HP swooping in on Sun customers

Hey guys this is a really cool article that I came across

Hewlett-Packard has certainly benefited from the uncertainty over Sun Microsystems' future, and now it's lined up a few partners to help win over more Sun customers.

In light of Oracle's failure thus far to seal its takeover of Sun, HP announced on Tuesday that it has teamed up with Microsoft, Novell, and Red Hat to offer further incentives to Sun customers.

HP reported that during the 12 months ending October 31, it scooped up more than 350 customers from Sun with offers of specialized services and support, and financial incentives through its HP Complete Care program. Now, the company said, it has enhanced this program with the help of its new partners to give Sun customers what HP is selling as "peace of mind."

HP said its new Complete Care program will offer such benefits as a 50 percent discount on Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Fundamentals training, 25 percent off Red Hat Global Training, and greater support through its Migration Competency Center in France.

Thanks to its new partnerships, HP said, it can also offer customers the flexibility to choose from among server operating systems, including Unix, Windows Server, Suse Linux, Red Hat Linux, and even Sun's own Solaris.

Oracle announced its intent to buy Sun in mid-April, but concerns from the European Commission and other parties over an Oracle-owned MySQL have stalled the deal. Recent promises from Oracle to preserve and protect MySQL seem to have eased EC concerns. But each day the deal remains unfinished, Sun customers likely wonder whether they should take their business elsewhere.

A recent IDC report showed that Sun had suffered a 35 percent drop in third-quarter sales year over year, compared with much smaller declines for rivals HP and IBM.

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The World Of Phone Apps

Despite the weak economy and consumers’ desire to spend less frivolously, the popularity of smartphones is paving the way for a new source of revenue: phone applications.
And developers are clamoring to take a piece of the growing market that many are modeling after the success of Apple’s App Store. For example, the number of downloads through Apple’s (News - Alert) App Store has surpassed 1 billion. That combined with the fact that more than 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches have sold since 2007 are contributing to an increase in companies that are tapping the mobile industry as a source of revenue, the New York Times reports.

It’s no surprise that iPhone (News - Alert) apps command most of the attention iPhone apps. Apple has reached a milestone of offering 50,000 applications. But competition is heating up. Thanks to the popularity of Apple and the onslaught of apps, the market for apps is growing. For example, Palm, Research in Motion, Nokia and Microsoft (News - Alert) are building app stores to work with phones to use with their operating systems, the New York Times reported. And it’s only going to increase.

By 2013, researcher In-Stat (News - Alert) projects nearly 30 percent of smartphones representing over 100 million unit shipments will be based on an operating system that supports app stores, according to a TMCnet report.

The increased interest in app developers is largely being driven by companies that seek to build cellphone apps for their products or services, according to the New York Times. While many apps are free, people are willing to pay 99 cents or more for them. That willingness gives companies hope that apps may be a more reliable source of revenue over Web sites, the report said.

“Companies are asking themselves, ‘How can we get on the iPhone?’ ” Matt Murphy, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which maintains a $100 million fund devoted solely to investing in start-ups creating apps for the iPhone, told the New York Times. “Instead of trying to organically create their own property, they’re looking at applications with traction and cherry-picking the ones that seem like a good fit.”

Beyond smartphones, other companies have discovered ways to use phone applications. Amazon use phone apps to broaden the market for e-books it sells with its Kindle device. Under a new program announced earlier this year, iPod Touch and iPhone users can access the same content as the latest Kindle electronic book reader, TMCnet reported.

While the market appears to be booming, the proliferation of application stores prompts the question: When will developers reach the saturation point? Not anytime soon, some experts say. For example, developers who offer more applications will help drive carrier loyalty, IT world reports.

"The more the merrier because it increases demand," Steve Glagow, vice president of Orange Partner,
a European wireless carrier, told IT World. "It also builds an affinity to the handset so they keep them for a longer period of time."

Some vendors will be more successful than others, but one thing is clear. There’s lot of room for growth in the application market.
"We don't know what kinds of apps people will want because demand keeps changing," Jeet Kaul, senior vice president of Java engineering at Sun Microsystems (News - Alert), told IT World. "We're not at that [saturation] point yet."
Consumers will spend more than $4.2 billion on apps in 2013, up from $343 million this year, research firm Yankee group says, as smartphones become ubiquitous and app prices rise. The average smartphone owner "downloads about 20 apps per year," says Carl Howe, director of consumer research. "It's a bigger market than a lot of people have been thinking." Half of newspaper and magazine publishers say that smartphones will become a vital distribution channel in three years, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports. Only 42% are as upbeat about e-book readers. Gamemakers also like sales trends for iPhones, BlackBerrys and phones based on Google's Android operating system.
Advertising on mobile phones should really take off within two to three years, driven by new applications on smartphones and the growing popularity of social networks such as Facebook.
Executives, who attended last week's Cannes Lions 2009 ad festival, told Reuters that emerging economies were also promising though the lack of a global mobile phone standard could be a brake to speedy development.
As more consumers embrace new technologies and devices such as smartphones, personified by Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone, mobile advertising is seen growing at an annual average of 45 percent to reach $28.8 billion within 5 years from a current $3.1 billion, according to Ineum Consulting.
"We have launched many mobile campaigns for the first time in the last three months. New people are coming in every week," said David Kenny, Managing Partner at VivaKi, the digital arm of French advertising group Publicis.
Social networks such as Facebook, which were becoming "increasingly mobile," and applications for the iPhone would be key drivers, he said.
David Jones, global chief executive of Havas Worldwide and Euro RSCG Worldwide, said that advertisers needed to be more creative to fully benefit from opportunities offered by mobiles
"If you are interrupted every two minutes by advertising, not many people want that. The industry needs to work out smart and clever ways to engage people on mobiles," he said.
Scott Howe, corporate vice president of the advertiser and publisher solutions group at Microsoft, predicted that mobile phone advertising will account for 5-10 percent of global media ad spending within five years.
Mobile advertising was likely to attract interest from a niche of advertisers, such as small "mom and pop" local retailers which did not routinely embrace the mainstream online advertising, he said.
These advertisers could shift their ad budgets away from local newspapers to mobiles for local highly-targeted campaigns.

Linux

With all the hype about Windows 7 I can’t help pointing out an alternative. Linux, now more than ever is a viable alternative to other operating systems. “The name "Linux" comes from the Linux kernel, originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds (Wikipedia)”.

Some of the advantages of Linux include:

-Linux is free and you can download several different distributions including, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SuSE, Fedora, Slackware to name a few. You can also download an ISO image of a “live” CD which will allow you to try it without loading any software on your pc. A live CD is also good when you want to browse the Internet without having to worry about getting some malicious software because it is running from a non-writable CD.

- You don’t need to worry about disk fragmentation.
- Viruses have a more difficult time on Linux. This article explains why: “The short life and hard times of a Linux virus.”

Some system services include:

- Apache Web server which is very robust and scalable.
- Ftp server.
-SSH a secure shell.
- Samba which makes the Linux file system look like a Windows system. This allows you to map the server and store files there.
- Bind or DNS which allows the server to cache DNS information locally.
- DHCP server which allows you to serve IP addresses to clients.
- Firewall that is configurable with iptables.
- There are many free compilers including: C++, C, Java and Fortran.

There are many free applications:

- Open Office which is a suite of Office applications similar to Microsoft Office and you can also download a version for windows.
- Gimp photo editing software (Photoshop like) which also has a windows version.
- Audacity audio editing tool and, of course, there is a windows version.
- Tux Typing a typing tutor.
- Tux Math a children’s math learning / practice application.
- Scientific calculators.
- TeamSpeak which allows people to talk to each other over the Internet.
- KStars is a desktop planetarium which provides accurate graphical simulations of the night sky.
- Firefox and Opera browsers are also available for Linux.

There are many Games:

-Arcade
-Board
-Card
-Tactics and Strategy

There are many more free applications available and here is a list of “100 top of the Best (Useful) OpenSource Applications”

Linux has been used primarily for Servers in the past but is becoming more popular for Desktop computing. Even though I give Windows a hard time it is currently what I use for most computing. I do use a Linux server for file storage and backups and, I currently dual boot my laptop with XP and Linux.

First Blog

Well since already someone already blogged about “mashups” and how to implement youtube video in your blog post, I am kind of limited in what to write. That is why I took the liberty to find some useful tips before starting this course.
First as we all know we need the book, and the good news about it is that it is really cheap. I searched through the various websites to buy it and found out that one of the cheapest place is amazon. So if you still do not know the book we need or where to find it here is the link http://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Ajax-Rebecca-Riordan/dp/0596515782/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252673493&sr=8-1. It seems that it runs for $12, which is great because all of my other books coast over a $100 each.
Some of you may find that interesting, but I kind of like one tutorial website, that helped me through my associate’s degree in software engineering. They have information on every web developing language that there is, so it is really cool. They have tutorials on AJAX as well, so I am sure some of you may find that helpful. The link is http://www.w3schools.com
Youtube is loaded with tutorials for AJAX as well.