Low cost suppliers more competent to deal with economic crisis, says Red Hat chief

Red Hat’s chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, says that his company is capable enough to deal with economic crisis being a low-cost supplier.

Speaking to journalists The about future of Red Hat and views on the Linux market, Whitehurst remarked that “at times like this, cheaper generally wins”. Read more

IBM announces validation programme for cloud services

IBM will soon be offering a validating programme for enhancing its influence in cloud-computing. Businesses well be allowed evaluation of cloud-based services and reliability of any provider. The programme ‘Resilient Cloud Validation’ assesses cloud-based services and applications against proven and rigorous design and benchmarking guidelines. The cloud-computing providers will be required to approach IBM for participation in the programme and only successful providers will be permitted to use the IBM logo ‘Resilient Cloud’.

Cloud computing, delivers services over network, in which user does not require any infrastructure or system and sees only the network. IBM said that since cloud is subjected to recovery events, high-profile downtime and unpredictable performance, potential customers needed to be assured that computing could be trusted. Cloud computing covers storage services and enterprise applications online.

According to IBM’s General Manager of Business Continuity & Resiliency Services, Philippe Jarre, objective of every service provider is to provide uninterrupted information to their businesses. Since other businesses are powered by these providers, it creates ‘network effect’ of downtime, it is therefore critical to build high standards of resiliency.

IBM is adopting best-practice approach with the Resilient Cloud Validation Programme. According to Julian Freedman of IBM’s Emerging Technologies group, Cloud Computing was better way of doing things.
The programme would be initiated in early 2009.

Opera releases browser for Google Android

The Google-run Android mobile platform got its first mobile browser, Mini 4.2, from Opera. It is not only the first browser making it onto Android phone but an alternative to Android browse being offered to Android users.

On the occasion of a recent beta release Opera claimed vast speed improvements in the browser version compared with past versions. Opera’s servers translate standard web content into more suitable formats for mobile delivery. The company claimed that its Mini server park in the US would enhance load times for users all over the globe. According to Opera’s spokesman, users in Asia and Europe will also get benefited from speed improvements.

Opera Mini 4.2 is enhanced with addition of supported languages and colour options for browser’s border. Opera link synchronises bookmarks between mobile version and Opera’s PC version and supports notes’ synchronisation.

Opera has claimed enhancement of ‘real-time streaming protocol’ (RTSP) in Mini 4.2 browser. It also claimed that Mini 4.2 browser increases number of phones providing support for mobile video.

Users of Android’s only device T-Mobile G1, can download Opera Mini 4.2 in the market from Android Market, free of charge. Browser would also be available to certain users of Windows Mobile handsets and BlackBerry.

Adobe responds to demands of open-source users for 64-bit Flash

Adobe ultimately bowed to the demands of open source users and announced the release of an alpha version of Flash Player technology for the 64-bit Linux software.

In comparison with Mac OSX or Windows, Linux moved much faster in supporting 64-bit processors. Technically savvy users were able to switch over to Linux easily due to its compile-your-own-software feature and developer-friendliness. But the switch has one limitation; people can make use of only 32-bit flash thereby restricting use of only 32-bit version of Firefox.

The software would be released at Adobe Max 2008 conference, to be held at San Francisco. The 64-bit support would be extended to other operating systems at later date, but Linux users, who were most vocal in their demand, would get it first, Adobe declared.

Adobe stated that this release was its first step in making Flash Player native 64-bit for all platforms. Linux was chosen as the initial platform due to numerous requests on issue-management, Flash Player bugs and also due to reasons that Linux, as a practice, was not being shipped with a 32-bit browser. The release has now made Flash Player 10 a full native participant in 64-bit distribution.

Adobe declared its commitment to bring native 64-bit flash Player to Mac and Windows in future releases.