Webremix Articles

Drivers react to Mayfield's reinstatement (AP)

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:50:36 GMT

AP - Bump-drafting, slingshot passing and restrictor-plate racing weren't the buzzwords being thrown around Daytona International Speedway on Thursday.

Corvette Adds Fiber, Flair to American Road

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:55:22 GMT

Chevrolet introduces the Corvette. It’s a time when “new” and “Space Age” are the big buzzwords, and the Corvette fits the bill. The Corvette featured a gorgeous body ma...

Infrastructure new buzzword for MFs

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 21:19:33 GMT

Thanks to the Reliance MF NFO, every fund house has woken up to the magical power of the theme, to offer ‘‘fabulous returns'' to the prospective investors.

Department Stores Stock The Aisles With Fewer Items

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:01:00 GMT

For those still out shopping last winter, department stores represented a rare opportunity, tons of inventory marked deeply down. Don't expect that magic to happen again. More and more stores are announcing that they are reducing inventory so as not to be left holding the bag if shoppers fail to show up. Saks CEO, Stephen Sadove tells Bloomberg that "across the board you are going to find less of the sizes, less of the availability in almost all of the categories." He also says that markdowns won't be as dramatic as they were last year. While in previous years the buzzword was "masstige" offering luxury for everyone now Sadove says that "luxury has always been about scarcity." The ripple effect of department stores cutting back inventory has already made it increasingly hard for some designer labels to survive. Neiman Marcus and Saks have both said they are cutting back on lines that don't sell well and linger on the racks. And the recession also seems to be stifling creativity a bit. Stores are looking for staples, classics and safe bets to stock their stores. The avant-garde, trendy and daring is too risky if there are fears that it won't sell. Brands are making one or two versions of a particular style rather than a wider range. Retail sales are expected to rise slightly by the end of this year but it won't be enough to make up for last year's sharp losses. Department Stores Stock The Aisles With Fewer Items originally appeared on Luxist on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Forbes AI Report: Gigadeath to the Artilects!

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:25:18 GMT

Forbes has posted a huge, mixed bag of interesting articles on AI and robots. They're calling it their AI Report. David Gelernter contributes the article, "What Happened to Theoretical AI". There are also articles from AGI folks, like Ben Goertzel's "AI And What To Do About It" which offers career advice for humans planning to live through the singularity. Even more loaded with singularity buzzwords is The Coming Artilect War by Hugo de Garis where you can read about artilect gods, Cosmists, Terrans, and Cyborgists duking it out in a post singularity world: I see a war coming, the "Artilect War," not between the artilects and human beings, as in the movie Terminator, but between the Terrans, Cosmists and Cyborgists. This will be the worst, most passionate war that humanity has ever known ... There will be gigadeath Maybe it's me but I keep expecting Xenu to get involved in all that gigadeath. Obviously, Hugo is as pessimistic about the singularity as Ray Kurzweil is optimistic. If reading singularity proselytes is more than you can take, there are plenty of other articles more grounded in science and philosophy such as The Ethical War Machine by Patrick Lin which addresses the legal and technical challenges of miltary robots; and Who Needs Humanoids by Helen Greiner who points out that when the first Roomba owners provided feedback, they weren't saying "I wish my Roomba was more human-like", they were saying "I wish my Roomba did a better job of cleaning the floor". Judea Pearl offers an article called "Giving Computers Free Will" but it turns out he believes free will is an illusion (as always, I recommend the more coherent explanation of free will offered by Daniel Dennett in Freedom Evolves).

Letter: The case for and against a Grenada cabinet reshuffle

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMT

“Reshuffle” is the buzzword on the various Internet fora, on the radio and in the streets of Grenada. Now the Grenada Today (GT) has waded in (in an editorial for the week ending June 19), offering advice to Prime Minister Tillman Thomas as to how he should fix his Cabinet. It is my opinion that GT's editor's...

After a Year of Free Beta, Acrobat.com Adds Fees

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:15:44 GMT

Service will feature document collaboration at its core, built around Adobe apps like Acrobat and Buzzword.

IT Needs a New Drug

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Let's talk about the next era of information technology. We seem to be in it, but we don't have a name for it yet. Suddenly, "cloud computing" is the dominant buzzword of the day, but the current confluence of trends includes much more. There is business process modeling, business intelligence, complex event processing, service-oriented architecture, Software as a Service and Web-oriented architecture.

Digital Literacy: Buzzword or Job Requirement?

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:02:16 GMT

Graduation season just finished and the air still rings with bad advice given to bored students.

Luxurious adventure: the new buzzword in tourism

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:33:27 GMT

An adventure sojourn during the day and the evenings filled with luxury and indulgence. Yes, that's the new mantra travel operators across the country are offering to woo domestic as well as international travellers.

Go green: Latest corporate buzzword

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:42:16 GMT

Several companies have taken steps towards creating a more environment-friendly business model and raising global awareness over ecological concerns.

Seeking a definition for 'unified communications'

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:12:57 GMT

I was struck by a comment on Monday's article on Cisco's pronouncement that the combined unified communications and collaboration market will be worth $34 billion. The commenter asked what I meant when I used the term "unified communications" in the story, as they had seen several conflicting takes on the term's meaning. As I pondered my response, I realized how many disparate definitions of unified communications are floated by industry watchers and the companies selling the solutions. While I waded through corporate definitions and read comments from companies decrying the shortcomings of their competitors' "UC" solutions, I realized something more important, and much more obvious: The definition of unified communications is considerably less important than the actual deployments of these solutions and the productivity and connectivity gains they can deliver. In our most recent reader survey, 75 percent of respondents said unified communications was the trend they were most interested in learning more about. So, to use another buzzword with an ambiguous meaning, I'd like to "crowd source" the FierceVoIP readership for your thoughts on your own UC deployment, or thoughts about potentially deploying one. Microsoft has a decent, though very general, jumping-off point for the discussion on its "What is UC?" page: "UC offers customers choices in how their communications and collaboration software is delivered, managed and maintained by uniting existing communications systems and tools with the productivity tools people use every day, and delivering them across multiple convenient applications and devices." While that's a nice theoretical explanation of the supposed benefits of UC deployments, I'm much more interested--and I'm guessing you are too--in the nuts and bolts of which solutions are delivering the best return on investment, how companies are realizing productivity gains from UC, and areas where additional technological development could improve UC offerings. What communication pieces have to be bundled for a solution to be truly unified, for your business? What parts of your unified communications solution have been the most or least effective? If you're considering a unified communications deployment, which features are the most critical to your business operations? And, if your company sells or develops unified communications products, what is the next big value-add to your solution? Does your ideal unified communications solution have a mobile piece? Do you need integrated video conferencing to bring travel costs down? Would one-number dialing save you accounts because potential customers could get a hold of you, no matter where you are? All of these pieces fit under certain definitions of unified communications, but likely are irrelevant in others. I'd like to know which fit for you and your company, so please email me answers to any of these questions at pwylie@fiercemarkets.com. I'll compile the responses and seek out experts to discuss the results, which I'll present to you later this month in a feature on the present state of the unified communications and collaboration market. Because if we get a good sense of what UC&C actually means today, I think we'll all be better prepared to recognize where it's headed next. - Pete @fiercevoip

Helmut Lang

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:22:27 GMT

Nicole and Michael Colovos were inspired by "erosion" for their latest effort—as in the erosion materials undergo over time, not that steady leak your 401(k) has developed the last several months. Suede leggings were treated to resemble rubbed-off metal, and the fabric appeared to melt away on a standout asymmetric-hemmed evening gown that underwent a burnout process. The Helmut Lang designers also experimented with mixing materials, cutting shirts and jackets in jersey with leather panels. Decay was the buzzword, but the experimentation never got out of hand, and we predict healthy sales for these razor-sharp separates with recession-friendly price points. —Romney Leader

Adobe offers free BrowserLab preview

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:29:57 GMT

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Adobe today continues to flesh out its broadening portfolio of hosted services. Last week, the company unveiled a Web-based slideshow tool called Presentations, which joined the online word processor Buzzword, ConnectNow Web conferencing tool, Share, CreatePDF, and My Files on Acrobat.com. This morning, Adobe Labs made BrowserLab available as a free preview. The cloud-based service renders Web pages in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari as seen in Windows XP and OS X without the need to have those browsers or operating systems installed on the local computer. This testing tool generates real-time screenshots of the user's chosen page for browser comparison. The page can be rendered in two side-by-side panels, for example, or in an "Onion Skin" view. In this view, there is a slider where each extreme represents a browser/OS combination, one side could represent Internet Explorer 7.0 in XP and the other Safari 3.0 in OSX, and so forth. When the slider is moved, it dissolves the image from one browser into the other, highlighting the exact differences by overlaying them on each other. Eventually, this will be a subscription-based service, but during this preview period, Adobe is testing its resource intensiveness and allowing U.S. users with an Adobe ID to freely play with it. Enrollment, however, is limited. But the preview's availability is kept current on Adobe Labs, so if you're interested in testing BrowserLab and cannot access it, just wait a while and check back. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

Linguist Reflects On 'Years Of Talking Dangerously'

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:27:00 GMT

Linguist Geoff Nunberg has made a living out of parsing phrases. His new book, The Years of Talking Dangerously, analyzes the buzzwords, stock phrases and metaphors that were made popular during the Bush administration's tenure.

Invasion of the Android Snatchers

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:50:09 GMT

Android — the mobile phone platform, not the AI-bearing robots — is the buzzword of the moment for netbook developers. Though the majority of the ultra-light devices are said to be utilizing a massively scaled down version of Windows XP — despite favoring Linux initially — the uber-portable boxen are poised to be Googlified. read more

Invasion of the Android Snatchers

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:50:09 GMT

Madden 10: Did EA press reset?

Thu, 28 May 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Senior producer Phil Frazier calls Madden NFL 10 a "reset." That's a tough buzzword to sell, especially for Madden, which is reappearing this August as its twenty-something-ith iteration. Despite its massive following, Joystiq has largely treated the series as uninteresting. Year in, year out, the process has grown mechanical: the annual announcement, followed by details of game enhancements, and then, of course, a look at those supposedly cursed cover athletes. Then, silence. The game's released. A few months later, news of its sales dominance. Rinse. Repeat. Reset. It's difficult not to trivialize a game franchise that follows such a formulaic path from concept to destined bestseller. On the surface, it appears as if there are no surprises. There's nothing to be inspired by. Maybe there's a twinge of aliveness in seeing the first screenshot of the new season, in admiring the game's gradual transformation into lifelike football, in our brief exaggeration of that image as actually lifelike, before scrutiny sets in, and we identify it as just the new Madden. Somewhere, certainly, there are discussion forums geeking out over the new look and tweaks and promises -- or passionately lamenting the next "QB Vision Cone." But here, we have not been moved beyond the mundane and have not trusted that an exclusive NFL license, a one-year development cycle and, dare we suggest, a "simple" sports game are keys to gaming innovation. An inner troll is nagging: Guys, you know it's just another "roster update." Continue reading Madden 10: Did EA press reset? Madden 10: Did EA press reset? originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 28 May 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink | Email this | Comments

Adobe brings its own PowerPoint-style app to the cloud

Wed, 27 May 2009 19:34:44 GMT

By Tim Conneally, Betanews Acrobat.com Presentations offers way to create simple Flash-based slideshow presentations online which can be worked on by numerous Adobe.com members simultaneously and then be presented from their online location or exported as .PDF files for offline use. The app's interface is similar to Adobe's Web-based Photoshop Express, and provides a comparable level of functionality: basic, but elegant and aesthetically pleasing. While the same Adobe user ID can be used to access both Presentations and Photoshop Express, the two applications are actually separate branches of Adobe's growing arsenal of Web-based services. Presentations is being grouped with Adobe's Buzzword document collaboration tool, the ConnectNow, Web conferencing tool, as well as Share, CreatePDF, and My Files on Acrobat.com. The product right now is oddly balanced. For example, there is no way to embed audio in a presentation yet, an essentially basic function. However, a fully-featured piece of desktop software such as Powerpoint 2010 does not include the kind of live multi-user collaboration that Presentations currently has. Since it's still an early build, the application has a great deal of potential. Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009

What's Next in IT: Corporate Flat Line or Next Renaissance?

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Suddenly, cloud computing is the dominant buzzword of the day, but the current confluence of trends includes much more. read more

What's Next in IT: Corporate Flat Line or Next Renaissance?

Mon, 25 May 2009 09:55:00 GMT

Suddenly, cloud computing is the dominant buzzword of the day, but the current confluence of trends includes much more. read more

Apple job posting hints at 3G-capable MacBook (Macworld.com)

Tue, 05 May 2009 21:29:00 GMT

Macworld.com - For the last few years,A 3G has been one of the most common buzzwords in the technology industry. The iPhone 3G has it right there in the name.A Some PCA laptops have the functionality built in. Mac notebooks, meanwhile,A have had to rely on third-partyA add-ons. But still rumors have persisted about whether 3G will ever be available as a built-in function of Apple's laptop line?

Stealth Ads: They're Effective — And Priced To Move

Tue, 05 May 2009 20:29:00 GMT

Stealth advertising and brand-building have been ad-industry buzzwords for years. Now companies are considering more stealth marketing — not least because it's relatively inexpensive.

Stealth Ads: They're Effective — And Priced To Move

Tue, 05 May 2009 20:29:00 GMT

Stealth advertising and brand-building have been ad-industry buzzwords for years. Now companies are considering more stealth marketing — not least because it's relatively inexpensive.

Apple job posting hints at 3G-capable MacBook

Tue, 05 May 2009 16:00:00 GMT

For the last few years, 3G has been one of the most common buzzwords in the technology industry. The iPhone 3G has it right there in the name. Some PC laptops have the functionality built in. Mac notebooks, meanwhile, have had to rely on third-party add-ons. But still rumors have persisted about whether 3G will ever be available as a built-in function of Apple's laptop line?

First quarter shows hint of recovery

Sat, 02 May 2009 23:37:04 GMT

First-quarter earnings so far from across the market are coming in better than expected _ largely as a result of a very low bar. The results have some people now uttering economic buzzwords like 'deceleration,' 'signs of recovery,' 'the bottom' and the very precise 'less bad'. More than half the companies in the S&P 500 have reported their first-quarter results. Of those, 65 percent beat analyst expectations. But overall, results were still down roughly 30 percent from a year ago. 'It's bad _ but it's not as bad as we thought,' said Bob Doll, global chief investment officer for equities at investment manager BlackRock.

Antivirus Moves to the Cloud

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:24:02 GMT

OPINION: The volume and velocity of malware developments necessitate changes like this, but there are advantage to the approach as well. It's also a risky move, but it's beginning to look inevitable. - Panda Security has released a beta of their new Panda Cloud Antivirus. It's a free download at www.cloudantivirus.com and there will be a free version of it even after it ships. The idea of a quot;cloud quot; product here is not really a gimmick, even if quot;cloud quot; is the buzzword of 2009. ...

Planet Eclipse: Frank Gerhardt: EclipseCon 2009 conference report (translated from German, Heise Developer)

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:13:08 GMT

This conference report by Jochen Hiller, Bernd Kolb and me appeared originally in German at Heise Developer. EclipseCon: The next version is on the horizon Hot topics at EclipseCon 2009 were the Eclipse Runtime, Cloud Computing and the next version of Eclipse, e4. The conference showed signs of the financial crisis though. EclipseCON 2009 EclipseCon 2009 was held from March 23-26 2009 in Stanta Clara, Ca. It was the sixth instance of the conference covering the Eclipse IDE and surrounding technologies. The current financial crisis left its marks. The Eclipse Foundation counted around 1000 participants, that's roughly 30% less than in the previous year. An above-average percentage of participants came from the Bay Area because of limited travel costs. According to the organizers about half of the attendees were visiting EclipseCon for the first time. The conference also had fewer sponsors. The ratio of German companies was surpringly high. The upcoming release of Eclipse 3.5 will be published at the end of June. It will be called Galileo. Several talks covered the new release. Big disruptive changes are not to be expected, especially not in the platform. The focus is on polishing the existing features. Several half-day tutorials, traditionally on the first day of EclipseCon, presented the New&Noteworthy features, many of them with practical exercises. Some of the tutorials had more than 80 participants. Busy exhibition, Image source: Hendrik Hofer, MicroDoc Eclipse Runtime und OSGi Like last year, the Eclipse Runtime Project (RT) was a main topic of the conference. Project lead Jeff McAffer showed a range of applications from Eclipse Equinox in embedded devices to Eclipse Rich Clients (RCP) and servers. The new p2 provisioning technology can be used to distribute and install components across different platforms, clients and servers. Eclipse has been using the Jetty web server for the Eclipse help system for a long time. The Jetty team announced the move of the core of the Jetty code base to Eclipse. This will give the Eclipse server technologies additional momentum. The new URL to remember is http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/ Co-located with EclipseCon was the OSGi DevCon. Several talks showed where the OSGi runtime platform is moving: away from embedded applications towards a general platform for all kinds of Java applications. The OSGi Alliance published a new draft of the OSGi 4.2 specification as well as an early draft of the Enterprise Expert Group. A highlight was the first demonstration of the new 4.2 features in early implementations. Composite Bundles support the nesting of OSGi frameworks so that one OSGi runtime can be launched within another. The project leads of the Apache Felix and the Equinox implementation showed how to run one implementation inside the other. All major representatives of the OSGi Alliance were present at OSGi DevCon, including Sun Microsystems. There were plenty of opportunities to discuss OSGi, JSR 294 (Improved Modularity Support in Java) and Jigsaw. The dispute between OSGi and Sun has not been settled yet and the community is waiting for a final word. Sun was a gold sponsor of the conference but kept its presence low profile. Sun promoted the OSGi-based Glassfish project rather than NetBeans. The current release of Glassfish attracted a lot of attention. The Glassfish Java EE Application Server is OSGi standards compliant and can be run both with the Apache Felix and the Eclipse Equinox implementation. Glassfish and OSGi is a nice fit that probably quite a few attendess will look into that after the conference. Eclipse Modeling Model-based technologies were represented with fewer sessions compared to previous years. This year, the focus was on model-centric approaches using DSLs, e.g. as in the xText project. Another discussion topic was the management and persistence of models. It was interesting to see that modeling is applied more in the U.S. since it is possible to create graphical and textual representations more easily. A big issue is EMF 3.0. It's success will depend on contributions from the community. e4: Desktop to Web, Web to Desktop The e4 project combines all activities around the development of the next major Eclipse Version 4. The developers published the second milestone of e4 just before EclipseCon. It demonstrates the use of various technologies. One session showed where e4 is heading, a combination of web and rich client, in both directions. Web to Desktop means using web/Ajax components and giving them access to features of the Eclipse platform. Desktop to Web means the generation of web frontends based on the Eclipse programming model, e.g. by implementing a GUI in SWT and compiling it to ActionScript and a Flash component. This includes the possibility to debug code in Java. Boris Bokowski, one of e4's main developers, showed how dependency injection can be used in the Eclipse platform so that evil singletons like PlatformUI can be avoided. The future workbench is modelled in EMF. Several sessions discussed declarative UI approaches. A new Eclipse project with that same goal is the Presentation Modeling Framework (PMF). Styling of the e4 workbench will rely on standard web technologies like CSS. This was demonstrated live in a panel on e4. A member of the Mozilla Foundation participated in this session, showing their approach with the Bespin editor project. Members of the Eclipse and the Mozilla project discussed possibilities for collaboration. After several review releases this year, a final version of e4 is planned for 2010. Eclipse committers confirmed that the 3.x codebase will be actively maintained for several years. The migration path from 3.x to e4 will be as painless as possible. The new e4 can not be 100% backwards compatible though. Large committer companies like IBM were notably less active in the e4 efforts. E4 will have to rely on support from the community much more than the 3.x stream. Cloud Computing Another big topic was Cloud Computing. Two keynotes covered the cloud. Amazon presented their platforms EC2 and S3. Experiences were reported from SmugMug. The network bandwidth used by cloud services has now exceeded the bandwidth consumed by Amazon's e-commerce platform. This looks like a big potential. The highlight of Amazon's keynote was the announcement of the Amazon Web Services Toolkit. A live demo showed how easy it is to install a Tomcat application in the cloud using Eclipse. Even remote debuggind is supported out-of-the-box. Entertaining keynote, Darwin Among the IDEs, source Anne Jacko, Eclipse Foundation In a second keynote Tim Wagner and Kevin McGuire presented a vision how IDEs will move into the cloud environment, a humorous and inspiring keynote. Other talks showed how to use OSGi and Equinox technologies from Eclipse to work in and with the cloud. Further innovation can be expected in this area. Despite the presence of the cloud buzzword, a topic that was missing from the program was the architectural changes required to make applications scale well when running in the cloud. Drive-by Innovations Source code management systems were another topic. The communitiy is exploring distributed version control systems like GIT. A panel discussion concluded that in the end the success of the new kinds of SCM systems will depend on the quality of integration into the IDE. For Eclipse, a first integration of GIT exist, called eGit. There seems to be a high demand for innovation. The Eclipse Foundation has been asked to support one of these new distributed SCMs besides the existing CVS and SVN repositories. All badges had an RFID sensor on the back, hardly noticeable, to track the attendance of the presentations in each room ("anonymously" of course). The data was collected centrally and mined with the reporting component of BIRT. Together with the votes of the attendees, traditionally collected in three buckets good/neutral/bad, the results were presented online. Audience asking panelists via Twitter, source Anne Jacko, Eclipse Foundation Twitter was the major communication tool around the conference. The participants posted their tweets live, causing a Twitter storm. Even panel discussion used Twitter - people asked questions for the panelists via Twitter. For many people this was a real new Web 2.0 experience. The Eclipse Foundation announced Eclipse Summit Europe 2009, the little brother of EclipseCon, to be held in Ludwigsburg, Germany, later this year. EclipseCon 2010 will take place again next year but possibliy in a different format and at a different place. Then e4 will be a really hot topic.

Blog - Why Taking Web Apps Offline Is Hard

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

Adobe still hasn't released an offline version of its Web word processor, Buzzword.

Huawei ignores downturn, grows profit in 2008

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:34:00 GMT

Filed under: Others"Loss" is a buzzword in the last couple quarters' worth of earnings reports from virtually every major manufacturer, but Huawei has somehow managed to operate in some bizarro La-La Land seemingly immune from the economic disaster unfolding around it. In 2008, the private Shenzhen-based firm posted an annual net profit of $1.15 billion, up some 20 percent from the year prior; it lost $776 million in the process due to the yuan's gains against the dollar, but that's still extraordinarily impressive. Interestingly, a majority of Huawei's business comes from outside China, suggesting that carriers around the world are looking outside traditional infrastructure suppliers like Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia Siemens to save a few bucks -- notably including Cox for its upcoming 700MHz buildout. 2009 might be a bit weaker thanks to soft demand in Europe, but still, they're predicting a whopping 29 percent growth in contract wins. Good to see some serious success in a down market, isn't it? [Via mocoNews] Huawei ignores downturn, grows profit in 2008 originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Sun, 26 Apr 2009 08:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Export Competitiveness Gains World Popularity

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:10:54 GMT

Harare — Export competitiveness has become the buzzword in the new thrust for rapid economic growth and development in the world's less developed countries. Landlocked countries such as Zimbabwe...

Zimbabwe: Export Competitiveness Gains World Popularity

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:04:40 GMT

Export competitiveness has become the buzzword in the new thrust for rapid economic growth and development in the world's less developed countries. Landlocked countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, DRC and other Sadc states remain encumbered by the high transport costs for their major exports due to poor infrastructure and facilities on their trade routes.

Nigeria: Mega-Party And the Politics of the Opposition

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:12:24 GMT

'Mega Party' has recently become the buzzword among Nigeria's opposition groups, and the radical press. Rattled perhaps by a sudden consciousness of their relative weakness vis-a-vis the ruling PDP, and the very possibility that their current precarious existence could slip, tripping them into the abyss, the opposition groups are talking tough. They want to take the fight to the ruling PDP.

Planet Eclipse: Michael Scharf: How to explain EMF?

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 03:36:18 GMT

Have you ever tried to explain EMF to nonbelievers? I find it difficult to explain what EMF is and why it makes sense to use it. I had this a few times in my career: In the mid 80ies when I started with object oriented programming. For procedural programmers (modula2/pascal/C/Fortran) it sounded like a lot of buzzwords and seemed to add no real value... End of 80ies and in the beginning of the 90ies (before the GOF book was out), patterns seemed to be quite fuzzy and it was hard to explain what the value of describing "patterns" is. Around the same time I discovered scripting languages (starting with (g)awk->TCL->perl and ending with python, which I used for a decade). It was hard to motivate why those "slow" languages are in any way useful. Aspect oriented programming is still in the "hard to explain/motivate" phase. The common pattern with those "hard to explain" new technologies is that they are incremental changes to existing stuff but once you understand and use them, they change the way you are thinking. If you adopt the "new technology" you feel a boost in productivity and you see better ways to solve old problems. The level of abstraction raises and you can focus more on the problem instead of dealing with low level implementation details (or reinventing the wheel). And then comes the time when you think all problems can be solved with the new "hammer".... It is similar to converting to a new religion. For the believers it changes their life. It changes the way they see, experience and interact with the world. For the nonbelievers it looks like a stupid set of paradigms that make no sense. They learn how to block the arguments of missioners of the new religion and the more missionary the believers are the more skeptical the nonbelievers get. So, how do you explain the benefit of EMF? What is the best strategy to evangelize nonbelievers? What is the best way to get the converts over the initial pain of change? What are the typical questions and problems with EMF? Here is a list of things I hear often: Why to use EMF for my DSLs instead of some hand-written well tuned Java? It generates lots of code and bloats my project. EMF is so complicated, it takes a long time to learn -- in that time I have solved my problem twice without EMF. What are scenarios where EMF increases productivity and where is it the wrong tool? I have seen Peter Frieses talk at eclipsecon. I really liked it but I am not sure it helps nonbelievers to understand what EMF (and modeling in general) is. I think what is needed is a hands-on way with some real examples that show step by step how modeling and EMF can be applied to real problems. I will post some of my experience with EMF in this blog in the next weeks and months. Michael Scharfs Eclipse and Java Blog http://MichaelScharf.blogspot.com/

Java in the cloud: Google, Aptana, and Stax

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 16:32:02 GMT

Just as the megastars in Hollywood seem to find each other and fall in love, it was only inevitable that two of the greatest buzzwords ever hatched -- "Java" and "cloud" -- would meet and begin to breed.

MySQL Conference 2009 Daily summary: Tuesday

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:44:55 GMT

Tuesday: day of the announcements and of numerous sessions. Busy day! The day started with the State of the Dolphin by Karen Padir (Sun Microsystems). She threw in some announcement, among which were MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7.0, better release cycles (matching the Enterprise), better code import from the community. Anyway, there is already a lot of talk about that. Later on, This is Not a Web App: The Evolution of a MySQL Deployment at Google, Mark Callaghan (Google) was a very interesting session, in which Mark described the needs for an enterprise database Google and (mysterious) others had, and the steps taken to modify MySQL in this direction. Mark explained the build & test process they use at Google, teased the MySQL Query Analyzer guys (”it’s amazing what you can do with sed & awk, actually”) - though expressed his appreciation of their work, and mentioned various contributors and collaborators. It was an interesting session, very wide in scope, I think. The rest of my schedule for the day was: MySQL and Search at Craigslist Jeremy Zawodny: a fast pace presented session, which described the growth challenges Craigslist were/are facing, and the MySQL solutions used. Jeremy spoke about the sphinx storage engine, and has discussed its many advantages. He also described the sharding solutions used and the master-slaves configurations. Starring Sakila: Data Warehousing Explained, Illustrated, and Subtitled Roland Bouman, Matt Casters. In this presentation Roland explained the basics of data warehousing: he discussed the related buzzwords and then demonstrated, using the sakilla database, and example star schema building process. Matt took on from there to present the Kettle tool (and other kitchen stuff), and the way DWH can be graphically designed, and data generated. I was personally more interested in the first part, I have very little experience with DWH, and Roland did a good job of make a simple and clear enough starting point. Rethinking MySQL, Enter Drizzle Brian Aker. That one was especially crowded. This was a session which presented Drizzle, the motivation behind it, what it consisted of, the decision making process, the community collaboration, the tools used in the project and more. It was a comprehensive “what drizzle is all about and what can be achieved with it” talk, and no doubt Brian Aker is a talented speaker, I’m not sure anyone were typing on their laptops during this talk… The PBXT Storage Engine: Meeting Future Challenges Paul McCullagh. Another interesting talk! The creator of PBXT gave an overview of the storage engine, and discussed some of the internals. He let us peek into the developing process by presenting some of the latest performance improvements he made, and through that, discusses multi cores issues, SSDs and more. This takes me back to Mark Callaghan’s session that morning, in which he praised the InnoDB performance, code, developers, but then added: “I thought I had the fastest storage engine, but then I tested PBXT…” Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine Beat Vontobel: the SeqEngine is an idea for a storage engine which generates sequences. A simplified, incomplete - yet surprisingly potent - implementation was presented. Beat has discussed various problems which could be solved with the SeqEngine. What was really nice about it is that it does not actually store data, but generates it on the fly, and yet, as far as MySQL is concerned, has a full blown indexing implementation. Finding table holes; generating sample data; normalizing (<= 2NF) data were among the problems for which the SeqEngine provided solutions. I enjoyed this session very much. On one hand, it was a modest one (this is a small scale development, unlike the huge PBXT, Drizzle discussed earlier), and yet elegant. The problems presented were the common daily time consuming problems any DBA encounters, and so it was practical and to the point. In between all these, there was the Expo, ice creams, T-shirts and many good talks and interesting people - the last being the major reason to attend the conference. I mean, apart from the ice cream. I do hope to get to have some more chit chat during Wednesday.

Soonr Updates Its Offering. Brings Up The “Netbook” Buzzword.

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:58:01 GMT

In this day and age, with technology, no one works alone -- that's how Soonr sees it. And it's a key part of the company's offering: collaboration. Another is portability, and with the launch of the 3.0 version of its software, Soonr is expanding in both of those areas. And this update comes complete with an attempt to leverage two of the hottest things out there: the iPhone and netbooks. Soonr launched its iPhone app back in January, and despite supporting some 800 phones, the company still touts that one as a key part of its business. And netbooks are a slightly newer phenomenon that the company is now mentioning as fitting in to what it's trying to do. Sure, Soonr works on netbooks, just like it works on other computers. But buzz-worthy products aside, the key idea is that you can access your documents from a huge variety of devices, no matter where you are.

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:52:42 GMT

Agree to disagree is buzzword in TN politicsAgree to disagree is buzzword in TN politics

Ford counting on the "B" word to score conquest sales

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:57:00 GMT

Filed under: Car Buying, SUVs, Trucks/Pickups, Government/Legal, Crossovers/CUVs, Chrysler, LLC., Ford, GM, Earnings/Financials Is that 'B' as in bankruptcy or 'B' as in bailout? Probably 'B' as in both. Regardless of the buzzword you choose to slap on the respective situations General Motors and Chrysler find themselves in, it's not good, and Ford realizes this fact just as clearly as the rest of us. In response, the Blue Oval has embarked on a new plan to pick up as much market share as possible. In an internal memo sent to Ford dealers in New York, the automaker laid out a new incentive that would pay current owners of Dodge, Chrysler or Jeep vehicles an extra $1,000 - in addition to whatever Customer Cash, Bonus Cash and 0% APR is already available - to trade in their current rides for a new SUV, pickup or crossover from Ford. As pointed out by Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes, this tactic is a bit of a slippery slope for Ford. Although the Dearborn-based automaker has yet to seek out or accept any financial assistance from the government, a bankruptcy at either General Motors or Chrysler could put a major dent in Ford's own perilous financial footing. Still, Ford will take all the sales it can get. [Source: Detroit News] Ford counting on the "B" word to score conquest sales originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Warne hopes jeers turn to cheers in IPL

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 13:51:44 GMT

By Zaahier Adams In a place where Bollywood is the buzzword, where superstars like Shilpa Shetty, Preita Zinta and Shah Rukh Khan are the attractions, it's ironic that the man nicknamed "Hollywood"...

AMD Launches 3D Media Browser: Does Anyone Care?

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 12:15:16 GMT

For whatever reason this week's launch of the beta version of AMD's Fusion Media Explorer, the company's first forray in the social media hub / browser space, isn't being met with a mountain of buzz. For a 40-year old giant of a tech company that's mostly known for its micro-processors and related technologies, that's quite surprising, especially because the product actually appears to be quite cool, if not very innovative these days. I say appears, because the installation failed on my computer for lack of an AMD processor (I should have known), and I should probably note the application has only been tested for use on Windows and Linux machines. From what I can gather, it most certainly makes me want to test it asap though. Here's how AMD pitches the browser (buzzword alert): (after the jump)

Nigeria: How Clear is Vision 20-2020

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:12:53 GMT

In the last couple of years the buzzword in Nigeria has been Vision 20-2020, a blueprint the Federal Government put in place to make Nigeria become one of the world's largest economies by the year 2020. It replaced Vision 2010 packaged by the erstwhile military regime of the late General Sani Abacha. It is a blueprint Nigerians have embraced with enthusiasm though experts caution that prevailing factors maybe make it difficult for the objective to be achieved.

TV Shows on the Web: The Haggling Begins

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:13:31 GMT

Could cable subscribers one day go to the Web to watch their favorite TV channel, much like they do today with their television sets? That day is coming, at least according to Walt Disney Chief Executive Robert A. Iger, who clearly wants his company to be among the first to offer the capability. "We are certainly open to exploring that possibility," Iger said in a keynote speech on Apr. 2 to the annual Cable Show in Washington, D.C. Iger was treading on potentially treacherous territory, as content owners and cable operators have been eyeing one another warily these days over the issue of "authentication," the latest industry buzzword. Authentication would effectively require content owners who offer TV shows to consumers online to certify that those folks aren't canceling their cable bills to get the online feeds. How they would do this isn't clear, although cable companies, such as Time Warner Cable, are already working on ways to bill folks for the amount of time they use the Internet. Needless to say, cable operators want to be assured that their customers aren't "cutting the cord," as Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn A. Britt said recently, in order to go channel surfing online. Moreover, the cable operators have a point: They pay billions each year to Disney, Viacom, and other content creators to carry their channels and aren't likely to take kindly to seeing their customers go off -- with a content owner's help -- and watch it free online. Laying Down His Marker Iger clearly wasn't offering anything close to caving in to cable industry demands. Giving consumers ABC or some other network online, he said, "would be an interesting and potentially compelling feature," if the two sides could work out a compromise on the authentication issue. What's not likely to happen, at least in Iger's...

P2P - " the New "Hardware Buzzword".

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:15:47 GMT

In years to come, we will see P2P "Enabled" hardware advertised by the Goodguys.

Amul Group turnover touches Rs 10,000 cr

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:40:49 GMT

Market meltdown and economic crisis seem to be the buzzwords for most corporations around the world. But not for home-grown Amul cooperative.

SES Speakers to Be Outfitted with Buzzword Shock Wristband

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 17:11:04 GMT

Was last week's SES New York just too filled with buzzwords? Was Guy Kawasaki's keynote too predictable? Did you feel that reading Lisa Barone's live blog coverage was the same as actually being there? Those days are over. From now on, if an SES speaker ever utters a buzzword, they will be shocked by this hi-tech wristband from ThinkGeek. Buzzwords that trigger the wristband include: integration transparency visibility user intent funnel engagement conversation buzzword tactics collaboration syncing maturation competency paradigm discovery relationship leveraging globalization optimization What do YOU think of the buzzword shock wristband? Leave your comments below.

This Java Architecture is a Tough Sell

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:32:51 GMT

Live Google News by SYS-CON! Every architectural diagram should include proper buzzwords, or else... By: Yakov Fain Mar.