In an effort to expand the reach of the newly open Symbian platform, Open Kernel Labs has released OK:Symbian, an open-source, ready-to-run, paravirtualized version of Symbian. OK:Symbian enables the Symbian platform to be used as a guest operating system running in a secure hypercell on top of the OK Labs OKL4 microvisor. Open Kernel Labs says that its HyperCell Architecture allows for higher levels of security and robustness and enables the use of the Symbian platform in new lower-cost devices and in new ways. OK:Symbian also lets handset OEMs, MNOs and mobile-phone users benefit from the tens of thousands of existing Symbian applications and the global developer community for the platform. In related news, Open Kernel Labs announced its joining of the Symbian Foundation, as well as its contribution of OK:Symbian to the Symbian Open Source community.
The new Openbravo ERP 2.50 was recently released by its eponymous parent company. In the new 2.50 version, the Web-based, open-source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (POS) solution for businesses is now available as a professional subscription service. The new release also introduces a modular architecture and adds a host of new features and functions, such as support for right-to-left languages (such as Arabic and Chinese), additional smart-build processes, autosave, more user alerts and enhanced support for complex organizations. Furthermore, Openbravo states that it is easier than ever before for the community and third parties to customize and create their own new features and functions. One can browse and use shared functionality created by other users or deploy third-party modules shared on the new Openbravo Forge.
The Marketcetera open-source platform for automated trading recently announced a significantly upgraded version 1.5. According to Marketcetera, stock-market data volumes are exploding and “automated trading is becoming more prevalent on the buy side and across more asset classes, not just equities”. The company also says that its application helps investment firms make fast, intelligent trading decisions at lower costs per transaction. New features in the latest release include real-time intraday position and profit-and-loss monitoring; simplicity and security for multiuser installations; Level 2 and depth-of-book market data and strategy agent integration via the new Strategy Studio.
The news out of LinMin is its upgraded version 5.4 of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning, a system provisioning and imaging solution that can be implemented by IT organizations of any size with limited budgets. Combining server provisioning and disk imaging in a single product, LinMin is a solution for deploying, repurposing and recovering the commodity hardware infrastructure layer used in hosting, corporate, cloud and other data-center environments. LinMin says that the new release adds the “Turbo-Imaging” high-performance disk imaging subsystem for disaster recovery, new operating system media management, updated Linux and Windows Server provisioning, extensive logging and others. The firm also adds that Turbo-Imaging adds automatic filesystem detection, intelligent compression and other capabilities to ease the rollback of systems back to a known good state.
The good folks at Talend have released the Talend Integration Suite MPx, a new enterprise data-integration platform that the company says “is designed to help organizations attain the highest levels of performance and shatter the limits typically associated with traditional data integration processes”. The solution is based on the Talend Integration Suite while adding the new FileScale technology, a breakthrough that allows organizations to conduct highly parallelized processing and reduce limitations inherent in traditional data-integration architectures. It further allows integration processes to sort, filter and merge data, perform aggregation and arithmetic functions, and transform and ensure the compliance of data. Finally, the new package features multiple levels of massive parallelization, allowing the execution of separate subprocesses in parallel, breakdown of data sets into many parallel streams and the ability to leverage parallel database loaders.
Take a more esoteric and artistic book to the beach this month with Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher's new title Beautiful Data from O'Reilly. In a nutshell, the book illustrates how wide-ranging and beautiful working with data can be. Thirty-nine of the best data practitioners in the field explain how they developed simple and elegant solutions on projects ranging from the Mars lander to a Radiohead video. Other topics include the visualization of trends in urban crime using maps and data mashups, how crowdsourcing and transparency have combined to advance the state of drug research and how data processing systems are designed to work within the constraints of space travel.
Get your creative groove on with Daniel James' Free Software for Creative People: Building Digital Media with Blender, GIMP, Scribus, Audacity, and More. Published by Apress, the book is a guide primarily for users of Linux (but also of Windows and Mac OS X!) who want to meet their creative goals without having to pay money for very powerful, world-class tools. Apress calls the book “your university of 2-D and 3-D graphics, and of video-based art and Web presentation”. The book also explains how to chain creative applications together, work cross-platform, share creative work with others, locate software development communities to connect with other creative types and configure Linux systems featuring these applications.
Opengear has added the IP-KVM1001 KVM-Over-IP Switch to its product lineup, a palm-sized KVM-over-IP solution aimed at branch offices, labs, Web-hosting providers and data centers. The company bills the IP-KVM1001 as a cost-effective “Zero U” device for KVM control “at the rack” or remotely over IP, providing full control of systems during bootup, BIOS maintenance or server/OS lockups. The product is browser-based and offers universal connectivity for USB and PS2 interfaces in one unit. Finally, besides virtual media support for transferring files and installing patches and upgrades over IP, the switch offers a serial port for serial console access to switches, routers, firewalls or an external modem for out-of-band access.