90 percent market share, does not natively support ODF and instead uses the company'sÂ OOXML (Open XML) format, which failed to pass a recent ISO vote for standardization. IBM and ODF supporters like Sun and Google have been waging a public battle against Microsoft to promote their interest in ODF, on which all three companies have based productivity applications. The Microsoft competitors are hoping that because ODF is a standard and Office does not support it, more users will begin purchasing ODF-friendly software, thus giving competing players more of a chance against Microsoft's dominance in the productivity-application market. Symphony joins Sun's for-fee version of StarOffice as the latest software suite based on OpenOffice.org code to go up against Microsoft Office. So far, neither the free nor for-fee versions of OpenOffice.org have achieved any real success in cutting into Office's market share or revenue. IBM only recently joined the OpenOffice.org communityÂ after holding off for many years, and Rhodin said Symphony is not meant to be a slight against the suite that is freely available from that organization. But IBM is clearly interested in being more successful than its rivals in presenting a true alternative to Office as a way to promote ODF. "This isn't just another OpenOffice suite," he said. "We have made investments in OpenOffice.org to create an enterprise experience around it." As a part of this, IBM based Symphony on the Eclipse open-source development framework so it would be easy for third-party ISVs to build plug-in applications for the suite much like third parties have built applications for Office. In fact, one company in Brazil, Totvs, is already building an ERP application on Symphony, he said. And before Symphony was released as a stand-alone product,Â IBM had already included it in Lotus Notes 8, the latest version of its collaboration software, another arena in which it is tweaking its strategy to battle with Microsoft. Office is playing an increasingly important role for Microsoft in this market as the company hopes to leverage the ubiquity of Office among business users by making its applications the front-end interface for worker collaboration. So far, Symphony is getting decent reviews among users, and analysts think IBM, because of its successful software history, has a better chance than others at giving Microsoft Office some real competition. "IBM is the 800-pound gorilla in enterprise software, and Microsoft's main rival for information worker productivity tools," wrote IDC analyst Melissa Webster in a research report published Wednesday. "And Symphony addresses the concerns that potential OpenOffice.org users might have had in regard to using open-source software: Symphony is backed by the IBM brand and is provided as a commercially developed and supported product suite." IBM plans to release a second beta of Symphony in the next six to eight weeks with a general availability release of the software to come early next year, Rhodin said. At that time, IBM will offer enterprise support for the suite for a fee, though he acknowledged that IBM doesn't really expect to sell much of that support and is only providing it so enterprises will feel more comfortable implementing Symphony.