Archive for January, 2008
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Coverage on IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution with Ubuntu
Saw a few articles today on IBM’s OCCS announcement with Ubuntu.
Satyadas said IBM thinks that this year, it will happen. “All the stars are lining up,” he said. “Everybody has been saying that since 2001 except IBM. We never said that, but we are saying that now.”
It’s easy to overlook IBM’s announcement that its Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony suites will run on Ubuntu. I think this would be a mistake. IBM is not a dumb company. It’s not in the habit of wasting resources. For IBM to be partnering up with Ubuntu says something about the enterprise mindset on Ubuntu.
By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers “a proprietary desktop model.” IBM’s Linux efforts will “further address customer demands around choice,” said Inna Kuznetsova, an IBM executive with responsibility for Linux, in a statement.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Automattic nets nearly $30M in financing
Wow! This is great news for Matt and the team behind WordPress. It’s always nice when one of your customers loves your product so much they invest in you! Matt Mullenwig covers his own news here.
Automattic, the commercial arm of the popular WordPress publishing platform for blogs, has received $29.5 million in financing from four companies, including a small portion from The New York Times Company.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Codename Nemo mashes up your Linux filesystem into a calendar
I just read about a pretty cool project over at Ars called Nemo. The developers did something really cool with Mono by using a calendar view to display files. They can do this by using either Beagle or Tracker. While screenshots look great, it’s still only in alpha so consider yourself forewarned.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
And the best Sun/MySQL Acquisition Analysis Award goes to…
drumroll please…
Jeff Gould. [applause]
Jeff’s analysis is dead on in my opinion and I found his application of business forces and behavior offers an analytical lens focusing on the real impact with great clarity. I’ve yet to see anyone prove MySQL can provide investors return on $1B using any conventional financial decision model. I’d like to also congratulate Oracle on a great move … (via Sun). Sometimes the smart thing to do is have one of these shirts on when you visit Redwood City (notice the arrow points in the right direction).
Anyway, you can read Jeff’s take here:
http://www.interopnews.com/news/can-sun-make-mysql-pay.html
BTW, if you’re curious, Mr. “My Sox stole your Tribe’s training program” O’Grady forced a very close, ballot-chad recount, second place finish with a very complete analysis over a Redmonk.com.
Update: It does appear Mr. O’Grady may contest the recount and this may drag on a while longer.
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
Buying an HD video player? Looks like Sony is the best bet…
I recently acquired a Samsung 50″ Plasma which has full 1080p resolution and I must admit… I’ll never go back to SD television. Even for what little I watch, the picture is just unbelievable. Now, keep in mind my prior TV was a 25″ Sharp CRT from back when I was in college… Yeah, I was long overdue for an upgrade. However, I chose to go with the 1080p, top spec sheet model for a number of reasons, but the top being it’s ‘near futureproof’ (famous last words, right?). Well, as far as resolutions go, 1080p should be around for a while and honestly, I can imagine a TV with a higher resolution as it looks amazing right now. I have a 1080i HDTV camcorder that I acquired last year and an Xbox 360 which does native 1080p and DVD upscaling. You could say within the last 12 months, I’ve gone from home media antique museum to MoMa.
However, I have two pieces of my setup that are still a generation behind. First, there’s the home theater. I have a cheaper setup that my wife bought me years ago and it serves its purpose and until the HDMI systems come down in price, there’s not much to gain from an upgrade. The other piece is the whole High Def video player. The HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray battle has been raging on and it now appears that Blu-Ray will win out (I *think* this is the better of the two, but it’s hard to tell – Microsoft vs Sony is like a computer virus vs a rootkit – which is less evil?).
Putting the standards battle aside, I’ve been waiting on the sidelines waiting for the future proof answer for high def video. The first Blu-Ray player I noticed on the market at sub-$1,000 was the PS3. It still is a competitively priced Blu-Ray player today (some newer models are ~$300). And guess what happens to all those who ran out and bought a Blu-Ray player for $1,000+, or when they dropped to $800 or when they hit $500 and then ~$300… they’re already antiquated: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080118-new-nlu-ray-2-0-spec-makes-ps3-the-most-future-proof-player.html
Who loses out in these standards wars? The consumer who’s willing to pay too much. But, I guess if you have $1,000 for a high end DVD player what does it matter anyway… just buy another.
So I guess I’m waiting again this time for a Blu-Ray v2.0 system (or PS3). It’s quite a shame that HDTV has come along so poorly for consumers. First it was 720i, then 1080i and then 1080p was the end game. Then you need to upgrade your cable, upgrade your DVR, upgrade your camcorder, upgrade your video player, upgrade your home theater system… if you bought any of those components at 720/1080i, upgrade again to 1080p. I have to wonder if HDTV will ever get to being “simple” and easy for consumers? I’m fairly knowledgeable, I can’t imagine some of my less than technically inclined friends of family buying all the right components in a future proof progression – it’s been hard for me I’ll admit… good luck to anyone looking to make a future-proof HDTV decision.
Monday, January 21st, 2008
An interesting follow-on commentary to my Linux and OpenSolaris post
I found this post interesting and if you can read Spanish, I encourage you to check it out. While it appears Sergio disagrees with me on economics driving participation (and hey, disagreement is allowed), you can see he then builds off my argument by offering four constructive rules to building an open, developer community. I liked his post and encourage you to check it out. It seems Sergio would also agree with Mark Shuttleworth from Ubuntu on the structure that drives participation.
http://www.lapastillaroja.net/archives/001454.html
El caso es que una licencia libre es condición necesaria pero no suficiente para crear una Comunidad. La licencia es como la ley, pero luego viene el reglamento, que, para que se forme una Comunidad requiere:
Monday, January 21st, 2008
Ubuntu and IBM bring enterprise collaboration to a user friendly Linux desktop
I read this news release with great excitement and will take a shameless opportunity to plug what I think is a fantastic partnership. The news? IBM’s Lotus group has announced support of its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) for Ubuntu Linux. OCCS is a layer of rich client communications apps including IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 (Calendaring, Email), Sametime 7.x (Instant Messaging), and Symphony (OpenOffice in an Eclipse RCP form). I’ve switched to Ubuntu for my primary system at home for well over a year now and while I took a very short break to dabble in Fedora 8, I’m back on Ubuntu again. I’ve been using a RHEL5 base at work for over a year as well but now that we have Ubuntu support coming, I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu once the OCCS solution is released (yes, I work in a strategy group in IBM and I don’t use Windows or MS Office – and most people can’t tell). The thing about working in IBM is that everyone uses Notes, Sametime, and ODF is even becoming more popular so there’s very little that prevents anyone from using Linux (or a Mac). Heck, many users can probably get away with an iPhone.
IBM also expanded the OCCS platform support with Red Hat EL Desktop and announced more partners around OCCS on Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).
What makes all this even better? Enterprise applications delivered in a rich client environment. Take for instance SAP, who today announced a joint product set with IBM that will be delivered through Lotus Notes (which we now know runs well on Linux)
The product, codenamed Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP’s Business Suite applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through IBM’s Lotus Notes desktop software.
So the ecosystem and vision is starting to come together. It’s early, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention again that 2008 will be the year of the enterprise Linux client ;-) How many users will we be saying this for? :-) (Note, I didn’t say ‘desktop’ specifically, and I said ‘enterprise’). As we’ve been saying all along, there are certain segments of users that can easily do their work on a Linux client (many won’t even know it’s not Windows). Those companies who take advantage of user segmentation have a lot to benefit from both on pure cost alone, but also in the next round of negotiations on your non-Linux client systems ;-)
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Mike Strosaker Takes on Sun’s Predictive Self Healing Claims
Mike Strosaker has a couple points to make about Sun’s claims of predictive self healing relative to Linux. One thing I’ve noticed is that Sun (and Microsoft) always compare one of their features to Linux on Intel/AMD and ignore the capabilities of Linux on Power, Itanium or Mainframe platforms (which, btw are growing faster than Linux on x86). It’s time to wakeup and realize that Linux runs anywhere and takes on the capabilities of the hardware platform.
Check it out Mike’s comparison here for the details: http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/predictive-self-healing-on-linux-on-power/
Sun frequently touts their “predictive self-healing” implementation in Solaris 10. I wonder if that bullet point would be further down the list if they were familiar with the error detection, prediction, and correction capabilities of Linux on POWER platforms. In fact, the Linux on POWER implementation precedes the Solaris 10 implementation by at least a year (Solaris 10 was released in January 2005; SLES 8 had this solution for POWER in 2003, and RHEL 3 had it in 2004 at the latest).
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
Ubuntu Customer Case Studies
Ubuntu is not just for the enthusiast; check out their case studies page:
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/casestudies
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Toshiba Spurs Engine: Cell processors in laptops and TVs … could it be an x86 and Power/Cell race in the datacenter?
There’s always a flood of news coming out of CES, but one that I find interesting that also impacts the server and technology market is a bit of news from Toshiba. As this video shows, Toshiba has embedded a Cell BE processor (yes, the same ones in PS3s) into a laptop and a television. The reason is that the Cell processor is far more capable of handling video rendering and stream computing than a typical general processor such as you find from Intel or AMD.
Now you may watch the video and then wonder ‘what the heck does this imply for the server market?’ and you’d be right to ask. Interestingly, Scott Handy from IBM recently did an interview with The Register and gave everyone the answer. The processor marketplace for desktops, laptops, mobile devices and servers requires huge volumes to provide economic returns to manufacturers. There is a huge capital investment that goes into every generation of processor not to mention all the IP that must be created to advance from one generation to the next. Similar to software sold on CD, producing the first chip may cost $1B and the second chip $500M, and it only gets cheaper as your volumes increase. In order to maintain a processor business profitably, chip makers live off volumes (hence the huge battles between Intel and AMD). Now the problem facing Intel for Itanium and Sun for SPARC is that these server technologies have no consumer application that will drive additional volumes. In terms of volume, the server market is a spec in chip consumption.
Yet the processor market is a rat race – vendors need enormous chip volumes to provide funding for future chip designs and whoever has the most funding, tends to produce the winning chips (see Intel for years despite competition from AMD). In fact one might point to Itanium as Intel’s decline – a chip that never saw the volumes needed to make it a competitive chip. Then as Intel was divesting profits from its x86 chips into Itanium chips, it suddenly found itself behind AMD. For a good grin, take a look at IDC’s forecasts for Itanium and the ‘revisions’ to those estimates. Heck, probably the only person to have worked around Itanium and advanced their career was Ashlee Vance.
Now look at Sun and SPARC and you see what used to be a high volume SPARC or UltraSPARC platform with many 1-4 way SPARC servers going into every datacenter giving Sun ‘good enough’ volumes to invest in future generations of processors. Then comes along Intel and Linux and Windows wiping out low end SPARC volume servers and cornering SPARC processors into a lower volume mid-high end server market. Without the funds for future generations of chips, Sun has to resort to stopgap measures craftily using old SPARC core designs in a Niagara multicore processor configuration. Regardless, that still doesn’t create high volume – the non-x86 server market is actually relatively low volume.
When you look at Power processors in everything from Mars rovers to cars, servers, printers and today it’s used in all 3 gaming systems (Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii). The gaming market alone consumes tens of millions of processors (far more than the server market). The Cell BE processor in the PS3 and IBM or Mercury Cell blades actually have 1 power core (PE) and 8 synergistic processing units (SPEs). The PE acts as a ‘router’ for instructions and data sent to the SPEs. So an application developer write much of the code similar to a power architecture when targeting a Cell based system. (Now I’m oversimplifying processor architectures a ton here, I’ll admit – but the point is not to debate the differences between PowerPC/POWER and Cell PE/SPE units… look at the big picture).
Now, going back to servers you can understand that winning in servers requires a high volume chip that funds future chip development and generates economic profits for the manufacturer. Without funds to invest in future chips, you lose the race. Once you view it all in this light, it becomes easier to see why the Power, ARM and Intel/AMD x86/x64 architectures are far ahead of other RISC or other architectures – they have volume. POWER6 was no small ’speed bump’ – POWER6 is a fierce chip with raw compute power and system throughput that leapfrogged its competitors. It took economic profits reinvested into chip design over years to create it. Cell is no different. And with Cell and Power having volumes in non-server markets including now potentially Toshiba laptops and TVs, I’ll leave you to place your bets on which architectures will be around in the server market for years to come.
Oh, and I should also note that Linux is the only OS that runs on both the Cell BE and POWER processors ;-) Guess which OS is likely to be around in your next generation server, television, printer and … well if only we could ‘fix’ the desktop/laptop market reliance on a different OS…
Monday, January 14th, 2008
The original SimCity is now available under GPLv3 under a new name, Micropolis
Very interesting news about SimCity – it’s been years since I’ve played it and this really is the earlier version (C64 actually). This is nothing like the later versions available in recent years so I don’t want to set the expectations too high. You can download the source or binaries here. Surprisingly it’s not in the Ubuntu repos yet. There’s actually a port specific to the XO which I’m sure Emily and David may be interested in ;-).
It didn’t work for me on a very quick attempt – my Micropolis window froze up but was easy to quite and exit gracefully. There must be a bug or it must not be Compiz-ready…
Monday, January 14th, 2008
Microsoft under EU investigation (again) for browser bundling
Could Britney Spears have relevance to Microsoft (e.g. “Oops I did it again”)? Reuters is covering a new investigation by the EC into Microsoft’s possible antitrust violations, this time for Internet Explorer.
The European Commission opened a new antitrust probe against Microsoft on Monday into whether it unfairly tied its Web browser to the Windows operating system and made it harder for rival software to work with Windows.
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
Ubuntu Live 2008 – Call for Papers
Mark Shuttleworth posted on his blog today a call for papers for Ubuntu Live 2008 in Portland (Oregon). You can see his blog here: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/137
O’Reilly, the organisers of Ubuntu Live, have just issued the call for papers for Ubuntu Live 2008. The theme of the event is “Taking it Further”, which I think is perfect for Ubuntu this year!
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Two items to check out today: ODF-XSLT project and IBM developerWorks
First a website: I came across the ODF-XSLT project and I will say this is just the tip of the iceberg for where the world could head if documents are moved into an ODF format. Nonetheless this is very cool (I didn’t see a demo code project to download, but it looks extremely easy to setup). Anyway, check it out here.
The second is an article over at IBM’s developerWorks on “Multiprocessing with the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)”. If you have been paying attention to LKML over the last year you’ve seen plenty on this. CFS is a great new addition to the Linux kernel and Avinesh did a great job covering the new CFS features, rationale, data structures and finally how to actually use it. I also noticed a fair (pun intended) credit to Con Kolivas for being the one to prove fair scheduling could be done without wreaking havoc. Con’s frustration with getting his patches accepted has been well publicized, but it looks like his contribution will live on in the CFS code.
Some of these changes were made for these reasons:
- To enable better scheduling for servers as well as for desktops.
- To provide new features that were requested.
- To improve the heuristics. Those used in the vanilla scheduler made some attacks easy to implement. Also, if the heuristics gauged a scenario incorrectly, unwanted behaviors could result.
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
Linux Foundation Podcast Series with Linus Torvalds
Very cool! The first podcast is with Linus Torvalds.
The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today launched Open Voices, a podcast series featuring interviews with the industry’s top Linux and open source leaders.
The debut podcast features a conversation with Linux creator and LF fellow, Linus Torvalds. Future Open Voices installments will feature Novell President and CEO, Ron Hovsepian; Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL; and Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu Project.
Update: there’s a transcript available too.
Monday, January 7th, 2008
Mike Strosaker points out a sample real world use of SystemTAP
I noticed an interesting blog post from IBMer, Mike Strosaker over on his blog Zombie Process regarding SystemTAP. Check out his post for all the details…
http://zombieprocess.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/sample-real-world-use-of-systemtap/
SystemTap has been sometimes plagued with “solution in search of a problem” complaints. It was interesting to run across an example of SystemTap being used to solve a real-world problem. A developer discovered an OOM (Out Of Memory) condition in the upstream kernel. In the quest to obtain additional information regarding the issue, the kernel refused to boot with additional debug printk()’s added to quicklist.c. The developer, being familiar with SystemTap, used the following script:
Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Windows Scalability Issues at Xbox Live?
Looks like Microsoft is having trouble scaling to keep up with peaks in demand…. unfortunately being an x86 only platform (I guess Itanic is an option), Windows cannot take advantage of features like capacity upgrade on demand or other UNIX/Linux/Mainframe scalability features… perhaps Microsoft could run its Xbox Live server apps on a Linux mainframe using Mono?
During this past holiday season you helped us break a number of Xbox LIVE records. This included our largest sign-up of new members to Xbox LIVE in our 5 year history and just yesterday you broke the record for the single biggest day of concurrent members ever on the service.
As a result of this massive increase in usage we know that some of you experienced intermittent Xbox LIVE issues over the holiday break. While the service was not completely offline at any given time, we are disappointed in our performance. I would like to take this moment to thank each and every one of you for your patience and understanding as our team has worked around the clock to return the service to a stable state.
Friday, January 4th, 2008
AP Interview with Red Hat’s new CEO, Jim Whitehurst
I like Jim already after reading this interview.
“We are working to democratize information,” Whitehurst said. “A lot of people don’t see the importance of that. But, ultimately, it is about information freedom and making sure information’s accessible.
“If we don’t fight those battles now, our entrenched competitors will lock up file formats, force you to use their software or force royalties,” he added. “Then the information stored in those formats will no longer be free.”
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
Seattle Windows glitch ruins fireworks show at Space Needle
Doh! The first thing I thought of was South Park the movie where the general has a Windows 98 computer crash and furiously yells “Get Bill Gates in here!”… nothing like rebooting Windows when the music is going off and a crowd watching … might I suggest another option next year – begins with an ‘L’?
http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW_010108WAB_fireworks_glitch_SW.72e7457c.html#
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
New Open Season Episode 8
I think Open Season is probably the only podcast session I listen to regularly. What can I say, I’m a sucker for Ashlee Vance’s humor/critique… although I haven’t purchased his book yet…
This episode includes some (dare I say unsupported) speculation on Ubuntu and IBM from Mr. Asay. I guess there’s some evil plot to take over the world in there, but given my job at IBM… I’d probably know :-) I also found it odd that the 1.5 minute speculation bit also became the title (what do you expect from El Reg?). Anyway, listen if for no other reason than Open Season offers Ogg downloads (thanks!).
Anyway, you can listen for yourself here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/28/open_season_8/
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