http://newskini.serveftp.net/news-01-Ars_Technica_Business.htmlNewsKini RSS Feeds for Ars_Technica_BusinessSun, 21 Mar 2010 23:32:40 GMTNewsKini RSS Custom FeederSee http://newskini.serveftp.nethttp://arstechnica.com/business/2010/02/an-introduction-to-collaborative-development-with-launchpad.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssLaunchpad is a Web-based platform for collaborative software development, and it's designed to enable collaboration among programmers, users, and the wide spectrum of other kinds of contributors who participate in the process of building and deploying software. It provides free project hosting for open source software developers and offers a number of important features, including a bug tracker, a version control system, a package building service, mailing lists, and an integrated framework for managing crowdsourced translations. The Launchpad service is developed and operated by Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution; it is one of the key enablers of Ubuntu development and is used extensively by the Linux distribution's multitude of contributors. When it was originally launched in 2004, the service itself was not an open source software project. In response to strong encouragement from the Ubuntu community, Canonical released Launchpad's source code last year under the open source GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:20:11 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/intel-vcs-to-replenish-innovation-pipeline-with-wad-of-cash.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIntel has announced a $3.5 billion plan to boost US job growth and innovation by investing alongside 24 of the country's top venture capital firms in industries like bioinformatics, clean technology, and IT. The program also includes a commitment by Intel and 17 other tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Cisco, CDW, Dell, and others, to increase their hiring of US college graduates. The overall plan has been dubbed the "Invest in America Alliance," and Intel itself is putting up $200 million of the total, with the other VC firms pitching in the rest. Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:27:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/future-of-collaboration/2010/02/tumblr-vs-posterous-quick-blogging-showdown.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssOnline blogging tools that are designed to make things as easy as possible for anyone to publish online have been around at least a decade and, by now, "blogging" is well-established as a popular form of one- or few-to-many publishing. But a new crop of tools aims to make things even easier by enabling individuals to quickly share several types of common content with others. There isn't an accepted name for this type of content. If Wordpress et al are used for what we traditionally think of as "blogging," and Twitter is "micro-blogging," these new tools represent something in between those two extremes. Because the focus of these platforms is on easy, quick sharing of content with a group of peers or "followers," I've settled on the term "quick blogging." Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:30:29 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/windows-7-stability-update-breaks-stability-for-some-users.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssLast week , Microsoft posted a slew of non-security updates for Windows 7, one of which was titled as follows: "An update is available to improve the stability and the reliability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2." Unfortunately, according to a thread on Microsoft TechNet , the update ( KB977074 ) is actually breaking the stability and reliability of the operating system. "I [j]ust installed this update and my system hangs/freeze[s] at the windows bootup screen," the thread starter wrote. Another user went a little more in-depth: "At shutdown the PC often hangs with a message that a program is still running. Forcing program end does not work. The PC hangs for minutes until I press the PC’s power button. During one startup, a message came up indicating I needed to validate Windows 7. Therefore the PC lost the validation information. The revalidate succeeded. Shutdown problems consistently occur after running media center. Also have problems with recorded TV programs. Intermittently can't burn a recorded TV program to disc. After this failure occurs, a subsequent shutdown produces a hang 100% of the time." Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:14:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/two-billion-transistor-beasts-power7-and-niagara-3.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIn years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture (pipeline, instruction fetch and decode, execution units, etc.), along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks (the decoder, the floating-point unit, the load-store unit, etc.). This year's ISSCC is well into the many-core era, though, and with single-chip core counts ranging from six to 16, the only elements you're likely to see in a floorplan like the two below are cores, interfaces, and switches. Most of the discussion focuses on power-related arcana, but most folks are interested in the chips themselves. In this short article, I'll walk you through the floorplan of two chips with similar transistor counts—the Sun's Niagara 3 and IBM's POWER7. Most CPU geeks will already know a lot of the information I'll give below, but many readers will appreciate having it all together in one place. Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:03:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/data-centers/2010/02/-since-the-rise-of.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssSince the rise of the Web, SQL-based relational databases have been the dominant structured storage technology behind online applications. The past few years have seen the emergence of the cloud as a compelling environment for online application development, bringing true utility computing into the infrastructure pantheon. But the cloud and SQL do not mix well, and multiple efforts are now underway to offer viable alternatives to the venerable database. In this article, I'll review the forces that have led to this shift, and I'll argue that while relational databases are by no means doomed, they will soon be joined in the cloud, and possibly out-shined by, new non-relational database technologies. Wed, 24 Feb 2010 05:30:20 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/intels-nas-specific-atom-platform-hastens-pcification.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIntel's announcement last week that the company is planning two versions of its Atom processor specifically for the NAS market was easy to overlook. After all, there are a few Atom-based NAS options on the market already, and the new single-core D410 and dual-core D510 aren't really different from their netbook counterparts in anything other than their target platform. But the roster of vendors that has already signed on to produce Atom-based NAS devices—QNAP, Synology, and LaCie, among others—gives a glimpse at the fact that the home/SOHO NAS market is one place where Intel is definitely poised to take significant marketshare from ARM, and in the near-term. This trend toward x86-based NAS will be great for consumers, because it will hasten NAS's integration into the home network. First, though, a quick note about the Intel hardware. The main thing that makes the new platform specialized for NAS is the amount of I/O hardware on the southbridge: six PCIe lanes, 12 USB 2.0 ports, a port multiplier function, and eSATA ports. This would be overkill for a netbook (compare Pine Trail's two PCIe lanes), but for a NAS that may host a number of peripherals, it's perfect. Read the comments on this posthttp://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100312_02769881.jpgThu, 11 Mar 2010 21:38:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/microsoft-removes-vm-hardware-requirements-from-xp-mode.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssMicrosoft made a slew of virtualization announcements today, affecting both current and future products. Arguably the most important tidbit is that the company has removed the virtualization layer's hardware requirements for the XP Mode available in Windows 7. Those already running XP Mode don't need to bother updating since they already have it working, but users who were unsure of their PC hardware can grab the update and try out XP Mode on Windows 7 Professional, Windows 7 Enterprise, or Windows 7 Ultimate. The update is available for Windows 7 32-bit (3.7MB) and Windows 7 64-bit (4.1MB). Microsoft has been criticized for complicating things by having XP Mode only work on processors that supported either Intel's VT or AMD's AMD-V. This requirement was troublesome and confusing, as many Intel owners weren't sure if their CPU supported hardware virtualization, and if it did, whether it was turned on in the BIOS. Now that problem has been eliminated, removing a barrier to the adoption of Windows 7 among small and mid-size businesses that still cling to Windows XP. Read the comments on this posthttp://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100319_02803761.jpgFri, 19 Mar 2010 01:33:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/designing-a-highly-reliable-small-medium-business-network.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIf you've ever been an IT manager for a small business network, you're aware of one simple fact: small and medium business (SMB) networks are generally something of a mess. Typically, they're organically grown and built off of consumer-class hardware. Network management tools are usually non-existent, documentation is erratic, and redundancy is totally absent. The end result is that the typical SMB network is a virtual fireball, with the network admin running around carrying a pail and trying to extinguish the fires. What tends to happen, eventually, is that one of these outages becomes damaging enough to cause management to demand a better infrastructure. There’s always a catch, however, and in most cases it’s money. Luckily, you can build a highly reliable network without breaking the bank, as long as you focus on eliminating high-impact, single points of failure. In this article, I’ll explain how to create a highly available SMB network. In order to be as vendor-neutral as possible, I will try to avoid specific technologies, and will instead lay out some goals, along with common methods for meeting those goals. For similar reasons, I will not detail exact costs, but where possible, I’ll give you relative costs. Finally, I won't include virtualization options in this article, and will instead focus on standard client-server infrastructures. While virtualization can allow for very highly available infrastructures, a fully virtualized infrastructure is beyond the grasp of most small to medium sized businesses. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 05:30:52 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/amd-reveals-fusion-cpugpu-to-challege-intel-in-laptops.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssSAN FRANCISCO—The "Llano" processor that AMD described today in an ISSCC session is not a CPU, and it's not a GPU—instead, it's a hybrid design that the chipmaker is calling an "application processor unit," or APU. Whatever you call it, it could well give Intel a run for its money in the laptop market, by combining a full DX11-compatible GPU with four out-of-order CPU cores on a single, 32nm processor die. Details on the highly parallel vector hardware—the "GPU" part of the device—have yet to be disclosed, but AMD is focusing today's revelations on the CPU part of the design. In a nutshell, AMD has taken the "STARS" core that's used in their current 45nm offerings, shrunk it to a new 32nm SOI high-K process, and added new power gating and dynamic power optimization capabilities to it. Each out-of-order core has a bit under 35 million transistors, and a 1MB L2 cache that's not included in that number. AMD is targeting sub-3GHz operation, and a power consumption range of 2.5 to 25 watts. Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:28:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/guides/2010/02/io-virtualization.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssVirtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn't be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based web applications. Even though it has been used pervasively in datacenters for the past few years, virtualization isn't standing still. Rather, the technology is still evolving, and with the launch of I/O virtualization support from Intel and AMD it's poised to reach new levels of performance and flexibility. Our past virtualization coverage looked at the basics of what virtualization is , and how processors are virtualized . The current installment will take a close look at how I/O virtualization is used to boost the performance of individual servers by better virtualizing parts of the machine besides the CPU. Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:30:30 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/collaboration-20-twitter-team-ups-for-fun-and-profit.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssEven if you're a compulsive tweeter, you probably didn't know what Twitter was a year ago. The 140-character broadcast machine has gone far beyond updating your friends about dinner plans, and, for those who use it, Twitter is slowly melding with the fabric of life and work. Turning the simple Twitter mechanism to creative uses has created a whole new toolkit, and I'm routintely surprised at some of the Twitter-based collaboration methods that users have come up with. Of course, for many tweeters and former tweeters, Twitter is primarily yet another form of Internet-based distraction. "Twitter" and "productivity" are antonyms for a significant chunk of the service's users. That's why I set out to catalogue some of the productivity-enhancing, collaborative uses of Twitter. The survey below isn't anywhere near exhaustive, which is why I hope you'll drop into the comments section at the end of this article and fill in the gaps by sharing non-distracting Twitter uses with the Ars community. After all, if we're going to keep a Twitter client open, we might as well get some work done with it. Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:30:55 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssDid you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us. Just like a restaurant, we have to pay to staff, we have to pay for resources, and we have to pay when people consume those resources. The difference, of course, is that our visitors don't pay us directly but indirectly by viewing advertising. (Although a few thousand of you are subscribers , and we thank you all very, very much!) Read the comments on this postSat, 06 Mar 2010 17:11:41 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/cloud-basics.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssCloud computing is one of the most hyped technology concepts in recent memory, and, like many buzzwords, the term "cloud" is overloaded and overused.A while back Ars ran an article attempting to clear some of the confusion by reviewing the cloud's hardware underpinnings and giving it a proper definition, and in this article I'll flesh out that picture on the software side by offering a brief tour of the cloud platform options available to development teams today.I'll also discuss these options' key strengths and weaknesses, and I'll conclude with some thoughts about the kinds of advances we can expect in the near term. In all, though, it's important to keep in mind that what's presented here is just a snapshot. The cloud is evolving very rapidly—critical features that seem to be missing today may be standard a year from now. Before I begin, it's worth notingone of the key reasons for the confusion that surrounds cloud computing. Unlike most hot tech trends that attain buzzword status, the aspects of the cloud that make it a truly new form of client-server (e.g., rapid scalability from a few resource units to tens of thousands, metered usage models, the ability to access resources from any Internet-connected device, low barriers to client entry, etc.) also make it impossible, at least from a developer's perspective, to pin down into traditional "enterprise," "small to medium business," or "consumer" boxes that the IT world traditionally thinks in terms of. Enterprises, SMBs, and tiny startups, and lone coders all run their code on the cloud platforms described below. It's true that each category of user faces different parameters and constraints when deciding how and where to use cloud services, and I'll reference a few of the issues that enterprise users face in the article below. But just because the basic perspective of this article is that of enterprise IT, much of the material has relevance to non-enterprise users, as well. Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:30:28 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/02/upcoming-outlook-for-mac-remains-shrouded-in-mystery.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssSAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft's Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) announced during the 2010 Macworld Expo more information about the upcoming Office 2011 for Mac, and users are excited despite the lack of details. Scheduled to be released before the holiday season this year, the revamped Office suite is bringing more parity than ever to the Mac version while still being as Mac-like as it can be. The bit of news that generated the most questions—at least to those of us in the Ars Orbiting HQ—is related to Outlook for Mac. Old is new again, at least for Mac users who have been begging Microsoft for years to introduce an e-mail client comparable to its Windows offerings. The company announced the arrival of Outlook to the Mac back in August of 2009 , but revealed this week that Outlook 2011 would have support for .PST files. The good news, as we discovered by sitting down with the Mac BU, is that Outlook for Mac will support bringing them in from Outlook for Windows. The bad news is that the company has "nothing to announce" (at least not at this point) regarding auto-archiving to PST. Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:30:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/guides/2010/02/creating-a-secure-domain-policy.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssThe recent Google hack has brought security to the top of every IT admin's mind, if it wasn't there already. But securing a network is a huge investment of time and money, to the point that many best practcices are out-of-reach for many small and medium businesses. Nonetheless, there is hope. Windows shops can get a good, cheap head-start on security by simply ensuring that their domain security policy is solid. In this article, Ars shows you how to create a group policy that will secure Active Directory (AD) according to current best practices, while keeping it open enough to ensure that operational headaches remain at a minimum. Note : For reference, all policy settings discussed in this article can be found under Computer Configuration Windows Settings Security Settings in the Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:30:03 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/16--and-48-core-monster-chips-on-tap-at-next-weeks-isscc.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIntel, IBM, Sun, AMD, and other chipmakers are set to unveil the details of a host of present and future processor designs at this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference. Let's take a look at each company's sessions, which cover processors that range from single-core to 48 cores, in turn. Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:26:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/firms-worry-about-social-networks-but-not-blocking-access.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssDespite widespread paranoia that social networks are putting businesses at risk, companies continue to give employees open access to them. The latest Security Threat Report (PDF) from security research firm Sophos notes that spam and malware attacks via popular networks continued to rise at "alarming" rates over the last 12 months, posing a risk to both users and the companies they work for. Nearly three-quarters of businesses (72 percent) told Sophos that they're concerned about employee behavior on social networks—and it's not the HR-related behavior they're concerned about. The majority of respondents said that reports of spam, phishing, and malware coming from the major social networks were way up, and they expressed concern about employees endangering business security. According to Sophos, there was a 70 percent increase in the proportion of businesses reporting spam and malware attacks in 2009. Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:29:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/intel-goes-to-gulftown-launches-6-core-xeons.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssIntel has launched its next-generation Xeon 5600 line, the 32nm "Westmere-EP." The new lineup brings more cores, more threads, Turbo Boost, and more instructions, all in the same socket format and thermal/power envelope as the older Xeon 5500 line. At the top end of the 5600 family is the six-core, 3.33GHz X5680, and at the bottom end is the quad-core, 2.40GHz E5620. All of the parts in the 5600 range are hyperthreaded, have 12MB of cache, and support Intel Turbo Boost, the AES new instructions (AES-NI), and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Let's take each of these features in turn. Read the comments on this posthttp://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100316_02794081.jpgTue, 16 Mar 2010 12:20:00 GMThttp://arstechnica.com/business/guides/2010/03/safely-whitelist-your-favorite-sites-and-opt-out-of-tracking.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssSo there was this article on the Internet recently about how ad blocking is devastating to sites that you love. You may have read it and there's a good chance that you participated in the frank and lively discussion that took place afterwards. One of the things we learned from all of this is that not all people who use ad blockers are actually out to block our ads, and that many of you didn't realize that blocking ads hurt us and the other sites you love. Many care deeply about their privacy, personal information, and the well-being of their computers. Many were more than happy to unblock Ars, but many others had difficulty doing so due to the complicated nature of many ad blocking solutions. Dozens of you asked for help, so here it is. Read the comments on this posthttp://newskini.serveftp.net/css/g/thumbs/20100312_02769882.jpgThu, 11 Mar 2010 16:28:00 GMT