Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 20, 2010
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Linux on the Cloud: The Ubuntu Way

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has always had many enthusiastic user and developer fans. It’s a different story within the enterprise. Canonical has been trying to improve its business reputation though in both the server and cloud spaces. In particular, according to Neil Levine, Canonical’s VP of Commercial Services, Canonical has been working hard to bring Ubuntu’s well-known ease of use on the desktop to cloud deployments.

A recent xample of this was Canonical and IBM’s launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C database management system. This virtual application can run on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform, in private and public cloud configurations.

DB2 Express-C is IBM’s free community edition of DB2 software. Small businesses and multi-branch companies, as well as developers, can use it as their DBMS platform. DB2 Express-C has all of DB2’s core features and can be used to power in-house DBMS applications, Web 2.0, and SOA-based solutions.

How this can work for an enterprise, said Levine, is “to give large companies a way to get a taste of our low-cost way to try Ubuntu and DB2 on public cloud. If you want to try it, you can.” Then, if you like the experience, you can use a more powerful DB2/Ubuntu stack on either a public or private crowd, “using the same tools and architecture that you’re already using. There’s no need to re-architect it.”

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December 20, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect Email as much as You might think

If you’re concerned with email privacy, at first glance, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the Constitution forbids the U.S. Federal Government from grabbing stored email without a warrant (PDF Link) sounds like great news. And, it is. It’s just not as great as you might think.

What happened in the case was that the government forced an ISP to reveal 27,000 emails without securing a warrant or giving notice to the customer, Steven Warshak. The Sixth Circuit Court held that the seizure violated Warshak’s Fourth Amendment rights because they were allowed to so because of the Stored Communications Act. Ironically, that act was meant to prohibit ISPs and other electronic communication providers from sharing mail or messages without their senders or receivers’ permission.

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December 16, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Good-Bye Alta-Vista, Delicious

Thanks to a leaked Yahoo! screenshot, we know that Yahoo! is closing the door on several of its services including the social bookmarking site Delicious and the search engine AltaVista. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but there was a time when both Delicious and AltaVista were very big deals.

Now,, how much longer can Yahoo! keep its doors open?

December 16, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Novell’s patents bought by Microsoft, Apple, EMC, & Oracle

When CPTN Holdings appeared out of the blue to snap up Novell’s patent portfolio, the only thing anyone knew about them was that Microsoft was behind the group and that’s all Microsoft had to say about its Novell intellectual property (IP) purchase. Now, thanks to Germany’s anti-trust body, the Bundeskartellamt, we know that Microsoft’s CPTN Holdings partners were Apple, EMC, and Oracle.

As my buddy Mary Jo Foley pointed out, this means that “CPTN Holdings isn’t just a front for Microsoft.” It’s easy, of course, to see why Microsoft would want Novell’s IP. While we don’t exactly what patents came with this deal, we do know that Novell owns significant networking, directory, virtualization and data center patents.

Still it’s hard to see exactly why this quartet of companies would work together on this IP purchase. As Florian Muller, who first revealed CPTN’s members in his FOSS Patents blog wrote, “I don’t know much about EMC other than that it’s a very significant company. I do know that Apple and Oracle are clearly companies who have different approaches to some important issues than Microsoft. Within the consortium, the four players will have to agree on a common denominator concerning the patents to be acquired. They’ve apparently been able to agree that those patents are valuable assets to own.”

I do know EMC. Ironically, EMC is VMware’s parent company. You know the other company that wanted to buy Novell. EMC and VMware both have deep interests in virtualization and the data center. Apple is the company that I don’t see fitting into the CPTN partnership.

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December 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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No Google Fibre for You (Or Anyone Else) Yet

I, and lots of other people in Asheville, NC, and many other towns and small cities throughout the United States, have been waiting for Google to announce who would receive the blessing of Gigabit Fibre Internet. Alas, we’ll have to wait for sometime in 2011 before we find out who wins.

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December 15, 2010
by sjvn01
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Roll your own Linux distribution with Novell’s SUSE Studio

One of the advantages of Linux is that you’ve always been able to build your own Linux distribution… if you were an expert programmer. But, today thanks to programs like Novell’s SUSE Studio it’s easier than ever to create Linux appliances or your house-brand Linux.

For proof that you can use SUSE Studio to create useful applications look no further than the winners of Novell’s Dister Awards. The two $10,000 grand prizes went to software companies, Radical Breeze and Anderware.

Radical Breeze, won in the “Commercial” category for its Illumination Software Creation Station. This program lets non-developers design their own software applications with no programming experience required. Anderware, a software company from Sweden, won in the “Community” category for its Hypergrid to Go appliance, which allows users to easily set up an extension to the OpenSim platform to create a multi-user 3D world similar to Second Life.

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