Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 16, 2009
by sjvn01
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Dell looks to Moblin for Linux future

In a recent blog posting, Dell Technology Strategist, Doug Anson, said that Dell, as I wrote last week, was considering selling Google’s new Chrome OS in its netbooks. That’s interesting, but what I found far more interesting was that Anson seemed a lot more interest in Moblin, the new mobile Internet device, operating system for Dell.

Anson opened by talking about Google Chrome OS. He wrote, “Given that Google has made it clear that the Chrome OS will be available in the second half of 2010, there’s still a lot of time to see how this will develop. As with most new technology, Dell plans to evaluate the Chrome OS and other alternative operating environments, like we’ve done in the past. Luckily (for me!), Dell enjoys a great relationship with Google. As we have more details to share on the topic, we’ll do it here.”

Fine and dandy, but what caught my attention was that he went on to talk about how “Alternative operating systems, continue to evolve, flourish and prosper.” Specifically, what he finds interesting about them is that “These alternative operating environments are truly “different” from the traditional Windows platform – they don’t attempt to simply ‘mimic’ Windows.” Sure, Anson admits that that can be a problem, but “these alternative operating environments attempt to address this shortcoming by focusing their feature set with a self-directed experience: entice and direct the user to its strengths.”

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July 15, 2009
by sjvn01
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Ballmer says Windows 7 is vaporware

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, shocked attendees at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner conference in New Orleans yesterday when he announced that while Windows 7 is certainly interesting since it won’t ship until late this year it’s little more than vaporware.

Ballmer continued, to the stunned audience of Microsoft programmers’ amazement, to say that “I don’t know if we can’t make up our mind or what our problem is over here, but the last time I checked, you don’t need two client operating systems. It’s good to have one.”

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July 14, 2009
by sjvn01
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Red-ink Sun Set

You can’t make up results as bad as this. Sun Microsystems, in its last days as an independent company has announced absolutely horrible preliminary numbers for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, which ended June 30, 2009.

According to the company, Sun expects revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 in the range of $2.580 to $2.680 billion, as compared with $3.780 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008. That’s a more than billion year-over-year dollar drop.

Sun went on to state that it anticipates a GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles) net loss per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 of from twenty-four to thirty-four cents per share. If you want to ignore GAAP, Sun says its net loss won’t be that bad: share holders will only lose six to sixteen cents per share.

Want to know more? Tough. “Sun will not host a conference call in conjunction with fourth quarter results. Results are expected to be posted on http://sun.com/investors upon the filing of our Annual Report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2009 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is due no later than August 31, 2009.”

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July 12, 2009
by sjvn01
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Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris?

People outside of IT seldom think of Oracle as a Linux company, but it is. Not only does Oracle encourage its customers to use its own house-brand clone of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle has long used Linux internally both on its servers and on some of its desktops. So, what does a Linux company like Oracle wants to do with its newly purchased Sun’s open-source operating system, OpenSolaris? The answer appears to be: “Nothing.”

Sun, Oracle and third-party sources are telling me that OpenSolaris developers are afraid that they’ll be either moved over to working on Linux or let go once the Sun/Oracle merger is completed. Other Sun open-source managers have expressed concern that their jobs may disappear once Oracle has acquired Sun.

This can’t come as much of a surprise. Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, said last year, “”Oracle definitely runs on Linux. We have very few servers in our infrastructure that are not Linux; that support, you know, internal IT systems, very few. And even the ones that continue to exist are on a plan to be phased out. So we definitely run our business on Linux. In fact, I mean, our entire IT infrastructure is Linux, our entire development infrastructure as well. So, you know, our development platform is Oracle Enterprise Linux. Our test platform is Oracle Enterprise Linux.”

He’s not just talking a good open-source game. Oracle has had thousands of Linux developers at work since the 1990s, and Wim Coekaerts, Oracle’s VP of Linux Engineering, is a major Linux developer. Indeed, Oracle is one of the top companies contributing to the Linux kernel.

The hand-writing is on the wall. OpenSolaris is on its way out.

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July 10, 2009
by sjvn01
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Windows of mass destruction

For most of this week, prominent Web sites in both South Korea and the United States have been being bombarded by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. At times, these assaults have knocked out multiple major sites. North Korea has been taking the blame for these attacks, but no one has any proof yet. What we do know is that the weapon that’s doing this damage is compromised Windows PCs.

Tens of thousands of Windows PCs have been taken over by an unknown botnet master. He or she is using an updated version of the ancient MyDoom Windows worm to make the attacks.

Let me put this in context. MyDoom dates from January 2004. It’s pre-historic by malware standards.

MyDoom, unlike most malware, such as Conficker was never meant to steal your credit-card numbers and the like. No, MyDoom, from its start as a DDoS attack dog aimed at SCO, was designed to wreck Web sites and, after it had done its work, blast your hard drive into randomized 1s and 0s.

Even today’s versions are primitive, brutally simple in its attacks, and, of course, powered by Windows. Without Windows, and its endless security holes, MyDoom couldn’t even exist, never mind thrive.

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July 9, 2009
by sjvn01
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Of Monopolies and Mono

Mono, the open-source development environment based on Microsoft’s .NET, has really gotten people ticked off lately. The long and short of the argument is that Mono is a Trojan-horse that will introduce Microsoft poisoned patents into Linux. After, Richard M. Stallman, free-software’s dad wrote, “Debian’s decision to include Mono in its principal way of installing GNOME, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use,” the fight was on.

Or, it should be said, the fight had been renewed. Stallman and many others, had often objected over the years to Linux, or other free software users embracing Mono’s implementation of C# or application written in Mono.

Stallman believes that “The danger is that Microsoft is probably planning to force all free C# implementations underground some day using software patents. This is a serious danger, and only fools would ignore it until the day it actually happens. We need to take precautions now to protect ourselves from this future danger.” Of course, no one is suggesting that any part of Linux, or any other operating system, be written in Mono. The problem is that several popular open-source programs like Tomboy, a well-regarded note-taking program; Moonlight/Moonshine, which enables users to listen and view Windows Media-bound music and videos on Linux; and Banshee, a Linux music player, are based on Mono.

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