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IBM Sued Over Disaster
IBM has been hit with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor’s business.
In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
“Seizing upon Avantor’s decision — and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor’s industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service — IBM represented that IBM’s ‘Express Life Sciences Solution’ … was uniquely suited to Avantor’s business,” the lawsuit states. “The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform.”
But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was “woefully unsuited” to its business and the implementation brought its operations to “a near standstill,” according to the suit.
IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.
“To conceal the System’s defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled — even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor’s ability to service its customers,” the suit states.
The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, “was a disaster,” with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing “that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations,” the suit states.
Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.
Samsung And Yahoo Ink A Deal
November 14, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Yahoo announced a deal on Tuesday with Samsung to integrate its Broadcast Interactivity service into the company’s Smart TVs.
The agreement will allow Yahoo to push real-time content alongside TV shows and advertisements on Samsung TVs, such as “subtle, on-screen prompts” that inform viewers of additional content that they can watch.
“With the touch of a remote, connected tablet or phone, Samsung Smart TV viewers can easily surface content or offers related to the TV shows and commercials they are watching,” Samsung said.
TV programmers can use the integration feature to provide Samsung TV customers with “complementary content” such as trivia, additional information about the show being watched and interactive gaming.
Showtime Networks and National Geographic Channel are two of the first TV programming partners that will take advantage of the agreement, Yahoo said.
If TV ads aren’t annoying enough, Yahoo said the partnership also creates new forms of advertising by “extending traditional 30-second commercials into immediate actions”.
In other words, with broadcast interactivity enabled commercials, advertisers can embed “calls-to-action” for downloading apps or digital media, providing coupons, ordering samples, reading reviews or viewing product information. Just in case you really want to know more about that Mr Muscle sink unblocker, or the next JML cleaning gadget that is set to transform your home life forever.
Amazon Goes To Court
Amazon is suing Daniel Powers, its ex VP in charge of global sales for Amazon Web Services because he joined Google in a cloud role.
Taking the new job, asserts Amazon, violates Powers’ non-compete agreement with Amazon, which let Powers go this summer with a reasonable severance package.
There is a risk that Powers could take important information that he learned about the Amazon web services business to its rival, Google, and that is what the firm is seeking to stop.
According to Geekwire Amazon wants an injunction against Powers to prevent him from “engaging in any activities that directly or indirectly support any aspect of Google’s cloud computing business”.
A court filing claims that Amazon has an agreement with Powers that says he will not join a rival for a “limited time following the termination of his employment”.
Powers, it warns, is a veteran who knows the cloud business from “top to bottom”, adding that he has “acquired and currently possesses extensive knowledge of Amazon’s trade secrets and its highly confidential information”.
The complaint says that he has extensive and detailed information about Amazon Web Services’ prospects, business, potential business partners, pricing strategies and goals.
Amazon has not provided us with further comment.
Can DRAM Be Saved By Win8?
Microsoft’s roll-out of Windows 8 is not expected to generate a significant increase in DRAM shipments, according to market research firm IHS iSuppli.
Other operating system roll outs have pushed up the demand for DRAM, and some had hoped that it would save the battered industry. However while iSuppli thinks that Global DRAM bit shipments are expected to increase by eight percent in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter, this is much lower than previous Windows roll outs.
In the good old days Windows rollouts have always generated double-digit increases in quarterly DRAM shipments. Part of the problem is that Windows 8 is pretty good software and has a leaner hardware requirement. But the biggest part is that Windows 8 is not likely to deliver a significant increase in PC shipments in the fourth quarter compared to the fourth quarter of 2011, IHS said.
Clifford Leimbach, analyst for memory demand forecasting at IHS said that starting with Windows 7 and continuing with Windows 8, Microsoft has taken a leaner approach with its operating systems, maintaining the same DRAM requirements as before.
Is Apple Spying?
Apple, which was in all sorts of hot water when it was caught tracking its users, is up to its old tricks again.
Apple was slammed by privacy experts protested the use of a universal device identifier, or UDID, to track the online preferences of iPhone and iPad users. This made it a perfect target for hackers who broke into digital media firm Bluetoad and made off with close to a million device IDs.
It looks like Apple remains addicted to tracking its users. According to Naked Security iOS 6 has a new tracking system called IDFA, or identifier for advertisers. Like the UDID, the IDFA uniquely identifies your Apple device and any websites that you browse with your iPhone or iPad device can request the IDFA.
While UDID could be tracked to users the IDFA can’t be traced back to individuals, it merely links a pattern of online behaviour with a specific device. In other words, it knows all about you, just not your name.
Fortunately it can be disabled from within iOS, though Apple leaves it enabled, by default and hopes no one will notice. The IDFA acts like a persistent cookie on the phone: allowing advertisers to track user surfing behaviour on their phone and record interactions up to and including purchases or downloads.
Michael Oiknine, the CEO of mobile application analytics firm Apsalar said that IDFA offered many advantages over the discredited UDID. For a start the IDFA is reset when the device, itself, is reset. That will prevent user data from being corrupted when they sell or transfer their phone to a new owner, Oiknine said.
GM Adds IT Jobs
General Motors Co said on Monday it will add 1,500 jobs at a new software development center in Michigan as part of the U.S. automaker’s previously announced plan to move information technology work back into the company.
GM said it will hire the software developers, database experts, analysts and other IT positions over the next four years for the office in Warren, Michigan. It is the second of four software development centers GM plans to open, following one it announced last month in Austin, Texas.
In July, the Detroit automaker said it would reverse years of outsourcing IT work. GM now outsources about 90 percent of its IT services and provides the rest in-house, but it wants to flip those figures in the next three to five years.
The IT overhaul is spearheaded by GM Chief Information Officer Randy Mott, who outlined the plan to GM’s 1,500 IT employees in June. The former Hewlett-Packard Co executive believes the moves will make GM more efficient and productive.
GM, which has not disclosed the cost or savings of its strategy, plans to cut the automaker’s sprawling list of IT applications by at least 40 percent and move to a more standardized platform. GM will also simplify the way it transmits data.
AMD And Oracle Join Forces
AMD is taking part in the OpenJDK project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle.
The project aims to bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for servers and clouds. It will look at how the Java virtual machine, language and APIs, can be spruced up to allow applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD APUs.
Manju Hegde, corporate vice president heterogeneous applications and developer solutions at AMD said that the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers. AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community, he said.
Server 2008 Support Ends In 2015
Microsoft has extended support for Windows Server 2008 until 15 January 2015.
Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 operating system had been earmarked to enter the firm’s extended support phase on 9 July 2013, however the firm has moved that date back by 18 months. The firm said that it will keep Windows Server 2008 in the mainstream support phase until 15 January 2015.
Microsoft generally provides a decade of support for its high profile operating systems and software applications. The company said, “Microsoft policy provides a minimum of five years of Mainstream Support or two years of Mainstream Support after the successor product ships, whichever is longer.”
Of course Microsoft likes its customers to buy newer, shiner versions of its software whenever the firm releases it, but server operating systems customers are resistant to change in order to avoid any possible disruption in service availability. The company is desperately trying to get customers to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 and Windows 8, even though it extended support for the operating system until 8 APril 2014.
Adobe Gives Up On Windows XP
Adobe said today that the current CS6 version of Photoshop will be the last one to support the operating system.
Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post that the Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP. He said that modern performance-sensitive software requires modern hardware graphics interfaces that Windows XP lacks, in particular a way to tap into the power of GPUs. By only working on newer operating systems and hardware Adobe can bring in significantly better performance.
Photoshop CS6 already demonstrates that relying on a modern operating system, graphics cards/GPUs and graphics drivers can lead to substantial improvements in 3D, Blur Gallery and Lighting Effect features not available to Windows XP customers, he said.
Adobe hopes that by providing this information early it will help you understand our current decisions around operating system support and where we we’re headed with future releases of Photoshop. It is hard to see how any serious user of Adobe products could be using an XP machine anyway. The move away from XP started with CS 5 which only ran on Vista.
Kaspersky Finds New Malware
Kaspersky Lab has discovered three Flame spyware related malware threats that it said use “sophisticated encryption methods”.
Kaspersky claims that it uncovered the three new hostile programs while analysing a number of Command and Control (C&C) servers used by Flame’s creators.
“Sophisticated encryption methods were utilised so that no one, but the attackers, could obtain the data uploaded from infected machines,” the firm’s statement read.
“The analysis of the scripts used to handle data transmissions to the victims revealed four communication protocols, and only one of them was compatible with Flame.
“It means that at least three other types of malware used these Command and Control servers. There is enough evidence to prove that at least one Flame-related malware is operating in the wild.”
The discovery of the three programs indicates that Flame’s Command and Control platform was being developed in 2006, four years earlier than first thought.
Flame was originally uncovered in May targeting Iranian computer systems. The malware drew widespread concerns within the security industry regarding its advanced espionage capabilities.
The full scale of Flame and its overarching implications remain unknown, despite the ongoing joint research campaign being mounted by Kaspersky, IMPACT, CERT-Bund/BSI and Symantec.
“It was problematic for us to estimate the amount of data stolen by Flame, even after the analysis of its Command and Control servers,” said Kaspersky’s chief security expert, Alexander Gostev.
Following the discovery of the three new related programs, Kaspersky’s chief malware expert Vitaly Kamluk told The INQUIRER that Flame is not the only one in this big family.
“There are others and they aren’t just other known malwares such as Stuxnet, Gauss or Duqu,” he said. “They stay in the shadows and no one has published anything about them yet. Others were probably used for different campaigns.”
Kamluk added that it is “very possible” there are more than the three listed in Kaspersky’s report.
“They started building RedProtocol, yet another ‘language’ for unknown malware. No known client types are using that one, which means that there is even more malware out there,” he added.