Archive for February, 2008
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Heading off to Whistler – back next Wed
I’m heading off for a little vacation / skiing time in Whistler. If you recall last year I said I needed to go back and now I’m making good on fulfilling that need. My blog will probably be silent during my trip, but you can imagine me skiing down the side of something that would scare any health insurer. I tend to always play it safe and land well, so no need to
worry about me – I’ll be sporting a permanent smile for the next 4 days.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
SELinux really does work as intended (and mitigates casualties)
Just saw this interesting update on some of the real world successes of SELinux.
Linux security experts are reporting a growing list of real-world security situations in which the US National Security Agency’s SELinux security framework contains the damage resulting from a flaw in other software. These so-called “mitigations” are showing that a Linux feature that began as an esoteric security measure is starting to prove its worth.
The article also references Dan Walsh’s LiveJournal entry here.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
Microsoft gets slapped by the EU for another record fine – will it really help??
Perhaps Microsoft’s recent, lame “open” announcements were prompted by an impending $1.3B fine… does anyone really think this will stop Microsoft? It’s just a tax and you know who will bear the cost (yes, those using Microsoft’s products, or Microsoft’s investors). I think a better solution would have been to look at what market structure would be necessary to facilitate the behavior that is needed. I think when it comes to Microsoft and its constant run-ins with antitrust regulators it is evident fines are not working. The industry needs regulators to step in with an effective structural change.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/02/27/ap4702025.html?partner=alerts
BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Union fined Microsoft Corp. a record euro899 million (US$1.3 billion) on Wednesday for charging rivals too much for software information.
EU regulators said the company charged “unreasonable prices” until last October to software developers who wanted to make products compatible with the Windows desktop operating system.
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
NYLUG’s Jim Gleason Presents on KVM
It’s great to see Jim hitting the streets in his new gig at Qumranet. Hopefully my schedule will allow me to travel between IBM sites and make it out next Wed. Note that you will need to rsvp at the NYLUG site.
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
6:30pm-8:00 PM
IBM
590 Madison Ave, 12th Floor
corner of 57th Street
** RSVP Closes at 4:30pm the day of the meeting (sharp!) ***
Please RSVP for EVERY meeting at this time.
Register at http://rsvp.nylug.org/
PLEASE NOTE: This meeting is at IBM, not Google!
Jim Gleason – on – The Next Wave of Virtualization
Kernel-based Virtual Machine and its impact on the desktop Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a Linux kernel virtualization infrastructure and open source hypervisor that provides both full and para-virtualization capabilities for Linux on commodity x86 hardware that contain the virtualization extensions from Intel and AMD. KVM is currently implemented as a loadable Linux kernel module. In late 2006, it was first included in Linux kernel 2.6.20 and and first shipped with OpenSuse 10.1 and Fedora 6.
Since KVM is part of Linux, KVM leverages the scheduler, memory management and other key resources in the Linux kernel, unlike VMware and Xen which must create their own custom mechanisms. Thus, KVM development focuses exclusively on the next-wave virtualization, while Xen and VMWare must also maintain these ‘forked’ non-Linux resources.
All of the core KVM developers, including Avi Kavity, work at the firm, Qumranet, which launched a desktop virtualization solution called Solid ICE that leverages KVM. Qumranet is the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM Open Source Hypervisor Project. Other high-ranking Linux kernel developers such as Rusty Russell and Anthony Liguori of IBM, Ingo Molnar of Red Hat, and Andrea Archangeli formerly of Novell, devote most of their time to KVM development.
What is the Next Wave of Virtualization?
Qumranet has gone beyond conventional server virtualization and application streaming by completely virtualizing end users’ desktop machines. From a browser on a thin client or PC, users access their desktop work environment over the network via a virtual machine running on a centralized server. The end result is a seamless end user work experience, just like a physical PC on a LAN. This is a high-level talk which will focus on the breakthrough Linux technology KVM, and its impact on the virtualization market.
About Jim Gleason:
Jim has been providing emerging technology to early adopters in the Financial Serivces Sector for the past ten years. Widely regarded as the person who brought Linux to Wall Street, Jim sold the first production Linux cluster to Goldman Sachs in 1998. Jim was also an early Internet pioneer having closed deals for the first official web sites of Charles Schwab, VISA, and all of Hewlett-Packard’s original web sites in 1993. Jim is also the Founder of the NY Linux Users Group and currently works at Qumranet in the capacity of Vice President of Sales.
Meeting Location:
Please note that this meeting will be held at IBM, 590 Madison Ave, 12th floor, corner of 57th Street, and not at Google. This is the building with the IBM logo on the front of the building.
Books!!!
Our friends at Prentice-Hall kindly provide us with review copies of various new titles. One of these could be yours, all you have to do is agree to review the book within a reasonable period of time.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
OpenSolaris issues are similar to OpenOffice?
I somehow missed this comment the other day… very interesting Sam. I’ve heard the same, but your history obviously lends more direct credibility. Let’s not forget Sun’s recent accomplishments with OpenDS either… see a pattern? ;-)
Mike-
You may be interested to know that the OpenSolaris Community developments you & Roy have described read like an OpenOffice.org redux. (I speak from the experience of an ex-Marketing Project Lead of OpenOffice.org)It is therefore hilarious to me, as it should be to all, that Sun calls itself an open source company. They have not got the foggiest clue, and this is all the more evident each 8-14 month period when I load a newer version of Ubuntu on the old box.
Linux improves because of trust. Period.
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Roy Fielding responds to the OpenSolaris “ripple” in his own words
If you’ve read any of the OpenSolaris/Roy Fielding news on any of the sites/blogs covering the news, you are obliged to also read Roy’s own explanation on his blog. I think many of my comments here are also in-line with Roy’s view. Now everyone can go comment/complain about how negative Roy’s being on his own blog ;-)
http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/watching-the-ripples
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Stephen O’Grady covers the OpenSolaris debate
A must read. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised by the balanced view Stephen posted this evening – it’s O’Grady at his best. I am a bit surprised he weighed in at all though – as he put it, there are a few things he’d rather do “Including having a few of my fingernails pulled out.”
Despite the painful picture that portrays, I’d recommend his post as a very well articulated and valuable Q&A to read if you’re interested in the topic. Sometimes the best work is the hardest… but I’m already brainwashed in Linux myself so it comes easy to me ;-)
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Fun experiment at Grand Central
Interesting experiment – it would be very odd to see this…
http://www.teamgroup.tv/pages/blog/308/another-example-of-doing-a-lot-with-a-little.
Monday, February 18th, 2008
Many comments, and a missing comments feed…
I recently noticed that my comments feed was not viewable on my blog. During a template update it appears I had commented out the comments feed. I “fixed the glitch” and you should notice a link on my menu sidebar now to access the feed for comments.
If you’re really lazy, or can’t see it, the feed is here.
Any comments ;-) ?
Monday, February 18th, 2008
Windows XP SP2 vs Vista SP1: Guess which one wins?
I “heard” Vista SP1 was supposed to be faster, and now I just saw that ZDNet put the claim to the test. It’s not clear from these results that Vista SP1 is any faster than XP SP2… in fact Vista won only 2 out of 15 benchmark tests which signals to me that it’s probably slower. Why should users upgrade again?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1332&page=4
Monday, February 18th, 2008
Notice regarding comments on my blog here
I just noticed that Jim Grisanzio had tried to post a comment to this post and his comment was queued into my spam comments by Akismet. I didn’t find out until a friend pointed me to a blog post where he mentioned the comment didn’t show up. After pouring through pages of spam caught by Akismet, I found Jim’s comment. For some reason the comment was not even put into the “Moderate” queue so I’m not sure what happened… Despite my disagreement with his view, I would not block or prevent his comment from showing. Please try to understand that I get well over 1,000 spam comments a day so I have to rely on Akismet to handle my spam monitoring. If Jim or anyone else posts a comment and for whatever reason it doesn’t show up, please send me an email and let me know something is awry. I apologize if any of you have had a comment lost at any time – a great part of my blog is spurring discussion on topics and obviously open comments are an important part of having beneficial discussion.
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
Linux is an example of successful “mesh innovation”
Interesting conclusion by Steve Hamm:
There’s already a clear example of mesh innovation working. That’s open source software. Linux, Mozilla, and other incredibly successful software programs were created and are constantly improved by people scattered all over the world. So it’s a powerful model for innovation.
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
Smackpad Compiz Plugin
This is outstanding – Brian pointed it out, but Vadim sent the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFi40HKFBZE
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Was the Terminator powered by Linux? The US military is gung-ho for Linux and “Future Combat Systems”.
This is a strong testmament for why I always tell people… it’s guaranteed that in the long run, Linux will win. The only OS out there that will remain competitive is Windows (IMO). And Windows will compete and be successful for the opposite reasons Linux will. That’s ok, if Linux dominated the market, it would be a monopoly – although a nicer one than we currently have :-)
Some analysts tout open source software as one of the next great technology waves, comparable in its disruptive effects to personal computing and the Internet. That future is already partly here for the U.S. military, with programs such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) and organizations such as the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) using open technologies.
http://www.military-information-technology.com/article.cfm?DocID=2326
Friday, February 15th, 2008
IBM’s System p 570 server wins prestigious Nikkei Award for Superiority and Datamation Enterprise Server of the Year
Here’s a shameless plug for the IBM team that designs POWER processors and servers. It looks like the Nikkei found the new POWER6 based p570 servers quite compelling. (Unfortunately, they forgot to mention the 570 is a screaming system for Linux – not just UNIX). Nonetheless, this is a great award for the IBM Power team and as you can see the “green” and energy savings efficiencies that the team built into the server contributed to IBM’s leadership and success. Having the fastest system “twice as other companies” while keeping the same power envelope seems to have been a successful strategy ;-)
“Nikkei Business Daily Awards for Superiority – Server “IBM System p 570” by IBM Japan” – IBM Japan released the first UNIX high-performance server after an interval of 3 years. The processing ability has been improved twice as other companies, compatible with keeping power consumption to be equivalent to their existing servers. Core part of CPU (central processing unit) is equipped with the latest version, “POWER6” released by IBM. Operating frequency, which shows processing ability, is 4.7GHz – giga is 1 billion- , and this is the first time to reach 4 GHz. Both Japan and U.S. engineers of IBM jointly developed this server to resolve the serious problem of increasing the power consumption.”
In news closer to home, Datamation just announced the same p570 server “easily won” the Enterprise Server of the year.
Enterprise Server
Whether a server is the “best” server is, in truth, based on your company’s individual needs and budgets. In the server world, with its myriad options and add-ons, one size definitely does not fit all. That said, IBM p 570 Server must fit plenty of needs; the box easily won the Enterprise Server category. IBM claims this workhorse doubles the speed of its predecessor without requiring a larger energy footprint.
The other nominees were all well-regarded boxes: the IBM System x3950 M2 Server, the HP MediaSmart Server, and the Dell PowerEdge 2970.
Friday, February 15th, 2008
Emily Ratliff covers Roy Fielding’s Departure from OpenSolaris
I love feed technologies – I just saw Emily posted on Roy Fielding’s departure from OpenSolaris. She made one point that I had to chuckle over:
To date, Sun has received 578 patches[4], which represents a rate of 0.6 patches a day (first patch dated 6/17/05, there were some earlier undated contributions). Linus gets more patches while he is brushing his teeth than OpenSolaris gets in a week.
And one that just really irked me about just how messed up Sun has been on its approach to building a Linux-like community:
For me, the realization that Sun just doesn’t get it, and never will, was crystallized the day I was turned away from an OpenSolaris Users’ Group meeting for refusing to sign an NDA.
Perhaps I should have applied for a job at Sun and tried to fix it myself. However, I think this strategy starts at the top and so Sun would have to offer me a very high position to fix this big of a mess.
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Open source communities and success: Dana gets it
On the heels of my prior post, I saw this:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2014
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Very cool: automatic screen rotation with ThinkPad X61 tablet
Very cool idea to use data from a hard drive accelerometer to drive automagic screen orientation on a tablet pc. Very cool.
http://www.krizka.net/2008/02/13/thinkpad-x61-tablet-automatic-screen-rotation-under-linux/
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
“I told you so” in order? Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2008-February/004488.html
In my opinion, Roy came up short in fully describing the issue, but he did a great job focusing on the thread at hand regarding OpenSolaris and trademark. The fact is, Sun is not an open source community or development player. Sun wants all the benefits of saying it’s all about open and freedom, yet, Sun does something completely different. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, the development is still behind the firewall inside Sun. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, open source community developers would have to get Sun engineers to agree to accept code. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, developers have to contribute copyright co-ownership to the corporation, Sun, in order to contribute to OpenSolaris. Nearly 3 years into OpenSolaris, there are still essential parts of the Solaris OS that are still not opened under a free license (they call it the OpenSolaris Binary License… aka proprietary). I could go on and on… but let me refer to Roy’s view below.
Will Ian be next to resign? I can’t believe he really believes this is the right execution of what sounded like an “open” strategy 2 years ago… I knew better, but many fell for the bedtime story that sounded sweet. Some will still argue that Sun’s great, open, etc., but they’re brainwashed; anyone who really knows what’s going on should not be fooled at this point in the game. “Open”Solaris is an OS that is created by 1 company, with no outside input or control and has a code repo on opensolaris.org… besides that, what has it done to contribute or help any community of users?
Some choice quotes:
Sun didn’t just make vague statements to me about OpenSolaris; they made promises about it being an open development project. That’s the only way they could get someone like me to provide free labor for their benefit. Given Sun’s recent track record on breaking promises, another one doesn’t surprise me at all.
…
Most of the stuff in that letter about Sun’s responsibilities in
regard to “International Trademark Law” is nothing more than
snow being tossed in the eyes of technical folks who don’t have
access to their own lawyers.
…
In fact, if it weren’t for the extremely pig-headed way in which Indiana was thrust on the community as Ian’s private domain, it could have easily been a unifying path for
all of the distros. It could have given them a gate within OpenSolaris in which to collaborate, instead of doing all of their work in separate communities outside OpenSolaris.Indiana is just another private marketing team within Sun that is making private decisions about “OpenSolaris” that aren’t even in line with the internal processes of Solaris Engineering, let alone the published governance model of the OGB.
…
Sun agreed that “OpenSolaris” would be governed by the community and yet has refused, in every step along the way, to cede any real control over the software produced or the way it is produced, and continues to make private decisions every day that are later promoted as decisions for this thing we call OpenSolaris. Rather than be honest about it and restructure the community to correspond to this MySolaris style of over-the-wall development, Sun prefers to lie to the external community members while ignoring their input.
…
This well is poisoned; the company has consumed its own future and any pretense that the projects will ever govern themselves (as opposed to being governed by whatever pointy-haired boss is hiding behind the scenes) is now a joke.
…
There’s nothing particularly wrong with that choice — it is a perfectly valid open source model for corporations that don’t need active community participation. IMO, the resulting code tends to suck a lot more than community-driven projects, but it is still open source.
In any case, I am done with it. I hereby resign my status as a Member of the OpenSolaris Community, effective immediately.
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Speakers are Lining Up
Speakers for 2nd Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Announced!
We are pleased to announce the speaker line up for the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the Austin Supercomputing Center. The speakers, like the attendees of the summit, represent leaders from the developer, industry and end user communities surrounding Linux. Don’t miss the opportunity to collaborate with these individuals on April 8-10, 2008 at the UT Austin Supercomputing Center.
Speakers for the Panel and Keynote Showcase on April 8 already include:
- Kernel maintainers and developers James Bottomley, Jon Corbet, Dave Jones, Christoph Lameter, Ted Ts’o, Chris Wright and others will discuss the state of the Linux kernel community
- Dan Frye, head of IBM’s Linux Technology Center, Christine Martino, vice president of the Open Source & Linux Organization at HP and Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux Engineering for Oracle will share their perspective on what Linux means to their companies and where it’s headed
- Senior representatives from LiMO, Open Handset Alliance, Moblin, OpenMoko, LiPS and others will discuss Linux and mobile: why it’s so strong and where it’s going
- Linux is now shipping on multiple hardware offerings. Hear from John Hull of Dell, Bdale Garbee of HP and representatives of ASUS, Acer, Everex and Lenovo on why they chose Linux and what they need from the Linux community to make it succeed
- IDC Analyst Al Gillen will share important new data on Linux deployment worldwide
- MySQL CEO Marten Mikos will discuss his company’s recent billion dollar acquisition by Sun Microsystems and MySQL’s continued commitment to the Linux platform.
This is truly an unbelievable assortment of people. The Collaboration Summit will have representatives from all the big names in Linux from Intel, AMD, HP, Texas Instruments, Google, NTT, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Dell, Red Hat, Novell, NEC, Sony, Motorola, Mozilla, GNOME Foundation, Nokia, Bull and dozens more. Additionally, the first day is an opportunity to meet press and analysts from eWeek, InformationWeek, BusinessWeek, Gartner Group, IDC and more.
Last year’s event filled up quickly. Please apply to attend this event if you feel you should be there:
ttps://www.linux-foundation.org/events/collaboration
This unique, invitation-only event bring together the brightest minds in the Linux ecosystem from the kernel, end user, desktop, legal and vendor communities to collaborate on the advancement of the Linux platform. Attendees can expect purposive discussion, examination and debate through engaging plenary session content and workgroup meetings. Breakout sessions contain all the domain expertise and key
players necessary to make immediate contributions to the platform.
You can see more detailed agenda information here:
https://www.linux-foundation.org/events/collaboration/program/agenda
This is a *free* event for LF members or key individuals needed to advance the Linux platform.
Additional benefits include:
• Special networking evening reception “Shark vs. Penguin” on Tuesday night in downtown Austin. Food, drinks and transportation provided.
• IBM Reception and Solutions Experience Lab Tour on Wednesday evening, including food and drinks.
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