lunes, agosto 01, 2011
miércoles, marzo 30, 2011
Oracle Rumors Swirl as Lawson Users Wait and Wonder (PC World)
Lawson Software customers still don't know the fate of the company following Infor's roughly US$1.8 billion acquisition offer earlier this month, with just days to go before Lawson's annual CUE conference in Boston.
Speculation that Oracle would submit a counter-offer for Lawson picked up again this week, although neither company would comment on that prospect.
Activist investor Carl Icahn, who took a stake in Lawson last year, has given a nod of approval to Infor's offer. Icahn is known for pushing companies he invests in to take actions he believes would benefit shareholders, such as a sale.
Meanwhile, Lawson users are watching and waiting, some with dread anticipation of what's to come.
Ever since Lawson went public in late 2001, "the quality hasn't been there, the service hasn't been there," said one long-time user who works in IT at a hospital chain in the Midwest. "It's been harder to get to knowledgeable people, and it takes longer to get issues resolved and fixed. It's been kind of a love-hate relationship with Lawson."
The user, who requested anonymity due to the situation's sensitivity, expressed concerns over what would happen if Lawson is purchased by Infor or Oracle, both of which are known for running lean operations.
It's not as if it would be easy for his company to switch ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, and only partly because of the organizational and financial impacts, he said. Organizations like his "really need something that's specific to health care, especially in HR," he said.
For now, the company will remain "cautious about any additional investment in Lawson above and beyond what we have now," he added.
Another Lawson user said he is taking a wait-and-see approach.
"Based on what I know, it appears that Lawson is doing due diligence and evaluating its financial position and making sure everything is on the up-and-up before moving forward," said Don Zoz, president of the Lawson Mid-America User Group, via e-mail. "If it appears that this would be a good move for Lawson, I'm not opposed to the transaction."
However, "as always, I'm concerned that user support could be affected if the resulting company grows too large," Zoz added.
Privately held Infor has reported revenues north of US$2 billion, while Lawson logged $736.4 million in its fiscal 2010. The combined company would be the industry's largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle.
Lawson customers might take some encouragement from Infor's recent announcement that it plans to hire some 400 engineers in order to boost product development efforts.
Infor's move has been seen as an attempt by its new leadership team, which includes former Oracle co-president Charles Phillips as CEO, to rid the company of its image as more of a collection of acquired vendors than an organization geared toward new software innovations.
An Infor spokesman declined to comment Tuesday on the status of its offer for Lawson.
Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com
Smartphone market to grow 50 percent in 2011: IDC (AFP)
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The worldwide smartphone market will grow nearly 50 percent this year and Google's Android will take over as the leading operating system, a technology market research firm said Tuesday.
International Data Corp. (IDC) said smartphone vendors are expected to ship more than 450 million smartphones in 2011 compared to 303.4 million last year.
IDC said the smartphone market will grow more than four times faster than the overall mobile phone market as consumers and enterprise users upgrade their basic handsets to smartphones with advanced features.
The research firm said Android is expected to surpass Nokia's Symbian in 2011 and become the leading smartphone platform.
"Android is poised to take over as the leading smartphone operating system in 2011 after racing into the number two position in 2010," said IDC senior research analyst Ramon Llamas.
"For the vendors who made Android the cornerstone of their smartphone strategies, 2010 was the coming-out party," Llamas said.
"This year will see a coronation party as these same vendors broaden and deepen their portfolios to reach more customers, particularly first-time smartphone users," he said.
IDC also predicted strong growth for Microsoft's Windows Phone platform which has been losing market share but was recently adopted by Finland's Nokia.
"Up until the launch of Windows Phone 7 last year, Microsoft has steadily lost market share while other operating systems have brought forth new and appealing experiences," Llamas said.
"The new alliance brings together Nokia's hardware capabilities and Windows Phone's differentiated platform," he said.
"We expect the first devices to launch in 2012," Llamas said. "By 2015, IDC expects Windows Phone to be number two operating system worldwide behind Android."
IDC said Android will have a 39.5 percent share of the worldwide smartphone operating system market in 2011 followed by Symbian with 20.9 percent, Apple's iOS with 15.7 percent, Research In Motion's Blackberry with 14.9 percent and Windows Phone 7 and Windows Mobile with 5.5 percent.
By 2015, Android will enjoy a 45.4 percent market share followed by Windows Phone 7 and Windows Mobile with 20.9 percent, Apple's iOS with 15.3 percent and Blackberry with 13.7 percent, it said.
Multicore Coding Standards Aim to Ease Programming (PC World)
The Multicore Association is establishing specifications for a programming model that will reduce the complexity involved in writing software for multicore chips used in smartphones, tablets and other embedded systems.
The association is putting together a cohesive set of foundation APIs (application programming interfaces) to standardize communication, resource sharing and virtualization spanning cores on the same or different chips, said Markus Levy, the group's president.
Chip makers are adding CPUs, sensors and accelerators to chips as an energy-efficient way to boost application performance on devices. But multicore chips have also created a challenge for programmers, who have to write applications that scale across multiple cores and synchronize correctly to ensure calculations are executed in a certain order to get the correct output.
The low-level APIs provide a consistent multicore programming model from which applications can be tailored to run across chip architectures, operating systems and specialized hardware, Levy said. The Multicore Association has completed the MCAPI (multicore communication API) and MRAPI (multicore resource management API) for communication and resource management, respectively, and has working groups to create new tools and APIs related to virtualization.
"There are many beneficiaries of establishing these APIs. But the primary goal for all parties is to establish portability," Levy said. A consistent programming model makes it easier to reuse the application across different multicore platforms. Prior to these APIs, most designs used proprietary mechanisms that lacked portability, Levy said.
A smartphone may be designed using multiple processor cores running different operating systems, with each core providing different functionality, said Colin Walls, an embedded software technologist at Mentor Graphics, which makes the Nucleus real-time operating system that ships in around 400 million handsets each year. MCAPI provides a straightforward means for the software on the two cores to communicate, Walls said.
In some devices, one core could run an OS, like Android or Linux, to manage much of the user interface, execution of user applications, file and data management and communications. The other core could be somewhat invisible to the user and manage low-level phone activities such as establishing and maintaining a cellular network connection and handling calls.
"By using MCAPI, the embedded applications code does not need to be aware of the inter-core communications method. The code is portable between operating systems and chip architectures," Walls said.
MCAPI allows programmers to enable applications for multicore once and reuse that same code on multiple products in a product line and for next-generation devices, thereby improving engineering productivity, said Sven Brehmer, CEO of PolyCore Software, which provides development tools and runtime software for multicore and multichip communication.
MCAPI is being used most in the telecom and datacom infrastructures and in multimedia devices, Brehmer said. Other areas of interest include medical devices, high-performance computing and military and aeronautics equipment such as radar.
The API allows the establishment of domains for specific implementations, such as communication between cores on a given chip or over specific areas in a chip's topology. This gives designers better control over the routing and security of their messages, Levy said.
"One aspect of the MCAPI infrastructure involves the specification of a network of communication nodes, where a node can be a process, thread, instance of an operating system, hardware accelerator, or processor core," Levy said.
MCAPI is designed to work with MRAPI, an API for application-level resource management capabilities that coordinate power management and virtualization on multicore chips. Chips contain functions and features that change dynamically, and on some multicore chips it is hard for a single OS to track and control all resources, Levy said. MRAPI provides low-level support for system-level event notification such as power-savings states, device failures and hypervisor repartitioning.
For example, Linux-based devices with symmetric multiprocessing do not support a facility to notify applications when the operating environment or resources have changed, Levy said. To accommodate the deficiency, MRAPI provides programmers with implementation mechanisms to manage resource sharing and respond to changes in the resource availability.
"Utilizing MRAPI, system developers can write portable application programs that will scale throughout current and future generations of multicore processors and architectures, benefitting application, middleware, processor and system developers," Levy said.
This standardization will allow chip vendors and third-party tool providers to take over the resource management, so programmers can focus on high-level applications, Levy said.
The organization is also developing APIs for users of embedded virtualization products, which could enable interoperatibility of applications and middleware across different virtualization environments. But a larger focus is on developing standardized tools that take advantage of the APIs. Some backers of the new APIs such as Mentor, Intel, Freescale and Texas Instruments, for example, all had developed their own debug and tracing tools, Levy said.
"The net result for tool vendors is that as much as they would like to be a one-stop shop, it is impossible. No single vendor can offer everything that their customers require, and yet customers must be able to develop for and understand this diverse system," Levy said.
There are other multicore programming models such as OpenMP and OpenCL, but they are all designed to be "synergistic" rather than competitive, Polycore's Brehmer said. The OpenMP API is designed to write machine-level parallel applications, while OpenCL is a programming framework for parallel execution of tasks across multicore processors including CPUs and graphics processors.
The Multicore Association members also include IBM, Samsung and Advanced Micro Devices.
jueves, diciembre 30, 2010
Turtles Double Damage
M.R.D. Escape
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Ninja Turtles
con el 'Shift' te preoteges y con el 'Ctrl' cambias de tortuga pero solo en la pantalla final.
Bleach Versus
En 'Tutorial Mode' puedes ver los controles de cada jugador.
Sweet Dogs Home
Es una Descripcion objetiva y el Autor tiene una actitud ajustada al objeto...