VMware shows strong profits in fourth quarter, renewed strength because it spending revives. Commoditization? What commoditization? VMware concluded 2013 with strength: Its fourth quarter was up 15% over the year-ago period, and revenue for the complete year was up 13%, to $5.21 billion over 2012. These numbers disguise greater than they reveal. VMware continues to go upstream at an accelerating pace into virtual datacenter and personal-cloud management. That isn’t just a revenue producer for the corporate today, but a trademark that, because it budgets strengthen, VMware is able on the way to yield growing revenue far into the longer term. The other view — that VMware is in a market that’s being commoditized — is thrown into doubt by the fourth-quarter figures. For example, without its Pivotal divesture, those numbers would had been up 17% for the year and 20% for the quarter. By moving Cloud Foundry, Spring, Greenplum, and RabbitMQ into Pivotal, VMware got both lower-yield open-source products (and the headcount related to them)... Read More »

If we do not control the technology we rely on, another individual will — and we would in contrast to the implications. When people fail to manipulate their actions, the law might step in. When people fail to govern their technology, code might intercede.  It’s happening already. Google is definitely on its strategy to developing self-driving cars. Definitely automated cars will save lives, fuel, and time because, let’s accept it, we’re terrible drivers usually. Normally you are an excellent driver, but statistically speaking, your average lifetime risk of dying in a car accident involves something like 1 in 84. Even when you drive flawlessly, another person won’t. You or someone you recognize could suffer for that. Expect that Google will do better, if we’re willing to give up control. It looks like we shall. Technology has become so complicated and robust that a lot of people prefer ease of use or the promise of security, real or not, over control. Apple has won... Read More »

Open Compute Project picks up key new members, sets more ambitious goals, and shows its multi-faceted, multi-chip side at annual summit. 6 Ways SDN Shakes Up The Enterprise (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) The Open Compute Project founded by Facebook has made rapid strides in what have been a narrow sphere of influence. The cloud is an x86 world, and, in its first three years, OCP has put out several motherboard and server designs for cloud projects. The early adopters has been primarily big financial services companies, reminiscent of Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, and Goldman Sachs. On the Open Compute Project Summit this week in San Jose, Calif., OCP showed it usually is able to grow beyond one industrial segment into others, resembling online gaming and pharmaceuticals, and expand the reach of open-source hardware in different ways. OCP broadened its technique to licensing, in addition. The hardware designs come in under an Apache Software Foundation-variety of license, where... Read More »

Glassdoor characterizes these actual job interview questions as “oddball.” We give these questions the answers they deserve. Employment site Glassdoor on Friday plans to publish a listing of the pinnacle 25 Oddball Interview Questions for 2014, compiled from tens of thousands of interview questions shared by job seekers last year. Of those, 16 come from tech companies. Job interviews are nerve-wracking enough, but if combined with ill-conceived questions, they are often downright harrowing. It doesn’t must be that way. Job interviews may be conducted diligently and respectfully. But both parties do their homework. Sadly, that won’t always the case and job interviews, at the least in the course of the first round, often include one-size-fits-all questions that quantity to being poked with a pole, so a reaction may be recorded and a few poorly reasoned conclusion may be drawn. Now it’s probably never advisable to be a snarky job seeker. But when you end up confronted by such eye-rolling questions as these and also you... Read More »