SJVN is not buying claims that the Microsoft antitrust consent decree has done its job. Of course, that’s his opinion. Personally, I think Vista may do what the consent decree couldn’t… but that’s just me.
VMware’s very own conference, VMworld, is being held this week in San Francisco. And the company has some big news, including an announcement that its VMware ESX Server 3i virtualization software will be embedded in servers from Dell, HP, IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, and other hardware vendors.
But Microsoft is never happy letting someone else get all the attention, so the company has created some news of its own, announcing that it will be previewing its own virtualization technology later this month, when it pushes the first release candidate for Windows Server 2008 out the door.
The Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the virtualization technology, code-named Veridian, is a trimmed-down version of Microsoft’s attempt at keeping up with the VMwares. And it won’t be a real product until at least six months after Windows Server 2008 ships — which, if Microsoft sticks to its latest roadmap, will be in February.
But wait, not enough? Microsoft also announced that the next version of its virtual machine management software, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007, will nice with VMware and Xen–when it is released sometime next year. The first beta will be released sometime in the first quarter of 2008.
So, really, there’s not much news there. But it’s the promise of news, and enough to at least momentarily distract some from all the VMware hype in the wake of the company’s IPO.
It seems every time Adobe updates something, it hoses my Mac. The other day, after installing the Flash Player 9 update, Flash ceased to work in any browser. I did uninstalls, re-installs, and all for naught.
Then I remembered what happened after the *last* major Flash update. I loaded up Mac OS X’s disk utility, and sure enough–the disk had become corrupted.
I’m not saying it’s Adobe’s (or the former Macromedia’s) fault that every time I get a Flash update, my hard drive needs to be repaired. I’m just saying it’s a hell of a coincidence.
Recently, the audio on Flash movies viewed in all web browsers stopped playing on my iMac. And apparently, I’m not the only one. Starting GarageBand fixes the issue temporarily, so I’ve ruled out the problem being exclusively an Adobe-created one; upgrading to Flash Player 9.0.2 didn’t change things.
In fact, initially, installing the update created more problems. I ended up having to run a disk repair utility because the volume information on my boot drive was mangled, and some permissions on Flash files got hosed.
First, Dave Winer coded NY Times River (and BBC River) to give Blackberry and Treo users a better way to get headlines. (I wish I could check them out from my mobile, but it’s a WAP phone, and the sites don’t display. What can I say–I’m a poor journalist.) And now, Dave has create a blogging tool for the Blackberry.
Nuts. I’m stuck with “moblogging” through Flickr with my webcam. And that doesn’t do very well with papercasting. I guess I gotta find a way to shake down some cash from the Internet tree and get me a Crackberry.
You can tell things are tough when all it takes is a Highway 101 billboard to elevate people’s adrenaline levels. And that, apparently, is what an Ubuntu Linux billboard has done.
From SJVN’s Linux-Watch:
The above billboard, and another just like it, were spotted by our roving reporter has he drove between Palo Alto and San Francisco on the 101 freeway earlier this week. We can’t help wondering: is it something in the water supply here in Silicon Valley? Or, is it the upcoming LinuxWorld conference that sets up shop in San Francisco next week?
Or, is it an indication that immense amounts of marketing crack are being done somewhere? Sure, Ubuntu is “increasingly popular” — for people who use Linux as a desktop. But that’s like saying that death is increasingly popular with the living — it’s a force of inevitability, given how awful most desktop Linux distros are, and how little most Linux players care about the desktop market.
There’s rampant speculation about whether Sun will announce that it is going to open-source Java at the upcoming JavaOne conference. With Scott “I’ll open-source Java when IBM open-sources DB2″ McNealy stepping aside, and John “what about the shareholders” Loiacono now safely ensconsed at Adobe, maybe this time Jonathan Schwartz will follow through all the way and release the reference implementation for Java Enterprise Edition under some form of open-source license, as Sun has done with Solaris. And who knows? Maybe Sun will do the same for Java Standard Edition and Java Mobile Edition.
There’s just one problem: open-sourcing Java won’t change anything at this point.
I’ve been beating the open-source-Java drum for a very long time. Seven years ago (back when some of the plankholders of the JCP were bitching about Sun’s grip on the process, and Sun was arguing that it didn’t want the IP corrupted), I suggested that Sun spin off the JCP as a nonprofit and retain the rights to the Java trademark for revenue-generating purposes–as sort of a half-step toward open-sourcing.
(Ironically, Sun did eventually spin off a nonprofit out of the Java community–except it was GELC, and not the JCP.)
But now that Sun seems close to actually going all the way, it’s almost moot. Open-sourcing Sun’s Java intellectual property won’t dramatically expand the reach of Java into the developer community on the middleware side–there are already open source Java Enterprise implementations that have paved the way. And with an Apache-licensed, J2EE-certified server already available, why would anyone use a CDDL-licensed Java server instead for development (aside from it being the ‘official’ reference version)?
Besides, Java Enterprise Edition has already won the war for a substantial chunk of enterprise architecture, and it did so in great part because of the success of JBoss and Tomcat as development environments (and Eclipse, and all of the other open-source tools built around the Java standard). On the other hand, Sun has been giving away its reference implementation for free
to developers for a while now. And despite a host of curiosity-inspired
downloads, Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition hasn’t
exactly won Sun much more market share in the enterprise application
server space.
On the desktop, there’s not much room for celebration either. Sure, an open-source Java Standard Edition could get bundled more tightly into Eclipse–if the licensing model allows it. But open-sourcing Java probably won’t increase acceptance of Java Standard Edition on Linux, because Sun will most likely veer away from a GNU-compatible licensing scheme. And with Loiacono’s new home making major inroads into the mobile space with Flash as a developer plaform for phones (and fragmentation of the Java Mobile code base) don’t exactly make an open-source JME any more attractive to the mobile developer community.
So, Sun won’t be giving anything up really. Except its royalties off Java certification. But there’s still an opportunity to derive revenue–perhaps a better opportunity than there is with Java’s current licensing scheme–to get trademark licensing and support licensing revenue. Sun wouldn’t necessarily lose any more control over the destiny of enterprise Java than it has already, between the Java Community Process and JBoss and Geronimo already available as open-source.
In effect, Sun has waited until there was nothing left to really lose by open-sourcing Java. As a result, the potential impact that the move could have had, say, three or four years ago has been squandered. With nothing to lose, there is also very little besides PR to gain–other than possibly hoisting off the cost of maintenance of future versions of Java onto the Java developer community.
I just recovered this server from a really hideous .htaccess failure. Since I’m hosting multiple domains on this one virtual server, I had constructed a whole bunch of .htaccess Rewrites to redirect requests to the proper subdirectories. During maintenance yesterday, the .htaccess file got corrupted, and my multidomain housr of cards fell flat–just before I had to leave the office to go visit my wife and son at sleep-away camp (a long story for a different blog).
I couldn’t figure out why the file had gone bad. On inspection, it looked intact; to be sure, I renamed the old file and saved a backup copy to the server in its place. No joy, the site was still sending everything to the root page. Fsk.
Tech support for my host, Powweb, was no help either. “We don’t support .htaccess,” they said. I said that the config had been working for literally years before the failure, and I thought that maybe there was a glitch in the server configuration or there was something wrong with the file system. They “elevated” the call — a fancy way of saying that they would eventually look at it.
So, rather than wait for them, I went back and beat on the server some more in an attempt to evict whatever demon had infested .htaccess. It took about 10 deletions and renames and reloads before I finally got a backup .htaccess file to take properly (or maybe someone rolled back a change they made in server configuration at my hosting company…I’ll never know). So at midnight tonight, I finally had everything where it should be. Sort of.
I was in San Francisco at JavaOne last week. It was great to see so many of the folks from my Java Pro days, and dive back down deep into the language (and the community) for a few days (and it didn’t hurt that I also had my wife and daughter along for some extracurricular activities).
But I skipped the big Wednesday night blowout that Sun threw for Java’s 10th birthday. Dennis Miller was on the bill, and I decided I’d rather spend the evening with Paula and Zoe than listen to some right-wing schmuck.
As it turns out, Miller managed to offend a fair portion of the audience–given that many of them were European, and his routine consisted largely of insulting foriegners. Simon went as far as to apologize on behalf of Sun.
It’s hard enough to find someone funny for these kinds of events (which Miller arguably is not) without the politics. But you’d have thought someone might have (a) done their homework on Miller’s content, or at least (b) briefed him on the demographics of his audience beforehand.
A month ago, as I was coming off a conversation about podcasting with a friend, I decided to do a little satire of the technology and created a new RSS-based media distribution technology: padcasting. I had an almost unused .Mac site that was begging to be used for something, and a mind for mischief.
As I continued the prank, I actually put some dev time into it, fiddling with the guts of Blosxom to leverage its static rendering features to automate the page generation for the “plog”. I substituted a set of scanned graphics for the usual text date headers, and *bing*, I had a completely (well, almost)scanned paper website.
What amazed me was that some people took it seriously. I had people writing me, asking questions like “what about accessibility?” and “what about search engines?” Well, duh. Those are the same problems facing podcasting and audio blogging. That was sort of the point in the exersise, no?
But then I found that I liked the format. I started playing with it some more. The great thing was that I was still getting traffic from Google–but only from people who were actually trying to find my site, not people who accidentally stumbled onto it from some stray keyword or some stupid trackback for all-nude Texas Holdem that I hadn’t deleted yet.
And I could do low-tech visual storytelling, still use hyperlinks within the content (which you *can’t* do in podcasting), and plog while totally disconnected and sync later without having to lug around a laptop or re-key.
Then these guys in Switzerland started to riff on the concept, and dedicated their site to me, “The Father of Papercasting”.
Maybe there’s something to this. Maybe it’s just a long-running April Fool’s gag gone awry. Either way, I’m sticking with it. I’m going to shift over to Pyblosxom so I can do some more automation…maybe I’ll even build a GUI.