EU and Oracle To Meet soon on Sun Deal

The European Commission is delaying approval of the $7.4bn deal because of concerns that the combination of Sun's MySQL database product and Oracle's products could harm competition in the database market.

Oracle rejected the claim that MySQL competes with its core database software and said it will " vigorously oppose" the Commission's objections.

Oracle said the objections revealed a "profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics".

The EU last week pushed back its deadline for reviewing the merger after granting a request from Oracle for more time to provide a counter argument to concerns over competition.

The US Department of Justice approved the deal in August, but had raised concerns over the future of Sun's Java software and programming language, not MySQL.

The UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) has told the European commissioner for competition, Neelie Kroes, that its membership believes the future of both Java and MySQL will be secure with Oracle.

"Oracle, in terms of strategy and commitment to open source, will provide a secure future for Java," said Ronan Miles, chairman of UKOUG.

"Oracle's record of preserving customer investments and support of open standards would indicate as safe a future for MySQL as any other 'owner'," he added.

Source:

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Analytics at Twitter

Last week I spent some time speaking with Kevin Weil, head of analytics at Twitter. Twitter, from a technology perspective, has had a bit of a hard time due to their stability issues in their early days. Kevin was keen to point out that he feels this was due to the incomparable growth Twitter was experiencing at the time and their constant struggle to keep up. Kevin was also keen to show that Twitter prides themselves on striving for engineering excellence, the creation & contribution to new technologies and generally assisting in pushing the boundaries forward. Our conversation naturally centered on analytics at Twitter.

Twitter, like many Web 2.0 Apps, started life as a MySQL based RBDMS application. Today, Twitter is still using MySQL for much of their online operational functionality (although this is likely to change in the near future – think distributed), but on the analytics side of things Twitter has spent the last 6 months moving away from running SQL queries against MySQL data marts. This was because their need for timely data was becoming a struggle with MySQL, particularly when dealing with very large data volumes and complicated queries. For Web 2.0 the ability to understand, quantify and make timely predictions from user behavior is very much their life blood. When Kevin arrived at Twitter 6 months ago he was tasked with changing the way Twitter analyzed their data. Now the bulk of their analytics is executed using a Hadoop platform with Pig as the “querying language”.

Hadoop is a distributed shared-nothing cluster which locates data throughout the cluster using a virtualized file system. What has made Hadoop particularly popular for large scale deployment is the comparative ease of writing distributed functions through a process known as map/reduce. Map/reduce hides much of the complexity of running distributed functions, even when running over a very large numbers of nodes. This allows the developer to focus on their “application logic” rather than worrying about specifics of the execution process (Hadoop handles distribution of execution, node failures, etc). But in saying this, expressing complicated application logic directly in map/reduce functions can become quite laborious as many pipelined map/reduce functions may be required to take raw data through to a useful processed result. Because of this complexity several higher level scripting languages have appeared to abstract this.

Pig is one such scripting language for Hadoop. Pig takes the developers requirement expressed in the script and produces the underlying map-reduce jobs that are executed on Hadoop. This abstraction is incredibly important as without it the complexity of expressing difficult analytical ‘queries’ directly in map/reduce would be highly time consuming & error prone. This can be thought of as being similar to the way SQL is a higher level abstraction language that hides all the query plan routines (written in C) that operate on the data in a traditional RDBMS. Of course abstraction provides increased efficiency in creating analytical routines, but comes at a performance cost. Kevin quantified his experience, he found typically a Pig script is 5% of the code of native map/reduce written in about 5% of the time. However, queries typically take between 110-150% the time to execute that a native map/reduce job would have taken. But of course, if there is a routine that is highly performance sensitive they still have the option to hand-code the native map/reduce functions directly.

Ok, so why use Hadoop and Pig instead of more traditional approach like an MPP RDBMS? Kevin explained that there were a few reasons for this. Firstly Twitter, like many Web 2.0 companies, is committed to open source and likes to use software that has a low entry cost but also allows them to contribute to the code base. Kevin mentioned that Twitter did look at some of the open source MPP RDBMS platforms but were less than convinced of their ability to scale to meet their needs at the time. And the second reason is exactly that, scale. Twitter is understandably coy on their exact numbers, but they have hundreds of Terabytes of data (but less than a Petabyte) and one could assume that to get reasonable performance they are running Hapdoop on a few dozen nodes (this is a guess, Twitter didn’t say). As they grow analytics will become more important to their business, this may expand to hundreds (or thousands) of nodes. A “few hundred” nodes is right on the upper limit on what is possible today with the world’s most advanced MPP RBDMS’s. Hapdoop clusters, on the other hand, grow well into the hundreds and even the thousands of nodes (e.g. at Google, Facebook etc).

So Hadoop was the platform choice, but why Pig? There are other “analytical” scripting languages that sit over Hadoop, notably Hive which was popularized by Facebook (Pig was popularized by Yahoo). On discussing the merits of Pig vs Hive it became apparent that Hive was more in tune with a traditional approach (“database like”). Hive requires data to be mapped to a given structure and the queries (using a SQL like derivative) are submitted against that schema. Pig on the other hand is less prescriptive in terms of schema and individual queries can define the structure of the data for that execution. In addition, Pig is more of a “procedural” language allowing the complicated data flow process to be more easily controlled and understood by the developers.

So, as mentioned, Hapdoop is a batch based job processing platform. Jobs (in this case map/reduce jobs generated from the Pig queries) are submitted and results are returned sometime in the future. Exactly when in the future varies from a few minutes (e.g. they run jobs hourly which only take a few minutes to run) through to many hours for jobs that run over much larger sets of data. This leaves a gap in “near real-time” analytics between the lightweight queries they can run on the transactional system and the more intense Hadoop based analytics. This has been a space that Twitter has been investigating solutions to fill. This space will be used for things like improved abuse detection, issue analysis and so on. Twitter is currently considering their data platform options here including Cassandra, HBase and may even decide to use a closed sourced MPP solution to fill this need (I can’t say what, sorry) due to the lack of suitable open source MPP alternatives.

For more technical info on Twitters use of Hadoop and Pig you can check out Kevin’s slide deck from the recent NoSQL East conference.


Source:

http://blog.tonybain.com/tony_bain/2009/11/analytics-at-twitter.html

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Google Lays The Groundwork for Extensions in Chrome

Google is getting ready to offer widespread support for extensions in Chrome, launching a program which will allow third-party developers to add features to its browser.

The company released more details about its new Chrome Extension Gallery Tuesday. Developers can now upload their extensions to the Chrome Extensions Gallery, in effect publishing their extensions even before the browser officially supports them. Support for Chrome extensions is available in the current developer release, but they will probably arrive in the browser for all users before the end of the year.

At the moment, there isn’t much to see in the Chrome gallery — it’s just a form for developers to upload their extensions. However, Google is clearly hoping Chrome will one day support an extension ecosystem similar to the one Mozilla enjoys with its highly successful add-ons community for Firefox. The site will offer the ability to search and browse for extensions, and Google is encouraging developers to upload videos and screenshots explaining what each extension does.

The company has also posted guidelines outlawing things like copyright infringement, hate speech and any extension to “enable the unauthorized download of streaming content or media” — which means we probably won’t see extensions for ripping videos from YouTube.

To that point, Chrome extensions will be reviewed before they become publicly available. The Chrome Blog says that, for most extensions, “the review process is fully automated.” However, if your extension plans to use low-level components or access file:// URIs, Google will require a manual review and may ask developers for additional information before such extensions end up in the gallery.

Source:

http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Google_Lays_the_Groundwork_for_Extensions_in_Chrome

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FaceFaceTime's Database Acquisition Highlights Need for Web 2.0 Control

FaceTime Communications today announced that Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. has acquired its application classification and signature database to add a new level of security for use in Check Point Security Gateways. Check Point's purchase of the database validates the need for businesses to implement Web 2.0 controls and security.

FaceTime incorporates the database in its recently announced Unified Security Gateway 3.0 - the first secure Web gateway to combine content monitoring, logging, management and security of Web 2.0 applications, such as social networking, instant messaging, and Unified Communications, with URL filtering, anti-malware and Web anti-virus protection.

The momentous growth of Web 2.0 platforms and the benefits gained through their use introduces significant new compliance and policy challenges. Government agencies and corporations worry about sensitive information leaking out over Twitter or Facebook and organizations now face new rules, from regulatory bodies such as FINRA, specifically relating to content posted to social networks.

"The growth in corporate use of Web 2.0 Applications and in the number of different applications being used makes compliance with legal and regulatory obligations incredibly important", said Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research. "Our research has shown that a large and growing proportion of corporate users are using Web 2.0 tools on a regular basis. Consequently, organizations must control how these tools are used and the information that is transmitted through them or face significant consequences for not doing so."

Source:

http://web2.sys-con.com/node/1198097

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New Oxford Names Facebook’s “Unfriend” as Word of the Year 2009

The New Oxford American dictionary has named “unfriend” as the 2009 Word of the Year, which literally means removing someone as a friend on popular social networking websites like Facebook and Friendster.

The word was chosen from a pool of finalists with a technology savvy lineage, Oxford said in a statement.

Oxford’s US dictionary program senior lexicographer Christine Lindberg said that the word was chosen among other finalist for its currency and potential longevity characteristics.

“It has an exact definition or meaning when being used as a verb or an action word by the online community. Its meaning is understood, because of this, the adoption of ‘unfriend’ as a modern form of verb makes it more interesting to be chosen as the Word of the Year,” Lindberg added.

Other finalists came from economic terms, technological trends, political, and current affairs as chosen by the Britain Oxford University Press, the publisher of the said dictionary.

For technology, “hashtag” was also named, which means a hash sign connected to a word or a phrase that allows users of popular microblogging website Twitter to search similar tweets; also chosen was “intexticated,” which literally means texting-while-driving; and “sexting,” which from the rootword means sending sexually explicit messages and MMS through cellphones.

Meanwhile, among the top choices for the economy terms were “freemium,” which means basic services that are offered free in some forms of business models; and “funemployed,” which refers to people or an individual taking advantage of his newly acquired status of being unemployed by pursuing or having fun with his own interest.

For the political and current affairs category, “birther, ”which refers to a person or a group conspiring or having a conspiracy theory regarding the birth certificate of United States President Barack Obama; and “choice mom,” which can be simply put as a single mother by choice.

Other words that made it to the shortlist of the Word of the Year 2009 were “deleb” or a dead celebrity; and “tramp stamp” or a tattoo on the lower back of a female.

Source:

http://www.socialnetworks10.com/new-oxford-names-facebook%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cunfriend%E2%80%9D-as-word-of-the-year-2009

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Firefox: Heat And The CPU Usage Problem

Firefox has a CPU usage issue and, consequently, can cause overheating problems in some laptops, particularly ultraportables. That's what I've found over the last couple of years.

But don't take my word for it. This is documented on a Mozilla support page entitled "Firefox consumes a lot of CPU resources." The page states: "At times, Firefox may require significant CPU [central processing unit] resources in order to download, process, and display Web content." And forum postings like this one about a Dell Netbook are not uncommon: "Mini9 would get way too hot."

The Mozilla support page goes on to say that "you can review and monitor CPU usage through specific tools" and describes ways to limit CPU usage, such as: "A Firefox add-on, called Flashblock, allows you to selectively enable and disable Flash content on Web sites."

Let me describe my experience. I find that tab for tab, Firefox uses decidedly more resources than other browsers--Safari, for example. And in the past (when I was actively using a Windows Vista-based machine) Firefox also compared unfavorably with Microsoft's Internet Explorer for CPU usage.

More specifically, here's the behavior as I see it. When I'm accessing sites with multimedia content such as the CNET front door, Firefox CPU usage will bounce around between 30 and 60 percent, and sometimes spike higher (80 percent and above), as indicated by the Mac OS 10.6.2 Activity Monitor.

On the other hand, the Safari CPU usage with the same pages open is much lower--typically between 2 percent and 10 percent.

My theory is that most users don't notice this because in mainstream laptops, this isn't an issue. But it can become an issue in ultraportables--typically under an inch thick--which are more sensitive to heat because of the design constraints. The ultrathin Apple MacBook Air, which I use as my main machine, is a good example.

The fan is usually an audible indicator of CPU usage issues. When I'm using Firefox and I have tabs open on multimedia-rich sites (which is par for the course these days), the Air's fan will almost invariably kick on and stay on until I close the tabs. As I write this, the fan has finally shut down after I closed the Firefox tabs (e.g, CNET front door). Those same tabs in Safari are still open and not causing any significant spike in CPU usage or fan activity.

When I contacted Mozilla, a technical support person guessed that Safari is possibly better at optimizing Flash-based sites compared to Firefox. And that may be true. However, I had similar issues before when I was using a Hewlett-Packard business ultraportable (also very thin like the Air) that were not necessarily tied to Flash usage. In short, Firefox was less efficient with CPU usage compared to Microsoft's IE 8. And the behavior was similar. The HP laptop would quickly heat up and the fan would kick on.

Finally, let me reemphasize that I'm guessing that most users don't notice this because heat dissipation is not a big issue for mainstream laptops that are not necessarily thermally-challenged when accessing multimedia-rich Web pages. That said, this has been a steady problem for me because I use ultraportables almost exclusively and has forced me to limit my use of Firefox.

Source:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10396076-64.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+webware+%28Webware.com%29

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Sony Slides to 4-mth low, Plan Fails to Inspire

TOKYO/SEOUL (Reuters) - Shares of Sony Corp fell to their lowest in nearly four months on Friday after the electronics maker's new business strategy failed to convince investors it could deliver strong profit growth.

Sony, which is heading for its second straight annual loss, said on Thursday it would launch 3D TVs and networked products and services as part of a plan to boost its operating profit margin to 5 percent in the year to March 2013.

The 5 percent target had originally been set by CEO Howard Stringer in 2005 for the business year to March 2008. It narrowly missed the target that year before falling into the red on the economic slowdown and tough competition.

Market players remain sceptical whether Sony can achieve its goal of turning its video game and TV operations profitable next year as it struggles to compete with overseas rivals such as South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co Ltd.

"The strong yen makes it difficult for the Japanese to compete on prices, while the Korean's strength in volume and mass production technologies keeps them ahead," said John Park, an analyst at Daishin Securities in Seoul.

"Japanese TV makers like Sony will try hard to expand in LED-backlit TVs next year, but are likely to have an uphill battle with Korean leaders," he said.

Sony's TV business is in its sixth-consecutive year of losses as it grapples with a firmer yen and intensified competition from Samsung and LG Electronics Inc

Shares in Sony were down 2.8 percent at 2,400 yen after earlier hitting 2,375 yen, their lowest since July 29. The benchmark Nikkei average was down 1.3 percent.

The maker of Cyber-shot cameras and PlayStation games shed jobs, closed plants and sold non-core assets following the global downturn to cut costs, and investors were awaiting a convincing growth strategy from management ahead of Thursday's announcement.

Source:

http://in.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idINIndia-44104820091120

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