Oracle says will catch up with SAP

Source Name : Yahoo! News

Summary :
Reuters - Oracle Corp moved to reassure investors that its business management software unit is healthy, even after sales dropped sharply in its most-recent quarter, telling investors it will catch up with bigger rival SAP AG .

SAN FRANCISCO/BOSTON (Reuters) - Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) moved to reassure investors that its business management software unit is healthy, even after sales dropped sharply in its most-recent quarter, telling investors it will catch up with bigger rival SAP AG (SAPG.DE).
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"We expect to catch them since we are growing so much faster than they are," Oracle President Safra Catz said at a financial analyst meeting in San Francisco.

Oracle, the world's third-largest software maker, last week reported that sales of business management software dropped 12 percent to $331 million in its fiscal first quarter ended August 31. The company and some analysts downplayed the decline, noting that they had risen 36 percent in the fourth quarter.

Business management software, or applications programs, helps companies manage tasks such as accounting, sales activities, inventory control, manufacturing and human resources.

SAP has long been the world's biggest maker of such programs, but Oracle has been boosting its share of the market through a string of acquisitions, including its purchases of PeopleSoft and Siebel.

Picasa Introduce Facial Recognition

In contrast to hype surrounding of the launch of Crome, Google’s new web browser, Picasa web album another of the Google family, very quietly launched an interesting technology of their own, this week.


The new Picasa technology, referred to as ‘name tagging’, takes some of the pain out of adding tags relating to the identity of individuals in your photographs. If you share photos on the internet, you’ll be used to adding tags (or keywords) to your images. Tags help you find your images within sets or collections on your site and allow search engines to catalogue them effectively.


One of the best things about the new name tagging technology is that it sits very comfortably with the old site, a new button has appeared giving you the option to add name tags. There is no need to reload images that you have already uploaded.

The name tagging process, automatically identifies what it thinks are faces within your images, it then asks you to put names those faces. Once you have named a person a couple of times, it will learn to identify that person for you and automatically tag them for you in future uploads.

To make tagging easier, Picasa automatically links to your gmail contacts and predicatively tries to fill names for you as you type. Another technology enhancement also allows “geo tagging” or adding geographical data to shots, by allowing you to drag and drop images to Google maps.
The application works best with higher resolution images and images that are taken from a similar angle to shots its already seen, and in some cases will ask you to confirm the identity of a person that it does not recognise.

Of course, you have the option to keep images private or to share them, but being a Google related technology, if you choose to share your images they will very quickly be picked up in Google searches, and if you are using the Google labs advanced search tools, the location will be picked up by the geographical filtering.

Picasa has been around for a while, but its always been overshadowed by yahoo’s flickr. Will this sort of advancement in technology be enough to tip the balance in Picasa favour

The Real Story about tape storage

An integral part of your data protection strategy

Physical tape is uniquely qualified for long-term information archival.
As data governance requirements continue to escalate, you need to store more types of data (e-mail, instant messages, website content, documents and financial records) for longer periods of time. In some cases, information must be preserved forever. While it may seem logical to use one medium for all your storage needs, each step along the data protection continuum has different requirements. For active data and for very quick recovery, online disk storage is the preferred media, providing real-time access. But for long-term data protection where real-time access is not required—as well as for offsite storage, compliance, business continuity and storing large volumes of unstructured files—tape media remains a first-rate choice.

Tape media is the cost-effective answer for storing your “information tsunami.”

Today, every company is interested in driving down costs. One way to achieve that goal is to use tape media for archiving files that are inactive. In the grand scheme of things, tape cartridges are more cost effective to purchase, and tape is less expensive in terms of the management and energy required to preserve the archive.

In a recent white paper from the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program, David Reine and Mike Kahn of The Clipper Group looked at total costs of ownership over a five-year period for the long-term storage of data in tiered disk-to-disk-to-tape versus disk-to-disk solutions. Factoring in acquisition costs of equipment and media, as well as electricity and data center floor space, The Clipper Group found that the total cost of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk solutions was about 23 times more expensive than tape solutions for archiving.2

Tape storage can provide a virus and data corruption-free repository.

According to Computer Technology Review, the monthly rate of computer virus infection in U.S. and European companies grew from 10 per 1000 PCs in 1996 to 105 per 1000 PCs in 2007. Now more than ever, you need to protect your information assets from assault. Disk storage providing mirroring, snapshots and clones can help you recover from a malicious attack. But did you know that a disk snapshot of a virus-infected server remains part of the file system, and the virus is still capable of damaging and destroying data? An archive tape recorded before the infection will not contain the virus. In addition, a virus on tape cannot infect other data on the tape, and the virus can’t spread to other tapes within the library.

Tape storage is “green” storage.

Reducing environmental impact is a major objective not only for computer manufacturers, but also for consumers like you. We all search for innovative ways to lower energy consumption and decrease the carbon footprint of our data centers. Including tape media in your data protection plans can help you accomplish that goal. Disk drives consume electricity to power and cool them, regardless of whether the devices are being accessed. Tape drives, on the other hand, use little power when not reading or writing tape cartridges, and tape cartridges stored in an automated library use no power at all. The Clipper Group’s recent LTO Program study found that over a five-year study period the cost of energy for disk is about 290 times more than tape.3

Today’s tape storage is bigger, better, faster and more reliable than before.

If you thought tape technology was on the decline, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to know that it’s growing at a phenomenal rate. The latest LTO data technology provides outstanding data integrity characteristics, massive compression and ultra-fast data rates.

* 1600GB of compressed data on an LTO-4 data cartridge, growing to 6400GB in LTO-5
* Mean time between failures (MTBF) of 250,000 hours at 100 percent duty cycle, making LTO-4 drives about 700 percent more reliable than the first-generation digital data storage (DDS) drive
* Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-256-level encryption for enhanced security
* Excellent resistance to shock/drops, with only 9 percent of tape cartridges failing after being dropped from a height of one meter, compared to 99 percent of disk drives failing
* Exceptional durability, as exhibited in a harsh test environment; Write-Once, Read-Many (WORM) HP Ultrium LTO-3 cartridges survived the equivalent of 30 years with no loss of function
* 120MB per second native drive data rate, enabling you to stream up to 864GB of compressed data per hour (providing your server can keep up)

HP is a major player in delivering data protection solutions worldwide.

It may surprise you that over the last 25 years, HP has delivered thousands of data protection solutions, shipped over 15.9 billion gigabytes of tape medium, and handled thousands of business interruptions and disasters worldwide. An IDC study in February 2008 reported that over one out of every three branded tape drives and one out of every three branded tape automation units were shipped from HP.1 Today, more than 80 percent of the world’s stock exchanges and worldwide banking institutions depend on HP solutions—and you can, too. Working from a proven disaster-recovery reference model, HP applies outstanding service practices defined by the de facto industry standard for IT management, the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Add to this over 140,000 HP Partners around the globe, and your data is protected—from start to finish.

source : HP

What Linux Will Look Like In 2012

Our open source expert foresees the future of Linux: By 2012 the OS will have matured into three basic usage models. Web-based apps rule, virtualization is a breeze, and command-line hacking for basic system configuration is a thing of the past.

What will desktop Linux be like four years from now?

In the time it takes most college students to earn an undergraduate degree -- or party through their college savings -- Linux will continue to mature and evolve into an operating system that non-technical users can fully embrace.

The single biggest change you'll see is the way Linux evolves to meet the growing market of users who are not themselves Linux-savvy, but are looking for a low-cost alternative toMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) (or even the Mac). That alone will stimulate enormous changes across the board, but there are many other things coming down the pike in the next four years, all well worth looking forward to.

Over the course of the last four years, Linux has taken enormous strides in usability and breadth of adoption. Here's a speculative look forward at what Linux could be like a few years from now -- or, maybe we could say what Linux ought to be like.

For-free Versus For-pay
Expect to see a three-way split among different versions of Linux. Not different distributions per se, but three basic usage models:

1. For-pay: Ubuntu's in-store $20 boxes are a good example. For a nominal cost, you get professional support for Linux as well as licenses to use patent-restricted technologies (e.g., codecs for legal DVD playback).

Expect this to at least gain nominal momentum, especially if the cost is no more than an impulse buy and people understand that Ubuntu can non-destructively share a machine with Windows. Also expect at least one other Linux company to pick up on this model (openSUSE, for instance), and to have preloads on new systems incorporate such things if they don't already.

2. Free to use: This is the most common model right now -- a free distribution with support optional, and additional optional support for closed-source components: proprietary, binary-only device drivers.

3. Free/libre: These distributions contain no components with patent encumbrances or other issues, in any form. Distributions like gNewSense or Blag Linux already do this, and an upcoming version of Ubuntu (8.10 / "Intrepid Ibex," due in October) will also feature a wholly free installation option.