2010 8:33 pm

Oracle meets hardware through Sun

Filed under: Miscellaneous

For $7.4 billion deal, Oracle has now a hardware business and competes with great names on the market like H.P., I.B.M., Cisco Systems or Dell. The trend these days is everybody to make alliances or acquisitions. The employees of the vendor suffer if its products are less interesting.

Customers need, after all, just an end-to-end service provider and cheaper products. Lawrence J. Ellison, Chief Executive of Oracle, referring to the costs, says the labor of assembling products and making them operational is really important for Oracle.

But it’s not that easy. This transaction seems to be the most important through the economic downturn and threatens about 2,000 people of losing jobs.

Oracle has now the opportunity to present large systems in one package, meaning hardware, main software and networking technology. This is what corporate clients ask for.

Even so, customers have to be careful not to create IT monopole and a lack of choices based on their needs. Competition is still a serious element and a good sign, but for how long?

Oracle says it plans to offer solutions like databases, business software, servers, storage systems, networking equipment and the technology to make all work together as all- in-one product. This company has already its clients where can land the hardware equipment from now on and gained Sun’s direct clients summing up about 70% of sales. H.P. and Dell have now serious troubles because none of them developed software products for hardware.

Before Oracle meets the Sun’s hardness, Cisco formed a partnership with EMC and VMware in order to sell computer servers. After that, H.P. and Microsoft get to know each other better in the beginning of this year. Big actors on the IT market get out and “old” beginners take their places. Products of different brands become compatible and form series of products for endless users.

Despite commercial competition, the executives of rival companies are friends and look to remain in same terms of relationships.

No Comments

2010 11:27 pm

Code-breaking quantum algorithm run on a silicon chip

Filed under: Miscellaneous

In 1994, a MIT’s computer scientist, Peter Shor affirmed that quantum computers will crack the RSA encryption algorithm and we are able to see his idea demonstrated on a silicon chip.

The chip is 26-millimetre-long and runs Shor’s algorithm in cut-down form (confirming that 3 and 5 multiply to form 15).

Factorization is an exponential problem. You can always make the code impractical to crack in realistic time by adding a few more bits. The point about quantum computing is that it allows the problem to be solved in polynomial time.

It is the first time a quantum calculation cracks data encryption on a silicon chip. Today, quantum computing is full of complex quantum circuits made of silicon and silica. The number is growing exponentially following the Moore’s law from semiconductor industry.

Coming back to RSA encryption algorithm, used in electronic commerce protocols, it becomes unstable if this chip will be produced on large scale. The algorithm involves three steps: key generation, encryption and decryption but it’s no longer a secret how to break RSA. Solving the problem takes time and today we seem to have the answer.

The chip uses light instead of electricity. It’s obvious the new chip saves time because of the photons.

One of the members of the team from Bristol, UK, says “It’s almost as simple as stamping the design out onto the chip and it is there and working”.

Andrew White, a quantum physicist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, remarks that “It is very important to shrink the circuitry, and the Bristol group ( Jeremy O’Brien, Jonathan Matthews and Alberto Politi) has shown … that this can be done using well-established techniques from classical photonics,” but he points out that even if the chip is only 26 mm long, it has surroundings of equipment.

Currently, a security code can be broken in realtime through parallel computing architecture, cloud computing and datacenters.

No Comments

2010 2:33 pm

IBM method and system for location-aware authorization

Filed under: Miscellaneous

The invention was created generally, for authorization systems and particularly, for mobile device authorization.

It implies a protection from unauthorized access for electronic devices. You need to define a user/password pair/ have a digital fingerprint and a local authorization control. The administrative privileges authorize which application or data you can access. This also means that companies may protect their information from outside their buildings if the employees must travel and a physical controlling cannot be made.

A system of controlling access is based on detecting spatial location, implying a module with a set of rules accessed locally. The needed information includes user credentials and time and/or date information.

The access control system is made of a controlled module. An authenticator controls the access to the controller module. The last one is based on spatial location with the set of rules.A location detector is being configured based on a geographical positioning system (GPS) and responds by giving access only if the location is authorized through the set of rules and there will be a denied access if there is no geographical authorization.

No Comments

« Previous Entries
Next Page »