Athyrius

The Politics of MySpace

Kenneth Corbin — 2008-04-22T19:44:44-05:00

There's no mystery about it anymore -- the wisdom of Web 2.0 tells us that the modes of packaging news are changing. People, particularly those who flock around the social networks, increasingly expect to be able to interact with the people who deliver their news -- or any other type of information, for that matter.

So, across the board, traditional news outlets are integrating social features into their Web sites, and most have formulated a strategy to give them a branded presence on the major social networks. For some, that simply means a profile page; for others, it's a real content deal.

NBC News is rolling out its Decision 08 page on MySpace, offering links to the profile pages of luminaries such as Brian Williams, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. The section will also feature news blogs, RSS feeds delivering updated news items and other interactive features.

The deal is very similar to the one ABC News struck with Facebook last fall, before election fatigue set in for so many and they just stopped paying attention.

Of course, it is curious that News Corp would look outside the family for a news partner for its social media property. Cynically, perhaps, I would have expected a MySpace news partner to carry a Fox brand, but maybe the Fox News voice was determined not to be the best match for such a youthful community -- one smitten by the promise of change, hope and a wholesale overturning of the status quo that will never be.

Red Hat Ups Virtualization With AMD and HP

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-22T15:57:07-05:00

From the 'I can virtualize faster than you' files:

Red Hat has been partnering with chip vendors AMD and Intel for a long time. Every so often though Red Hat will announce something specific with one vendor (or the other) -- that's the case with the announcement today on a speed/functionality announcement with AMD's processors running on HP hardware with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Red Hat is announcing that users can, "...achieve significant performance gains by coupling new high-performance device drivers with the features provided by Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, available with HP ProLiant DL585 G5 servers."

The improvements are non-trivial. By taking advantage of AMD's silicon based Rapid Virtualization Indexing, the promise is that users will reduce the overall number of cycles required to enable virtualization.

The problem with virtualization has always been that it requires a certain degree of processor utilization which tends to impact performance such that often times virtualized application simply cannot perform at the same level as their non-virtualized counterparts.

The actual metrics reported by Red Hat show that in an OLTP (online transaction processing) environment test, with a 16-CPU system, there are considerable gains to be had. With a fully virtualized system running the Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature Red Hat reported a 21-fold performance gain over regular (non-Rapid) virtualization metrics.

"Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM," said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD in a statement. "We've been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away."

The problem though, in my simple layperson's opinion is that even though the AMD/HP/Red Hat metrics are significantly improved, they are still not at the same level as non-virtualized (that is native) environments. Red Hat reports that the AMD/HP/Red Hat solution, "...reached 77 percent of the performance of a non-virtualized environment on one of the industry's most difficult database OLTP workloads."

So in my opinion, while this is certainly a good piece of forward momentum news, for data centers with heavy OLTP workloads, the case for virtualization will still remain a utilization versus performance issue.

I would suspect given this massive leap forward, that others (be it IBM and/or Intel) will soon enough come out with their own tests that will continue to push Linux virtualization closer and closer to fully native performance levels.

Open Source SugarCRM Scores Big with BT

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-22T09:46:39-05:00

From the 'it's not what you know, it's who you know' files:

SugarCRM the open source customer relationship management (CRM) software platform provider announced today a very large reseller agreement with one of the world's largest telecom providers -- BT (formerly known as British Telecom).

BT will offer its customers SugarCRM's commerical offerings of Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise - either as an on-site deployment or over the web as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

"The combination of BT's incredible reach in the UK market and SugarCRM's industry-leading CRM solutions makes this a perfect partnership for the UK market," said John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM in a statement. "This alliance strengthens our global reach and further exhibits SugarCRM's momentum as a global provider of business applications."

The fact that BT is now offering SugarCRM to its customers doesn't automatically mean that they'll all magically now become users, but it does open up a massive new sales opportunity for the open source CRM.

It also potentially opens up a vast storehouse of innovation for the broader SugarCRM community as well.

Let me explain my rationale : SugarCRM (like MySQL) has a dual-source model with community and commercial offerings. While Sugar Professional and Enterprise are on the commercial side, they are both still based on the an open source core (and with SugarCRM 5.0 that core is GPLv3 licensed). As the demand and needs of BT's customer base for SugarCRM grow, I would hope (and expect) that there will be improvements to SugarCRM and those improvements will become manifest in the community core (and therefore benefit the community as a whole).

Certainly open source software on it own can generate users, but the reality of the modern IT marketplace is that you really need to have partners (like BT for SugarCRM) to really take off commercially.

The Power of the BlackBerry

jmottl — 2008-04-22T09:06:47-05:00

Research in Motion couldn't have asked for a better product endorsement than a research effort coming out of the Australian School of Business and Sydney University which claims that its popular email device, the BlackBerry, can increasingly "make or break a business."

Research authors Judi MacCormick and Kristine Dery spent time exploring how the smartphone device can help businesses achieve what a press release claims is the "newest Holy Grail" -- organizational ambidexterity, or OA for short.

The researchers define OA a company's ability to balance often conflicting internal and external demands at the same time as balancing the need for flexibility and control.

MacCormick reports businesses that successfully juggle multiple "climates," which includes involvement, adaptability, consistency and mission perform better.

In simple terms, multitasking pays off and can pay off big.

At least that's my interpretation, though given I have no formal business degree, I could be wrong.

But I don't think I am.

It seems that the way a BlackBerry is used can have a significant impact on boosting a company's weak areas such as market or employee focus.

Yet too much BlackBerry can be a bad thing. {This part of the research, I'm guessing, would not be welcome news to RIM}.

The researchers say connectivity can go sour -- especially when bosses expect employees to be as on-call 24x7.

"Positive climates of involvement and adaptability can quickly turn into over-involvement, addiction, and diffusion – where your sense of control becomes watered-down because you are in constant contact," states MacCormick in a press release.

But that doesn't mean IT or corporate leaders should ban BlackBerry use, warns MacCormick.

I'm definitely sure RIM would agree with that research consensus.

Hackers Take From Obama and Redirect to Hillary

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-21T16:32:42-05:00

Yes Cross Site Scripting (XSS) errors are all over the place. And YES they can affect very prominent web sites.

The discussion forum area on Barackobama.com is allegedly the victim of a XSS exploit that redirected comments from Obama's site to....HillaryClinton.com.

A hacker going by the alias of 'Mox' has claimed responsibility for the exploit. Mox argued that the Obama site was not 'hacked'.

It is because what I did was not hacking in the sense that I burrowed into some dusty served and changed the Obama site and stole all your credit card numbers. All I did was exploit some poorly written HTML code.

The application security vendors (Fortify, Coverity, Watchfire, Cenzic etc) will all likely have a field day with this one. Clearly as InternetNews.com and other technical trade outlets have been reporting for the last two years, XSS attacks are a serious issue. With a high profile public exploit of a presidential candidate now attributed to XSS, the notoriety (and popularity) of XSS will unfortunately likely grow even more.

Ubuntu's Misleading Hardy Heron (8.04) Release

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-21T10:22:42-05:00

From the 'you gotta read the fine print' files:

I track Ubuntu development reasonably closely, which is why I was surprised to see a release this AM titled," Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition Released." After all, according to the publicly available info I had on Friday, the release was set for an April 24th release.

Perhaps I was mistaken? Nope, that not the case. Ubuntu in my honest opinion has just put up a slightly misleading headline for its press release.

After you get pulled in by the headline -- (with the 'released' in it) - if you actually read the very first sentence of the release it states:

LONDON, April 21, 2008 Canonical Ltd. announced the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition for free download on Thursday 24 April. In related news, Canonical also announced the simultaneous release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition.

Aha! So it is a Thursday release! So if you see the press release (or some unfortunate mis-informed press story on it) and think that you can get the full GA version of Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 today...cool your heels for a few days until Thursday. There is however a release candidate that you can get today, but with a full version out in a few days, it's likely a smarter move just to wait.

Certainly Ubuntu isn't the only software vendor to pre-announce availability of software. However to state in a headline that something is released - when it's not - is not something that I think is a good thing.

Microsoft and Novell Bring Linux Deal To China

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-21T09:33:32-05:00

A year and a half after first announcing their landmark interoperability and patent protection deal, Novell and Microsoft are now targeting China.

In their release (which they sent out late Sunday night) the two partners called the new push, "an incremental investment in their relationship."

Essentially what they're doing is providing a focussed effort to China in the cities of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing to get CIOs to move to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) from other unsupported versions of Linux.

"We recognize that our customers want to use Microsoft products in heterogeneous environments, and therefore we are pleased to offer this option to meet customer needs in one of the leading global markets," said Ya-Qin Zang, Microsoft corporate vice president and chairman of Microsoft China in a statement. "We are very pleased with the initial response in the Chinese market to our joint offerings for IP peace of mind and technology interoperability in such areas as virtualization and high-performance computing."

Novell has been a leading Linux distribution in China for some time, and as far back as March of 2006 they were actually claiming to be THE leader. The Chinese market for Linux however is increasingly competitive with offerings from TurboLinux, Red Hat and Asianux all competing for a slice of the world's fastest growing economy.

Whether or not a joint Microsoft/Novell push will help or hinder Novell (and Linux in general) remains to be seen. That said, in my honest opinion it seems unlikely that the additional effort with Microsoft could be anything but a good thing for Novell's prospects in China.

New Microsoft Security Alert

Andy Patrizio — 2008-04-19T02:57:46-05:00

Microsoft has issued a rare security alert, something it usually doesn't do because then that tells the bad guys where to go look for an exploit. That usually means it's pretty severe.

The problem relates to a vulnerability that could give an unauthorized user access to LocalSystem, a user account not normally accessible by Windows users, as it has extensive privileges within the operating system and access to pretty much the entire system.

This affects Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 and all supported versions and editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008. Customers who allow user-provided code to run in an authenticated context, such as within Internet Information Services (IIS) and SQL Server, should review this advisory, since it contains workarounds.

Microsoft may issue an out-of-band patch if the problem is serious enough, or it will hold off until the next Patch Tuesday, which would be May 13.

Fedora 9 : Good News. Bad News.

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-18T09:24:22-05:00

First the good news. Fedora 9 Preview is now out -- woohoo!

The bad news? Well since Fedora 9 Preview is out a little late, Red Hat has now pushed back the official release date of Fedora 9 by two weeks. The original release date for Fedora 9 was set for April 29th, the new date is now May 13th.

According to Fedora Release Manager Jesse Keating:

The Preview Release is where we expect to catch all manner of last-minute bugs, do very heavy QA, and otherwise perform all the final spit-and-polish. There needs to be sufficient time between the PR and the release for testers to find and report issues.

In the grand scheme of things, two weeks isn't really a big deal at all. Especially since the extra two weeks are really all about testing. Fedora 9 is an important release for both Red Hat and the Fedora community in that it will introduce several new innovations to the Linux distribution.

Key among those innovations is FreeIPA, which is a tool for system administrators to install, set up and administer centralized identity management and authentication. The new PackageKit system that I wrote about at the time of the Fedora 9 Beta last month is also very interesting.Fedora 9 will also be the first Fedora release that will provide full support for the KDE 4 Linux desktop.

Fedora currently claims that there are now 2 million unique installations of Fedora 8 which was released back in November of 2007.

Innovation of Many Stripes

Kenneth Corbin — 2008-04-17T19:41:55-05:00

We all love lists, right? They're a quick read. Nice and digestible. Quick flashpoints that make for marvelous conversation fodder, if not much else.

So here's this from over the transom, courtesy of BusinessWeek. For the last four years, the publication has offered a listing of the world's most innovative companies. Returning to the apex of the list are two of the ones we here write about with metronomic regularity. That seems a fair reward for pretty well reinventing their industries and making a mint doing it.

The whole list is heavy on tech companies. Check out Microsoft at No. 5, Amazon at No. 11, and __ at No. 25?

1 Apple
2 Google
3 Toyota Motor
4 General Electr
5 Microsoft
6 Tata Group
7 Nintendo
8 Procter & Gamble
9 Sony
10 Nokia
11 Amazon.com
12 IBM
13 Research in Motion
14 BMW
15 Hewlett-Packard
16 Honda Motor
17 Walt Disney
18 General Motors
19 Reliance Industries
20 Boeing
21 Goldman Sachs
22 3M
23 Wal-Mart
24 Target
25 Facebook

Wow. In the world! Well, nicely done Facebook. No top-25 love for Yahoo, MySpace, alas.

And how about stodgy old IBM, checking in at No. 12. Maybe they're onto something with this whole "Enterprise 2.0" press, after all.

What's going on with the Red Hat Linux Desktop?

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-17T12:44:09-05:00

From the 'apparently it's not the year of the Linux desktop' files:

For years, we've heard various vendors and pundits proclaim, ' the year of the Linux Desktop' . Linux leader, Red Hat however isn't proclaiming 2008 to be the year of the Linux Desktop, in fact they're being very forthright about the difficult prospects that the Linux Desktop faces.

In a very blunt blog post Red Hat noted:

We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

The post notes that Red Hat is a publicly traded for profit company and that making money with desktops is harder to do than with servers. That said Red Hat did indicate that they are NOT abandoning the Linux Desktop all together. Red Hat still plans on working on the Red Hat Enterprise Desktop (which first debuted in 2004), as well as Fedora (which runs multiple desktops including KDE and GNOME).

Work is also still ongoing with the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD) which has been somewhat delayed. RHGD is supposed to be a smaller Linux Desktop for emerging market deployments.

So why isn't Red Hat going after the consumer market? The answer is really simple. They don't want to get killed by Microsoft.

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.

Being a curious journalist, I contacted Red Hat to see if I could get any additional insight, but unfortunately I was denied.

"At this point we are not granting any interviews on this topic, just pointing folks to the blog," a Red Hat spokesperson told InternetNews.com.

Considering that Red Hat is literally giving away a very viable Linux Desktop today for free -- with Fedora, I'm not at all worried or surprised by Red Hat's desktop disclosure. The technology is there today for those that have the willingness to experiment and tinker. Providing support to millions of end-users, at what would likely be very low margins is undeniably a tough business. Ubuntu is kinda/sorta trying to do it with Dell today and it still remains to be seen how successful that effort actually will be over the long haul.

In the new era of Software as a Service and Cloud Computing though, the need for an actual desktop -- beyond just a web browser -- is also becoming increasingly limited.

Mozilla Updates Firefox 2.0.0.14 for Garbage Collection

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-17T09:13:15-05:00

Barely three weeks after its last update, the Mozilla Firefox 2.x browser is again being patched for a security issue. Firefox 2.0.0.14 fixes a single issue that is a result of a fix that Mozilla made in the Firefox 2.0.0.13 release.

The fix for 'Crash in JavaScript garbage collector' MFSA 2008-15 that Mozilla fixed with Firefox 2.0.0.13 is the culprit.

Mozilla explains in its advisory that the fix, introduced a stability problem:

This is being fixed primarily to address stability concerns. We have no demonstration that this particular crash is exploitable but are issuing this advisory because some crashes of this type have been shown to be exploitable in the past.

Memory Production to be Cut (Finally)

Andy Patrizio — 2008-04-16T14:13:33-05:00

Basic economics tells you that when there is an oversupply of something, you cut back on production.

It took memory manufacturers a little while to figure that out, but at least they did figure it out.

Gartner estimates that worldwide capital spending on semiconductor equipment in 2008 will be $47.5 billion, a 19.8 percent decline from 2007. Memory-related capital equipment would see a 29 percent reduction and DRAM in particular would drop by 47 percent.

Gartner cited a weakening in the U.S. economy and oversupply as the reasons for the cut in spending. “The expected bursting of the DRAM capital spending bubble has finally happened, as rampant overcapacity in that sector drove unit prices well below cash costs for most manufacturers,” said Klaus Rinnen, managing vice president for Gartner’s semiconductor manufacturing group.

Rinnen noted that the memory market spent more than 57 percent of total revenue on capital expansion, “a level which cannot be supported by the anticipated lackluster revenue growth.”

Much as I love seeing 2GB of memory at Fry’s for $50, they really needed to smarten up on pricing.

Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion?

Sean Kerner — 2008-04-16T09:59:45-05:00

Talk about FUD. I came across a release this AM titled, "Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion," New Standish Group International Study Finds".

This 'research' firm claims in its release that they've spent 5 years studying the Open Source market (funny since in the last five years I've never heard of the Standish Group). After all that 'research' they've come to a big conclusion and one that is obviously very debatable.

"Open Source software is raising havoc throughout the software market. It is the ultimate in disruptive technology, and while to it is only 6% of estimated trillion dollars IT budgeted annually, it represents a real loss of $60 billion in annual revenues to software companies," said Jim Johnson, Chairman, The Standish Group International, Boston, MA in a statement.

Unfortunately I don't have a full copy of their research, so I'm unable to comment on their methodology. But to make an outlandish statement saying that open source represents such a dramatic loss in revenues is -- to say the least - inflammatory.

According to IDC (which in my opinion has perhaps the most accurate stats on the issue so far), $21 billion in revenues came from the Linux ecosystem in 2007 alone. That's only Linux (and Open Source is more than just Linux) and that's only 2007.

What would make for an interesting study though, is a full study on how much open source in total has contributed to growing software revenues (considering that nearly every major software vendor uses open source software in some way shape or form). Open Source certainly represents a threat to proprietary closed software vendors, but it also represents an opportunity for them and for the entire software market as a whole.

The Mac Clone That Wasn't

Andy Patrizio — 2008-04-15T20:16:39-05:00

(Update: 4/18)

It's amazing how quickly things change these days, thanks to the Internet, and more important, just how dogged some blogging sites have become.

A Florida company called Psystar created a stir on the Internet with its PC white box that runs Mac OS X. It was selling the $399 mini tower under the name Open Computing and OpenPro. I had figured the company would be obliterated by Apple, but now it seems Apple won't have to lift a finger thanks to some dogged bloggers.

The ensuing flood of customers willing to fork over credit card information to an unknown company skirting the law is alarming, but apparently the company was so inundated it was briefly knocked off line. Its payment processor cut it off, citing the company's questionable legal standing.

First, the company's address seemed to change daily, as noted by the UK newspaper The Guardian. Then some people from Gizmodo actually went to an address for Psystar and found that it wasn't there, and the business at the address had no idea what Psystar was.

Seriously, if you want a Hackintosh PC, it's very easy to do on your own. Build a computer and get a copy of Leopard and a few utilities off the Internet and you're golden. You can find plenty of information with a basic Google search.