March 21, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Windows is caught between Mac and Linux

For the first time in ages, the sale of new PCs with Windows as a percentage of the PC market is declining sharply. The new winner is the Mac, but, while no one does a good job of tracking the still-new, pre-installed Linux desktop market, it’s also clear that Linux is finally making impressive inroads into Windows’ once unchallenged market share.

The Mac numbers are especially revealing. NPD, a global market research company, has revealed that Apple’s share of the U.S. computer market jumped to 14 percent in February 2008. This was up from 9 percent in February 2007.

In comparison to the overall market, U.S. PC retail shipments only grew 9 percent in units shipped and a mere 5 percent in revenue in the last year. Macs, in the meantime, saw a 60 percent growth in unit sales with an even more impressive 67 percent gain in revenue growth over the same period.

Continue Reading →

March 17, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Bear Stearns` Collapse Means Trouble for IT

Forget about whether we’re in a “recession” or not, the truth of the matter is the economy is in real trouble, and that means IT is as well.

Over the weekend, the IT world was transformed. Chances are you didn’t notice. No, Vista SP1 wasn’t released, neither was XP SP3, nor the beta of Ubuntu 8.04. What did happen was that on Friday, March 14, the major Wall Street bank Bear Stearns collapsed.

Bear Stearns has invested billions in two hedge funds that were built around sub-prime mortgages. Even as it became clear that holding onto sub-prime mortgages was like hanging onto an anchor, Bear Stearns decided to pour even more money into its sub-prime mortgage funds.

To put it another way, with only a pair of twos in its hand, Bear Stearns decided to go all in. They lost. Even on March 14, when it was becoming clear that Bear Stearns was in real trouble, CEO Alan Schwartz was swearing that the company would show a profit in the first quarter. Sure it was.

At the beginning of that week, Bear Stearns was selling for $70.28 a share. By Friday evening, it was selling for $30 a share. Over the weekend, with the U.S. government giving JP Morgan Chase a $30-billion guarantee it would make up any of Morgan’s losses, Morgan agreed to rescue Bear Stearns from bankruptcy for… $2 a share. For those keeping score at home, a company worth more than $8 billion Monday a week ago was just sold for $236 million.

Now, what does all that have to do with our cozy world of IT? Everything.

Everyone needs money to make money. Even Microsoft, if it’s successful in buying Yahoo, may need to borrow money. Now Microsoft can find a bank willing to loan it a billion here or there. What about your company?

More >

March 17, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Biggest legal victory ever for GPL

For decades, almost no one challenged the General Public License in legal matters. In fact, no one has even dared to try to break it in court. That record remains unsullied as the biggest company to date–Verizon–that had been accused of a GPL violation opted to settle out of court.

The Software Freedom Law Center filed a copyright infringement lawsuit on Dec. 6 against Verizon Communications on behalf of its clients, the two principal developers of BusyBox. The suit alleged that Verizon violated the GNU GPLv2 by distributing Actiontec MI424WR wireless routers–which contained unsanctioned GPLv2 code–that were used with Verizon’s fiber-optic Internet and television service, aka FiOS.

On March 17, the SFLC announced that Verizon has come to an agreement with the SFLC and the BusyBox developers, which enables them to dismiss the GPL enforcement lawsuit. BusyBox is a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems. The popular development tool kit is licensed under GPL. Verizon and Actiontec violated the GPL condition that redistributors of BusyBox are required to ensure that every user of the code, or a device containing the code, must be provided access to the program’s source code.

In return for the SFLC and the BusyBox developers dismissing the lawsuit and giving Actiontec and its customer, Verizon, the right to distribute BusyBox, Actiontec will appoint an open-source compliance officer; publish the BusyBox source code on its Web site, and, according to the press release, “undertake substantial efforts to notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Actiontec and its customers, including Verizon, of their rights to the software under the GPL. The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid to the plaintiffs by Actiontec.”

“We are happy to have settled this matter in a way that upholds the GPL and the interests of our clients,” said Dan Ravicher, the SFLC’s legal director, in a statement.

“Actiontec takes great pride in providing innovative, quality products to its customers, while respecting the intellectual property rights of third parties,” said Dean Chang, Actiontec’s president and CEO, in a statement. “We appreciate the value of the technological contributions of the open-source community, and look forward with renewed commitment to working cooperatively with them.”

In an interview with Linux-Watch, Jim Garrison, the SFLC’s public relations coordinator, added, “The settlement also includes an undisclosed amount of financial consideration paid to the plaintiffs by Actiontec.”

A version of this story was published in Linux-Watch.

March 14, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

One-third of Asus Eee PC users to run Linux

It’s funny how some people are so stuck on the idea that Windows, and only Windows, is the one true operating system that they can’t even hear their own words. That’s the case with a recent news story with the headline, “Windows XP Will Fill Two-Thirds of Asustek Eee PCs.”

OK, I know almost none of you are journalists, but what’s wrong with that headline?

That’s right. You didn’t need to do paste-up classified ads for your high school newspaper to figure out that the news here is that Linux will be running on a third of Asustek’s Eee PCs. Windows being installed on PCs is no more news than “Dog Bites Man.” It’s “Man Bites Dog” that’s interesting.

So, the main news, buried under that misleading headline, is that Asustek plans to sell 5 million Eee PCs in 2008. Which — let’s do the math here — I think means that the Taiwanese company plans on selling 1.66 million Linux PCs.

Now, that’s impressive!

If you actually read the article, you’ll also see that the Asustek chairman said the company expected to sell 60 percent, not 66.6 percent, of its Eee PC line with XP. So, we’re actually talking about 2 million new Linux PCs landing in customers’ hands in 2008.

If Asustek sells that many, it’ll have sold more Linux PCs than all other Linux PC vendors combined up until 2008. That, my friends, is the real news here.

The company also revealed that in 2007 it sold 300,000 units. All of those systems ran Linux.

Take a look at Amazon’s list of top-selling computers. Earlier in March, seven of Amazon’s top 25 were Asus Linux laptops.

Need I say more? Well, actually there is one thing. There is one element of news to the original headline. Asustek is selling Windows XP, not Vista. Interesting, isn’t it?

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux.

March 14, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Parallel Computing`s Already Here

The future is today. When Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, Craig Mundie, looked into his crystal ball and predicted that parallel computing would be the next revolution in computing, he was quite correct. It’s just that he was looking into the past. Parallel computing has been here and changing the world for years.

The problem with parallel computing today is that we don’t tend to see it. Just as the Internet had been around for decades before the parallel rise of the CIX (Commercial Internet Exchange) and the Web in the early ’90s transformed the world, most of us are blind to the changes that today’s multicore processors and MPP (massively parallel processing) have already made.

CIX, which made commercial use of the Internet possible, allowed people to make money from the net. The Web was the killer application.

Today, multicore processor and MPP are already in use, just like ftp, e-mail and gopher were in use in the pre-Web Internet. Some applications, such as video editing programs like Sony Vegas Movie Studio and Nero, are already making use of dual core processors and parallel processing today.

It’s not just video though. Supercomputers are made up of MPP arrays of hundred or even thousands of ordinary Intel or AMD chips running Linux. The current top supercomputer, the IBM Blue Gene/L system at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, can hit 478.2 teraflops (trillion calculations per second) with its tens of thousands of PowerPC processors running Linux. Indeed, 85.2 percent of the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world run Linux.

More >

March 11, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Windows Home Server: Unbelievably Bad Storage

Add another hard drive and lose your data. What the heck is this?

Believe it or not, recently I’ve seen several Microsoft products – Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V virtualization – that I think are winners. But then, just when I think Microsoft might finally be getting its technology act together, it comes up with a complete disaster: Windows Home Server.

I never liked Home Server because I couldn’t see a point to it. There’s really nothing it gave users that they couldn’t already get with any one of the dozens of cheap USB hard drives or NAS (network-attached storage) devices now on the market. If users wanted more, any version of Linux and Samba could turn any old Pentium system into a full-powered file server.

What I never even imagined, though, was that Microsoft would ship a basic file server operating system that was fundamentally flawed. Windows Home Server’s problem, in brief, is that if you have more than one hard drive in, or attached to, your Home Server, it may destroy your data if you use any of nine programs. The list includes Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office OneNote 2003 and 2007 and Intuit QuickBooks. In other words, exactly the kind of programs you’re likely to use on files on a file server.

How could Microsoft blow this? I mean, come on. Microsoft gets many things wrong—see Vista, Microsoft—but file-serving 101? It managed to get that to work back in 1993 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and NT 3.1. Not to mention, everyone else in the operating system business—such as NetWare and Unix—had already mastered getting files to work on a file server years before Microsoft got it right.

On top of that, Home Server, Microsoft told us, is built around Windows Server 2003. I can make Samba run rings around Server 2003 in terms of performance, but Server 2003 is stable. I’ve never lost a file on it.

Now Microsoft is telling us that it doesn’t even really have a clue as to why Home Server is losing files. Oh, in the blog announcing that there really was a problem with Home Server, Microsoft’s Home Servers developers said, “We understand the issue really well at this point—it is at an extremely low level of the operating system and it requires thorough testing to ensure that the fix addresses the issue.” So, they continue, the real fix is “currently estimated for June 2008.”

Say what!? How can there be a low-level problem in Home Server if it’s really based on Server 2003? How, if they know what the problem is, can they say with a straight face that it will take three months to fix that most simple of problems: a file server that corrupts files?

This is beyond bad. This is awful. If I were in charge of this division, I’d fire them all and let unemployment sort them out.

In the meantime, I know there’s been a lot of interest among small and midsize businesses in Home Server. Many users even wanted to know if they could run Home Server with SBS (Small Business Server). Don’t do it!

Do you want your accounts receivables in QuickBooks to vanish? Do you want your Outlook e-mail store to disappear, or those of you who are running SharePoint on Home Server to possibly see all your collaborative work to disappear into a black hole? I don’t think so!

SharePoint? Yes, I know it’s not listed by Microsoft as a problem program for Home Server, but with so many of Microsoft’s own programs on the list, I wouldn’t trust any program’s data on Home Server. Would you?

If you really want an inexpensive server for storage and nothing but storage, just buy a USB hard drive or a cheap NAS box from Netgear, Linksys or SimpleTech. They run Linux and, in my experience, NAS devices from all three of these vendors are as stable as bedrock. If you want more from a server, then just install Linux and Samba on the PC of your choice. It will cost you less and any of these will certainly do a better job of keeping your data safe than the fatally flawed Windows Home Server.

A version of this storyt was first published in eWEEK. >

Practical Technology

for practical people.