ReadWriteWeb

There are a number of projects out there that claim to be "democratizing" complex systems such as big data analysis, predictive analytics and business intelligence. Sometimes this means making tools free or cheap (such as Revolution Analytics). Other times, it just means making them more accessible to non-programmers, through either SQL-like query languages or drag and drop interfaces. A new example of the latter comes in the form of the service Radoop, which provides a Yahoo Pipes-like visual programming interface for Hadoop (it's still in private beta).

But is it really possible to make complex tools like Apache Hadoop accessible to non-programmers?

Last month we asked you what you thought the most over-hyped cloud technology was.

The results are in.

What's over-hyped and why? Read on.

Cloudera has long been seen as a potential acquisition target. Last year GigaOm's Derrick Harris questioned whether Cloudera was allying its way to an acquisition. Earlier this year RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor wrote that it was "highly likely" that HP would make a play for Cloudera.

This week Cloudera entered a new alliance with Dell to offer a pre-configured stack of hardware and software for running Apache Hadoop clusters. Also, last year Dell fought a bidding war with HP over storage vendor 3Par. HP ending up winning even after Dell released a press release stating that it would acquire 3Par. That's got to smart.

Do you think Dell will make a play for Cloudera?

Google's lashing out at competitors over patent claims has set off another round of discussion about the role and value of software patents (be sure to read Microsoft's response). It's an issue that lawyers and technologists have been discussing for a long time.

The nuances of such a debate are beyond the capabilities of a simple poll such as this one, but just to gauge the community's response to the issue, we're asking you: is it time to end software patents?

Earlier this month the Java 7 release candidate came out, and the official version was released earlier this week. Now that it's out, and apart from some serious bugs, what do you think about it?

One of the issues brought to mind by VMware's new pricing scheme is how important price actually is in enterprise software pricing. For SMBs, pricing can make a break a deal. But for large enterprise, it's not as clear-cut. In some cases, as Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group has pointed out, buyers may actually prefer a higher price because they need to justify their budgets (that's oversimplifying things, but there you have it). Also, too low a price may suggest to enterprise buyers that a product isn't enterprise-class.

What do you think?

This week, Mozilla re-established its Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group, following last month's controversy over Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler's comment that, "Enterprise has never been (and I'll argue, shouldn't be) a focus."

At issue is Mozilla's lack of support for previous versions of Firefox, even as it releases new versions at a feverish pace. Mozilla released Firefox 5 only three months after Firefox 4, and announced it was end-of-lifeing Firefox 4. The organization will repeat the cycle in another three months when it releases Firefox 6. The problem for enterprises is that it can take at least 3 months to test required sites and applications against a new version of the browser.

One of the various announcements coming out of VMware this week is change to how vSphere is priced. VMware's "simplified" pricing can be found in a nightmarish 10 page white paper. Hey, no one ever said enterprise technology pricing was easy.

But the problem is that VMware's new prices are much higher for some customers. Ars Technica points to this thread on VMware's community site. And CRN reports on how Microsoft is already hammering VMware on its new pricing model.

Dropbox has updated its Terms of Service yet again. The latest revision is much more clear about what rights Dropbox reserves with regards to stored content. This follows an uproar over a revision to its terms last week.

Earlier this week we compared Dropbox's ToS with that of similar cloud storage services, but Dropbox now appears to be the clearest of them all.

We asked you recently whether you want to use a platform-as-a-service, and it turns out most of you either want to or already do. But outside of ReadWriteWeb, PaaSes have yet to catch fire.

Bob Warfield suggests that the two keys to a successful PaaS are 1) Revenue generation (such as through an app market) and 2) Commodity pricing. It reminds me a lot of our post What do Developers Dream Of? Fun, Money and Beautiful Machines.

What is that you look for in PaaS?