Archive for June, 2010

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HTC confirms software updates for mobile handsets

June 30th, 2010
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Mobile phone manufacturer HTC has confirmed it is to update the software on several of its handsets which use Google’s Android operating system.

While the older HTC Hero has already been updated to version 2.1, the HTC Desire, Legend and Wildfire are all set to receive version 2.2 of the mobile operating system, codenamed Froyo, in the autumn.

HTC said: “We are working hard with our partners to update the HTC Sense experience on Froyo and distribute it to our customers as fast as possible.
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“We expect to release updates for several of our 2010 models including Desire, Legend and Wildfire beginning in Q3.”

As well as new shortcuts on the home screen, the 2.2 update promises dramatically improved performance, especially when viewing websites that use Javascript.

It will also allow handsets to be switched to ‘tethering’ mode. This allows people who want to connect their PC to the internet but who are not in range of a fixed wireless network to use the phone as a 3G wireless router.

Although Google has already made the update available for its own Nexus One handset, which also runs Android, owners of HTC-branded phones have to wait while the company tweaks the software to ensure compatibility with its products.

Network operators such as Orange will then also have to sign off the software before it is automatically made available to subscribers. This is in order to ensure additional graphics and software added by the operator still work correctly with the device.

Mobile phone manufacturer HTC has confirmed it is to update the software on several of its handsets which use Google’s Android operating system.

While the older HTC Hero has already been updated to version 2.1, the HTC Desire, Legend and Wildfire are all set to receive version 2.2 of the mobile operating system, codenamed Froyo, in the autumn.

HTC said: “We are working hard with our partners to update the HTC Sense experience on Froyo and distribute it to our customers as fast as possible.
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“We expect to release updates for several of our 2010 models including Desire, Legend and Wildfire beginning in Q3.”

As well as new shortcuts on the home screen, the 2.2 update promises dramatically improved performance, especially when viewing websites that use Javascript.

It will also allow handsets to be switched to ‘tethering’ mode. This allows people who want to connect their PC to the internet but who are not in range of a fixed wireless network to use the phone as a 3G wireless router.

Although Google has already made the update available for its own Nexus One handset, which also runs Android, owners of HTC-branded phones have to wait while the company tweaks the software to ensure compatibility with its products.

Network operators such as Orange will then also have to sign off the software before it is automatically made available to subscribers. This is in order to ensure additional graphics and software added by the operator still work correctly with the device.

Source:http://www.computeractive.co.uk/computeractive/news/2265738/three-htc-handsets-confirmed

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Cisco ships fabricpath software for nx-os

June 30th, 2010
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today began offering new hardware and software features and products for the NX-OS operating system that, when combined, bring the scalability and performance of layer 3 networks to the layer 2 world.

The first new product is FabricPath, a licensable software feature for the NX-OS operating system. The software works in conjunction with a new line card for the Cisco Nexus 7000 Switch – the Nexus 7000 F-Series I/O module.

The I/O module delivers up to 32 ports of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) for a maximum of 320Gbps of switching capacity. The module supports the Data Center Bridging (DCB) and Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol standards, with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to be enabled “in the near future” through a software upgrade.

Cisco is trying to get out ahead of the TRILL curve with FabricPath. The emerging protocol, which is in the process of being ratified as a standard by the IETF, is designed to replace the spanning-tree protocol.

Cisco refers to FabricPath as a “Cisco innovation of the TRILL protocol” that addresses the challenges posed by dynamic data centers with virtualization and cloud computing.

“With spanning-tree you have multiple links which are blocked and a high level of oversubscription. With FabricPath you can build a scalable, flat, non-blocking network with two layers and no oversubscription with a 16X improvement in bandwidth performance,” says Nikhil Kelshikar, product marketing manager for Cisco Nexus 7000 Solutions.

Brocade, Cisco’s chief competitor in the battle to become the network fabric provider of the future, made its TRILL play earlier this month when the company introduced Brocade Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS), a software technology that collapses the access and aggregation layers of the network to create a masterless and distributed control plane.

Brocade VCS continuously synchronizes state, status and configuration information between nodes to enable converged fabrics to be self-forming, auto-healing and self-configuring – think VM metadata, network and storage policies (see “Brocade tries to One up Cisco in virtual data centers”).

Cisco claims FabricPath was authored by some of the people working on the TRILL standard and, once TRILL is ratified, Cisco will support it on the Nexus platform

A single chassis license for FabricPath costs $25,000, and the F-Series I/O modules cost $35,000 each. Both products are scheduled to be available in the third quarter of this year.

Current Nexus 7000 users can take advantage of FabricPath by slotting the F-series I/O module into their existing switches, but for those who want to buy a pre-configured system Cisco is offering the Cisco FabricPath Switching System (FSS).

The FabricPath Switching System is an integrated hardware and software system that delivers the FabricPath functionality to build massively scalable domains.

The entry point for the FabricPath Switching System is a configuration of six Nexus 7000 switches, each with eight F-Series modules, and includes the FabricPath license for a price of approximately $2.4 million.

Kelshikar says the entry-level configuration of the FSS supplies 10 Terabits of bandwidth and can scale to 20 Terabits by adding additional line cards.

WAAS extensions

Cisco also debuted version 4.2 of its Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) software for accelerating application traffic over the WAN. WAAS can now be deployed in a branch office as an on-demand service direct from certain models of the Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) G2.

WAAS 4.2 also provides support for Windows-server-on-WAAS (WoW), with fast access to data center and cloud applications, and locally-hosted Windows services.

Cisco WAAS 4.2 software for the ISR G2 starts at $2,500 and is available now.

New Catalyst switch

In addition, Cisco introduced a new member of the Catalyst 4000 Series of switches in the form of the Catalyst 4948E Switch with support for wire-speed IPv6, in addition to auto-provisioning and call-home features.

The Cisco Catalyst 4948E is available now and is priced from $10,995.

Source:http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/9853323703/articles/infostor/san/fibre-channel/2010/june-2010/cisco-ships_fabricpath.html

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Sony offers free software update

June 30th, 2010
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Sony Corp has started to provide free software updates to more than half a million users worldwide to fix a glitch that could cause overheating in its popular VAIO laptops.

So far, no injuries have been reported, but the Tokyo-based electronics company said it has received a total of 39 problem reports, including 26 in the US, with users complaining about the heat and distortion of the shape of their computers, the company said.

The problem could affect a total of 535,000 VAIO laptops worldwide, mainly with US users but also others in Europe, Japan and the rest of Asia.

The overheating could occur when a user plugs in an adapter to charge when a battery in the laptop is nearly used up, Sony said.

Source:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5ggk0iScRqgszMWgYdrdoIkzuI9Bg

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Sony ericsson pushing out xperia x10 software update

June 30th, 2010
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Today Sony Ericsson announced a few details on its Xperia X10 software update that the company has begun to roll out to devices in some markets. The update improves general performance, speed, and responsiveness of the Xperia X10, specifically in the camera UI and messaging applications.
Sony Ericsson is also adding a free backup and restore applications.

Source:http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=9885

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Telesoft upgrades version 10 of tem software

June 30th, 2010
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The Telesoft 10.0 TEM tool incorporates a number of improvements over its core functionality to deliver greater enterprise visibility and management control for both fixed and wireless telecom expenses.

The enhancements focus on reducing inappropriate telecom spending by providing customers with more actionable, service- and user-specific tracking of all telecom outlays across the board.

While Telesoft is currently a direct-sales only company, company president Kevin Donoghue says that’s about to change in the very near future; in fact, the company is hard at work putting together a partner program and is looking at distributor deals, although nothing has been finalized yet.

But he feels release 10.0 is the most channel-friendly version yet, offering easier installation, and a relatively quick learning curve for users and partners alike.

The main attraction of 10.0 is a new Web interface that allows customers to view, save, send and retrieve wizard-based reports on mobile usage and order management to help IT managers establish more effective automated control of their wireless services, which are typically hard to track and control on a per-user basis.

With greater visibility into mobile usage, ordering, and user behavior, customers can establish better policies and guidelines for mobile device usage while reducing costs by identifying the source of inappropriate expenditures. Reports can break down usage on an individual, departmental, or company-wide basis, by provider, type of service, level of usage, or for particular customer divisions such as telecom, IT, finance or management.

Telesoft has also spent considerable time overhauling their user interface to make it more user-friendly. Addressing nagging customer requests for more flexible reporting, the new interface exposes more data fields and provides more query/report options, making it easier to mine data quickly.

Telesoft’s Donoghue says these kinds of solutions can typically save customers 10 to 20 percent of their annual telecom spend, a range typically in line with most analyst figures, which can translate to big bucks for the medium-to-large enterprise customers that form Telesoft’s target market.

Thierry Zerbib, CEO of Telesoft, however, ups that number to about 35 percent, given the tool’s ability to integrate both fixed and wireless telecom expense reports. Part of that leap is likely attributable to the spiraling costs of wireless usage; the company cites analyst reports of mobile growth rates of 30 percent or more per year, driving 80 percent of enterprises to overspend on these services by an average of 15 percent.

Moreover, the reports provide more actionable data that can be more easily broken down to help customers not only craft more efficient mobile policies, but improve their mobile ordering technology processes as well.

The latest release can enforce these mobile policies and simplify ordering or changing access privileges, even for multiple providers, through a single interface for administrators, managers or employees. The tool also enables administrators to make moves, adds, and changes relatively quickly as tactical business requirements change.

Source:http://www.phoneplusmag.com/news/2010/06/telesoft-upgrades-version-10-of-tem-software.aspx

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Scaleup selects scality storage software for german cloud storage solution

June 30th, 2010
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The developer of massively-scalable storage software for email and cloud storage applications today announced that leading German Cloud Computing provider ScaleUp has selected Scality cloud storage software to provide an Amazon S3 compatible Cloud Storage solution for its German customers.

Christoph Streit, ScaleUp’s CTO & Co-Founder stated, “As a cloud computing provider based in Germany, we have seen a huge demand from our customers for a scalable storage solution also based in Germany.

According to German & EU Data Protection Directives, data for EU customers must remain in the EU. While services such as AWS & Rackspace Cloud offered EU-based data centers, this still did not ease the concerns of most German customers.

ScaleUp has also been seeking a technology solution that could offer a hybrid storage cloud solution, a combination of on-premise private storage & hosted cloud storage, much like our Hybrid Cloud Offering.

We found this potential with the Scality solution. We expect the Scality technology to provide the foundation for a highly secure storage solution – while supporting our strategy of a lower cost offering than that of even Amazon S3, for a German-Based solution – only 0.10 € / GB / MO” added Streit.

Serge Dugas, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for Scality commented,

“We are excited to be working with ScaleUp who are moving aggressively to offer a compelling Cloud Storage service at price point for German-based, EU compliant cloud storage solutions that is lower than Amazon’s.

“Our Amazon S3 compatible API enables ScaleUp to offer a secure on-premise hybrid private storage & hosted cloud storage solution.

Scality’s RING storage software is simple to deploy, requires minimal hardware investment and will enable ScaleUp to expand storage capacity rapidly with demand, while retaining their low cost Gigabyte pricing strategy,” added Dugas.

Source:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/06/prweb4210174.htm

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The supreme court’s anti-software patent decision.

June 30th, 2010
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To start, on the particular patent application at hand the court was unanimous: It was a no-go. According to the filings, Bilski and company had sought patent protection over “business methods” aimed at helping people make money by predicting how fluctuations, such changes in the weather, would affect energy prices. Kennedy, joined by the conservatives, wrote the opinion of the court finding that Bilski’s creation was “unpatentably abstract.”

Ah, but there’s more. The court’s members issued two concurring opinions that challenged the Kennedy notion that the problem with patenting a way of doing business was simply that it was, in this case, a bit too vague.

Those challenges to the reasoning behind the majority opinion, from the pens of Stevens and Breyer, should, it seems, give a bit of hope to those who want to see the court eventually rule on whether business-method patents more generally are unsustainable fictions, an invention that unfairly favors existing players and stymies innovation.

First up, Stevens. He was joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Breyer in arguing that the court’s opinion here was only inviting “mischief” by not coming out plainly and saying, “Folks, we have not descended so far into patent confusion that you get a patent for simply dreaming up a new way of doing business.” Then, there was Breyer.

Joined by Scalia, he cut to the chase: “This Court has never before held that so-called ‘business methods’ are patentable, and, in my view, the text, history, and purposes of the Patent Act make clear that they are not.”

Now, this being patent law, nothing that’s simple. The court as a whole also found that the standard currently being used in the U.S. to determine the patentability of business methods, the so-called “machine-or-transformation test” (as I’ve written before, where ‘”patent eligibility requires either a tangible invention or a change of some kind from state A to state B”) is too limited. But the pro-reform reading there is that overeager courts have interpreted a certainty about how to patent “processes” that is outside what the law suggests.

Source:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2010&base_name=reading_bilski_as_propatent_re

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