Google Confirms Android 5.0, Might Launch It in Fall

admin    Android, IT News    

The next major Android release might become available in late 2012, Mountain View-based Internet giant Google confirmed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Nothing was specifically announced on the matter, but things that we were already expecting have been confirmed.

Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for mobile at Google, told Computerworld that the company was indeed planning to make the next flavor of Android available in 2012, but did not offer a specific release date for it.

“After Android 4 comes 5, and we haven’t announced the timing yet, which we’re still sorting out,” Lockheimer reportedly said. “There’s a lot of engineering work behind it still, and there’s also just the question of how to time it.”

He also noted that Google was working on bringing a new Android release each year, and that small updates would be delivered before that.

If so, it means that Android 5.0 might not be released until fall, but that we will see updates such as Android 4.1 made available before that.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was launched in November, which points at a similar launch timeframe for the next Android release, but changes might occur, it seems.

One thing that appears to be certain, however, is the fact that the next Android release will be called Jelly Bean.

In fact, Google appears to be already teasing the next version of Android in its booth at MWC 2012. The photo attached to the left, courtesy of The Verge, confirms that.

Recently, Google was rumored to plan the release of Android 5.0 in the second quarter of the year, with optimizations for tablet PCs. A similar rumor emerged in December, claiming that the OS would be dubbed Android 4.1.

Google has yet to make any plans on the upcoming OS flavor official, but it might not be too long before that happens. Keep an eye on this space for more on the matter.

 

[sofpedia]

Patent ranking slips in 2011 as IBM retains the crown

admin    IT News    

You can measure technology companies in all sorts of ways — from revenues to market value to employees. Another data point is patent filings. And, in that category, Microsoft is losing ground, according to a report released this week by IFI Claims Patent Services.

The Redmond software giant fell three slots to sixth place in 2011, trailing Japanese electronics companies such as Canon, Toshiba and Panasonic. In fact, Asian companies represented eight of the top 10 recipients of patents last year, according to the report.

For the 19th year in a row, IBM received more patents than any other technology company. It was granted 6,180 patents from U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That compared to 2,311 patents granted at Microsoft.

As we’ve reported in the past, patents are becoming an increasingly important offensive and defensive weapon for many technology companies. And the patent battles now occurring — many of them centered around tablets and smartphones — could alter the technology landscape as we know it.

Just today, Microsoft announced a patent deal with LG Electronics that covers LG’s tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running Google’s Chrome and Android operating systems. Microsoft now says that has patent deals covering more than 70 percent of Android smartphones sold in the U.S.

Here’s a look at the top 20 companies that were issued patents in 2011. (Click on the image for the full list).
Please Contact Us for more information about our Patent Intelligence and Technology Report .

[geekwire]

DDR4 RAM Demonstrated at ISSCC, Will Enter Manufacture in 2013

admin    Hardware, IT News, Memory    

DDR4, the next DRAM memory standard, is expected to be massively adopted by 2014, which means that the companies behind its existence have to start showing prototypes now instead of later.

It so happens that the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) has just taken place (between February 19 and 23).

The conference was the perfect occasion for revealing next-generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips.

TechEye reports that two companies were willing to show off their inventions.

Hynix is one of the companies with a DDR4 device. The chip works at 2400MHz (2400Mb/s) and needs a voltage of 1.2V. It bears a 64-bit I/O.

The second company to bring out a DDR4 product was Samsung. The clock frequency was of 2,133 MHz and the voltage was the same as above.

Hynix used its 38nm manufacturing process technology, while Samsung employed the 30nm node instead.

For the sake of comparison, DDR3 needs 1.3V or 1.5V to run, even if the manufacturing process is the same.

All in all, DDR4 modules are going to be not just faster, but also energy efficient, by about 40% compared to their predecessors. They won’t be pin-compatible though.

Elpida, Micron and Nanya did not show DDR4 prototypes at the show, for one reason or another. There is no real rush, though, since the chips and modules aren’t going to be available for a while still. Volume production will only commence in 2013, which means that mass availability is something that 2014 will bring at the earliest.

Until then, memory companies will have to deal with more pressing matters, like the low market prices of all DRAM chips and how consumers, while not at all disapproving, don’t seem to be responding with much enthusiasm either. Granted, contract quotes are going up little by little now, but there is no guarantee that this trend will last.

[softpedia]

Amazon cloud gets application workflow

admin    IT News    

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a workflow service that aims to take business logic and automatically embed it into cloud apps.

The service, dubbed Amazon Simple Workflow Service, aims to speed up the development of cloud applications. For the enterprise, automating business processes for cash to order, finance and analytics can gobble up development time.

AWS is looking to automate a lot of that business logic with the Simple Workflow Service. The move makes a lot of sense since replicating business processes across various cloud apps can be tricky. With the Simple Workflow Service, developers can assign tasks to distributed applications and Amazon coordinates the execution.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said in a blog post:

A growing number of applications are relying on asynchronous and distributed processing, with scalability of the application as the primary motivation. By designing autonomous distributed components, developers get the flexibility to deploy and scale out parts of the application independently as load increases. The asynchronous and distributed model has the benefits of loose coupling and selective scalability, but it also creates new challenges. Application developers must coordinate multiple distributed components to get the desired results. They must deal with the increased latency and unreliability inherent in remote communication. Components may take extended periods of time to complete tasks, requests may fail and errors originating from remote systems must be handled. Today, to accomplish this, developers are forced to write complicated infrastructure that typically involves message queues and databases along with complex logic to synchronise them. All this ‘plumbing’ is extraneous to business logic and makes the application code unnecessarily complicated and hard to maintain.

Trial customers for Amazon’s workflow tool included NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which uses the service for various missions. RightScale and Sage Bionetworks are also using the service.

Amazon said the workflow service is available in its US East region and will come to other areas in the months ahead.

Here’s a diagram of what the service does.

 

Via ZDNet US

Ubuntu for Android Video Presentation

admin    Android, IT News, Linux    

Canonical announced last evening, February 21st, the Ubuntu for Android product, allowing users to connect a multi-core Android phone to an Ubuntu desktop.

Once docked, the Android phone’s data, apps and connectivity can be easily accessed within the Ubuntu desktop PC.

For example, you can go to Unity Dash, go to the Video Lens and you’ll see all the videos stored and captured with the phone.

In the same way, the photos stored in the Android phone can be easily viewed and accessed. The apps available on the mobile device can also be viewed in the Application Lens, and they can also be launched on your Ubuntu desktop.

Another amazing feature is the People Lens, allowing you to view all of your phone’s contacts, favorites, recent calls.

The Android’s network settings and connectivity can be accessed directly from the Unity Panel network indicator, which is integrated with the phone’s Wi-Fi.

Moreover, incoming phone calls and SMS (text messages) will be automatically displayed on your desktop, via built-in notifications. Wait, that’s not all, as you can read the text messages and reply to them!

[softpedia]

Ubuntu for Android Officially Announced

admin    Android, IT News, Linux    

Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth proudly announced a few minutes ago a new product, called Ubuntu for Android and designed to bring the popular Ubuntu operating system to Android mobile devices.

Ubuntu for Android is not really an operating system for Android devices, it is intended to be installed on the mobile device alongside its Android OS while it’s docked.

Designed only for mobile phones with dual-core ARM CPUs, Ubuntu for Android runs on top of the Android kernel, like Motorola’s Ubuntu-based WebTop environment.

Ubuntu for Android offers a complete desktop environment with popular apps like Chromium web browser, VLC media player, Thunderbird e-mail client, Google’s Calendar and Docs, Ubuntu’s music player and photo viewer, Android dialer or the popular Gwibber social networking software.

“This isn’t the “Ubuntu Phone”. The phone experience here is pure Android. This announcement is playing to a different story, which is the convergence of multiple different form factors into one most-personal device.”

“Naturally, the most personal device is the phone, so we want to get all of these different personalities – phone, tablet and desktop – into the phone. When you need a desktop, you connect up to a screen and a keyboard. When you need a tablet, you dock to some very elegant glass.” – said Mark Shuttleworth.

The phone’s connectivity (3G or 4G networks) can also be access by Ubuntu for Android.

Learn more about Ubuntu for Android on the official website.

[softpedia]

Microsoft Extends Consumer Support for Windows 7 and Vista

admin    IT News, Microsoft, Windows    

Earlier this month, Microsoft has made a series of changes to its support policies for the consumer versions of its Windows client.

Basically, the company has made some changes to the support lifecycle of Windows Vista and Windows 7. Compared to the initial period, the new support timeframe has been doubled.

Basically, instead of five years of Mainstream Support, which have been previously guaranteed via the said policies, consumer will benefit from ten years of assistance with their products.

Microsoft did offer ten years of official updates for Windows before, but only to its business customers.

Following the said changes in the company’s policies for offering assistance for the said Windows client versions, end-users will benefit from the same extended period of updates as business users.

On the company’s support web page for both Windows Vista and Windows 7, the said new Extended Support end dates for consumer versions are already listed.

Thus, users who will access the said pages will learn that Windows XP will benefit from Extended Support until April 8th, 2014; Windows Vista will be receiving official updates until April 11th, 2017, while Windows 7 will enjoy them until January 14th, 2020.

Microsoft has already confirmed these changes officially, a recent post on ZDNet reads:

Microsoft is updating the Support Lifecycle policy for Windows desktop operating systems, including Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Through this update, customers who remain on the most current supported service pack will be eligible to receive both Mainstream and Extended Support, for a total of 10 years.

With these changes, Microsoft shows once again its commitment to providing enhanced support to its Windows users. To learn some more info on the company’s support lifecycle policy for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, just head over to the company’s support website.

[softpedia]

It’s the New Windows 8 Logo!

admin    IT News, Windows    

“If you look back to the origins of the logo you see that it really was meant to be a window,” writes Microsoft user experience director Sam Moreau this afternoon. ” “‘Windows’ really is a beautiful metaphor for computing and with the new logo we wanted to celebrate the idea of a window, in perspective.”

Granted, the four-color motif was starting to look a little dated, and newcomers to computing were wondering why Microsoft was borrowing from the Google Chrome logo. But growing up among graphic art as I did, and also speaking as someone with a bit of Scottish heritage, it’s hard for me not to wonder whether the new Windows 8 logo falls short in several key respects. First of all, it’s a classic Nordic Cross flag, still flown today over Shetland Province in Scotland.

It’s also the flag of the French city of Calais, of the Estonian city of Pärnu, the former flag of Iceland, and the flag flown by some ships of the Greek Navy.

Moreau credits the design team of Pentagram with the new Windows logo concept. Last year, out of necessity (because it no longer contained 11 members), the Big Ten athletic conference signed Pentagram to redesign its logo. The result emphasized the number “10,” even though the conference now has twelve members with the addition of the University of Nebraska. Graphic designer Nick Conflitti called that design an “epic fail,” asking why the conference would want to “bash it over our brains twice” that it really doesn’t have ten members.

The previous year, when Pentagram redesigned the North Carolina Museum of Art logo by styling the words completely out of blocks and curved wedges, its hometown’s Web site was besieged by protest comments. Said one, “It is just evocative of the more hideous examples of late ’60s through mid-’70s architecture. It reminds me of all those concrete buildings with arrow-slit windows that popped up on college campuses all over the state during that time.”

Added Microsoft’s Moreau about the work Pentagram produced for Windows 8, “It was important that the new logo carries our Metro principle of being ‘Authentically Digital.’ By that, we mean it does not try to emulate faux-industrial design characteristics such as materiality (glass, wood, plastic, etc.). It has motion – aligning with the fast and fluid style you’ll find throughout Windows 8.”

Years ago, Microsoft told me that after the development team met one of its early milestones and the campus celebrated, they hoisted a flag of the existing Windows logo – which looked at that time like a sideways cinder-block – over Redmond headquarters. Someone, perhaps Bill Gates, said the logo should become a flag and represent all colors of the computing spectrum. It’s interesting that the company should heed an outsider’s advice and discard that important symbology.

[RWW]

Anonymous Wants Internet Blackout, Targets 13 “Root” DNS Servers

admin    Hacker, IT News, Security    

A Pastebin post, allegedly published a few days ago by members of Anonymous, reveals the hacktivists’ intentions to shut down the Internet on March 31 by going after “the 13 root DNS servers of the Internet.”

While many may argue that this is a hard to accomplish task, it seems as the plan is already laid out. A number of 13 IP addresses are listed, which allegedly belong to the 13 DNS servers.

The initiators of this attack, part of Operation Global Blackout, are aware of the fact that the Internet can’t be simply unplugged, but they’re confident that the sites to suffer as a result of this outage will draw enough attention to their cause.

“By cutting these off the Internet, nobody will be able to perform a domain name lookup, thus, disabling the HTTP Internet, which is, after all, the most widely used function of the Web,” the hackers write.

“Anybody entering ‘http://www.google.com’ or ANY other url, will get an error page, thus, they will think the Internet is down, which is, close enough. Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most.”

The mastermind behind this operation claims he already compiled a Reflective DNS Amplification DDOS tool to be used in this attack.

“It is called an amplified because we can use small packets to generate large traffic. It is called reflective because we will not send the queries to the root name servers, instead, we will use a list of known vulnerable DNS servers which will attack the root servers for us.”

We have contacted some security experts hoping that they can provide some technical insight on this plan of action. Stay tuned to see if professionals find these claims plausible.

[softpedia]

Scientific Linux 6.2 Officially Released

admin    IT News, Linux, Red Hat    

Pat Riehecky proudly announced last night, February 15th, the immediate availability for download of the Scientific Linux 6.2 operating system. Being based on the Red Hat Linux Enterprise 6.2, the Scientific Linux 6.2 distribution contains all the upstream goodies, as well as lots of in-house updates and improvements. Among the updated/added packages in Scientific Linux 6.2 we can mention Anaconda, OpenAFS, livecd-tools, liveusb-creator, sl-release, yum-autoupdate, external repositories for yum, mingw32, hivex and openmpl-psm. Take a look below to see what exactly was changed in each one! Highlights of Scientific Linux 6.2: · Added the Scientific Linux install classes to Anaconda installer; · Installations from DVD images don’t ask for a network connection unless needed; · Updated OpenAFS to version 1.6.0-97.z2.sl6; · Patched OpenAFS to disable NAT pings in order to avoid a race condition; · Updated livecd-tools and liveusb-creator to version 13.4; · Added support for Scientific Linux 6.2 in livecd-tools and liveusb-creator tools; · Troy Dawson’s GPG key was removed from sl-release; · CERN’s GPG key was added in sl-release; · Added the POSTRUN and PRERUN in yum-autoupdate for more flexibility; · yum-fastestmirror is now required for yum-conf-* packages; · New 64-bit Adobe repository is now available in the External Repositories for yum; · The mingw32, openmpi-psm and hivex packages were removed from the i386 tree as they don’t belong in there. The following packages were changed in Scientific Linux 6.2 comapred with RHEL 6.2: Apache, Plymouth, RedHat-Logos, SL-Bookmarks, SL-IndexHTML, SL-Release, SL-Release-Notes, Anaconda, and RedHat-RPM-Config. Scientific Linux For the detailed changelog with the full list of updated packages, removed packages, bug fixes and know limitations, please have a look at the official release notes.  About Scientific Linux Scientific Linux is a distribution put together by miscellaneous universities and labs around the world. It was created to reduce the duplicated effort of the labs and as an install base for the numerous experimenters. Scientific Linux is actually an Enterprise Linux, built from sources of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 series. Download Scientific Linux 6.2 [softpedia]