Michael Dolan Dot Com

Archive for November, 2007

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Mel Gorman covers memory partitioning for managing hugepage pools flexibly

Mel Gorman has a great post up over at his blog showing how to setup hugepage pools with memory partitioning – no reboots ;-) I also recommend you subscribe to the feed – he also did a great post on setting up Debian on a PS3.

In the past, hugepages had to be allocated at boot-time. Now, you can setup a partition at boot-time instead and allocate hugepages to the pool when they are needed, and return them to general use when not required allowing the memory to be used as normal.

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Red Hat wows the CIO office: another #1 ranking in this year’s poll

Mr. Vaughan-Nichols has the coverage of the latest CIO Insight poll here. I think other vendors in the industry in Redmond and Santa Clara (heck, some perhaps in Armonk and Redwood Shores) will have to re-evaluate whether their products are delivering the same consistent business value, reliability and quality. In some respects it’s “easier” for Red Hat as they’re a one-product company and it’s in some sense easier to over-deliver when you’re focused on one product (yes, they have a couple products, but let’s be realistic, the revenue is all Linux). Regardless, this is a great story for Red Hat and hope to see them at the top of the list again next year.

For the fifth year, CIO Insight polled IT executives on how well their major vendors deliver business value, reliability and quality. This year’s winner? The No. 1 vendor? None other than Linux distributor Red Hat.

Perhaps even more impressive than Red Hat beating such name brand companies as Google and Hewlett-Packard was that Red Hat also earned a remarkable 97 percent loyalty rating.

Friday, November 30th, 2007

InfoWorld: “Why Microsoft Rattles The Patent Saber”

Interesting article over at InfoWorld:

Imagine you’re Microsoft and you’ve spent years struggling to get Windows Server 2008 out the door and will be struggling afterward to add server virtualization? Then along comes Linus Torvalds and his merry band and they add KVM to the Linux kernel over the course of a few months, release a new kernel for review every 2 to 3 months, and attract thousands of developers interested in the new features. Linux had both VMware and Xen hypervisors running on it just fine. Now it’s got another one freely available inside the kernel. It must feel in Redmond like Linux steals from the rich to give to the poor.

and…

Now the Linux kernel development process, which has been under way for 16 years, represents the largest, most complicated ongoing software development project in the world, with the possible exception of Windows itself. It’s moving fast, fluidly filling niches that Microsoft in the past had staked out. It’s leading in virtualization, in virtual appliances, in mobile devices. It’s threatening Windows on a number of fronts.

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Two interesting datapoints on the PC / desktop; and if you’re buying a new desktop/laptop, buy one with Linux or at least buy a Mac

I noticed a couple items hit my radar this morning.

First, ZDNet’s David Meyer outlined 10 things holding back technology. I happen to agree wholeheartedly with his first item:

1. Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop
Windows unified the personal-computer market, and led it into the enterprise. A good thing, surely? Yes — if unity is more important than innovation, flexibility and a free market. The European Commission disagreed with that, as have courts around the world.

For most people, computing means Windows, not because they choose it but because the company’s immense power in retail and business channels, together with the inertia that comes through decades of market dominance, make it a default that’s hard to change.

So why does this hold back innovation? The European Commission ruled that computer users are unnecessarily used to products like Windows Media Player — applications that are mediocre just because Microsoft has no real incentive to make them better. Monopolies are anti-competitive and therefore anti-innovation. Just look at Internet Explorer’s long stagnation.

Microsoft’s stifling influence on new ways of thinking goes beyond applications, however. As Vista so readily proves, rehashing the same idea again and again does not make for progress. For everyone’s sake, especially Microsoft itself, the company needs to learn to compete fairly again.

It would be great to see this stranglehold loosened and allow new innovators to enter the market.

The other item of interest I read was over at CNet who listed the Top 10 terrible tech products. Windows Vista made a strong showing at #10 (somehow they overlooked Windows Me):

Windows Vista
Any operating system that provokes a campaign for its predecessor’s reintroduction deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that quietly has a downgrade-to- previous-edition option introduced for PC makers deserves to be classed as terrible technology. Any operating system that takes six years of development but is instantly hated by hordes of PC professionals and enthusiasts deserves to be classed as terrible technology.

Windows Vista conforms to all of the above. Its incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of hated DRM, not to mention its general pointlessness as an upgrade, are just some examples of why this expensive operating system earns the final place in our terrible tech list.

So we’re stuck in a market that lacks innovation, forces over-reliance on a single vendor and leads to poor products that do not meet the needs of the customers. And yet, the poor product still maintains a dominant market share and can charge a premium. This is a monopoly the industry must break free from in order to innovate and deliver unique value to users. Unlike some, I don’t see the market shifting to a cellular/non-PC world anytime soon. There will be some shift, but the shift will take years, and may never fully replace the laptop/desktop.

Is 2008 the year to shake up the desktop market? I think so. I must admit, even if the market shifts to Apple Mac OS I’d be fine with that. We need some change in the market and if Mac meets the needs of consumers (and I think it does), let’s at least promote choice. I happen to like Ubuntu myself (as does my wife who doesn’t know she’s using Ubuntu).

Finally, I just love this Apple ad:

Monday, November 26th, 2007

The Register: “Linux desktops grow and grow and grow”

URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/23/linux_desktop_survey/

Initial figures from the 2007 Linux Foundation Desktop survey are coming out. In this article, two items caught my eye:

1) SMB

The majority, 68.4 per cent, of Linux desktops are in small and home office set-ups or small businesses with less than 100 machines. Medium businesses of between 101 and 500 PCs account for 9.7 per cent and companies with between 1,001 and 5,000 account for 6.2 per cent of Linux desktops.

2) Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu

In terms of flavours of Linux the “Ubuntu family” accounts for 54.1 per cent followed by Red Hat versions with 50.2 per cent, while Novell SUSE picks up 35.2 per cent. (Eagle-eyed readers may notice this adds up to more than 100 per cent because many groups have not settled on just one Linux version in their office or organisation.)

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Phil Dawson’s crazy field goal to tie the Browns-Ravens game

This is just something you have to watch:

Monday, November 19th, 2007

NYLUG October meeting featuring James Vasile of the SFLC is online with audio and video

NYLUG is pleased to announce the immediate availability of our October
meeting as audio and *video*.

 

James Vasile, Software Freedom Law Center
- on -
GPL3, The FOSS Legal Primer,
and The Interaction of Licenses & Communities
Recorded live at Google New York, November 14, 2007, 6:30 PM

 

http://nylug.org/meetings/index.shtml?20071100

Audio/Podcast:
————–
The audio files run 1:27, contain the entire presentation, and are
available in Ogg Vorbis and MP3. These can be downloaded or streamed
here: http://www.archive.org/details/NYLUG_2007_11_14_General_Meeting

Video (640×480):
—————-
The new “experimental” video runs 01:27. It is available via BitTorrent.

2.0 GB MPEG file here:
http://nylug.org/raw/NYLUG-2007-11-14-GM-RAW.MPG.torrent

182 MB AVI file here:
http://nylug.org/raw/NYLUG-2007-11-14-GM-RAW.avi.torrent

Monday, November 19th, 2007

IBM Partners with Mainsoft to bring .NET apps to WebSphere Portal (and Linux)

The title says it all. I’m pleased to see the press releases have hit the wires (even though some may argue press releases are in the past). IBM customers can now purchase Mainsoft’s .NET Extensions for WebSphere Portal to start integrating their .NET based Windows applications into IBM WebSphere – which gives users the flexibility to deploy on any OS platform that WebSphere runs on (I prefer to say Linux).

I’ve worked with the team at Mainsoft for a while now and am pleased to see this relationship has moved another step closer. The ability to remove the middleware lock-in associated with the Microsoft programming model is exceptionally helpful for many users – especially those with volumes of .NET assets in their company.

If you haven’t tried out Mainsoft before, you can also use their ‘free’ tool called Grasshopper. You can download Grasshopper here: http://dev.mainsoft.com/

What the Mainsoft tools let you do is add a plug-in for Visual Studio into your IDE. You basically open up your .NET app and then publish it to a WebSphere (or other Java app server) using the usual VS.NET process. It’s really that easy. In the background, VS compiles your .NET code into intermediate .NET bytecode, then Mainsoft kicks in and translates the bytecode to Java bytecode, wraps up the code into JAR/WAR files to deploy on the server. You might think it’s “magic”, but it’s real – and customers are using it to break free from the Microsoft lock-in (some even on Mainframes – how crazy is that?).

Congratulations to Mainsoft and the IBM Portal team who have turned a successful relationship into one built for volume and scale.

Friday, November 16th, 2007

Acacia loses its patent case against Microsoft

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/11/16/ap4348387.html

It always creates a good feeling to see a patent troll go down in court (and feel the burn) and I’m sure Redmond is quite pleased. The only problem I have is Microsoft uses this same type of situation to somehow suggest that “Linux” is an IP infringement – funny, because Microsoft is fighting the exact same battles (actually… I think they fight more of them).

A U.S. District Court jury in Texas found that the patent was not infringed and invalid, the company said.

The news sent Acacia shares tumbling $5.90, or 34.4 percent, to $11.25 in morning trading.

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

IBM introduces Blue Cloud

I rarely link to press releases, but this one looks good enough. The Blue Cloud is built on Linux on both x86 and POWER processors. This is very cool. Congrats to Dan Frye and his “kStart” team on bringing a great vision to reality.

Blue Cloud — based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure — will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Fedora 8 sees strong first week adoption; but what will it take to quadruple or exponentially grow?

While the Fedora camp may be excited about 54,000 users, I have to admit given the stats I’ve seen 54K users is a small drop in the Linux user base ocean. I’m not sure exactly how they track this …

I’m actually one of those 54,000 users as I installed Fedora 8 on my home PC which now dual boots Fedora and Vista (solely for Photoshop and my Sony HD camcorder video editing).  I actually replace Ubuntu Gutsy with Fedora to try out the new virtualization features in Fedora 8. I must admit, when it comes to virtualization, no distro comes close to Fedora (I tried Ubuntu 7.10 and OpenSuse 10.3). The polish, focus, and achievements with Xen and KVM are second to none. The Fedora 8 Virtual Machine Monitor is fantastic – worth testing the distro out alone. I have not (yet) seen any other distro port this with as many features available.

However, from an end user experience perspective, I would recommend every Fedora developer force themselves to use Ubuntu for the next month. The Ubuntu competition has a huge leg up on Fedora from a user experience perspective and it’s as if they don’t even know it  (or Fedora has decided just to not care). For instance, just try watching an MPEG movie, try even finding how to use the licensed, paid for codecs, try listening to an MP3, try enabling 3D desktop with nVidia drivers, try customizing the 3D effects. When you need help, does the Wiki really help? Does the FAQ that is still stuck on Fedora 7 content apply? Fedora has now released quite a few well done releases – why are there still issues?

It truly was difficult to accept that Fedora was still as far behind as it was from an end user perspective. Now, I don’t want to scare anyone off – as a Linux user – I’ve grown accustomed to self help and working through these issues one by one. None are insurmountable and Fedora 8 is no more complicated for these things than Fedora 7. However, Fedora 7 should not be the bar against which you’re competing. I’ve said many times that Linux distros should ignore Windows and focus on the value Mac OS X offers its users (security holes, firewall issues, and upgrade dilemmas aside).

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Eclipse users are driven by…. surprise, surprise… Economics

URL: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2213907,00.asp

I tend to bring up economics in conversations about Linux and open source. I completed my undergraduate work in Economics so the bridge between the two topics comes rather easy. Economics is a key driving force behind what makes “open source” (software) fundamentally “work”. The “invisible hand” makes course corrections and drives investment from multiple parties, each investing for their own gain. Many point to open source as some weird form of technical socialism, and to some extent perhaps the community aspect and personalities lend help to that portrayal. However, at the root of open source I see free market capitalism. Someday, if I ever have the time, I’d love to write a paper (or blog) about the economic principles that we can see playing out in the open source software and Linux ecosystem. If you know of an economist who has written on the subject, I’d love any pointers to their research.

The survey, conducted by The Eclipse Foundation and market research firm IDC, found that 75 percent of the IT solution providers polled said they are using Eclipse for economic reasons—either to make money or to save money. Of the organizations using Eclipse to make money, 47 percent said they are making at least 50 percent of their revenue from Eclipse-based products.

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Wed Nov 14th: NYLUG Presents James Vasile of the Software Freedom Law Center

James Vasile, Free Software Law Center
- on -
GPL3, The FOSS Legal Primer, and The Interaction of Licenses & Communities

Please join us on Wednesday evening, for a presentation by James Vasile of the Free Software Law Center on several legal topics of interest to users of Free and Open Source Software. While version three of the GPL is now old news, there are still some points about it worth discussing, and many still have questions about what makes it different from previous versions of the widely-used GNU General Public License.

James will also be talking to us about the interaction between licenses and communities.

Further Information:

• Free Software Law Center
• GNU General Public License v. 3 (GNU GPL)
• Dragging developers towards the core: How the Free/Libre/Open Source Software community enhances developers’ contribution

About James Vasile:

James Vasile holds a Juris Doctor (JD) from Columbia Law School, where he was a member of the law review and a Stone Scholar. He also has a bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from Fordham University. He spent several years in the litigation department of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he worked on a range of cases and dealt with a variety of new media issues. Vasile has also contributed code and documentation to numerous FOSS software projects. He is admitted to practice in the State of New York.

You Must RSVP HERE: http://rsvp.nylug.org/

Directions to Google’s NYC office are here: http://www.nylug.org/home/index.shtml

Friday, November 9th, 2007

ComputerWorld UK: “Linux wins Nigerian school desktops back from Microsoft”

Interesting, very interesting… I love the comments over at Slashdot ;-)

URL: http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/government-law/public-sector/news/index.cfm?newsid=6124

Now, however, a government agency funding 11,000 of the PCs has overruled the supplier. Nigeria’s Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) wants to keep Mandriva Linux on the Classmate PCs, said an official who identified himself as the programme manager for USPF’s Classmate PCs project.

…

Mba-Uzoukwu wrote that Microsoft is still negotiating an agreement that would give TSC US$400,000 (£190,323) for marketing activities around the Classmate PCs when those computers are converted to Windows.

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Fedora 8 is Out; KVM is the default virtualization technology

I’m installing Fedora 8 and just noticed that when you add “Virtualization” during the install, the default is KVM (not Xen). Very interesting and very cool. Xen is also an option.

You can grab Fedora 8 yourself over here:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

All laptops in the future will run Linux – it’s near certainly fact now

I clicked on an alert I received that read, “PCs Could Run Multiple Operating Systems” I actually laughed, because PCs already do run multiple operating systems – what nonsense is being written now? Reading the article helps you see the impact of Phoenix’ HyperSpace announcement and it hit me – all laptops (using the Phoenix BIOS and HyperSpace) in the future will likely run both Linux and Windows whether a certain company likes it or not.

The HyperSpace environment would be based on Linux, giving the freely distributed operating system what could be its biggest break yet in the struggle to gain traction against Windows on PCs.

Note to self: don’t simply judge an article by its title ;-)

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Has Desktop Linux reached “The Tipping Point”?

You have to wonder when Malcolm would agree looking back 10 years from now, Linux hit the “Tipping Point”… when I see ordinary Windows users switching (and liking it), I can’t help but think, it might be tipping right now…

Well the Linux desktop is certainly here and I can prove it because as of today I’m officially an Ubuntu user and even though things aren’t perfect, I feel like I’ve finally escaped from jail.

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Nigeria paying for Mandriva, but still going to install Windows on Classmate PCs

A real shame, just a shame. There are some business practices that I certainly could never support – see my lost post for a different approach:

http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

And finally, congratulations to Mandriva who effectively presented a Linux client based solution that met Nigeria’s needs and would have created a new generation of Linux users for the world to leverage. It’s a step backwards, but at the same time, a step forward knowing you can successfully win these deals in a fair competition.

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Making money without doing evil can be profitable

A lesson to others in the industry (including IBM) on value capture (without “evil”):

But the most interesting number is Google’s market capitalization — the value of all of its shares combined. Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider does a little fast fingering to calculate that with the $20 jump in Google’s stock in the last two days, its market value is now about $217 billion. That ranks it the fifth most valuable company in the country.

Most valuable are Exxon Mobil, General Electric, Microsoft, and AT&T. Google has now become worth more than Procter & Gamble, Bank of America and Citigroup. Google of course is a lot smaller than the companies it passed. P&G, for example, has nearly eight times the revenue and three times the profit of Google. But of course Google is growing far, far faster.

Now before all you Google-naysayers email me “yeah but Google did this ___ which is not good for _____ and they doing do enough ____”, stop and think: of the 5 named companies above, which one would you rank as the “less evil”? I hate to say it, but in any corporate environment, you’ll never find an “angel” but you can find some progressive, stars and I think Google is one. Just check out Chris DiBona’s interview on LWN for more.

Anyway, congrats to the Google company on a very aggressive growth curve.