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OS X 10.4 has some glitches of its own
Certainly users must be frustrated with the abysmal support that Microsoft offers for its Windows XP x64 Edition, but users switching to the latest Apple operating system 10.4 Tiger should prepare for some unpleasant surprises too.
Cisco Systems already confirmed that the new version of OS X won't work with its VPN software (virtual private network). The technology is often used to securely connect from home to an office network. An upgrade should be available by mid-May.
In addition to the Cisco VPNs, Tivo's desktop software won't work with OS X 10.4 either, according to a posting on TiVo's website.
The issues appear to be minor, but it just proves that the old mantra still goes: it's better to hold of switching for a few months so the bugs can be worked out.
Music management beyond the iPod (Sun Labs Day)
You won't have to pick your music because you think that Britney Spears is hot, predicts Paul Lamere, a principal investigator with Sun Labs. But you still might get it because your computer know you think her music is good.
Lamere developed a technology that makes recommendations for music you might like, based on an analysis of the existing music in you library. Instead of using buying patterns (Eg: shoppers who bought Britney spears also bought Beethoven) the software bases its analysis on the actual song, looking at features such as rhythm and beat strength. It will then find songs with similar characteristics.
The software for instance lets you pick two songs you like and then tracks a path from point A to B. Or it will just find songs similar to that one favorite of yours.
In the picture below the software plotted a path from rock band Metallica to Jazz artist Dave Brubeck in 15 steps.
The demo used a collection of 10,000 songs, but Lamere expects that our music collections will grow to about 1 million songs in the future as storage technologies continue to advance.
The second picture shows a map of all the music in the demo, mapped out on a grid. The prepresents the path that the software took to get from Metallica to Brubaker.
Sun Labs opens its doors
Sun labs is one of this institutions where scientists run around trying to solve unsolvable problems. The server vendor allocates about two percent of its research and development budget to Sun Labs, yet it is responsible for roughly 50 percent of all the patents filed within the company.
Once a year Sun Labs opens its doors to show off some of the projects they are working on. This isn't just a PR stunt – research arms inside tech companies often have to fight for their survival. They don't work on revenue generating products, and often create technology that makes existing product lines obsolete. Opening their doors to internal and external visitors allows Sun Labs to justify its existence.
Glen Edens Glen Edens, director of Sun Labs, describes his task as: finding what replaces Solaris, Sparc and Java. If you were the Java product manager, wouldn’t you too rather kill this Edens figure? Opening Sun Lab's doors is merely a preemptive strike against all the threatened Sun employees.
In the following post you'll see some projects that I found noteworthy at this year's Sun Labs Day that took place yesterday (Thursday) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Sun's Glen Edens.
A Friday of rumours
Does Sun Microsystems want to go private? According to report in Business Week, the server vendors considers delisting itself from the Nasdaq stock exchange through a leveraged buyout. But the story was based on one anonymous source. Sun stock went up. Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz called the Wall Street Journal and said that the folks at Business Week must have been smoking pot. Or fell victim to a source who hoped to make a quick buck by driving up the stock price.
A little more credibility has a report that Siebel System is in talks with Oracle for a possible takeover. The two have been in talks in the past. Siebel since landed in the bargain basement after firing its CEO two weeks ago and posting disappointing financial results earlier this week.
Microsoft gives users the finger
Microsoft thinks you are a redundant dinosaur if you haven't yet switched to Office 2003. They won't say it out loud, but that's the message they send with their latest marketing campaign for the productivity suite.
It's always nice when your vendor tells you he appreciates your business in such a clear way.
It reminds me of an advertising campaign that a cable company once ran. They showed people that looked their dumbest with the accompanying text asking the reader: "Or do you want to keep progress out?" Of course this made me run to the phone. Not to order their broadband internet or VoIP telephone service, but to tell them that I hate them too. And that I don't appreciate it when people say I'm stupid, especially when those people don't know me.
So, dear Microsoft, why don't you come over? Then you can learn that I don't need XML in my word documents. I don't need to build connections between my enterprise applications and Excel or Word. And even if I would want to, there are other ways that don't include your overpriced Office 2003.
Or maybe you mean to say that you think your product is too advanced and overpriced for me. Are you trying to tell me that I should take a look at OpenOffice? Now that's the smartest thing you've said in a long time.
Microsoft gives bloggers a royal WinHEC treatment
Bloggers don't have to be a pain in the behind, as Apple seems to think. Microsoft this week at WinHEC showed that there is a better approach to take to bloggers: treat them like royalty. Spoil them. Bribe them. And then let them loose.
The company flew a dozen of bloggers from all over the world to Seattle for the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) and put them up in hotels, labelled them as 64 bit enthusiasts and handed them a press pass.. When they left, the bloggers had brand new Intel processors and video cards stacked in their bags.
I can't help but wonder: does this breed complacency?
Of course not, the bloggers will say. On the contrary. But the truth lies in the eyes of the beholder: if it breeds the appearance of complacency, you as a blogger have lost your credibility.
Microsoft put up a list of WinHEC bloggers. Consider it the wall of shame. Not all the bloggers on there accepted free travel, but many of the "External bloggers" have put their reputations at stake. (I want to emphasise that Mary Jo Foley goes free - she is a professional journalist with eWeek).
Silicon Valley Sleuth attended WinHEC, but paid for his own travel and hotel (with a little help from my corporate sponsor vnunet.com).
Media in the US don't accept travel or housing arrangements around events. Accepting gifts is prohibited, or subject to monetary limits (typically $25). When reputable US media cover a Microsoft sponsored event like WinHEC, the only perk they get is a free press pass that gives them access to the keynotes and sessions. Oh, and a lunch of soggy sandwiches in the pressroom.
In the rest of the world things are a little more complicated. Historically technology companies fly in press from Asia and Europe for major events.
So did Microsoft at WinHEC.
The companies certainly won't stop doing it: a few thousand dollars in hotel and airfare gets them far more exposure than they would be able to buy through advertising.
For many money strapped publications accepting travel is the only way to attend shows like WinHEC, JavaOne or RSA Security. At least they don't bring back home hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars worth in hardware. And here too goes: if they even create the illusion of complacency, they lose their credibility.
64 bits Windows far from ready
Delegates at WinHEC in Seattle received a CD with the new Windows XP Professional x64 edition. So once I got home from Seattle, I popped in the CD.
I don't consider myself the type of person that overclocks his CPU or has water cooling, but I couldn’t resist and created a separate partition on my hard drive to install the software on the AMD 64 bits system that sits next to my Apple.
And that's when all hell broke loose.
The software didn't recognize the graphics card but tried to run at a high screen resolution nonetheless. The result: a black screen at the system boot.
The graphic card manufacturer offers a 64-bits driver for download on its website (you can't use your old 32 bits drivers in Win x64) and that took care of the problem. But next the computer also lacked the proper drivers for my scanner, webcam, audio card or SM Bus controller (some feature on the motherboard). The website of the computer manufacturer didn't help much, as it didn't offer ANY 64 bits drivers.
On to install my virus scanner? Forget it! An error message pointed me to a website that stated that: "Symantec currently does not sell any consumer products that are certified to be compatible with 64-bits processors and operating system."
Bear in mind that this just the personal experience of one user who isn't geeky enough to overclock his CPU, but I wouldn't be surprised when more users will run into problems.
Now I suddenly understand why HP won't ship Win XP x64 on its 64 bits computers. When the company told IDG News that the operating system was just for gamers and digital media enthusiasts, he just wanted to say politely that the operating systems doesn't work for regular users.
The gamers and media enthusiasts have to jump through so many hoops, that you'd have to be a true enthusiast to prevent you from giving up.
Longhorn turns network users into doctors (WinHEC)
The upcoming version of Windows will contain a feature that helps users to troubleshoot their networks. The application, previewed at WinHEC, gives a graphical presentation of your network and will indicate any problems (see picture below). The official name for this is Link Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD).
Many users will find LLTD a useful technology, but it's also sad that we need it to administer our networks. Acutually, that we need to adminster out networks to begin with.
This isn't something that we can blame on Microsoft, but instead of LLTD, wouldn't users prefer to see that their networks just worked?
Beware the Tablet revolution (WinHEC)
If Tablet PC functionality wasn't on you wishllist last time you purchased a notebook PC, you're not alone. Tablet PCs made up 1.3 percent of overall notebook sales in 2004, according to IDC.
A lack of applications that use the "pen" functionality, similar to a touch screen, could be to blame. So Microsoft earlier this month released a free "Experience Pack".
It offers users a collection of applications that use the tablet's pen capabilities. Think crossword puzzles (you get a new one every day for the next three years!), drawing applications or the capability to easily exchange video and music between your PC and Tablet.
The applications look nice, but none of them has the appeal that would cause me to pick a tablet the next time I'm buying a portable computer. Especially not when tablets are still priced about $100 higher than their non-tablet counterparts.
Free crosswords on your Tablet - a must have feature... if you're fed up with Freecell.
WinHEC: The Longhorn stripping continues
Microsoft has pulled yet another feature from Longhorn. When the operating system ships in 2006, the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB – the most impossible acronym in the industry. But Microsoft will let you pronounce it as Engscub) will be a mere sliver of the old promise.
The only feature that will be available is Secure Startup:
A technology that protects users against offline attacks, blocking access to the computer if the content of the hard drive is compromised. This prevents a laptop thief from swapping out the hard drive or booting up the system from a floppy disk to circumvent security features.
The system's security was supposed to come from compartments, separated areas within the OS that would prevent a virus from spreading itself freely through the system. The technology is still under development, but won't be available until 2007-8.
Manuel Novoa, a distinguished technologist and security architect at HP's Personal Systems Group, told vnunet.com that when the OS ships, users will get a version of NGSCB that is "NGSCB with a delay".
But it gets better. The security features in NGSCB rely on a special security chip, the trusted platform module (TPM). But most systems that ship today don't have that chip. And the chip isn't even a requirement for systems to receive the official label that they are ready for Longhorn under Microsoft's "Ready PC" programme.
So even if you have Longhorn, and even if you have a Longhorn ready PC, chance are that your system won't be able to support NGSCB. How's that for taking computer security seriously?
WiNHEC: An auxiliary display for your laptop (VIDEOBLOG)
The auxiliary display that Bill Gates demonstrated earlier this morning during his opening keynote at WinHEC certainly looked better than the device that I saw in February 2004 at Intel Developer Forum.
Instead of opening your laptop in the elevator on your way to an appointment to look up the room number, you can now just use this auxiliary display that will pop up on laptops by the time Longhorn is launched late 2006.
Watch the video to see Bill Gates demonstrate the technology.
(In Internet Explorer please wait for the entire video file to download. Firefox users can start watching the video as it downloads)
WinHEC: Bill Gates about 64 bits (VIDEOBLOG)
At WinHEC in Seattle this morning Bill Gates unveiled 64 bits enabled versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Why do we care about 64 bits? Watch the video to see what Bill Gates had to say about that.
(In Internet Explorer please wait for the entire video file to download. Firefox users can start watching the video as it downloads)
The amateurs have it
The biggest laugh at the Les Blogs, Blogs and Social Software Conference at the Senat in Paris without doubt went to Joi Ito, vice president of International and mobility for Technorati and chairman of Six Apart Japan.
He managed to break the ice with a crack about how amateur or hobbyist bloggers should not - at least in many cases - be considered “worse” than professional bloggers or online journalists.
Not all “professional” things are better than amateur things, he pointed out, adding that few would prefer professional sex to the amateur alternative.
Which of course went down well.
Mr Ito is also a supporter of Creative Content so as long as Loic (le Meur) doesn't mind, we have reproduced his photo from his site ;-)
SVS
Vive le blogging revolution
Blogging is creating a quiet revolution in Paris today and SVS was there before you can say Camembert. The epicentre of the revolution is located in the grand corridors of the French Senat buildings in Paris.
But there is nobody storming the Bastille in this land of Libertie, Fraternitie et Egalitie, rather over 200 of the world's internet movers and shakers have arrived at the Les Blogs, Blogs and Social Software Conference at the heart of the French government in Paris. The event was organised by one of the key members of the blossoming blogosphere, Loic Le Meur and featured speakers from the industry such as Joichi Ito and bloggers such as Doc Searle
The venue for this event is telling: rather than a single vendor pitch in an airport hotel which we would, based on previous experience, have expected, we are in the Senat - proving beyond doubt that the world of blogging has come out of the shadows and into the mainstream.
This is not a debate about niche technologies for anoraks. This is nothing less than the future of communication and collaboration, they say. Vive the revolution. Check back for more before I gear up for WinHEC
SVS
Java's 10th B-day: a peek at Sun's Santa Clara Campus
This might be slightly off-topic from Java's 10th birthday bash, but behind Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz you see a bell tower.
The building originally was part of a mental hospital. Sun took over area during the dotcom boom but preserved the original buildings, that are now surrounded by about 20 modern 3-story office buildings.
The campus is a short stroll away from Intel's headquarters. Sun CEO Scott McNealy used to have his office up in the bell tower. But even he apparently thought that was over the top. He has since moved to a nearby campus in Menlo Park, which also houses one of Sun's Executive Briefing Centres.
These centres are the inequivalent of showrooms for car dealerships. The server vendor uses the Menlo Park facility to receive and educate customers, and McNealy has the nasty habit of walking in on presentations unexpectedly. He'lscare the hell out of the sales rep that is holding a presentation at that time.
Java's 10th B-day: Jonathan Schwartz and the cake
You know the frosting tastes horrible, but for the rest it was an OK cake. If only because it doesn't happen every day that the President and Chief Operating Officer (left: Jonathan Schwartz) of a multi billion dollar company hands you a slice. If you preferred, you could have one of the legends of programming languages James Gosling (right) hand you your sugar high.
VIDEOBLOG: Java's 10th B-day: The story of Duke
Watch this (slightly edited) video to learn from James Gosling where Duke, the Java mascot, came from.
I have my doubts however about the part where he accuses Microsoft of basing "Clippy" on early sketches of Duke. At least - John Michaud, a graphical artist from Seattle who designed the character, has a different version.
Since they are easily confused: from left to right: Duke, Jonathan Schwartz, James Gosling.
VIDEOBLOG: Java's 10th B-day: Happy birthday Java
Sun's Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Schwartz (black shirt) even came out to join Java creator James Gosling (yellow T-shirt) and cut Java's birthday cake. And there was singing of course. Hideya Kawahara, the developer who came up with the idea for the 3D user interface "Lookingglass" played a custom ukulele that was modeled after the Java mascotte Duke (hence the nickname: duke-ulele.
VIDEOBLOG: Java's 10th B-day: Watch James Gosling make the plunge
Sun Microsystems had most kindly invited Silicon Valley Sleuth to attend Java's 10th birthday party on the company's Santa Clara campus in Silicon Valley. I love clowns and ponyrides, so I grabbed my camera and battled the rain to join several hunderd people who currently work or in the past have worked on the programming language in celebration of Java's first decade.
In this first post: James Gosling, Senior Vice President at Sun and the creator of Java, daringly volunteered for the dump tank. What is a dump tank, you ask? You throw a ball and if you hit the target... just watch the video to see what happened.
Some would consider it a carreer limiting move to play this game however...
PS. The video seems to be working fine in OS X and on Win XP in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Linux seems to be having issues with the embedded video. Please let me know in the comment section below if there is anything I can do to help Linux users, or if you have problems with your configuration.
Click here to download the video
Dual core battles – do we care?
Dear Intel and AMD,
Congratulations both of you with the launch of your dual core processors this week. I understand it is quite an engineering feat to slam two processor cores on a single piece of silicon. I understand that it will give my computer a power boost without straining my utility bill.
And all that after you just gave us processors that were capable of addressing both 32 and 64 bits instructions. You must have a bigger plan for me, where I need al this power sitting on my desktop.
But I don't care.
You so eloquently explained in the past year that you understood that end users didn't need any more more processor power. That instead I wanted enhanced security, connectivity and the ability to watch my digital photos on my living room TV without needing a PhD in computer science.
Yet you bring us a childish fight over who gets to deliver the first dual core chip focusing on the fact that yours is bigger than his.
You promised you would change, that you would stop trying to sell us on ever faster computers that don't solve any real problems. But so far I've seen very little proof. Maybe it's time we split up?
Apple's security myth
Security vulnerabilities are a fact of life. How you deal with them is what separates the serious players from just the players.
Apple earlier this week released a patch for a vulnerability in iSync. The flaw makes iSyncs "mRouter" tool vulnerable for a buffer overflow attack. Users who have local access to affected systems can then gain superuser privileges.
Apple however didn't bother plugging this hole for at least 3 months. As a Mac user, that makes me very nervous. Does Apple take the security of its users even serious?
Not if you ask Braden Thomas, an independent developer of security software and a member of the University of Southern California's Digital Security Interest Group who discovered the flaw:
"I was surprised that [Apple] did not include a fix in Security Update 2005-003," he wrote in an email to vnunet.com "In fact, an AppleFileServer DoS bug I discovered that was disclosed in February was fixed by Update 003."
So next time you claim OS X is more secure than Windows, take Apple's response to security threats into consideration. Security vulnerabilities are a fact of life. How you deal with them is what separates the serious players from just the players.
SCO nears its SCObye
The software company that so conveniently took over Microsoft's position of being the most hated software vendor by the open source community, is about to return the honorary position to Redmond, according to a SEC filiing.
Since SCO filed its lawsuit against IBM and other Linux vendors and users, the company has seen its revenues evaporate. The company claims it owns the copyrights of the Linux Operating System, and has been trying to create a revenue stream out of that self-perceived ownership through its SCOsource programme.
"If we do not receive SCOsource licensing revenue in future quarters and our revenue from the sale of our Unix products and services continues to decline, we will need to further reduce operating expenses to generate positive cash flow," the company's SEC filing said.
The filing continues by sparking hope for IBM and anyone in favor of open source: "Our SCOsource initiatives are unlikely to produce a stable or predictable revenue stream for the foreseeable future."
Hang in there IBM. Time will heal all wounds – including SCO.
Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has a little fun with a Sun server
What do you do if you're Microsoft and want to show that your management software plays nicely with hardware from a variety of vendors?
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer at the Microsoft Management Summit in Las Vegas decided to take apart a Sun server. And he wasn't even trashing the leading vendor of Unix systems.
Sun and Microsoft after all patched up about one year ago, with Microsoft paying Sun about $2 billion as a "shut up" fee. ("2 billion dollars buys you a lot of love," Sun's Jonathan Schwartz said about the deal).
But the new-found love didn't mean that Ballmer wasn't truly enjoying himself when he pull the fans out of a Sun server to demonstrate the Microsoft software - through webservices - could diagnose the problem.
This too is Linux
Linspire chief executive Michael Roberst has a thing for drama. In an interview with vnunet.com last year, he had little trouble comparing his company Linspire with the Chinese student who stopped a column of tanks during the 1989 student uprising.
He didn't even hisitate when he answered: "There is some analogy," about the comparison. But he recovered quickly during the interview: "It is overstated a little bit." But just a little bit.
Linspire sells Linux for the desktop, targeting the product at the lower end of the market and everyday users.
Back at the time of the vnunet.com interview, Linspire had just reached a settlement with Microsoft over the name of his company: the Redmond company payed him $20m to change it from Lindows to Linspire, ending some long court proceedings in Europe and the US.
Soon after reaching the settlement Linspire cancelled its IPO. The market wasn't yet ready to fund a loss making high tech company.
The Linspire prospectus contained a paragraph that said that Robertson had borrowed his company roughly $10m. And part of the IPO proceedings would be used to pay Roberts back. But when Microsoft opened its wallet, Robertson was first in line to claim back his $10m. The prospectus had to be amended.
Was Robertsen entitled to get his money back? Surely he was. But should we feel sorry for him, facing the risk of loosing his hard earned greenbacks? Not at all. Back in 2001 Roberston made a tidy profit when he sold his company mp3.com to Universal for $350m.
Robertson is currently touring Europe to promote the latest version of his software, Robertson spoke with vnunet.com once again.
There he complained about how Microsoft had him kicked out of a hotel once in Japan. But his revenge was sweet: "It's a sweet irony that the $20 million we got from them has funded this release."
That is, of course, after we take out the ten million that Robertson needed for himself. But that doesn't fit well in the story of the little student blocking the seemingly invincible tank.
Microsoft evangelist loses his faith
Lenn Pryor, director for Platform Evangelism, has quit his job with Microsoft. He will move to the UK and start working for Skype.
People change jobs all the time, but Pryor's case is noteworthy because he's leaving a company in which he lost faith.
He writes on his blog: "I decided to swap problem sets from one that I am not passionate about any more to one that I AM deeply passionate about. I just couldn't go on being an evangelist for a gospel that I don't believe I can sing. I am returning to focus on what I enjoy most, building amazing things that make people happy, change lives, and make money. In this case Skype was a better place for me to do this and one that shares my core values and beliefs in how the future of both software and business will unfold."
Pryor leaving Microsoft is more than just a job change. It's like a rabbi converting to Christianity and becoming a priest.
UPDATE - OpenOffice runs out of steam
The launch of the next 2.0 version of the free productivity suite OpenOffice has been postponed because the project lacks developers.
The project is effectively run by Sun Microsystems, the company that kicked off OpenOffice by donating the StarOffice source code. The company currently has about 50 developers working on the suite. Novell has about 10 developers working on the project, and only 4 community members are actively contributing.
IBM sells the suite through its consulting services, but apparently doesn’t contribute to development.
The problems with OpenOffice will give Microsoft once again a change to argue that you can't rely on open source because no one's responsible for the project.
Since they make a pretty penny from the application, IBM would do good to contribute back to the community, instead of just making money through selling services around the software. The same goes for all the government institutions that have switched to open source in the past years.
But then again, many users embraced OpenOffice because the application is cheaper than Microsoft Office. If we start pressuring them for contributions (either financially or through developer time), we might kill the case for users to switch.
----
UPDATE 4-19-05 1:31 PM
Just spoke with Louis Suárez-Potts, Community Manager for OpenOffice.org. Technically there can be no delay because the organisation never set a deadline. The software currently is in beta and the a release date will be set as the feedback is collected and adjustments have been made.
That doesn't mean that he doesn’t want more developers working on the project. But that's about as obvious as me wanting a pay raise.
Skype moves to hype mode
Boasting 100 million downloads for its Skype client software for Linux, Windows, Mac OS and Windows Mobile, Skype has launched the official beta for its SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail services.
SkypeIn assigns a phone number to a user's Skype account (at a cost of €30 per year) that allows him to receive incoming calls from a regular telephone. Users can buy up to three numbers in Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, the UK or United States. SkypeIn comes with free voice mail, or users can buy just the voicemail for €15 per year.
These are the first of several premium services that Skype will offer. The company desperately needs to add such services to get some revenues, especially now that the company is rumored to start running out of money. (link broken... working on it)
I use Skype, but I don't see myself signing up for a SkypeIn phone number if all it means is that I would receive even more calls through even more phone numbers. Managing both a regular and mobile phone is enough of a challenge. The same goes for the voicemail. If a fellow Skype user wants to leave me a message, he can send me and email. And if they want to leave one by calling me, they can just call one of my other phone lines.
SkypeIn is a nice to have feature if you desire a local telephone number in some remote location such as Hong Kong, so people there have an inexpensive way to contact you. But I can easily save €30 a year if I can convince them to just download and install the Skype software on their computers.
Tech jobs rebound
The number of tech job postings on Dice.com has risen by more than 22 percent in the first quarter of this year. The job site claims to have the largest collection of technology related job postings.
The job service on 1 April listed 7,611 openings in Washinton D.C., followed by New York-New Jersey with 7,464 and Silicon Valley with 5,947, up 22 percent from 1 January.
Don't use these figures to jump to any conclusions about the state of Silicon Valley however. Over here people swear by alternative services including worth of mouth and good old Craigslist.org.
A blemish on Moore's Law anniversary
Tuesday marks the 40-year anniversary of Moore's Law. A law it might have proven to be, but it's anything but Moore's.
Apparently Moore had gotten the idea for "his" law from a lecture by computer scientist Douglas Engelbart as early as 1960 – Moore didn't write his famed article until 1965.
It was Moore however who took the effort to map out the increase of the number of transistors on a chip over time, which in turn lead to the "law" behind Moore's Law.
It's not to say that Moore doesn't deserve the spotlight, but he might have to share it.
Good intentions only get you so far
Surely the German Linux programmer Har Welte had nothing bad in mind when he filed his lawsuit against Fortinet accusing the security vendor of GPL violations.
A German court last week sided with the Linux programmer and in a preliminary injunction ruled that Fortinet violated the GPL and had to stop shipping its FortiGate and FortiWifi products.
But the Linux enthusiast might have caused more harm than he did good, says James Governor, principle analyst at Red Monk.
The treat of being sued by seemingly random Linux programmers over GPL violations will make the commercial developers think twice about incorporating GPL code into their products. That will have programmers cheering, no doubt. But it will hold back the adoption of Linux in the enterprise, Governor argues.
Microsoft surely will like that. And even on the campus of Sun Microsystems, you might just overhear Jonathan Schwartz shout: "I told you so!" these days.
Sun Microsystems is under attack from members in the open source community because its open source CDDL license deviates from the GPL. Contrary to the GPL for instance, it doesn't require developers to release the source code of their work if they mix it with CDDL code.
Sun claims that the requirement to share proprietary code is keeping many enterprises from using Linux. Surely Fortinet would agree.
Microsoft turns up the Longhorn bullhorn
Microsoft on Friday wrapped up a week-long media tour across the US to promote Longhorn, its upcoming operating system. Your Silicon Valley Sleuth was invited too, so I packed my iBook and headed for a San Jose hotel suite.
Since Microsoft started talking about Longhorn in 2003, the company has had its share of distractions and disappointments. The company had to pull developers off Longhorn to deliver the security focused Service Pack 2 (SP2), and well as pull out its next generation file system WinFS.
But things are back on track, is the message that Microsoft tried to send with its press tour. A beta for Longhorn will be available this summer. The company aims to have the operating ready in time for the 2006 holiday shopping season.
In anticipation of this major new software release, Microsoft in the following weeks will kick off a worldwide media campaign targeted at us mortal end users. The advertisements will show us what Windows enables us to do and make us realise that without the blesses software from Redmond we would still be hunting and gathering – in the digital sense of the word.
Apple's killing the iPod
In what promises to be a repeat of the downfall of the Mac as a computer, Apple is at risk of losing the lead in the market for digital music downloads.
Take the dominance of the iPod and the iTunes music store, add up Apple's refusal to share its "FairPlay" digital right management (DRM) technology (which prevents other manufacturers from making devices that can play music from the iTunes music store) and throw in the company's decision to stick to a price of $0.99 per download, and you understand why the recording industry is questioning if their deal with Apple has any future.
We have seen Apple refusing to open up a format for external developers before with MacOS. It resulted in a market share that stands below five percent – the Mac now is the number three desktop platform behind Windows and Linux.
With Steve Jobs' "take it of leave it" attitude, the record companies are getting ready to turn their attention to mobile operators instead. They are much more flexible in their pricing policies (charging $2.49 for a ringtone is no problem for them) and are used to playing nice with the other kids in the sand box.
Steve Jobs had better check his history books before he smothers another good technology with stupid marketing and sales decisions.
The alarm clock as innovation's next frontier
It seems like that alarm clock is rapidly placing itself in the centre of innovation. After last month's Clocky, now students at the University of Rode Island have developed an alarm clock that monitors your sleep pattern before waking you up.
The SleepSmart system uses ECG sensors to determine your sleep phase, making sure it wakes you up during a period of light sleep. This makes you feel more awake and well rested than when your REM sleep is cut short.
The headset is expected to be available next year for about $200.
The system follows last month's "Clocky ultimate alarm clock", an alarm clock that physically hides after the owner has hit the snooze button.
Although the SleepSmart seems to have science working for it, it looks goofy and nerdy. At least the Clocky has a nice, fuzzy look, making it an appliance that you can show off at parties without people thinking that you are completely out of your mind.
Big brother puts GPS in your car
The fair and balanced government of the United Arabic Emirates has placed an order with IBM for $125 million to equip the nation's cars with a GPS tracking device.
The black box will monitor the speed of the car and send a warning signal if the driver exceeds the speed limit. It will also collect data for traffic control and targeted advertising (you don't want to bother your oil sheik with an ad for goat food).
Apparently the citizens of the oil-pumping nation are among the worst drivers in the world, with 38 traffic related deaths per 100,000 people. The UAE's government has set a target to cut that figure in half within the next five years.
And the technology is also very useful to track political opponents or other unwanted elements of society – especially in a country that has a reputation of valuing oil more than human life.
IBM made this mistake once before when it equipped the Nazis with the technology that facilitated the holocaust. But apparently IBM loves its money just as much as the UAE's sheiks love their oil.
Buy a pageview for $520.52
Did you ever wonder how much advertisers had to pay when you clicked on a Google ad? You can find out now that the makers of The Googlest have created a nice overview of several hundred of the most expensive keywords.
To get the top listing for "domains yahoo" cost $520.52, with the average floating around $97.44. The first price is the highest price in cost-per-click that the advertiser should expect to pay. The average is more accurate however, because adds are rotated and bids are lowered to match the next ad.
The runners up:
2: domain name yahoo – max: 418.63 – avg: 79.81
3: dc hair laser removal – max: 147.71 – avg: 69.91
4: law lemon Wisconsin – max: 119.63 - avg: 66.15
5: hair removal Washington dc – max: 135.94 – avg: 51.14
Niche searches top the charts, not general keywords. It just shows you how different Google's adsense programme is compared to traditional advertising with mass media such as print publications, television and radio. Google allows you to narrowly target very specific groups, where television is all about reaching as many people as you can. The real value on Google it in catching that one visitor that gets you a sale, its not necessarily about eyeballs.
I wouldn't encourage you do a "domain name yahoo" search and click on the top ad. Unless of course you'd like to see 1and1 hosting lose a buck or eighty.
HSBC signs up for the Month of Identity Theft
The financial giant HSBC is the latest institution that had to admit that it didn't care about the privacy of its customers and as a result exposed the files of 180,000 customers in the United States.
The company was quick to defer all blame to a retailer (rumour has it that the Ralph Lauren Polo store is the culprit) that was allegedly using an antiquated point-of-sale system. The credit card readers stored a copy of the credit card information instead of just forwarding it to the credit card processing computer. The incidents occurred between June 2002 and December 2004.
Ralph Lauren (if they are to blame) should be sued out of business for this , but HSBC is just as much to blame. The company never bothered looking into this matter prior to the breach – they were all too keen to accept the payments and fees.
HSBC is in good company. Earlier this week Reed Elsevier had to admit that the scope of a security breach in its online database LexisNexis was much larger than originally thought. Data for as many as 310,000 people has been compromised.
Maybe – just maybe – its time to take a very serious look at the state of our computer security, and maybe we could start talking about adopting legislation that requires companies to have a minimum level of security? Because about half a million consumers experienced this week that self regulation doesn't work. Maybe some effectively policed legislation would help me regain my trust in companies that deal with my personal data.
Siebel's new CEO has his priorities mixed up
Is Siebel's new CEO George Shaheen out to rescue the company or his own bank account?
The fellow bloggers at Silicon Beat point out that Shaheen has corporate greed written all over him.
As the CEO of the now defunct online grocer WebVan.com, he negotiated a perpetual retirement pay of $375,000 per year, to be transferred to his wife in case she would outlive him. The company also loaned him $6.7 million to help him pay the taxes on his stock options. He could have cashed some of the options, but why pay for something if you can have the shareholders pick up the tab? When the stock went south, Shaheen paid back the loan with the shares, that by then were valued at just $150,000. Shaheen's little scheme ended up costing shareholders $6.55 million.
In case you wondered where Siebel Systems found Shaheen: he is also the former chief executive for Anderssen Consuling, now knows as Accenture. Siebel and Accenture we intimate since the early days of the CRM vendor, which landed Shaheen a position on Siebel's board of directors.
Board members have to be compensated. And in Shaheen's case, Siebel handed out about $100 million in stock options. Protesting against this lavish compensation, one of Siebel's shareholders filed a lawsuit to limit such packages.
Shaheen has proven that he knows how to look out for himself. But that isn't in the best interest of Siebel as a company.
European venture capital events turn up the noice
Americans have the Demo and DemoMobile shows where startup companies show off cool (and not so cool) new technologies to an audience of press, analysts and venture capital investors. Demo has a clever business model, charging companies who want to present their products to this attractive audience. But Europe for now lacks an event of similar stature.
That could soon change with "Innovative Europe 05" coming to Sarragossa, Spain in June. Because the woman behind the event is Demo-producer Chris Shipley.
Just the prospect of the Shipley event is making the competition shake in their pants. Enough so for Red Herring's "Venture Market Europe" event in London this week to deny Shipley access , and even instructed its staff "not to deal with her," reports The Inquisitor.
But as the blogger points out, that might be too much honour for an event that hasn't event debuted. Unless of course the Red Herring event organisers know that they sucks so badly that their show it will disappear unnoticed as soon as a competitor, any competitor shows up.
Burn the blogger
Bloggers should be kept on a short leash, Americans said in a survey commissioned by hosting company Hostway.
Seventy two percent of the 2,500 people surveyed would back a ban on publishing personal information about celebrities. Another 68 percent supported a similar measure protecting elected officials such as judges and mayors.
Here's the catch however: only 30 percent of the people survey had actually visited a blog. More than one third had never even heard of blogs prior to the survey.
And the survey doesn't bother contradicting itself either: although the American public is all to keen on imposing regulations on bloggers that don't apply to the traditional media, 52 percent of the people surveyed said bloggers should have the same rights as journalists.
I'll just file this one under crappy research. It's getting crowded in there.
Firefox logs record visitors, but that's actually bad news
The page where users download the latest version of the Firefox browser attracted 2.6 million visitors in March, according to Nielsen//Netratings.
Good news for the open source project you would think, but all those downloads actually tell a less fortunate story.
Firefox so far has had to plug several security holes. And instead of releasing patches, the software requires users to download and install a new version of the software.
So the 2.6 million that Nielsen//Netratings saw, are probably to a large extent current users who needed an updated version of the product. It's hard to compare figures here because there is little data about the number of computers running Firefox, but let's just let give it a try (if I screw up, I'm sure you'll let me know in the comments section below ;-).
If we just assume that Firefox has a 5 percent share of the browser market and that all downloads in March were replacements, and that every user downloaded the latest and patched version, that would mean that there are 52 million computers running browsers in the world (2.6/0.05 =52).
Surely the real number of computers out there is higher. So either a large percentage of Firefox' installed based is running an outdated, insecure version of the software. Or the browser doesn't have as high a share of the browser market as we assumed all along.
Either way the Nielsen//Netratings study is bad news for Firefox.
iPod all the way
iPod sales in the last quarter ending 31 March 2005 have surged by 558 percent compared to last year, making for 5,311,000 units sold. The company also reported a 43 percent increase in the number of computers and desktops it shipped.
For Apple this resulted in a $290 m profit, up from $46 m last year.
To put it in Geoffrey Moore's terms: the iPod has entered the tornado, a moment in the business cycle when customers are throwing their money at you, you can't do much wrong and managers later on will claim that it was their great vision and insight that caused all this success.
Don't get me wrong: you'll need insight and vision to get there, but once inside the tornado, you've entered a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Apple now needs to turn its attention back to the computer business and use the iPod's success to regain some of the market share in the desktop market. The company didn't release sales figures for the Mac Mini - a computer that is targeted at currently Windows users.
Relative to last year the number of sales of both iMacs, Mac Mini and eMac combined more than doubled, but relative to the last quarter, the number of units sold stayed nearly flat. That's no big surprise however if you realise that the company introduced a new iMac last year and that sales usually drop leading up to a new product unveiling.
Moore's other great vision
When Moore wrote his famous article in 1965, predicting a regular increase in the number of transistors that would result in Moore's Law, he also predicted the advent of the home computer, he said in an interview with vnunet.com.
You should have some doubts about the extent of Moore's geniousness however:
"Of course I had no idea what it would look like," he told vnunet.com. "The first time I discussed a home computer at Intel the only reason we could think of to use one was for a housewife to store recipes on."
UPDATE: corrected the year of Moore's article. As "mike malone" noted, the original incorrectly stated that it was published in 1975.
Siebel creates yet another problem
Siebel Systems over the past years has become know as the company that is glued to the floor. It keeps jerking and trying to move, but never ends up anywhere.
Now the company fired its chief executive Michael Lawrie and replaced him with George Shaheen, a former chief executive for WebVan and Accenture. Under Lawrie the company showed disappointing financial performance, which led to his ouster.
In summary, the company has sold every corporation in the world a CRM suite that wants one, and now can't find anyone else to sell to. Meanwhile the competition from enterprise suite vendors such as SAP and Oracle is increasing, Salesforce.com is moving in with an on demand solution and Siebel fails at penetrating the mid sized market.
Siebel's problem is so hard to summarise because there are so many of them. And the company should be thanking its namesake and founder Tom Siebel for that. He set out on the course of delivering only CRM solutions for large enterprises while ridiculing Salesforce.com.
When he stepped down as CEO, Siebel left Lawrie a company with a healthy business but no room for future growth. Since Lawrie didn't create this mess, it remains the question if prelacing him will create a solution.
Salesforce.com is on a roll
Salesforce.com is fed up with being just a CRM provider and now has its eyes set on the world. Today the company's chief executive Marc Benioff took the stage at a company event in San Francisco and bluntly claimed that "We are building a platform".
The company last year stopped being "just" a provider of customer relationship management when it launched Sforce, an online platform that accommodates third party software developers.
In the upcoming summer release the company will further advance on its path to enterprise software domination by offering a single sign-on technology that enhances the Windows or LDAP user authentification and a data loader that allows companies to bulk import and export data between Salesforce and legacy enterprise applications.
If Salesforce plays its cards well, the company becomes the standard for online, ASP based applications and Benioff can start browsing through catalogs listing tropical islands for sale. If not, otherwise he still has a well performing CRM business to make his mortgage payments.
Marc Benioff - had to find out the hard way that electric razors don't work on every tropical island. (or is he going for the Larry Ellison look?)
Apple makes us pay to show it our love
Apple is getting ready to release a new version of its operating system on Friday 29 April.
The Apple faithful can line up at the company's stores and authorised resellers at 6:00 PM and hand over the company $129 or € 129.
The operating system might have 200 improvements, it doesn't even come close to being "groundbreaking" or "the most innovative […] desktop", as Apple's cheerleader Steve Jobs claims.
The most visible improvement is the Spotlight desktop search technology, promising to make it easier for users to search for text inside their emails, word documents and other data. Apple might be the first to ship a desktop operating system with such a search technology build into the OS, but Google and MSN last year beat the company to delivering such a desktop search technology.
Next comes Dashboard: "a new world of beautiful accessory applications called widgets that appear instantly to give users immediate access to information like stock quotes, weather forecasts, airline flight tracking, unit of measure, currency conversions and a phone book." Translation: Apple has redesigned its old Sherlock application and added the calculator and weather forecasts.
What about an integrated RSS reader for Safari, Apple's browser? Finally an industry first. But with RSS adoption rates still in the single digit percentages, it's hardly worth waking up your grandmother for.
Another year, another operating system with a few new features. If Microsoft would release a new OS every year (like Apple does) and charge users $129 for it, the world would be crying foul. But this is Apple. That company that loves its customers – and makes them pay for that love.
MTV gets the scoop on the Xbox
Microsoft won't need the gaming industry, press and analysts to fly out to some remote location for the launch of the company's newest Xbox gaming console. The company instead has taken the highly unusual step of launching the new computer on MTV.
The unusual step fits the unusual gaming device, said Peter Moore who heads up the Microsoft gaming division. "I think we need to signal a change that things aren't going to be the same in the next generation," he told Reuters. "While it's gaming at its core, there's a much bigger and broader entertainment message that we need to get out there."
The Xbox will be unveiled on March 12 in the US. Japan and Europe however have to wait another day before the show airs on MTV there.
If it works for cars, it should work for computers
Hybrid cars are making waves with automobile manufacturers. Now Sanyo and IBM hope that technology will do the same for laptop computers.
The two companies have put together a prototype of a current generation Thinkpad that instead of a battery uses a fuel cell. Because it uses a current generation internal power technology, the laptop works with both a fuel cell and a regular power cord.
CA puts out the trash
No-one would have expected this two years ago, but Computer Associates at last appears to become an interesting company for what they do, not for what they did wrong.
The company for the past year made headlines for it's creative accounting methods and investigations by the SEC. It took two CEO sacrifices for the company to clean up its act.
The recently appointed chief executive John Swainson last week that he will realign the company along two main areas: systems and security management. CA traditionally has always been strong in these areas, but Swainson's move is a strategy U-turn nonetheless.
More importantly, CA is quickly becomine a large player in the field of open source applications. That isn't such a strange move for a company that owns an enormous portfolio of "end of life" applications. The company get roughly half of its software revenues from mainframe systems. Not that there is anything wrong with mainframes, but it isn't an environment where there are lots of growth opportunities.
RSS for dummies
The latest thing in publishing land is to release your own RSS reader. Cnet has done it, VNU (publisher of Silicon Valley Sleuth and vnunet.com) inked a deal with NewsGator and in the future the LA Times, Denver Post and England's The Guardian will follow.
The slew of RSS readers can either confuse the hell out of consumers, or at last create some acceptance for this new medium with the general public.
RSS has been slow to catch on, although I personally couldn’t live without it anymore. The problem is that I can't look my next door neighbour in the eyes and expect him to understand that "RSS is a substandard of XML, allowing for syndication of online content."
The solution: kill the term RSS. Never say XML. Have people deported to Iraq for talking about syndication. And anyone saying that RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication OR RDF site summary should be executed on the spot for making things needlessly complicated.
Hopefully the acceptance RSS will skyrocket if newspapers say: this LA Times reader will notify you when we publish new articles. Hopefully by the time consumers understand the concept of the LA Times reader, they will be ready to realize that the application is also capable of reading the New York Times or vnunet.com.
And more importantly, hopefully by then we will have shot all people who are so religious about the technology that they fail to see that their shouting is scaring away users.
ICANN creates more land to grab
ICANN once again proves the point that in the digital age there is no limit to the amount of real estate, unless physical factors play a role. The non profit that manages the top level domain names such as .com and .info just approved the creation of the .travel and .jobs internet domains.
Rather than serving the public, the decision caters toward the domain registrars that make a pretty penny of the registration of internet domains.
The vast majority of the internet domains are registered by speculators. They hope to make a buck or two by selling valuable domain names to stupid entrepreneurs who think that something like "business.com" is actually worth the $7.5 million that eCompanies paid for it in 1999.
In the future ICANN plans to bring us .cat, .post and .mobi domains. It is also considering adding .asia, .mail, .tel and the .xxx porn TLD.
But rather than bringing us ever more domains, the organisation would do better to improve on the current registration process.
Will travellers prefer to surf to expedia.com or expedia.travel? I'll put my money on .com.
If I'm looking for a job, do I need a Microsoft.jobs domain instead of jobs.microsoft.com?
Do we need some visionary leadership from ICANN instead of having them stick to a broken domain name model?
Dell looks to outshine itself
Dell was making a bold projection when the company projected it would reach $80 b in revenues by 2009. The company last year achieved $49 b in sales. The prediction was so bold that CEO Henry Rolling had to come out and talk to financial analysts to convince them that he wasn't high on pot when he had his vision of another 30 billion materialising before his eyes.
To get to the magic $80 billion, the computer maker will emphasise high margin products, including printers, professional services and mobile computers.
It seems like logical step, weren't it for the fact that Dell is know as the company that conquered the computer business by focusing on high volume and low margin. If it is to break into the printer business, it would have to take a similar approach. But what is left of a high margin market like the printer business if you sacrifice your margin in order to break into that segment?
Or does Dell, a company that is known for making some of the crappiest laptop computers available, plan to cash in on it's image as a high quality (ahem) manufacturer and its pretty blue eyes? Bring in the drug sniffing dogs, because there must be some hallucinating substance in the company's Texas headquarters.
PSP shines, but suffers from self-inflicted injury
What were the guys over at Sony thinking when they predicted that they would sell one million of their new PlayStation Portables (PSP) in the first week after the introduction in the US? The company revealed that they sold about 600,000.
The notion that these are mostly "hype" sales to gadget hunters with too much money to spend is underlined by the fact that in first two days the company sold 500,000 units and sales quickly dwindled in the following days.
In its first week the PSP outsold the Nintendo DS, its main competitor that was introduced last year December. Nintendo cleverly made its introduction coincide with the holiday shopping season, so all the more respect for Sony's achievement. If only there wouldn't have been this overzealous manager claiming that he would rule the world.
Success or failure is relative to the expectations that are set. Sony's PSP could have made slash, but instead decided to ruin its own party.
Windows SP2: swallow or choke
Computers using Windows XP will receive service pack 2 starting this Tuesday, whether they want it or not. Microsoft has given enterprise users the option to delay deploying the patch for about 7 months because it can disable some of their applications. But they'd better be ready this Tuesday.
Microsoft should be praised for its resiliency in making computers safer. Loyal readers of Silicon Valley Sleuth know that I believe Microsoft to a large extent is to blame for the current state of (lack of) computer security. But I applaud this initiative to force IT administrators to properly secure their Windows XP equipped machines.
Running machines that acts as spam relays or spread viruses, simply because they lack the proper security settings, is as immoral as a person suffering from HIV having unprotected sex.
Iceland advanced to the post-internet-buuble age
The poor citizens of Iceland will have to live without their online retailer "Iceland". The company has finally figured out that offering frozen polar bear snacks for sale on the internet requires a sophisticated sales model and a large customer base.
'The online service is a loss-making operation and one in which we simply cannot justify further investment of either money or management time,' said Malcolm Walker, Iceland's (the company, not the country) founder and chief executive.
Seems like Iceland is finally stepping into the 21st century, an age in which ecommerce only flourishes because it makes for profitable companies. Maybe they are ready to hear about the war in Iraq next?
Taxi backseats go online - but no porn
Have you ever had an awkward conversation with a taxi cab driver? Ones where you are confronted with somebody who can solve every problem in the world, as long as the solution involves invading sovereign countries, or where it takes an enormous effort to make out the driver's accent?
Interactive Taxi has the solution for such situations. The company develops an interactive display that allows the passenger to read news headlines, watch streaming video or look up local information such as restaurants or movie theaters.
While offering a "broadband-like" experience, the unit really cashes all the data on 2 gigabits of flash memory, together with the Windows XP Embedded operating system. The display uses a 3G wireless connection to contact Interactive the head office in New York every five minutes, getting updated headlines and advertisements.
Will this make a taxi driver's job boring now that he won't be able to enlighten his passengers with his philosofical insights? Interactive Taxi CEO Corey Gottlieb thinks not. Because apperently they are fed up just as well with the stale old stories from their passengers. . "Taxi drivers love this," Gottlieb told vnunet.com. "One driver told me he had a bunch of kids in the back and they were all quiet because they were playing with the display."
Interactive Taxi on Thursday launched the units in San Francisco - there are already 250 installed in Boston and another 350 in Chicago. San Francisco started out with a more modest 2 units.
But the content on the device hasn't been adapted to the local market. As Gottlieb showed off the united to your Silicon Valley Sleuth in the parking lot of a San Francisco taxi company, a cab driver stuck his head through the Window. "I heard about these on the radio," he said. "Is there any gay porn on it?"
Gottlieb had to disappoint the driver.
The Taxi Interactive display. Not the 3G antenna sticking out at the top.
Lawrence Lessig takes Microsoft bashing to a new level
Microsoft is an evil empire, whether it wants to or not. That in summary is what Lawrence Lessig told delegates at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco today.
His thought line:
1. Microsoft is a monopoly (proven in court – the case just conveniently dwindled away after Bush became president)
2. Microsoft is threatened by open source
3. It's a historical fact that monopolies will spend whatever they can on protecting their monopoly. It is also their obligation to shareholders.
Since Microsoft is insanely rich, the company has equally insane amounts of money it can spend on its war against open source.
Microsoft's weapon of choice, according to Lessing (who is a law professor at Stanford university) will be patents. "We hear a huge sucking sound out of Redmond. A sucking sound of them hiring as many patent lawyers as we can produce."
Microsoft is a threat to the world, worthy of a James Bond movie. We should take this threat very seriously, Lessig warned. Because if we let the company get away with using patents to stop competitors from entering the market, everybody loses.
Lessig warns against the great evil from Redmond
Open Source Licences all the way
The Open Source Business Conference today showed in a big way how quickly the open source industry can respond to challenges. At LinuxWorld in February, open source licences suddenly became an issue after HP's Linux boss Martin Fink said there were too many of them (there are 58 different ones).
Today, CA's Linux guy Sam Greenblatt revealed that he has been talking to Sun Microsystems and IBM to create a common commercial licence that companies across the industry can use as a template on top of which they stack their own requirements. If it's up to Greenblatt, Sun's CDDL has a good shot at forming the initial framework for this template.
And speaking of templates, the Open Source Initiative in the future will start requiring anyone that seeks certification to start using templates. The OSI is the organisation that gives licences the official status of being open source. After all, at the end of the day most licences look very much alike. If people just start using templates with – again – some customizations stacked on top of it, at least it all becomes a lot easier to oversee. It might not solve the issue of licence proliferation, but at least its becoming a lot easier to oversee.
Sam Greenblatt
SpikeSource stacks up the goodies
At the Open Source Business Conference, SpikeSource launched its first products. The company takes the idea behind companies like Red Hat and Novell, and takes it a step further: instead of selling a Linux distribution that it didn't develop, the startup plans to make money by selling Linux integrated component stacks of applications, libraries, language runtimes, middleware and tools that it didn't develop.
The SpikeSource Core Stacks solve an important problem for the IT manager, who otherwise would have to compose his own stack, and test it to guarantee interoperability between the components and his operating system. SpikeSource already has done all that testing. It certifies the stacks and also sells upgrade and patching services, promising to also test the upgrades and patches to guarantee continued interoperability.
If Red hat can make living off selling an operating system it didn't develop, I don't see any reason why SpikeSource couldn't pull the same trick by selling its stacks. And Silicon Valley's premier venture capital investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers seems to agree – the company is incubated by the VC's parter and former Oracle executive Ray Lane.
Spikesource's Kim Polese (former CEO of Marimba, a dotcom-bomb company that has since been acquired by BMC Software) spoke at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco yesterday, but didn't say much that got us exited other than that open source rules. But at least she didn't put on a 45-minute SpikeSource pitch.
Kim Polese praying that SpikeSource will do better than Marimba.
Open source preys on enterprise applications
With Linux considered "ready", where do all the open source developers turn to? Red Hat and Novell are aiming their efforts at middleware, because that's where the money is for operating system vendors. But according to Larry Augustin, CEO of Medsphere Systems and founder of VA Linux, there also is a huge opportunity in the market for enterprise applications.
He sees green pastures with small and medium sized enterprises, where the traditional enterprise applications from SAP and Oracle are too expensive. Open source requires less of a development investment and spends less money on sales and marketing (which in the case of Siebel systems makes up about 30 percent of the total costs). As a consequence customers in the SMB market are able to afford the solutions. And over time, maybe, open source enterprise applications are able to move up to larger customers.
Medsphere sells an open source enterprise application for hospitals that was originally developed with tax dollars. There are similar offierings for open source CRM and VoIP PBX.
Augustin however conveniently leaves out ASPs such as Salesforce.com and Netsuite, who are showing some muscle in the very same SMB market that he is after. You can also have your doubts about the appeal of an open source solution for a user that already has an ERP system up and running.
Augustin has a big vision - but there might be some cracks in it.
Jonathan Schwartz' subscription car
Sun Microsystems current mantra is "subscriptions" and "subsidised hardware". So in his keynote this morning at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco, Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz predicted the advent of the subscription car.
Jonathan's vision isn't the same as our old fashioned lease. What Jonathan sees is a automobile with premium services such as video on demand and something similar to OnStar, a technology developed by General Motors that gives users access to emergency dialing and remote diagnosis services.
Since it is Sun's mission in life to create as many connections with as many devices as humanly possible, the company is ecstatic about OnStar. After all, it requires GM to buy more servers and hopefully that will come from Sun factories.
OnStar charges you a tidy $20 per month for the most basic service (emergency services), and prices go up from there for more advanced features such as directions. With our cars turning into communications devices, why not copy a trick performed so well by mobile operators and give away the car, free with a 5 year subscription?
Don’t laugh just yet –GM has already done the math, Schwartz said. You'll get your free car if you subscribe to a service plan that charges $222 per month.
Jonathan Schwartz is at it again by making bold predictions - at the OSBC in San Francisco.
Yahoo sets a new record for corporate greed
Yahoo CEO Terry Semel made a cool $231 million last year by exercising some stock options, the company disclosed. That is of course in addition to his much more modest base salary of $600,000.
The figure makes for the third highest annual pay for any public Silicon Valley, the San Jose Mercury News point out.
Semel succeeded in turning Yahoo into a successful company and he has every right te be rewarded for that. But what on earth does he plan to do with $231?
Further more – if I were a Yahoo shareholder (which I'm not), I wouldn't be too exited about $231 million of shares diluting the total number of outstanding shares in the stock market.
Following Enron and Worldcom, the high tech industry told us that we didn't need legislation to regulate stock option compensation for executives – self-regulation would be sufficient. If Semel's record pay shows anything, it is that selfregulation doesn't work. We need a legal requirement to expense stock options and we need it now.
Will Sun's OpenSolaris follow Iraq's lead?
Sun earlier today unveiled the members for its OpenSolaris advisory board. The group of five will have to prepare the OpenSolaris community towards self-governance. The community will then have all the resources to sustain itself.
It sounds much like the story we were told before the war against Iraq – once we free the country, we will be greeted with open arms and oil will start flowing freely. And much like the propaganda before the war, OpenSolaris might turn out to be an utter failure too.
The board is made up by five members, two of which are Sun employees and two more of which are elected from the current developer community. Lastly Sun appointed Roy Felding, co-founder and member of the Apache Software Foundation.
Will the group be able to resist pressures from Sun management? Don't count on the Sun employees – no offense, but those guys need to watch their careers.
Move on to the "independent" members:
Al Hopper, engineer consultant, Logical Approach, in a conference call announcing the board said: "I've been a Sun zealot for 15 years plus."
Rich Teer, independent Solaris consultant and author of "Solaris Systems Programming at least buttered up only Solaris and not Sun in general: "I've been using Solaris for eons, it seems. This is the culmination of a Solaris evangelist's dream."
The board will needs its independence if OpenSolaris is to become a success. Sun Microsystems has succeeded in upsetting much of the open source community when it picked the CDDL as a open source license.
Although legally the CDDL is open source, many in the industry claim it violates the spirit of open source because it puts up barriers between OpenSolaris and the open source community at large.
The CDDL-decision has already caused a backlash against Solaris, keeping developers from embracing the project. All it needs is a spineless advisory board to further finish the job Sun will have created its own little Iraq wasteland.
SAP makes another attempt at a rather ridiculous switching programme
Enterprise software provider SAP is extending its "Safe Passage" programme that aims to win over current Peoplesoft and JD Edwards users.
The programme was initially launched in January and targeted customers using both SAP and Peoplesoft or both SAP and JD Edwards. The scope is now expanded too any user of Peoplesoft or JD Edwards.
The offer is obviously aimed at users who refuse to deal with Oracle. The SAP website promises to let you "plan migration at your own pace". Oracle has said it will stop supporting current software versions by 2013. But I have yet to meet any user that is scared by that date.
It's good for SAP to have a, just any, switching programme in place. But I don't think that even they expect much to come out of it.
Viagra to bloom for years to come
The internet will see about 52.4 billion spam email messages PER DAY this year, according to a prediction by the Radicati Group.
The figure is so mind bugling that we had to get it confirmed that this wasn't the total number per month or year even. But apparently spammers really try to sell us Viagra, mortgages and get us infected with computer viruses 52.4 billion times a day.
All this spam is good news for email appliance vendors, Radicati points out. The market for appliances is set to grow by 331 percent by 2009. The clear losers are providers of managed services who filter email on their own servers (109 percent growth), and trailing behind are the software providers with a mere 23 percent projected growth.
Radicati forecast that e-mail appliance revenue will grow 331 percent by 2009, while managed services will grow 109 percent and software will grow by only 23 percent. Overall Radicati expects e-mail security revenues to hit $6.3 billion by 2009, up from a projected $3.8 billion in 2005.
A managed service will filter email for spam and viruses at an offsite location – see it as outsourced spam filtering. For users in regulated parts of the industry such as banking and healthcare, this isn't an option.
The 55 percent rule in blogging
As Pubsub has surpassed the 9 million mark in the number of blogs it tracks, the percentage of active blogs remains at a stable 55 percent.
Pubsub serves as a kind of search engine for blogs, allowing users to enter keywords and get alerts when one of those shows up in a blog.
It would seem logical for the total number of active blogs to slowly decline over time, as bloggers get fed up or overworked, or because of a lack of new blogs being created. Yet 55 percent seems to be the magic number here.
Microsoft takes the lead, Linux held back
With all the noise about large enterprises embracing Linux, the open source movement seems to have lost sight of medium sized businesses.
Only 27 percent of the medium sized companies use Linux. And it gets worse: 48 percent of that group said they weren't interested at all in the open source OS. A mere 10 percent said they planned to actually look at it in the next three years.
All these data come from a survey by Info-Tech Research in Canada. And don't blow it off as Microsoft propaganda: the company doesn't do research that's sponsored or commissioned by IT vendors. Instead it polled its nearly 20,000 clients in the US, UK and Canada, 1422 of which responded.
Why won't medium sized businesses hear the open source gospel? It's the same old story all over again: general management believes the software is insecure, unreliable, simply said: not ready for mission critical applications. So instead they are going with Windows.
Open source has its challenge spelled out.
Yes, it's 1 April again
Google Gulp is "designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty." It's all part of Google's strategy to organize the world's information. And happens to be launched on April Fools.
Bottles of the drink can be obtained by turning in a cap from a used one. How do you get a used cap? Exactly… from a friend. "And if you don't know anyone who can give you one, don't worry – that just means you aren't cool."
Today also marked the occasion of the hostil takeover of Wikipedia by the commercial Encyclopaedia Britannica. The online collaborative reference service will stop receiving contributions from members of the public unless they have signed formal agreements with Britannica.
CreativeWish meanwhile did some wishful thinking and claimed that the side had been sold to Microsoft. It would have more credibility if the site didn't write about graphic design on Mac OS X.
Linux.org cooked up a story about the open source operating system getting ready to dump the Pengiun as its symbol of choice. Linux godfather Linus Torvalds allegedly wrote in an email: "I'm _totally_ sick of wearing penguin shirts, dressing up in penguin costumes, signing people's penguin posters and looking at those
stuffed penguins that kids carry around." An new mascot will be picked by 4 April.
Our friends at The Register went a little crazy, and had Steve Jobs joining Ikea, made Cisco merge with Nabisco and sent of Bush's daughters to serve in Iraq.
If you have that sick desire for even more April Fools jokes, you can find a list long enough to waste the remainder of your day here.
PS. Silicon Valley Sleuth lacks the creativity and wit to come up with any good April Fools pranks. You can safely browse through these pages, although I do not guarantee that I won't fall for a well thought of joke myself.
Gmail's size: it's a male thing
Size does matter, according to Google, which subsequently increased the size of the mailboxes in Gmail accounts from 1 to 2 Gb.
The move follows Yahoo's decision last week to up its storage to 1 Gb. To show the progress of the upgrade the Gmail webpage features a counter that indicated the storage available to users.
The question remains what a user should do with 2 Gb of email storage, and if it will make us more happy than owning 1 Gb.
Maybe we should ask Bill Gates, but I have a feeling it is similar to him getting his second billion dollars after he obtained his first one: The excitement quickly wears off. Except that you can pay your mortgage with his billions, and Google's Gmail ones have no monetary value.
iPod copycat: Hype or hoax?
At Cebit a little known Korean company called Luxpro caused quite a stir with its Super Shuffle. The device looked exactly like an iPod Shuffle. And the consensus after the show was that the company was after attention rather than looking to actually sell the device.
But now the company is either looking for more attention, or is actually serious about its ambitions to deliver an MP3 player the size of an USB memory key, because the device is back.
Well, not back exactly: the name has been changed to Super Tangent, and the control buttons are slightly adjusted so the device looks a bit less like the iPod Shuffle.
And, of course, the device still comes with a FM radio and buyers have the option of buying one of three colours. But apart from that, it still looks an awful lot like an USB memory key … er … iPod Shuffle. Apple's legal team'd better get warmed up.
The power of the e-vite
Apparently the Evite.com service isn't known very well outside the US, but here in Silicon Valley we live and die by it. Need to know who can play in this Sunday's sports match? Use an e-vite. Need to persuade party goers that they are not the only one to show up for your birthday bash? Use an e-vite.
Evite in summary allows you to manage the invitations for all kinds of social events. It also maintains a list of people who plan to attend. And – this is Evite's insider secret - will let you know which slackers have looked at the invitation but are too lame to actually fill out the RSVP form.
Evite sends out about 8 million invitations a month, Wired.com estimates, and by now has its share of competitors, although there's nothing yet for Evite to worry about.
If you haven't tried Evite yet, give it a shot for the next social event you're organising. I promise you'll never want to go back.
Transmeta keeps it cool
Transmeta might not find a market for its energy efficient processors, but the underlying technology is very much in demand, the company speculates.
Today the company further outlined its restructuring, which will see all of the company centring around the LongRun2 power saving technology. The technology tackles two issues that will become ever more stressing once we start using a 90 nanometer production process: leakage and overall power consumption.
The company apparently isn't just warming employees and investors up for its upcoming bankruptcy. It just signed a strategic alliance with Sony where Transmeta will supply over 100 engineers to help Sony quickly implement LongRun2 technology. And more such deals are in the works, the company's CEO claims.
It leaves you to wonder however what kind of future Transmeta envisions. With a total staff of just over 200 employees, it appears to have become pretty much an energy consumption consultancy bureau with little manpower dedicated to research and development. That doesn't bode well for the future.
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