Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 21, 2008
by sjvn01
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You can build your own Mac, but do you really want to?

Psystar claims it can make Mac clones for cheap. There’s reason to doubt however that anyone will ever actually own a Psystar $399 Open Computer running Mac OS X. Funny, though, as Jason Perlow points out in his ZDNet blog, it’s really not that much trouble to build a Hackintosh.

Perlow explains that “Well, along with legal copies of Mac OS X and a special EFI firmware emulator for PC BIOS-based equipment and instructions how to put it all together it doesn’t really require any more effort than what it would have typically taken a PC homebrewer to assemble their own DOS or Windows-based white box 10 or 15 years ago.”

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April 20, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Microsoft is telling you Vista’s DOA

They really are. Are you listening?

First it was Bill Gates , now it’s Steve Ballmer. In the latest example, Todd Bishop of SeattlePI reported from last week’s Microsoft MVP Summit that at the meeting’s keynote address that Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer called Vista “a work in progress.”

Vista? A work in progress? After more than five-years of development and over a year after its release? My goodness, Ballmer was actually being relatively honest about Windows. That was a red-letter day.
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April 18, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Jealousy? Novell, Red Hat, and the Linux Desktop

Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It’s not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They’re all doing great with consumer Linux desktops.

Novell actually isn’t taking an extreme position on the consumer Linux desktop. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian on April 15th in India, according to an InfoWorld report, simply said that the consumer market is taking longer to develop than the business market and that “The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related.”

OK, fair enough. I think the consumer Linux desktop is growing faster than he does, but he’s certainly right when he says that the Linux desktop is going to grow faster still in business. I mean, there must be some enterprises moving to Microsoft Vista, I just don’t happen to know of any.

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April 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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Will MySQL Keep Lighting up LAMP?

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business’ flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems’ senior vice president for databases, didn’t look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

The pro-Linux crowd of 200-plus were worried that now, with Sun in charge of MySQL, Sun’s focus would be on creating a SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software ecosystem instead of supporting the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack, which has enabled Linux to gain $21 billion worth of traction in the server market.

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April 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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Why there won’t be a Red Hat Consumer Linux Desktop

Last May, Red Hat announced that, with Intel, it would soon be releasing Red Hat Global Desktop, a consumer Linux desktop for emerging markets. But, then one delay followed another. Now, on April 16th 2008, Red Hat has announced that it has no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.”

What happened?

Officially, in its desktop group blog, Red Hat states “The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.”

Off-the-record, according to sources close to Red Hat and Intel, it’s a different story.

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April 17, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Shuttleworth starts countdown to Ubuntu 8.04 release

The next red-letter day for Ubuntu fans will be April 24, when Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support) arrives. Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, guarantees that the next version of the popular Linux distribution will make it on time, with something for enterprise, desktop, and Internet users.

In an interview, Shuttleworth made the point that, while many executives have yet to realize it, “Open source software projects and Linux distros are actually better than proprietary companies at hitting deadlines.” In particular, Shuttleworth says, “Companies are now comparing Linux with Vista, and it’s clear that’s Linux does a better job of meeting people’s expectations.

“When you look at people’s expectations, proprietary software gives the impression that its makers can deliver on time. It’s top-down, it’s how people think businesses should work, but bottom-up innovation actually is more timely. This is a real credit for free software, and it’s also a real challenge for the proprietary guys to meet.” Nowadays, it’s “very difficult to know when proprietary software and operating systems will be out.”

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