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Putting those micro-slaves to work
Japanese researchers have created a first bacteria powered micromotor.
The device is essentially a minuscule (20 micrometres, about one fifth of a human hair) version of a horse mill. The bacteria are locked up in a grove and surrounded by proteins that make them all move in the same direction. This forces them to push against one of six feet sticking into the grove, which is attached to a larger circular device.
Don't expect these bacteria to power your vehicle just yet. The current prototype does about 2 rotations per minute, which is still pretty fast given the bacteria's microscopic size.
On the video below you can see the engine in motion. Shot from the top, The green line is the groove in which the bacteria make their rounds. The flower-shaped device is what lies on top of the groove with the feet sticking out from underneat.
August 31, 2006 at 07:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Human resources Radioshack style
Nothing says "we appreciate the efforts of our employees" like a mass email informing them that they've been laid off.
That's what electronics store Radioshack did when it decided to lay off 400 workers at its corporate headquarters in Forth Worth, TX.
radIn all fairness, the retailer had previously said that it was looking to cut costs and drive up efficiency. Printing letters, sitting down with employees and showing human emotions is highly inefficient.
Many consumers meanwhile have found out the hard way that the Radioshack stores are highly inefficient, selling overpriced goods and plagued by an ignorant sales staff of bored high school students. But instead of voting with my feet, perhaps I should send the company an email?
technorati tags: radioshack, lay-offs, HR
August 31, 2006 at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Belgium goofs up on electronic passport, embeds chip in the wrong ID card
The manufacturer of the Belgium electronic identification cards Zetes has goofed up, embedding the wrong chip in it least two of the cards.
The error was discovered when 25-year-old Pam Helssen tried to check into a camping site in Spain, where she was told that: "According to your card, you're a boy," she was quoted saying in the Gazet van Antwerpen.
The information on the chip belongs to a Wesley Meynendonck, who was born in the same year and lives in the same village. His ID card has a chip with Helssen's information on it.
Local authorities claim that there are checks in place to prevent errors like this one, but those obviously have failed. It shows that even though technology can be perfect, humans will always make mistakes.
technorati tags: rfid, belgium, passport, ID+card
August 31, 2006 at 05:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Reading into Eric Schmidt's Apple board position
Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining Apple couldn't be merely about a smart guy taking on a board position for a company looking for input from smart guys (which is in essence what the board of directors is all about).
No, something bigger must be going on. Why? Because the world must have something to write about!
Other Apple directors include former vice president Al Gore, Intuit chief executive Bill Campbell, biotech powerhouse Genentech's Arthur Levinson and J Crew's Millard Drexler.
Yet nobody is speculating that Al Gore's position indicates that Steve Jobs is running for president. Intuit got big making book keeping software, but where are the rumours about the Apple Books application? J Crew must signal Apple's Steve Jobs clothing line of turtlenecks and blue jeans. And let's not even get into the obivousness of Genentech helping Jobs to clone himself.
But when Google's Eric Schmidt joins Apple, the iPod maker is suddenly contemplating a merger with Sun Microsystems (wait, wasn't Google supposed to buy Sun?).
Google has expertise in online applications, and Apple's internet strategy has holes big enough to fit a freight liner. So if you're going to speculate, at least mention something like a Mac that comes preloaded with Google's hosted applications (eventhough preloading online applications is contradictionary).
Or dust of the old checkerboard theory: everybody hates their neighbour (competitor), so my neighbour's neighbour is my friend. In other works: let's all hate Microsoft.
Enough already! It's much more obvious than everybody thinks.
technorati tags: apple, google, eric+schmidt, schmidt, director, board+of+directors
August 31, 2006 at 01:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Red Hat explores Oracle's Linux aspirations
Red Hat executive and Jboss founder Marc Fleury is taking a closer look at Oracle's plans to launch an Oracle Linux version, and argues that it will be an uphill battle either way.
Oracle's Larry Ellison floated the idea in an interview with the Financial Times in April.
"I would like to have a complete stack," he said. "We are missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux."
The company later adjusted its rhetoric to argue that it could start offering support for the Red Hat Linux distribution.
Fleury quickly points out that the latter doesn't make any sense. Rather than buying a software box, enterprises purchase a Red Hat subscription that provides them access to the software, updates and support.
Given that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is available under the GPL license, Oracle could compile the code and sell it as Oracle Linux. But that still doesn't take care of the updates. And third party applications won't be certified for Oracle Linux, even if the code is 99.999 percent identical.
The problems are largely the same if Oracle would choose to build an Oracle Linux from the ground up, Fleury argued: the suite would suffer from limited third party certification and a lack of large engineering investments.
Fleury isn't only proven wrong by the rise of Ubuntu as a major Linux distribution, he also fails to address the reasons for Oralce to create its own Linux.
Controlling the full stack from operating system to end user application would allow Oracle to create a tightly integrated collection of applications that is also referred to as a software appliance.
Essentially it's the difference bewteen creating a home stereo set by buying separate components or getting one of those nifty integrated sets: it has fewer buttons and fewer needless features and cables. The majority of the users are perfectly happy with an appliance.
Oracle contender Ingres unveiled such a database appliance at Linuxworld earlier this month. Getting rid of all the unused Linux features allowed the company to strip down Linux to 20-30 per cent of its original size.
Ingres is relying on rPath/ to build its appliance. Oracle could ask Red Hat to create such an appliance, as Fleury suggests, but why bother? Oracle is big enough to create one itself and ensure the optimal level of integration.
technorati tags: red+hat, jboss, marc+fleury, fleury, oracle, linux, ingres, rpath
August 30, 2006 at 08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
HP chief Mark Hurd goes on a customer safari
Who hasn't strolled into a store or shopping mall on a weekend shopping spree only to run into some company promotion team? Add some freebies to the mix and you have a guaranteed, although small scale, marketing success.
Except that a HP promotion at a Best Buy store last weekend in San Jose didn't feature some marketing type, but no other than the company's media shy chief executive Mark Hurd.
The visit was part of a regular "meet the engineer" kind of thing where HP employees volunteer to visit retail stores on weekends and talk about the technology that they create.
It shows the human face behind the corporate logo, allows HP workers to stay in touch with their customers and the store gets some free promotion. It could come straight from the marketing best practices handbook.
Mark Hurd had insisted that he too would like to meet some customers in the wild. And so it happened that unsuspecting Best Buy shoppers looking for free goodies were greeted by the HP boss last Saturday.
Hurd explains why you're a nobody on Myspace if you don't have a HP digital camera.
technorati tags: hp, mark+hurd, hurd, best+buy, marketing
August 30, 2006 at 01:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
iPod sweatshop hits back at reporters
Original equipment manufacturer Foxconn has frozen the assets of two reporters who broke the story of the deplorable working conditions in its factories.
Writing for the China Business News, the duo in June published a report about the harsh working conditions at the plant. Workers were paid less than $50 a month and had to work 60-hour weeks including Saturdays on a structural basis.
Apple investigated and found that the company violated its supplier code of conduct. Although claims that workers were underpaid were prove wrong, the company was found to engage in objectionable disciplinary punishment, allowed employees to work excessive over time and had an "unnecessarily complex" pay structure.
Foxconn however wasn’t happy. It publicly lashed out against the complaints, charging that its employees simply love to work overtime. But apparently it felt that a PR campaign itself wasn't enough.
The manufacturer now has gone after the two reporters' personal assets, demanding $3.8m in damages. In China's modern legal society, it's rather common that companies file lawsuits against publications, but it's rare for these suits to be filed against individual reporters.
Perhaps its time for Apple to intervene once again and explain Foxconn how to be a good corporate citizen instead of a furious capitalist.
Workers on a leisurely stroll on the Foxconn roof. It just looks like a military style drill.
technorati tags: ipod, foxconn, sweatshop, apple
August 29, 2006 at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
AOL ventures on the Zango route
When internet provider America Online said that it would start offering free services in an effort to increase its advertising revenue, few people would have guessed that the provider take it as far as they have done.
The Stopbadware.org initiative on Sunday issued a harsh warning against the website, claiming that the software acts as 'badware'.
Badware really is a politically correct term for malware or spyware. It's just that most badware makers don't want to be called malware or spyware and sue anybody who does (Zango maker 180solutions comes to mind).
In AOL's case, the software installs items without the user's authorization, it contacts AOL's servers without the user's knowledge and it fails to fully uninstall. There's no excuse for any of that.
AOL doesn't steal confidential information or do any of the horrible things that Zango is known for. And Sunday's warning should prevent the provider from wanting to take this any further.
Mission accomplished.
technorati tags: zango, 180solutions, aol, badware, stopbadware.org, malware, spyware
August 29, 2006 at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Welcome to the Google police state
Most democracies are based on solid principles to proect its citizens against bureaucracy and baseless legal claims, but don't bother looking for those at Google.
The online search provider last week decided to remove one of our videos. In an email, the provider said:
Google was notified that your video "Cisco on telepresence" allegedly violates the copyright of others. According to our policy regarding copyright complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), we are removing the video in question.
You can find the offending video below (on Yahoo! Video). It features Cisco chief executive John Chambers discussing telepresence at meeting with reporters last June. We're utterly clueless as to the kind of copyrights this video violates... perhaps we weren't allowed to include the image of the plant in the background?
But the worst part isn't even that Google gets to act as judge, jury and executioner. It's the fact that it will act on seemingly anonymous claims and that it won't identify the person filing the complaint. But in the Google police state, I guess that we should be happy that at least we get to hear the charges, however baseless and frivolous they are.
We've protested the removal of the video and requested that Google disclose the identity of our accuser. I'll keep you posted.
technorati tags: google, video, copyright, DMCA, cisco, telepresence
August 29, 2006 at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Really, it's 2B1. Or how the OLPC naming nightmare illustrates the flaws of the blogging echo chamber
The One Laptop per Child project has settled on "2B1" as its launch name. Pronounced as 'To be one', the name refers to the project's goal of uniting children through technology, Walter Bender, president of the OLPC's software and content programme.
The change comes only weeks after the name "Children's Machine 1" started circulating in an Aljazeera.net reports.
The initial story failed to explain the origin of the CM1 name. But because the name is now publicly used, Bender on 17 August published a page which refers to the device as the Children's Machine 1 (CM1).
In a classical case of information getting malformed in the blogosphere, the Aljazeera story was picked up by the One Laptop per Child News blog. Last Friday it spread to Arstechnica which incorrectly states that the OLPC has "announced" the CM1 name. The Arstechnica copy advances to Slashdot.
The fact is that CM1 is an internal code name, Bender told us in an email. It refers to the B-Test units that will be shipped to prospective buyers this fall and was never intended for public use.
Looking to clarify the name changes, Bender over the weekend decided to unveil the "2B1" name on the
The OLPC News blog further added to the confusion, baselessly claiming that the CM1 name has been retired – and Engadget runs its blogging Xerox without bothering to check the information.
The OLPC project certainly could have done a better job at explaining its naming changes. But a lack of information is no excuse for baseless speculation.
Or to make a long story really short:
The OLPC project is using the CM1 moniker as an internal code name. The final units will likely be launched as 2B1.
Was that so hard?
technorati tags: $100laptop, olpc, 2b1, CM1,
August 28, 2006 at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Online video is broken
I was looking at Jonathan Schwartz's blog just now and was surprised and pleased to see a familiar video there: the Sun chief executive embedded the video that we produced of the Sun Fire X4500 (which we made available on YouTube, Yahoo and Google Video).
If you're a regular visitor to this blog, you know that we've produced and published several dozens of videos over the past months.
Our (exclusive) video of the first working One Laptop per Child prototype has attracted over 100,000 viewers so far. Another success story is a video that we produced at the recent McAfee Avert Labs demonstrating how a Windows system got infected by a fly-by download.
Youtube and Google Video have been great in helping us find an audience for our videos. But as new and better video services continue to emerge, it becomes ever more obvious that something is inherently wrong with online video.
Each service is building a walled garden where users upload their content. You are able to share the content by embedding a Youtube video onto your website, but you can't use Google to find Youtube content, let alone Web1.0 videos that publishers have locked up inside their websites.
All these video services are taking an upside-down approach to search: they'll search any content, as long users submit it to their servers. Online search always has been the other way around, with engines spidering websites for fresh content.
I don't upload this blog posting to Google or Technorati. Instead I can patiently wait for their spiders to come by, or ping them to indicate that new content is available. Why should online video be any different?
The technical answer would be that Google has no way to index content outside its walls. It relies on the text description that user provide when they upload the content. But surely we must be able to come up with a simple tag that the publisher (me) to provide search engines with information about the video?
Most webservers also won't be able to handle a massively successful video. Some Youtube videos attract 100,000s of viewers. Such traffic will crash the average server and run your bandwidth bill through the roof. Even youtube can't handle it all the time: the service is down right now.
Professional publishers will be able to overcome these problems, and hosting services such as Google's and Youtube's are a great solution for bloggers. But it's no excuse for building a walled garden.
The current uploading model is creating a video monopoly where everybody is forced to upload to one or two services, simply because they have all the traffic.
It creates a situation similar to the Ebay monopoly: everybody lists their goods on Ebay because that's where the buyers are. And buyers flock to the site because that's where all the goods are offered for sale. It's nearly impossible to break that cycle and allows Ebay to raise their fees at will.
Youtube is building a nice little monopoly. It could allow the company at some point to insert commercials into our content or charge a fee for the privilege of reaching its massive user base.
Are we willing to let that happen?
As seen on Youtube and Jonathan's blog ;-)
technorati tags: youtube, video, google, monopoly, ebay
August 26, 2006 at 03:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Office video that Microsoft doesn't want you to see
When Microsoft UK hired actor Ricky Gervais to feature in internal training videos, the company never realized that people outside the company could be interested.
It didn't take long for the videos to end up on Youtube and Google Video. The video talks about corporate values and integrity. As important as that may be, it's boring as hell and you need a comedian like Brent to make it slightly palatable.
Gervais stars as David Brent, the (obnoxious) boss in the UK version of "The Office", upon which the US edition is based (PBS has been broadcasting the UK edition it in the US lately). The sitcom is a rare example of a character comedy, exploring what could happen if you allow a group of characters to collide in an office situation.
But Microsoft apparently doesn't want the rest of the world to find out that it values women in the work space and honesty. The company lawyers ordered Youtube to remove the video. Until then, you can still watch it on Google. Until Microsoft discovers Google.
Part one:
Part two:
technorati tags: google, video, youtube, micorosft, office, david+brent, brent, Ricky gervais, gervais
August 25, 2006 at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Domain leeches: grab your dictionaries
Some prime online real estate has just hit the market: Aland's .ax internet domain went live earlier this month.
You're too late for rel.ax, anthr.ax or thor.ax, courtesy of local resident Jonas Holmström. But there surely must be additional words ending in .ax in the dictionary. You might not get the $350m that Michael Robertson got for mp3.com back in 2001 (mp3.ax might still be available, by the way), but there must be some internet gold available on these desolate islands.
Minor detail: you have to somehow exist on the island, be it as a business or not-for-profit organisation or resident. You also aren't supposed to register trademarks (google.ax, anyone?) or names of individuals other than your own.
But those are battles for the courts later one. This web2.0 goldrush is getting boring. Time to start an .ax one.
Some of Aland's 6,500 picturesque islands
technorati tags: aland, ccTLC, domain
August 25, 2006 at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Digg elite forcing out outsiders
Digg is falling victim to its own success, blogger Jason Dowdell charges.
Now that the social news site is using "karma scores" to rank stories in addition to plain Digg votes, the service has given rise to a small elite of users who determine which stories make it to the front page.
Invisible from end users, karma scoring is designed to prevent spammers from creating a set of new accounts to push stories to the front page. Instead of merely counting votes (or diggs), each has an invisible karma score. Digg doesn't say much about the karma score's underlying algorithms, but in general you can assume that high scores are awarded to users with a lot of front page diggs and who vote along the same lines of the average user.
The important thing to remember is: the higher the karma score, the more weight a vote carries.
But the system has been taken too far. Is has become practically impossible for a regular user to have his submission end up on the front page, Dowdell charges. Instead of questioning his headline writing skills, he went looking for a conspiracy - and found one: Top diggers have teamed up to create a Digg monopoly
"After contacting a few of the prominent "Diggers" in the sports section (who asked to remain nameless), I asked them all the same question on how their stories always get "dugg" and I was taken aback by the answers. These "diggers" all have some sort of advanced notification system, from email list servs, message board, and even IM bots to notify their digging network.
I guess it could be true, but the evidence at is point is weak. Digg's defence always has been that there simply is a group of power users who waste hourse digging and submitting stories. It also contends that the viral nature of the service makes that some times things happen that might not make any sense.
It's easy to spot conspiracy theories. But we'll need some real evidence beyond anonymous elite diggers.
Is the Digg elite having all the fun?
technorati tags: digg, netscape, manipulation
August 24, 2006 at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Expatriates put Dubai's VoIP ban to the test
Expatriates in Dubai have started an online petition, attempting to get local authorities to lift a ban on VoIP services. As of now it has been signed by 1,435 upset residents.
Dubai's local telecommunications monopolist Etisalat last week started blocking all traffic on the UDP port, which is used for Voice over IP traffic by instant messaging applications and VoIP services like Vonage.
In a less subtle move, access to the Skype.com website has been completely blocked, preventing users from downloading the peer to peer messaging client. Blocking Skype traffic is hard to do because of its peer to peer architecture.
Dubai might not be the first region where a local telecommunications monopolist is blocking VoIP traffic, but the measure is raising some serious questions over the nation's aspirations to becoming a regional IT hotbed.
Special "free zones" have been created where residents face less restrictions in their internet access. They are part of a bigger plan to attract foreign programming talent. Expatriates have gratefully used it to stay in touch with friends and family in cooler parts of the world without paying monopolistic phone prices.
The VoIP blocking illustrates that Dubai's commitments to free online innovation only applies when it doesn't threaten the powers that be.
Many regions in the world have tried to copy Silicon Valley's success, but most are merely paying lip service and are scared away by the consequences of truly open innovation.
Modern technology clashes with Dubai's harsh environment
technorati tags: skype, voip, net+neutrality, messenger, vonage, dubai,
August 23, 2006 at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Aussies having fun with the flaming Dell laptops
technorati tags: dell, laptop, battery, recall
August 23, 2006 at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Is there a case for search regulation?
About 500,000 small businesses in North America rely on Google searchers for the bulk of their online traffic. Another half million spends money to advertise on the website, according to John Battelle.
The ability to be found on Google can simply make or break a company, and has forced desperate site operators like Kinderstart.com to resort to legal action.
The judge in the kinderstart case ruled that the site had no constitutional right to be found through Google or any other commercial search engine. But could it once be, now that Google's economic importance keeps growing?
Fortune Small Business lined up some ruined online entrepreneurs who lost revenues after Google demoted their sites in its search results: the myrateplan.com service lost 20 per cent of its revenues because of Google.
But opposite to those cases are companies like Sharkdiver.com, which build its shark diving travel agency entirely through Google ads, and is now achieving $1m in annual revenues.
Selling wild flower seeds, Americanmeadows.com was able to slash its marketing budget. Ten years ago the company spent $300,000 per year on print advertising. Moving to online ads allowed it to shave off $180,000 each year.
All the whining entrepreneurs look a lot like inn keepers on country roads resisting the construction of highways. Any business that relies on a single source of revenue is setting itself up for disaster.
For that matter, Google had better watch out itself: more than 95 per cent of its revenues come from online advertising.
technorati tags: google, online, search, advertising
August 23, 2006 at 08:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Maintaining momentum in the tech revolution
Ingres' chief technology Officer Dave Dargo is charging that Oracle has lost "it". As the company matured, it turned from an innovator into a "lord of its manor".
The database and enterprise software maker is no longer marches on new markets. Instead it's focussing on protecting its existing business. You can see the same happening in their SOA suite, as we described yesterday, where the technology is used to wage a market share battle instead of brining innovation.
Dargo has a personal reason to gripe: he has worked for Oracle for 15 years, retired in 2004 and last year joined the open source database vendor Ingres. Now he's staging an attack on Oracle's database fortress, questioning the company's strategy and commitment to its customers. It begs the question: "If Oracle is such a horrible vendor, why did you work there for 15 years?"
His answer:
"I want to be a revolutionary. I want to be part of something that is promoting new ideas and change and helping the industry see better ways of doing things. I’ve always sought change and new ideas. That’s why I joined Oracle in 1989. That’s also the reason I joined Ingres in 2005.
But what will keep Ingres from becoming an entrenched database vendor once it turns into a billion dollar public company.
Wall Street tends to suck the innovation out of innovators. Investors demand a steady stream of revenue increases, forcing enterprises to focus on safe bets rather than big bets. Few companies have been able to marry the two. GE comes to mind, and so far Cisco Systems is at least attempting to.
That's why there is a multi billion dollar market for start-up companies. It's also why Microsoft had to acquire Ray Ozzie's Groove Networks to find a decent replacement for Bill Gates.
technorati tags: ingres, oracle, database, sap, dargo, dave+darge, open+source, innovation
August 23, 2006 at 07:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Sun marches on server market
Sun Microsystems had retaken the third place in the server market, bumping back Dell.
According to the latest market share data from IDC, Sun increased its server sales by 15.5 per cent. No bad for a company that has been declared obsolete for the past five years, especially if you realise that both first place ranked IBM, HP in second place and Dell saw their server sales drop in a growing overall market.
AMD too has plenty reasons to celebrate. The chipmaker powered 20.2 per cent of all x86 servers shipped in the last quarter.
Intel's Itanium meanwhile brought in paltry $740m (6 per cent of the overall serer market), most of which went to HP. Although Itanium sales are increasing (last quarter by 36.4 per cent), the chip architecture continues to look like a dead end street.
Sun Microsystem's Andy Bechtolsheim demonstrates the company's Sun Fire 8000 blade server
technorati tags: dell, sun, idc, market+share, server, x86, ibm, hp, itanium
August 23, 2006 at 06:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Gmail adds integrated mp3 player
Google has started offering users of its Gmail service to play mp3 files that are sent as an email attachment directly from the browser.
Short term this is a great application for office workers whose IT department won't allow the installation of music players.
If I may speculate on the long term implications, this kind of application further illustrates Google's strategy of delivering all software as a service. Once Google launches its Gstore online storage service, users will be able to upload their entire music collection and play them through a widget in the sidebar for Google Desktop, or through the browser based player.
The same goes for word documents (Google opened its Writely online text editor to new sign-ups just days ago) and the online spreadsheet that was launched last June.
Gmail and Gstore will conveniently direct users to Google's applications and in the process undercut Microsoft's lucrative Office business.
Who needs Windows Vista in such a world?
technorati tags: google, mp3, player, gmail, microsoft, office, writely, spreadsheet, SaS,
August 23, 2006 at 05:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Oracle turns SOA into SAP competition game
Oracle has bundled its middleware applications into a single Oracle SOA Suite 10g Release 3. It was released as a developer preview last week and will be launched some time this fall.
But if you know a thing or two about service oriented architectures (SOAs), you should be extremely puzzled by Oracle's decision to create a bundle.
SOAs are about turning applications into Lego blocks that can be stacked randomly and reused throughout the enterprise (and beyond). That also means that enterprises will be able to pick middleware components from any webservices compliant vendor or open source project.
Although Oracle says that it's shipping a house build from Lego blocks, it has already put them together and glued them in place. You can pry them loose with a knife, but why would you bother if you already paid for it?
Oracle isn't looking to abandon open standards, but its focusing its attention on its premier competitor: SAP. The latter is offering its Netweaver platform as its SOA-flavoured solution, and Oracle wants to make sure that it's as easy as possible to compare the two, Zapthink senior analyst Jason Bloomberg explained to vnunet.com.
The suite might cause Oracle to lose its battle against IBM and BEA, but it will beat Netweaver hands down. Right now that's what matters.
technorati tags: oracle, sap, netweaver, fusion, SOA, middleware
August 23, 2006 at 01:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Apple bails out of Paris Mac Expo
Macworld Paris in September will go without a keynote by Steve Jobs, or any other Apple executive for that matter.
Conspiracy theorists charge that Apple is upset with the pending digital content legislation, which will upset Apple's comfortable hold on the iTunes music store in combination with the iPod.
Apple certainly is known for pulling its support from industry events for seemingly trivial reasons. The company for instance abandoned the East coast MacWorld show when the show's organizer IDG decided to move it from New York to Boston. The East Coast event was cancelled altogether after a lacklustre 2005 edition.
If you're open for even crazier speculations, there are some persistent rumours that suggest that Steve Jobs isn't 100 per cent healthy.
The executive's presentation at the World Wide Developers Conference earlier this month was sub par. Jobs is known for knowing his presentations by hearth, yet this year he was obviously reading off prepared notes. He also relied on fellow executives much more than in the past.
But all this is mere speculation and is only slightly better founded than the average Thinksecret scoop.
technorati tags: apple, mac+expo, steve+jobs
August 22, 2006 at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Dell haunted by inflammation laptop nightmares for at least 10 months
Dell's inflammation nightmare started 10 months ago
Dell received the first hints that its (Sony supplied) laptop batteries were defective as early as October 2005, a company spokesperson confessed to Infoworld.
The company also knew that the batteries could overheat. It just chose not to instate a recall until it stated raining reports of spontaneous laptop combustion incidents.
Instead of recalling the defective units, Dell and Sony decided to tweak the production process. Meanwhile they kept their fingers crossed that no airplanes would drop from the sky as a result of their defective products.
All that happened however was the widely publicised Dell laptop catching fire at a Tokyo event, which was followed by numerous reports of other incidents, including a Florida home that allegedly caught fire thanks to a Dell laptop.
technorati tags: dell, laptop, fire
August 22, 2006 at 02:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Open source licence confusion to remain
The licence proliferation committee of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) last month published a first draft of a report containing recommendations to curb the open source licence proliferation.
There currently are 58 OSI approved open source licences (meaning that they can officially call themselves "open source"), and many consider that's too many. Enterprises refuse to spend hours studying the terms of all 58 licences. Instead they tend to approve only a few and simply ignore all software that's governed by other licences.
Developers too should be careful, because many of these licences are incompatible with each other. So even if two applications are both open source, it might very well be illegal to mix their code or code fragments in a single new application.
Simply said, the open source world would look a lot better if there were only a few open source licences.
But enough crying over spilled milk. These 58 licences are used today and there is very little that we can do to change that – revoking them certainly isn't an option.
So instead the OSI is proposing to create licence categories: 9 licences will be labelled " popular and widely used or with strong communities". Second comes group of special purpose licences for education, US government or testing purposes and a third group holds redundant, non-reusable and miscellaneous licences.
The categorization will clearly steer new open source projects away any but the 9 "popular" licences. The organization won't say it out loud, but the 9 essentially fall in a group of OSI-approved licences. It would kill all the other ones if it had the means to do so.
The proposal has "compromise" written all over it. OSI simply can't revoke its Open Source Approved label from any of the non-popular licences. But by describing them as "non-popular", it will make sure that no future open source project will pick them. Any existing project furthermore will be considered a second tier open source citizen.
It may not solve the problem of licence proliferation any time soon, but it's probably the best that OSI could do.
HP's Martin Fink kick-started the licence proliferation debate in a February 2005 keynote at Linuxworld.
technorati tags: open+source, OSI, license, licence, GPL, CDDL
August 22, 2006 at 01:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Cutting through the Xen on Linx mud slinging
Is the Xen virtualization technology ready for prime time?
Ask Red Hat and you'll hear a company that isn't so sure: "What makes us most nervous is putting a bad taste in someone's mouth around the Xen technology, which we think is business-transforming. We should not screw this thing up and put a cloud around Xen," Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens told eWeek.
Red Hat Coincidentally won't be able to support Xen until laste this year, if not early 2007. Novell however started shipping a Xen-ready version of its SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 last month.
When I asked Novell's CTO Jeff Jaffe about Xen last week at Linuxworld, he responded with a big smile.
"Virtualization is on of the key differentiators of our release. We are very happy to talk about it," was the first thing he said.
Jaffe's comments hit the nail on the head. The Xen-readiness discussion doesn't revolve around the technology itself. It's a ego trip for the companies building support for the technology into their products.
Novell has it, Red Hat doesn't. So instead of admitting defeat in the race towards Xen, Red Hat prefers to spread FUD on the technology's readiness. But when the Linux vendor finally is ready to launch, it will boast that Xen is the best invention since sliced bread.
technorati tags: xen, virtualization, red+hat, novell, FUD
August 21, 2006 at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Net neutrality doom scenario hits Dubai
What happens when telecommunications giants get their way and the US government abandons net neutrality?
Just take a look at Dubai, the Gulf state that's pouring billions of dollars into building an IT economy. The state is considered one of most politically advanced nations in the Mid East, and has set up special "free zones" where the web can be accessed with little or no restrictions (regular zones have more restrictions). But even the local telecommunications monopolist has now stareted a war on VoIP services inside the free zone.
Gulfnews.com reports that instant messaging clients offering internet telephony services including Yahoo! IM and Windows Live Messenger are mysteriously being blocked.
The likely culprit is the local Emirates International Telecommunications Company monopolist, which is rumoured to block the services on its DSL and dial-up services because they affect its lucrative landline telephony market.
The same goes for the Vonage service. Although the company doesn't sell its VoIP services in the Gulf state, many expatriates from the US and Europe have directly imported the required hardware to make cheap phone calls to the home front.
Meanwhile major US network operators and telcos continue their lobby to kill network neutrality (the requirement to treat all network traffic as equal). If they succeed, you can expect Dubai's problems to pop up all over the US.
Dubai's internet city is left without VoIP
- Thanks to a Dubai-based tipster (you know who you are).
technorati tags: netneutrality, network+neutrality, dubai, voip, vonage, yahoo, msn
August 20, 2006 at 07:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
It's raining web2.0
Web2.0 start-up Kiko has gone belly-up. The online calendaring application has been listed on Ebay with a minimum opening bid o$50,000 (no bids as of now).
Kiko offered an online calendaring application. It looks great but offers very little added value over its competitors (both software and online).
The Onstartups blog has a thorough analysis of the failure. In summary it comes down to: don't try to compete with Google and: just using web2.0 technologies doesn't make for a viable business model.
Smart entrepreneurs had better dust off their domains and launch fuckedweb20company.com or dotcom2failures – copying the success of the vultures of the web 1.0 hype.
Another one for the Computer History Museum
technorati tags: bankruptcy, web2.0, kiko, google, yahoo
August 19, 2006 at 12:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Dell Dilemma
Dell is going down. The company in the last quarter saw its server sales drop, profit was cut in half and let's not even think about the 4.1m batteries that it has to recall.
Dell rose in a downward market by competing on price, selling point solutions. The price compensated for the lacking customer service.
Buying a Dell is going to a warehouse store for your groceries. You know you get a good deal, but it's a long drive and the service sub par. The warehouse shopping is fine if you're student with too much time on your hands. But once you land that high paying executive job, most people will opt for a more convenient store and happily pay the higher prices.
It looks like that same thing is going on with Dell. The company provided great servers and desktop systems in a time that IT budgets were tight and that every dollar had to be stretched to the limit.
But the lean years are over and companies are once again starting new IT projects and increasing their spending. IBM, HP and Sun offer a full range of servers. Dell is still selling point products and offers poor servers.
As the focus has shifted from cost cutting to growing the business, purchase priorities too have shifted. Configuring your own server network was great fun for a while, but the world has change. And Dell never saw it coming.
technorati tags: dell, server, sun, hp, ibm
August 18, 2006 at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Linuxworld Red Hat mystery
Red Hat may be dominating the world of corporate Linux, the company is a no-show at Linuxworld this year. The company declined to spend marketing dollars on a large showfloor booth. Instead it did some one on one interviews with clients and press in a nearby hotel and hosted a private reception.
The company itself is dodging questions on the subject, but speculations range from a fallout between Linuxworld organizer IDG to the fact the Linux vendor did its main announcements at the Red Hat Summit last May.
There is something to say for the latter explanation. But given the recent controversy surrounding Red Hat's support for the Xen virtualization technology (the company claimed that it wasn't ready for prime time yet and then retracted that statement) and the Jboss acquisition, it has plenty to explain.
Novell steals the show at Linuxworld 2006
technorati tags: red+hat, linuxworld, lnxw, lnxwsf06, open+source, linux, novell
August 17, 2006 at 08:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Lawrence Lessig full Linuxworld keynote presentation video
It took a little more time, but Google Video has finally processed the video of Lawrence Lessig's opening keynote from Linuxworld.
It is 50 minutes of pure excitement and education, so sit back and enjoy.
technorati tags: linuxworld, linuxworld2006, linuxworldsf06, lnxw06, lnxwsf06, linux, open+source, lawrence+lessig, stanford, user+generated+content, youtube, google+video
August 17, 2006 at 06:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
15 years Linux: past and future (video)
Monday 21 August 2006 marks the 15th birthday of Linux.
At Linuxworld, open source luminaries Larry Augustin (VA Software), Dirk Hohndel (Intel), Chris DiBona (Google) Eric Raymond (author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar") and Jon "maddog" Hall discussed the operating system's past and future.
You can watch a video below.
technorati tags: linuxworld, linuxworld2006, linuxworldsf06, lnxw06, lnxwsf06, linux, open+source
August 17, 2006 at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Open source mobile phones redefine "open"
Just because mobile phones are increasingly running Linux doesn't mean that users should expect the devices to be as open as a Linux PC.
Regulators and operators have a big interest in limiting open source's "openness" as much as they can. Because they wouldn't want an enthusiastic developer to tweak the radio to ensure better signal quality, having him knock out the entire cellular system in the process, or secretly flip the switch on premium services such as high speed data plans without having to pay for it.
Phones are not PCs," Palmsource's senior vice president of Engineering Mike Kelley said at Linuxworld.
"They tie in to a radio that is regulated. They are tied into very expensive back end infrastructure that can be seriously disrupted by malfunctioning phones. They bill the users for all kinds of activities."
Smart phone makers therefore prohibit native Linux applications altogether (Motorola's current approach) or limit them to a so-called sandbox where they have limited exposure to the phone's vital functions.
But that won't stop open source developers. Given that Linux is governed by the GPL, they will hack away at mobile Linux simply because they can. Harald Welte especially seems to have made it his life task to (fully legally) tear down the walls that Motorola has constructed inside its Linux phones.
Mike Kelley
technorati tags: linuxworld, lnxw, lnxwsf06, palmsource, mobile+linux, cellphone, harald+welte
August 16, 2006 at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Crash course in user generated content
In his opening keynote at Linuxworld, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig described the "read-write culture", which revolves around user generated content.
The issue is that current copyright law is restricting user generated content. We therefore need a grassroots revolution to shake up the status quo, and as open source developers already have gone through this experience with Linux are in the perfect position to deliver this shake-up.
Read-write indicates that consumers don't just consume media (as they do today), but actively contribute (like they have done until the 20th century).
The video below offers a crash course in user generated content by Lawrence Lessig.
technorati tags: linuxworld, linuxworld2006, linuxworldsf06, lnxw06, lnxwsf06, linux, open+source, lawrence+lessig, stanford, user+generated+content, youtube, google+video
August 16, 2006 at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Has Linuxworld lost it?
Linuxworld once could boast that it was the premier open source show. But as Linux matured into a boring adult, Linuxworld slipped into the position of a second tier open source show.
It all became instantly visible to those attending the opening keynote by Lawrence Lessig this morning: the keynote room was the smallest in at least five years of Linuxworld San Francisco. And even open source darling Lessig was unable to fill all the seats.
The expo is dominated by the big companies looking to make big bucks. Meanwhile there might still be interesting sessions, but the sense of excitement has long ago left the event.
Linuxworld is desperately attempting to change into an open source event. While it's making some progress, it doesn't seem near enough.
Lessig
technorati tags: linuxworld, linuxworld2006, linuxworldsf06, lnxw06, lnxwsf06, linux, open+source
August 16, 2006 at 04:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Novell's CTO on Desktop Linux
The market for Linux on the desktop is a lonely place. Red Hat has abandoned its desktop Linux version and Linspire has failed to inspire anybody. The only real players in this field are Ubuntu and Novell.
While Ubuntu has traction among hard core Linux fans, Novell is targetting the enterprise. That market has been largely the domain of Windows 98 replacements. In other words: leagacy systems that are used to perform a single task (including cash registers).
But all that is going to change, Novell's chief technology officer told vnunet.com in an interview at the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco.
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