SQL Server Application Support Analyst - Back Office

SQL Server Application Support Analyst - Back Office A top tier Investment Bank requires an experienced Application Support Analyst to join it's Payments and Funding area. You
SQL Server Application Support Analyst - Back Office

A top tier Investment Bank requires an experienced Application Support Analyst to join it's Payments and Funding area. You will be required to support a number of key applications in the area which covers Global Treasury Trading and Settlements.

Ideally the right candidate will already be working in a similar environment supporting these sort of applications. The enviroment is a mix of Windows and Unix platforms. The databases supported are SQL Server. So SQL Server knowledge is a must (triggers, stored procedures, SSAS/SSRS) combined with scripting in PERL, JAVASCRIPT for example.

You will be joining a global support team in a follow the sun model. It is a good opportunity to join a stable team following the ITIL framework.

For more information and a job specification please forward a Word CV in confidence.

SQL Server Application Support Analyst - Back Office Source http://careers.hereisthecity.com/job/sql-server-application-support-analyst---back-office-367409/

NetBSD 6.0 Beta Arrives With Cortex-A8, MIPS64 Support

NetBSD is a compact Unix-like open source operating system. NetBSD's origins are in version 4.3 of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) that was developed as an Unix-derivative by the University of California, Berkeley until 1995.

NetBSD 6.0 Beta arrives as a substantial update with numerous new drivers, support for ARM Cortex-A8 processors, greater compatibility with Linux software, as well as Xen support for multiprocessor systems.

With support for ARM Cortex-A8 CPUs, as well as 64-bit MIPS processors, the operating system could become much more attractive for ultraportable systems that rely on a highly customized, low cost feature set. There are several interesting a feature additions that go along with a strategy that is apparently targeted at expanding the operating system's reach. These include the addition of Logical Volume Manager (LVM), which supports partitions that can be dynamically changed, as well as the replacement of the virtual machine monitor Xen2 with version 4.1, which now supports Citrix Xenserver and Xen Cloud.

NetBSD developers said that the 6.0 release is in Beta only at this time and they expect the release to include "some lurking bugs". The current stable release of NetBSD is version 5.1.2, which was introduced last month.

Source http://www.tomshardware.com/news/netbsd-os-linux-unix,15029.html

Rocket Buys Zephyr For Terminal Emulation

Rocket Software consolidated its position in the market for terminal emulation software last week when it acquired Zephyr Development Corp., a Houston, Texas, company that developed the PASSPORT line of terminal emulation and integration solutions for accessing and modernizing applications running on z/OS, IBM i, Unix, and OpenVMS servers. It was the second IBM i-related acquisition for Rocket in a month, and sends a strong signal of support for the platform.

Zephyr was a small, feisty company that delighted in taunting its larger competitors in the mature terminal emulation space and pressing customers to question the value they get from the likes of Attachmate and IBM, the undisputed giants of terminal emulation. The company, which was founded in 1985, made migration from Attachmate's EXTRA! and Reflection products and IBM's Personal Communications (PCOMM) core staples of its marketing efforts, and would often sell its PASSPORT products as part of a larger migration kit. Indeed, Gregg Ledford, a Zephyr co-founder and formerly its CEO, once said he considered Zephyr to be an "Attachmate displacement company."

Rocket--like all terminal emulation providers not named Attachmate or IBM--has heavily leaned on a replacement approach to selling software as well. The company claims its BlueZone line of emulators (obtained via the Seagull Software acquisition in 2006) can save customers 50 to 90 percent in maintenance fees compared to other emulation suites.

Now, with the duo of PASSPORT and BlueZone rocking the emulation world, Rocket will have two fairly young and flexible emulation product sets (as measured by the relative difficulty that vendors showed in getting their legacy code bases to support new Windows OSes such as Vista and Windows 7) to attack the large-but-stationary market for emulation tools. The Massachusetts company will likely market the BlueZone products more strongly to IBM i shops, owing to that product's stronger 5250 heritage; Zephyr supported the midrange server but had a stronger business selling 3270 solutions to mainframe shops.

The Zephyr name will disappear as Rocket focuses on PASSPORT as another solution in its Application Development, Integration, and Modernization business unit. Rocket says it intends to continue developing and adding new features to the PASSPORT products (including PC to Host, Web to Host, and Host Integration Objects), and will keep the PASSPORT development teams in Houston and the United Kingdom intact. Zephyr's founders, including Ledford and David Muck, have elected to leave the business, Rocket says. According to Hoovers, Zephyr was owned by its employees.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Rocket (which is a private company that's backed by the private equity firm Court Square) would not share any additional details, including the number of employees or customers that Zephyr had. Rocket said Zephyr had "hundreds" of customers, and pointed to a list of 115 customers on the Zephyr web site with Fortune 200 names such as Bank of America, Comcast, Lockheed Martin, Progressive, Verizon, and Xerox.

This was the second acquisition of the year for Rocket, a 900-person company that was founded in 1990 primarily as an OEM developer for IBM, but which has grown into a $300 million-plus company (estimated as of 2009) as the result of 30-plus acquisitions over the years. The revenue figure has undoubtedly grown thanks to Rocket's December 2011 acquisition of the iCluster high availability business from IBM for an undisclosed amount. Rocket also bought the IBM i lifecycle management tool vendor Aldon less than a year ago (also for an undisclosed sum).

Rocket's position in the IBM i marketplace (and its maintenance revenue stream) has been bolstered by the Zephyr, iCluster, and Aldon acquisitions, but Rocket has many other irons in the IT fire, and insists its specialty remains software development, a claim bolstered by the fact that many of the executives of acquired companies stay on as heads of Rocket's various business units, brands, and software development labs.

The vendor's web site now touts 110 products across 13 brands, including Aldon; Arkivio for storage and archive software; AS for mainframe business intelligence software (formerly ASTRAC); BlueZone; CorVu for business performance management and BI; Folio/NXT for electronic publishing; iCluster; MainStar for mainframe systems management tools; M204 for mainframe data management; Networks for network management; Seagull; Servergraph for backup tools; and U2, for the UniVerse and UniData "multivalue" database managements Rocket acquired from IBM in 2009. When PASSPORT is tucked into place, there will likely be 113 products across 14 brands.

Source http://www.itjungle.com/tfh/tfh020612-story05.html

Here's How Box.net Wants To Be More Like Facebook

Box.net, the cloud-based collaboration startup that's taking on Microsoft in the enterprise, wants to be more like Facebook.

Not that it wants to be come a consumer oriented social network. Rather, it wants to become the platform on which other enterprise startups build successful businesses. Basically, Box.net wants to foster its own Zynga equivalent.

To spur that on, the company today launched a program called the Box Innovation Network or /bin (the slash is kind of an inside joke -- /bin is a term used in Unix commands).

As part of /bin, the company is offering up to $2 million in funds to encourage developers to build business apps that use the Box APIs for collaboration and content management.The funds will be used for equity investments, intellectual property purchases,

and codevelopment.

CEO Aaron Levie told us, "If you think about enterprise software today, it's complicated to build and integrate, expensive, and hard to customize. It's not built for the way we work. In all three areas we are trying to drive innovation, but can't do it alone."

Box is partnering with several other companies on the initiative, including VMWare, Rackspace (hosting), Salesforce's Heroku (app development), and Twilio (for voice and SMS-enabled apps).

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-boxnet-wants-to-be-more-like-facebook-2011-11#ixzz1e2oPuH9R

Oracle President Attacks Microsoft, HP, IBM and SAP

Oracle President and CFO Safra Catz today said Hewlett-Packard may be a “former” partner, claimed Microsoft is distracted by 16-year-old consumers, and said IBMers should hide under their desks in Armonk, N.Y., as Oracle’s Exadata business marches forward. Catz’s comments, some tongue-in-cheek, surfaced at Oracle OpenWorld today in San Francisco. Here’s the blow by blow.

Catz and Oracle (ORCL) Channel Chief Judson Althoff shared the stage during Oracle PartnerForum, part of the broader Oracle OpenWorld gathering today. Amid an audience of roughly 4,500 Oracle partners, Catz took aim at Oracle’s four fiercest rivals. Her comments were captured in this FastChat Video:

Source http://www.thevarguy.com/2011/10/02/oracle-president-attacks-microsoft-hp-ibm-and-sap/comment-page-1/

Three free tips to better protect your iPhone

Smartphone security expert Graham Lee offers some simple advice on how better to protect your iPhone or iPad.

The iPhone - along with the rest of Apple's iOS product family - seems to me to be the TARDIS of the computing world.

There's a full-featured UNIX computer with almost permanent network access, and it fits in my pocket: surely it must be bigger on the inside. Apparently you can even use them to make phone calls, too.

It certainly puts my first portable to shame.

Of course, such a powerful computer must be protected, particularly when you use it for sensitive tasks like email and editing work documents on the move. So here's a short list of iOS tips to help you stay secure using your iPhones and iPads.

1. Set the passcode

Passcode screenAll of Apple's products that run iOS allow the user to configure a passcode. The passcode controls access to the apps and data installed on the device. No passcode, no data - and there's no way to get around that, because content including saved passwords and mail attachments is encrypted so that without the passcode, iOS can't read the content at all.

To enable the passcode, first launch the Settings app. In the "General" section, look for the "Passcode Lock" setting. Tap that, and you'll see a screen that allows you to turn the passcode on, and to define when it's required and whether to use a "simple passcode" (a four-digit PIN) or a longer password.

Even though iOS is designed to slow down "brute force" attacks (where the attacker enters multiple guesses at the passcode until he finds the correct value), guessing one of the 10,000 simple combinations is very quick.

Particularly if you use one of the most common PINs.

It's best to turn simple passcode off and use a stronger password, following Graham Cluley's advice.

2. Don't jailbreak

JailbreakMeBy default, Apple limit the software that will run on your iPhone or iPad to their own apps, and anything that you download through their app store. They do this to restrict the chance that malware gets onto the devices, and so far it seems to work: iOS has not seen the same malware problems that have plagued Android.

Google are more permissive about the software allowed in their marketplace, and allow installation of non-marketplace apps: both good avenues for getting malware onto a mobile phone or tablet.

Of course, some people (including regular Naked Security contributor Duck, who discussed the issue in a recent Chet Chat podcast) see this as an unwelcome limitation on what they can do with the phones that they paid for.

Such people may turn to jailbreaking to remove Apple's limitations, so that they can install unapproved software or reconfigure the operating system.

Down that path lies iPhone malware and an easy route for attackers to install remote access tools, keyloggers (well, taploggers I suppose...) and other nasty things.

"Grange Hill" stalwart Zammo would probably agree with me here: when it comes to jailbreaking, just say no.

3. Be careful of where you surf

Phishing, and other scams like the recent iTunes giftcard ruse, do not depend on your technology choices: they're designed to fool you, not your computer.

Mobile SafariWith that said, it's perhaps easier to be taken in when surfing with Mobile Safari: user interface hints including the location bar and the SSL padlock are smaller, and in scrolling to read a page's content you'll push them off the top of the page and perhaps forget to check that you're on the correct site.

Especially if you've just snuck your phone out during that boring meeting, and are still half-listening to the Q3 sales projections.

Personally, I reserve sensitive tasks including online shopping and banking for either native apps released by the banks and stores, or for the desktop browser where it's easier to see whether I'm on the right website.

I hope you found those tips useful. For more chat about mobile security and privacy, please follow me on Twitter.

Source   http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/07/20/tips-protect-iphone/

Robert Morris, Pioneer in Computer Security, Dies at 78

Robert Morris, a cryptographer who helped developed the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers and touches almost every aspect of modern life, died on Sunday in Lebanon, N.H. He was 78.

The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Anne Farlow Morris, said.

Known as an original thinker in the computer science world, Mr. Morris also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the nation’s first cyberwar: the electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein’s government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

Although details are still classified, the attacks, along with laser-guided bombs, are believed to have largely destroyed Iraq’s military command and control capability before the war began.

Begun as a research effort at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, Unix became one of the world’s leading operating systems, along with Microsoft’s Windows. Variations of the original Unix software, for example, now provide the foundation for Apple’s iPhone iOS and Macintosh OSX as well as Google’s Android operating systems.

As chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center, Mr. Morris gained unwanted national attention in 1988 after his son, Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student in computer science at Cornell University, wrote a computer worm — a software program — that was able to propel itself through the Internet, then a brand-new entity.

Although it was intended to hide in the network as a bit of Kilroy-was-here digital graffiti, the program, because of a design error, spread wildly out of control, jamming more than 10 percent of the roughly 50,000 computers that made up the network at the time.

After realizing his error, the younger Mr. Morris fled to his parents’ home in Arnold, Md., before turning himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He was convicted under an early federal computer crime law, sentenced to probation and ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and perform community service. He later received a computer science doctorate at Harvard University and is now a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science faculty.

Robert Morris was born in Boston on July 25, 1932, the son of Walter W. Morris, a salesman, and Helen Kelly Morris. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s in applied mathematics from Harvard.

At Bell Laboratories he initially worked on the design of specialized software tools known as compilers, which convert programmers’ instructions into machine-readable language that can be directly executed by computers.

Beginning in 1970, he worked with the Unix research group at Bell Laboratories, where he was a major contributor in both the numerical functions of the operating system and its security capabilities, including the password system and encryption functions.

His interest in computer security deepened in the late 1970s as he continued to explore cryptography, the study and practice of protecting information by converting it into code. With another researcher, he began working on an academic paper that unraveled an early German encryption device.

Before the paper could be published, however, he received an unexpected call from the National Security Agency. The agency invited him to visit, and when he met with officials, they asked him not to publish the paper because of what it might reveal about the vulnerabilities of modern cryptographic systems.

He complied, and in 1986 went to work for the agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare. Although little is known about his classified work for the government, Mr. Morris told a reporter that on occasion he would help the F.B.I. by decoding encrypted evidence.

In 1994, he retired to Etna, N.H., where he was living at his death.

In addition to his wife and his son Robert, of Cambridge, Mass., Mr. Morris is survived by a daughter, Meredith Morris, of Washington; another son, Benjamin, of Chester, N.J.; and two grandchildren.

Source http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/technology/30morris.html?_r=1