Stories by Joab Jackson

Microsoft promises partners Windows tablets, phones

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised a sports arena filled with Microsoft partners that, within months, a number of Windows-based tablets would be hitting the market, and that the company is urgently working to bring its Windows 7 smartphone OS to market.

HP breaks in new TPC power usage benchmark

The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has added a power efficiency metric, TPC-Energy, to its ongoing roundups of speedy transactional processing systems. Hewlett-Packard is the first participant to use the new TPC-Energy specification, submitting benchmark results of four of its systems.

New Postgres to add the polish

With the impending release of version 9.0 of the open-source Postgres database, due in mid-August, the developers behind the project are hoping that the new features will attract more interest from enterprises.

Unix Active Directory software gets faster

Likewise Software has released a new version of its open-source authentication software for allowing Linux, Apple Macintosh and commercial Unix-based computers to hook into Microsoft Active Directory controlled servers and networks.

IBM to commercialise genome reading

IBM has partnered with Roche, a manufacturer of medical devices, to build a low-cost device that can read human genomes, the company announced Thursday.

Fedora gets new leader

The Fedora Project will be getting a new leader next month, as Jared Smith takes over the helm from current head Paul Frields, Frields announced Tuesday on the Fedora mailing list.

YouTube backs Flash

In the ongoing debate over whether to use Flash or HTML5, Google has weighed in heavily in favor of using HTML5.

Cloudera preps Hadoop for the enterprise

Cloudera has unveiled a new set of Hadoop management tools, called Cloudera Enterprise, that the company will offer for an annual subscription fee, it announced on Tuesday. It has also updated its open-source distribution package of Hadoop.

Oracle engineer reveals latency mysteries with heat maps

While data-center managers have long used heat maps to help determine where to best position racks of servers and cooling units, this mode of visualization can also be handy for better understanding system latency, argues an Oracle engineer in the July issue of Communications of the ACM.

Google Gmail to harness HTML5

In keeping with Google's enthusiasm for the emerging HTML5 standard, many upcoming features of the company's Gmail Web-based e-mail service will be rendered in HTML5, said Adam de Boor, a staff software engineer working on the service.

Red Hat overhauls JBoss portal interface

Red Hat has released version 5.0 of its portal software, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, the company announced Thursday at its Red Hat Summit in Boston.

Oracle APEX gets Web 2.0 boost

Oracle has upgraded its Oracle Application Express development software so that it will allow developers to add some Web 2.0 flash to their applications.

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