System Administrator Appreciation Day

Horray for all SysAdmins all over the world :D

http://www.sysadminday.com/

CCIEs Worldwide (and the state of Egypt in high-tech industry)

I browsed the CCIEs worldwide list and found some interesting numbers, it sheds some light on the distribution of the top networking talent in the field geographically.

First the totals (last updated 2/5/2010):

Total of Worldwide CCIEs	20864
Total of Routing and Switching CCIEs	17774
Total of Security CCIEs	2393
Total of Service Provider CCIEs	1752
Total of Storage Networking CCIEs	150
Total of Voice CCIEs	1180
Total of Wireless CCIEs	20

Then the country-by country numbers:

USA	5494
P.R. China	3619
Japan	1142
United Kingdom	1052
Korea	1033

Naturally, USA is the largest country to have certified CCIEs (being that it is the home country of Cisco and the largest market for its products), but the interesting number is that Asia holds the largest number of CCIEs collectively (given the population numbers), the really surprising omission in this list is India (which comes in the seventh place), it gives it a more realistic perspective of top tech-related talent distribution in developed countries (with China holding about 5 times the CCIEs compared to India).

Then the Arab World

Saudi Arabia	193
United Arab Emirates	169
Egypt	110
Israel	65
Kuwait	47
Qatar	34
Jordan	33
Lebanon	28
Bahrain	13
Oman	10
Algeria	6
Morocco	6
Tunisia	4
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya	2
Palestinian Territory	2
Yemen	2

Here we find that Saudi Arabia holds the largest number of CCIEs, followed by UAE then Egypt, this shows that Egypt (unlike public press from the Government) is not the largest pool of high-tech talent in the Middle East (and its not Israel either, shown here for comparison purposes), but Saudi Arabia and UAE, this might not be true in all of the high-tech segments, but it indicates that the efforts excreted by the Governmental initiatives in Egypt are not that effective in creating a pool of high-end expertise in the field.
Egypt is not even the largest country in Africa to hold CCIEs, South Africa (with 122 CCIEs) is higher in this list.

Oracle Sun Acquisition complete

Earlier today, Oracle held an event to outline the road-map of acquisition of Sun Microsystems and the transformation from a software-only company (the third largest already) into a complete systems provider (integrated hardware and software solutions provider) that control each and every part of its ecosystem.

The event talked about many technologies that is affected by the acquisition, like:

Java

• JavaFX is the highlight of presentation layer technologies.
• Will continue to address Desktop (SE), Enterprise (EE) and Mobile (ME) platforms, and will try to converge the APIs between SE and ME and use JavaFX as the common presentation technology.

Application Server/Java EE

• GlassFish will join WebLogic as the Application Server platform for Oracle (positioning it for the Developers and the Open Source community while position WebLogic for the enterprise and mission-critical installations)
• GlassFish will continue to be the reference implementation, based on Open Source model, with commercial support for it, parts of it will be ported to WebLogic, most probably it will form the foundation for newer WebLogic releases and powers its Java EE-certified core.
• Web Center will be the strategic Portal solution (against Sun GlassFish Web Space)
• The JRockit JVM will be positioned on the same support level as the reference HotSpot JVM, most probably is that more interactions between the core-JVM and the JRockit in the upcoming years.

Developer Tools

• Oracle JDeveloper will continue to become the premier IDE for Oracle and Java Enterprise Applications (for Database and Java EE based Applications, SOA, and ADF-based applications)
• Oracle Pack for Eclipse will continue to be developed to provides integration between Eclipse and Oracle, but no major new offerings (which was expected)
• NetBeans will continue to be an Open Source offering, and stay as very wide covering as it is now (for covering the complete Java portfolio) and support for NetBeans Platform will continue.
• Support for Hudson, Oracle Team Productivity Center, maven, Subversion, BugZilla, and many other ALM tools to be shared among JDeveloper and NetBeans
• The Matisse Visual Forms Editor from NetBeans will be integrated in JDeveloper
• SOA & Application Server Adapters will be shared from JDeveloper to NetBeans

Operating Systems

• Continue support and development in Solaris and Unbreakable Linux
• Higher integration between the Oracle Database and Solaris ZFS

Virtualization

• Virtual Box will be continued to be developed and integrated with Oracle VM (to use the same Oracle Virtual Machine template format)
• Solaris Logical Domains (LDom) will become Oracle VM for SPARC and managed through Oracle VM management consoles
• Oracle VM for x86 will add support for Solaris
• Continued support for Solaris Containers and Dynamic Domains (on M Series Servers)
• Next version of Oracle VM will include Virtual Iron technology with better APIs and management console
• Sun VDI Broker will be continued to be development (including Secure Global Desktop)
• Oracle VM Storage Connect and ASM will continue to be used for Storage Virtualization
• Open Storage systems will be used for Storage at the hardware and low-level functions

Management

• Oracle Enterprise Manager (For managing Database, Middleware, and Applications) and Sun Ops Center (for managing Hardware, OS and Virtualization) will be support for the short-term
• Higher connectivity between Enterprise Manager and Ops Center will be developed in the mid-term to allow shared alerts and events, and allow some data to cross applications (12-18 months)
• In the long-term, the Enterprise Manager will consume the functionality of Ops Center and become the unified management console of all the Oracle products 

More topics tofollow in later posts...

Egypt lifts the ban of GPS devices

NTRA Issues GPS Related Decisions

The Egyptian National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) issued new decisions that essentially lefts the ban on the GPS devices for civilian uses.

The decisions allow the import of cars equipped with GPS and navigation programs, the new rules also permit the import of GPS-enabled mobile phones, computers and other devices with civilian applications.

The major use of GPS devices that is still restricted is the Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) services, or Fleet Management Services, this use while technically possible now, will need to be authorized by NTRA according to specific regulations and in coordination with the concerned security authorities.