Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 8, 2008
by sjvn01
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VMware gets slugged

I told you so. I told you back in late June VMware was about to get its block knocked-off by the one-two of open-source virtualization and virtualization being baked into operating systems. On July 8th, VMware’s rump hit the canvas.

That was the day Diane Greene, CEO and co-founder was fired and replaced by former Microsoft. executive Paul Maritz. Officially, VMware’s board gave the usual executive song-and-dance about needing to “bring in new leadership with the experience and operational breadth to capitalize on the opportunities in front of VMware as it scales up from its current place to a billion-dollar software company.”

Scale up!? Please!

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July 7, 2008
by sjvn01
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Ballmer, dead parrots, and dead deals

What part of “Yahoo doesn’t want a thing to do with you” did Ballmer not get? The new lord and master of Microsoft seems to be deaf, as well as dumb, in his latest attempt to try to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft, along with billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who at 72 seems to be losing his business smarts, confirmed that they still wanted to buy Yahoo. All that Yahoo has to do, to get in on this new deal, is fire its board of directors.

In other words: “Dear Yahoo leadership. You recently turned our offer down to buy your company. Then, you decided to turn down our offer to buy the search part of your company. Please quit your jobs so we can replace you with people who will take our lowball offer. Thank you very much. Ballmer and Icahn.”

Just how stupid is Ballmer? The deal is dead.

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July 5, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

We’re Number Two: Firefox Grabs More Market Share

Mozilla’s successful attempt to set a world record for downloads of a single program, Firefox 3 was dumb. It was also incredibly successful.

Does anyone really care about how many copies of a program are downloaded in a day? In 2008? When a program can be downloaded from hundreds of different sites? When BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks makes measuring file ‘downloads’ more of an exercise in speculative fiction than a science?

I guess so because, not even counting the fuzzy downloads of P2P networks and the like, Firefox was downloaded 8.3-million times in one day. This is spiffy. Meaningless in and of itself, but spiffy.

Having said that, I will say Mozilla’s pounding the drum for downloading Firefox did do one good thing. It did a great job of marketing Firefox.

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July 5, 2008
by sjvn01
5 Comments

Adobe Flash 10 on Linux: Looking Good

Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux may only be a beta, but it’s one heck of a beta.

I didn’t care for Adobe Flash video at first. It was just another proprietary audio/video format in a world already over-flowing with them.

Three things have happened to change my mind. First, Adobe made it possible to use the open H.264 video and HE-AAC (High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) audio standards in Flash SWF (Shockwave Flash) files. Then, they made the Adobe Flash player available on Linux, and, this May, Adobe announced that it was opening up the SWF and FLV/F4V (Flash Video) formats and dumping the format’s licensing fees. At about the same time, Adobe also released the Flash 10 beta for Linux, as well as some other desktop operating systems you may have of heard of: Mac OS X and Windows.

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July 3, 2008
by sjvn01
8 Comments

KDE Developer Quits

Being grumpy is almost part of the job description for developers.

Recently though several KDE developers came right out and asked, “Does KDE even need (certain) users?” While, Troy Unrau, a KDE developer and perhaps best known as the author of stories for KDE News, opened this can of worm by saying “This is a rant,” it was soon taken in earnest. Unrau’s opinion was quickly seconded by another KDE developer, Jason Harris, who said, “KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn’t really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.” Instead, both Unrau and Harris wanted to see KDE get more developers.

In the end though, KDE has ended up with at least one less developer. Unrau has quit KDE. He puts the blame, in part, on simply having too much to do and too little time to do it and on both internal and external criticism of KDE’s recent development direction.

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