By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews
On news of its best financial quarter in company history, Sybase celebrated this week by officially rolling out a new edition of its enterprise database.
The new Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.5, which shipped in December 2009, is the first product from Sybase to be shipped with an in-memory database (IMDB), an emerging alternative to disk-based databases which has already been adopted by competitors Oracle and IBM.
Read More...By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
My answer is 5. Yesterday, when checking my bank account, I found that Dow Jones had charged 5 for a year’s Wall Street Journal online subscription. I had been expecting the same 9 charge as last year, which already was borderline too high but acceptable (I had a fulltime job 12 months ago). WSJ had gone too far with its pricing. I called customer service, cancelled the account and asked for a refund. The call wasn’t easily made, because of the real and sentimental value received. I do regularly read the Journal online, and I have subscribed since 1996! No longer.
Read More...By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
If today’s Internet worked the way it was originally designed, where content took whatever route seemed most convenient at the time to reach its destination, there’s a good chance we’d already be in a state of gridlock today. As it turns out, global-scale load balancing has already been well under way for several years, with companies like Akamai providing edge caching services that move copies of frequently accessed content from a high-volume server geographically closer to the clients that access it.
Read More...Mission: Assemble a full-HD video camera setup that can fit into a carry-on bag with a total weight under 6 pounds.
Deadline: SXSW Interactive Conference and Festival, March 12.
At the end of 2009, I was challenged to put together a video camera rig that was as light and portable as possible, that could still produce “Web-broadcast-quality” video. The weight limit was between 5.5 and 6 pounds, or the weight of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and it had to be able to fit entirely (tripod and all) into my usual carry-on luggage: a Timbuk3 messenger bag.
Read More...Those who say there are no decent Twitter apps for Android simply haven’t found the right one. When the Android Market first opened, you could sign in, watch the handful of new apps being uploaded every day, and generally know everything that was available on the platform. There really were only a couple of Twitter clients.
But now that the Market has been revised, and there are more than 25,000 apps by the last unofficial count from Androlib, there are plenty of Android Twitter clients to choose from.
Read More...By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
The original reason for Microsoft Office’s existence was to provide retailers with an incentive to move product that wasn’t moving. The bundle created a discount deal that enabled the momentum behind Excel, which was hot, to help push Word, which was not. It had hardly a tenth of the sales volume of WordPerfect, and Word was a product that retailers had to actively work to sell. This was at a time when software consumed shelf space in stores and was sold like automobiles — a time which is now essentially gone.
Today was 2010′s first iDay- the announcement of a new or updated Apple product, predictably following months, or in this case years of feverish speculation. Steve Jobs gave the gathered press the first glimpse of the super-tablet himself, proudly declaring the new iPad not just revolutionary, but magical. It is undeniably sleek, beautiful, and impressive to look at but is it necessary, especially for people already toting around iPhones or iPod Touches, along with a MacBook or a MacBook Air?
By Joe Wilcox, Betanews
For a month, I’ve grappled with the “Why?” of an Apple tablet. Why should Apple make a tablet? Why could Apple succeed in a category where so many other companies have failed? Why would I –or anyone else — want to buy an Applet tablet? No answer, despite all the plausible rumors about the device, could convince me “Why?” Until tonight. I thought of a “What?” that would make me interested in a portable tablet: Delivery of a unified content platform, mixing different media types and live information.
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New wave of outages impacts the plagued Google phone
By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Since early Friday morning, as hundreds of commenters on T-Mobile’s and Google’s support forums are reporting, 3G data connectivity service has been completely unavailable — for some, since approximately 4:30 am Eastern Time this morning, but for a great many more users beginning at 10:00 am. Some users in recent minutes are reporting service restored, although indications from both forums are that service can come back and go away again. Read more...