Tech Giants Sizing Up Yahoo Bid/ Yahoo NOT Sold yet!

October 23, 2011, 9:33 pm
Tech Giants Sizing Up Yahoo Bid from nytimes.com
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED and EVELYN M. RUSLI
ps: Israeli Radio said Google is buying Yahoo, Not True Yet!! (s.c.)

As a host of potential bidders circle Yahoo, several of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are considering whether to jump into the fray themselves.

Microsoft and Google are both weighing whether to participate in the bidding. Each has its own business reasons for wanting to see the continued existence of Yahoo, which despite its financial struggles still has a monthly audience of almost 700 million unique visitors.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

But there’s one thing the technology giants have in common: Not one of them wants to actually buy or run Yahoo.

Instead, Microsoft and Google are considering lending financial support to private equity firms or others weighing a bid, according to people briefed on the matter.

Microsoft is the furthest along, having held discussions with a number of leveraged buyout firms, these people said. Under one possible combination, Microsoft would chip in billions of dollars in financing as part of a consortium led by the private equity firm Silver Lake and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, three of these people said. That group would be backstopped by billions of dollars in bank financing as well.

Google, for its part, has had conversations with two private equity firms about backing a takeover, according to another person briefed on the matter. Such discussions are in the early stages and may not lead to a bid, this person said.

Representatives for Microsoft, Google, Silver Lake and Yahoo declined to comment on any potential bidding.
rest of article at nytimes.

Microsoft Posts Gain Despite Soft PC Sales

October 20, 2011 nytimes.com
Microsoft Posts Gain Despite Soft PC Sales
By NICK WINGFIELD

SEATTLE — Microsoft said its net income rose 6 percent in its first fiscal quarter, but the company’s results continued to reflect weak growth in PC sales.

The PC market, especially the part representing the companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system, has suffered lately as economic uncertainty has crimped spending on information technology. Newer types of devices like tablets and mobile phones have sapped some of the business as well.

Microsoft said net income rose to $5.74 billion, or 68 cents a share, from $5.41 billion, or 62 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue rose 7 percent, to $17.37 billion, from $16.2 billion a year ago.

Analysts estimated that, on average, Microsoft would earn 68 cents a share on revenue of $17.24 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. Microsoft’s shares fell 1 percent after it released the financial results at the close of normal trading.

Microsoft said its revenue from selling Windows rose less than 2 percent during its first quarter, which ended Sept. 30. That reflects the fact that shipments of new PCs grew only 3.6 percent globally in the quarter, which ended Sept. 30, according to the research firm IDC. Apple defied the trend, reporting a 26 percent increase in the number of Macs sold during the same period, the company said on Tuesday.

Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, said the company’s revenue from Windows sales was weaker than he had expected. “We’ve now had a year where Windows hasn’t come in in-line with analyst expectations,” he said. “It’s less of a miss than in the past.”

The Microsoft division that includes its Office suit of applications fared better than Windows, with a revenue increase of almost 8 percent. That division — Microsoft’s largest, representing a third of total revenue — got a boost from a new version of Office released last year that continues to sell well for the company, despite competition from free and low-cost online applications from Google and others.
The rest of this article on nytimes.

Waze- I use it

• haaretz themarker Latest update 04:54 19.10.11

Israeli start-up Waze draws investment from Chinese billionaire

Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing, greater China's richest man, invests in Israeli navigation technology start-up.

Steve Jobs talks Thin Clients in 1997 | The Candid Root

Steve Jobs talks Thin Clients in 1997!

Steve Jobs talks Thin Clients in 1997 | The Candid Root

Watch Steve Jobs in 1997 discuss network based computing. Listen for mentions of “Thin Clients” and “stateless devices” (between 2:00 and 4:00). Steve discusses the same benefits and concepts behind the solutions we provide at DisklessWorkstations.com with LTSP.  Call it VDI, call it Cloud Computing, call it Thin Clients, at the of the day the concepts are all the same.

Mint Cast: The Popular Ubuntu Derivative:

Episode 83: The Wonderful World of Linux

News & Personal Updates

• The Linux Foundation suffers a major hack and is still down as of recording time
  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/some-linux-foundation-crack-attack-details-emerge/9535

• Fedora is looking for a codename for Fedora 17: Hugo or Shakespeare
  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTkwNA

• Proposed Kernel 3.1 logo change
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/9/10/24
  http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2011-09-13-009-41-SY-SM-HU

Non-News…!

• IBM sells Google 1,023 patents for Android legal defense
  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/ibm-sells-google-1023-patents-for-android-legal-defense/3317

• What’s coming in Ubuntu’s new Unity Linux desktop
  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/whats-coming-in-ubuntus-new-unity-linux-desktop/9519

• Official NASA Futuristic Space MMO May Come to Linux
  http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2011/09/official-nasa-futuristic-space-mmo-may.html

Main Topic

http://www.mintcast.org/2011/09/episode-83-the-wonderful-world-of-linux/

• The Wonderful World of Linux:

IBM to Acquire i2 and Algorithmics

ARMONK, N.Y., - 31 Aug 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire i2 to accelerate its business analytics initiatives and help clients in the public and private sectors address crime, fraud and security threats. Financial terms were not disclosed.

With more than 4,500 customers in 150 countries, i2 is a leading provider of intelligence analytics for crime and fraud prevention based in Cambridge, UK with U.S. headquarters in McLean, Va. i2’s clients span multiple sectors globally such as banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail. i2 solutions are currently used by 12 of the top 20 retail banks globally and eight of the top 10 largest companies in the world.

Organizations in both the public and private sectors today are facing an exponential increase in “big data” -- information and intelligence coming from disparate and unstructured sources including social media, biometrics and criminal databases. When it is accessible to the people who need it, this information can be used to anticipate potential problems, make better, faster decisions, and coordinate resources to deliver exceptional service to citizens and customers. IBM Press Releases.
IBM to Acquire Algorithmics

IBM Accelerates Business Analytics into Financial Risk Management
ARMONK, N.Y., - 01 Sep 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Algorithmics for $387 million, subject to price adjustments at closing. Algorithmics is a risk analytics firm with operations in Toronto, Canada. Algorithmics risk analytics software, content and advisory services are used by banking, investment and insurance businesses to help assess risk, address regulatory requirements and make more insightful business decisions. Algorithmics is a member of Fitch Group, which is majority owned by Fimalac, a holding company based in Paris, France.

This acquisition expands IBM's business analytics capabilities in the financial services industry by helping clients quantify, manage and optimize their risk exposure across a range of financial risk domains, including market, liquidity, credit, operational and insurance as well as economic and regulatory capital.

Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Linux Turns 20: Open-Source OS Changes Course of IT History

Linux Turns 20: Open-Source OS Changes Course of IT History

Link above with Slideshow about Linux today. 

On Aug. 25, 1991, Linux Torvalds announced a new project on the comp.os.minix newsgroup. He described a "free operating system" that resembled Minix, an operating system based on Unix, and asked for feedback on what people thought worked and didn't work. Torvalds was not aiming high with this project, noting that his new project would be "just a hobby" and not "be big and professional like gnu." Now 20 years later, the OS has exceeded its creator's expectations as it is now available for practically every processor architecture and can power mobile devices, computers, mainframes and supercomputers. The free operating system that Torvalds just gave away to anyone may never supplant Windows or Mac OS X on the desktop, but it is appearing in practically every other computing device, including set-top boxes, cloud servers, social networks, tablets and mobile phones. A vast majority of users may never download the operating system, but the odds are likely they are using a product based on it. Now eWEEK takes a look at some of the biggest achievements of the little operating system over the past 20 years. 

Security Controls and Lessons Learned from the Financial Crisis

Security Controls and Lessons Learned from the Financial Crisis (IBM)

Bryan Casey 270003BSJV |  Today 10:43 PM | Tags:  financial mortgage security ibm crisis
Comments (0)  |  Visits (61)

You know one of the interesting things I've noticed, and it's not really specific to security, is that the more interconnected the world becomes, the harder it is to find the root cause when something goes wrong.  If we look at the financial/mortgage crisis for example, if you wanted to point the finger at one person or event, could you do it?  I've wanted to for a long time, tracing this chain back to some single point of failure, but it's really not possible.  When something like this happens, where there isn't one root cause, accountability becomes a big mess because everyone can push the problem onto someone else.  The problem is that if everyone pushes around problems, problems never get solved.  So, the way that we need to look at it is that instead of there being limited accountability, there needs to be a lot of accountability. 

This type of complex interconnected failure isn't so different from what we see in the news around data breaches.  People want security to be simpler and they want to find that single point of failure, and sometimes it's there, but often times, it's really not.  Our technology world has grown to become a complex systems of systems where legacy systems are communicating with new systems, the notion of a perimeter is dissolving, new consumption and delivery models are popping up all the time and we have to secure all of this. 

Let's face it, the majority of attacks today don’t operate in little silos.  They can cross users and endpoints, applications, networks, databases, etc.  So despite the fact that you might have different teams responsible for all of these areas of your system, and you might see them as separate, attackers see this as one, connected system.  As a result, when breaches happen, often times it is often a combination of insufficient security controls, problematic policy and even things like a lack of user education. When we live in a world of complex and networked technologies, the notion of a single point of failure is disappearing.

So what do we do about this?  Obviously a layered defense is imperative.  You need to think about your data, how it moves, where it rests, how it gets accessed, which data is most important and how you can apply security controls all along the way.  Moving away from just the technology, one of the other things that people talk about is accounting for the human element in security.  When people are talking about this they are generally referring to the fact that users will click on just about anything, so security has to acknowledge that users are going to constantly put their organizations at risk.  But there's another side of that human element that I think is important, and that is establishing a culture in your organization that security needs to be top of mind, and that everyone is responsible.  Whether you are a developer, a DBA, an executive who might be targeted or an IT manager, security is something you need to consider.  Yes, new technologies will help, but changing culture and process, while never easy, is almost always an essential element of dealing with systemic issues, whether they be financial markets or security concerns. 

The last bit worth acknowledging is the dangers of ignoring something that appears broken, but ignoring it because it hasn’t actually broken yet.  So in this case we’re talking about warning signs around the economy but the market still going up, and IT decision makers saying, "well we haven’t been breached, so we must be secure," regardless of their actual security posture. 

Despite what we would all like, these aren’t issues you can just sweep under the rug and cross your fingers hoping that a problem won’t pop up.  Organizations need to confront these issues. 

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs
from techrepublic

By Jason Hiner

July 22, 2011, 10:04 PM PDT

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs.

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.
Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.
Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.
When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.
Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.
That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.
So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.

Microsoft and SUSE extend Microsoft's controversial Novell Linux pact

Summary

Microsoft and SUSE announced they are extending the 2006 Microsoft-Novell Linux patent-protection agreement, and that Microsoft is buying $100 million worth of SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for its customers.

In November 2006, Microsoft inked its controversial cross-licensing pact with Novell. In exchange for Microsoft distributing to its customers certificates for Novell’s SUSE Linux, Novell paid Microsoft patent-licensing royalties for Linux.
The original pact was due to expire in 2012. On July 25, Microsoft and SUSE announced a year ahead of that expiration date that they’re extending their partnership.
Microsoft is buying $100 million in additional SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates and the pair are going to continue to collaborate on interopability solutions through January 1, 2016. The SUSE certificates are designed to insure Microsoft customers who are implementing Linux that they won’t be caught in any Microsoft-Linux patent crossfire.
In the years following the original Microsoft-Novell agreement, a lot happened. In February 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated the deal between Microsoft and Novell was proof that open-source vendors need to respect Microsoft’s intellectual property. One month later,Microsoft licensing officials claimed publicly that Linux and other free software violated 235 Microsoft patents. Microsoft convinced a few smaller Linux vendors to sign patent-licensing deals with the company.
In 2010, Attachmate ended up purchasing Novell for $2.2 billion, and Microsoft and a handful of other tech companies bought 800 or so Novell patents as part of the arrangement.
In more recent months, Microsoft has increased its IP licensing pressures on Linux and Android vendors and has convinced quite a few, including Amazon, General Dynamics, Onkyo and Velocity Micro, to sign patent-licensing agreements. Barnes & Noble, maker of the Linux-based Nook, is fighting Microsoft over its attempt to exert its IP claims.
Microsoft and SUSE said that the agreement is benefiting customers and partners who need interop guarantees to do things like run SUSE guests on Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor.from zdnet 25th july 2011