The Pervasive Datacenter

I'm out at JavaOne in San Francisco this week and one discussion I've heard popping up with some regularity is, "Do we need to do something to protect open source in a cloud computing world?" I've written about aspects of this topic at length previously. However, given that this is an area that is buzzing up a bit, I thought it would be useful to boil down the key issues and give my personal take.

The nub
Copyleft licenses, such as the GPL used for the Linux kernel and the majority of other open-source projects, require that the source code for enhancements and other modifications to GPLd code be made available to the commons if the modified software is distributed. Distribution is the key here. If the modified code is only used within a company, that's not distribution. Germane to our purposes here, neither is access to services provided by that code over a network. In other words, offer access to a CRM or content management system built from a GPL foundation solely in the form of a hosted service and there you can make any proprietary changes or extensions you like and there's no requirement that you make the source code for those available.

A loophole?
Some view this as a simple loophole to be plugged. The GPL was originally written very much within the context of Unix programmatic and operating system interfaces. Therefore, the reasoning goes, the only reason the GPL didn't ... Read more

Don't get me started on weird period-ized names.

As I've written about previously, social bookmarking hasn't advanced a whole lot. Frankly, I don't care a whole lot about the social aspect beyond maybe keeping an eye on the links of a few friends who I know turn up interesting stuff. However, I've found that keeping my bookmarks in the Cloud rather than in my browser works well for me. Doing a daily link post with some short commentary also fits my style and workflow better than doing a lot of short posts does.

My latest experiment is with Ma.gnolia.com. It's pretty, but probably its biggest advantage in my book is that it doesn't truncate the description (i.e. the comment or excerpt that I enter) like del.icio.us does. Although del.icio.us's limited character count does encourage a certain twitter-ish brevity, which is probably good discipline for me, I do find it annoying. You also don't get to see what is actually being truncated until you save it.

Ma.gnolia.com has its own application programming interface (API) to interact with the service. However, it also supports an API and other access methods that mirror those in de.licio.us. Thus, with minor (but hard to figure out from the documentation) modifications, I was able to use the same javascript

With its scheduled April 24 release of Ubuntu 8.04, which also goes by the alliterative moniker "Hardy Heron," Canonical will ship its second "long term support" (LTS) version. But the first, really, since the company and distribution became widely popular.

There's always been a bit of a flavor-of-the-month aspect to Linux distributions other than the big two: Red Hat (along with its Fedora community version) and Novell's SUSE. Gentoo grabbed headlines one year; Mandrake was supposed to make the Linux desktop a widespread reality another year. It might be tempting to paint Ubuntu's current popularity in a similar light but I think that would be unfair. Ubuntu is really a more consumable flavor of Debian--which has long been a popular non-commercial alternative to Red Hat and Novell but has equally long held a reputation for being geeky (as in hard to install and configure) and for having a often prickly community.

The relationship between Ubuntu and Debian is more fully described here, but in a nutshell, Ubuntu is built on top of a Debian foundation but has its own community and release process. Ubuntu is also supported by a company, Canonical, whereas Debian is an (aggressively) volunteer effort.

Hardy Heron comes in two builds, one with packages oriented around server use (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition) and another around desktop applications (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition). The two different builds also have different support windows during which Canonical commits ... Read more

I've been on a bit of a de-cluttering jag over the past year or so. Too much paper, too much "stuff" around the house. So I've been slowly dumping the junk and selling or donating the rest.

ScanCafe Bangalore office

(Credit: ScanCafe)

This includes photographs. I had stacks of snapshots of family, friends, places, and so forth sitting around in various drawers and boxes. I had made a half-hearted effort to digitize some of the old slides previously, but scanning is really tedious work. Scanning the hundreds of photos involved here was just more than I realistically felt like tackling.

Over the past couple of years, I'd had some slide scans done locally by a small photo store and a large one. I wasn't impressed in either case. I paid about $1 per scan and the results were pretty mediocre. I don't doubt that I could have eventually tracked down someone in the Boston area who could do a better job for a reasonable cost, but we're still talking pretty big bucks for a mass scan-athon.

That's when, after reading some reviews and surfing some forums on photo sites, I decided over Christmas to box the whole lot up and send them to ScanCafe.

I recently received the results. Bottom line? Good quality and, at $0.24 per slide and $0.27 per print, the price is hard to beat.

I'll dig into my experience in a bit more detail, ... Read more

It doesn't take much to put Apple in the news, and this afternoon's excuse is that a Miami-based company called PsyStar is selling a Mac clone.

Its Web site was down earlier--ostensibly because of the overwhelming reaction to its product. As Computerworld's Gregg Keizer reports:

Before its site went dark Monday, PsyStar was pitching an Intel-based system it said could be configured to run Leopard, Apple's Mac OS X 10.5. The machine, which was priced at $399 minus Leopard, $554 with it already installed, is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and includes 2GB of memory, a 250GB hard drive, optical drive, and on-board graphics based on Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950 graphics processor. The GMA 950 is part of several Intel chipsets--notably the 945 series--that are popular on PCs designed to run Microsoft's Windows.

There are a variety of issues here:

• Are Macs really overpriced these days, compared to a truly comparable Wintel alternative? (Certainly far less than in the past.)

• Is OpenMac a trademark violation? (Seems possible. I am not a lawyer.)

• Are any possible savings worth getting a PC-Mac OS combo that the Apple won't support? (Not from where I sit.)

• Does PsyStar have the right to preinstall an operating system for which it (apparently) doesn't have an original-equipment manufacturing, or OEM, license? (Seems dicey.)

But I wanted to focus on one issue in which I have some personal experience.

The Mac OS X end-user license agreement ... Read more

Niagara 2 (formally the UltraSparc T2) was a big step forward for Sun Microsystems' chip multithreading (CMT) efforts. It's not that there was anything really wrong with its Niagara 1 predecessor, but 90-nanometer process technology imposed some fairly severe restrictions on what could be crammed into each of the eight cores. As a result, Niagara 1 was well-suited for a relatively narrow range of network-facing workloads. Niagara 2, by contrast, was able to leverage 65nm process technology to spread its wings considerably--which it did by significantly beefing up the threading, floating point, and other capabilities of the individual cores, in addition to adding on-chip I/O. (Our full report: Niagara 2: More Heft in the Weft.)

Now Sun has rolled out its promised dual-socket version of the UltraSparc T2--aka "Victoria Falls" or the UltraSparc T2 Plus--in 1U (Sun Sparc Enterprise T5140) and 2U (T5240) server flavors. In essence, it replaces the two on-chip 10-gigabit Ethernet ports with four coherence channels that tie together two UltraSparc T2 Plus chips into a single SMP system. So you get twice as many cores and threads, and about twice the processing power. Sun has also tweaked other server capacities a bit higher. For example, the 2U box now supports up to 128Gb of FB-DIMM memory (using 32 DIMMs and a new memory riser card) and up to 16 disk drives.

Most everything else remains unchanged from the UltraSparc T2-based servers. As before, there's embedded cryptography, a floating point unit for ... Read more

One of the problems with putting things into categories is that as technologies and the environment change over time, those which were once separate and distinct can become much less so. But, because we've grown so accustomed to thinking of them as independent entities, we can miss that shift.

From a practical business perspective, this can mean failing to notice that someone we never thought of as a competitor is now serving the needs of our customers. They may well be doing it in a different way or coming at a problem from a different mindset or design point. But, at the end of the day, they end up solving the same customer problems and taking away business. The datacenter space is replete with examples such as more distributed systems replacing centralized ones (through several cycles) and standard interconnects replacing proprietary ones.

Here's a new one to think about in the Web application and Cloud Computing space.

Is Web Hosting the same as Cloud Computing? It's tempting to say not. After all, isn't Cloud Computing the future while Web Hosting something that's been around since, well, the beginning of the Web (and even earlier if you consider all the various pre-Web Internet services)? But what is Web Hosting exactly? It's providing access over the network to a set of services--such as those associated with the LAMP stack--together with some storage capacity, and a bandwidth contract. For this reason, in Defining Cloud Computing, I wrote &... Read more

As I've written about previously, we're starting to move beyond the familiar keyboard  and mouse/touchpad, and two-handed game controller as ways of interacting with our computer systems. In the gaming world, the motion-sensing Nintendo Wii remote is the most obvious innovation. Elsewhere, multi-touch screens, either on the large scale (Microsoft Surface) or small scale (Apple iPhone) have been garnering a lot of attention.

(Credit: 3Dconnexion)

Another interesting category is the six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) controller. These aren't particularly new but, until recently, they've been targeted primarily at 3D CAD professionals and have been priced in line with relatively expensive engineering software. If you're spending thousands of dollars for a CAD package, spending a few hundred for a piece of hardware that lets you use it more easily is pretty much a no-brainer. (Devices of this type are also a good match for controlling robotics.)

However, more recently, 3Dconnexion, a wholly owned subsidiary of Logitech, has pushed down the price point considerably with its SpaceNavigator line. The SpaceNavigator PE is $59 (MSRP) for a non-commercial use license with online support and the SpaceNavigator SE is $99 (MSRP) for a commercial use license with full support. (The two differ only in licensing and support; they're otherwise physically identical and support the same software.) The company has now updated its lineup with the SpaceNavigator for Notebooks, priced at $129. It's a bit smaller than the standard SpaceNavigator and, at .55 pounds, weighs about half as much. ... Read more

Over the past year or so, IBM has been revamping its Systems and Technology Group (STG) organization in a major way.

We see those changes reflected in a major way with IBM's Power systems announcement Wednesday at its COMMON User Group Conference in Nashville.

Two aspects of the STG reorg are of particular interest here.

The first is the customer aspect. This announcement reflects its venue; COMMON is IBM's midrange user group--which at IBM historically more or less equated to System i (and its iSeries and AS/400 predecessors). However, this announcement pulls in multiple product threads--including blades. This reflects how the client-facing part of the new STG organization now breaks down by customer type, rather than technology base. STG's Business Systems Group (BSG) is chartered with selling to the midmarket--across product groups. This is essentially a return to the older IBM sales model that was subsequently replaced by a more specialist-led approach.

The announcement also reflects changes to the product side of the reorganization. Looking back, System i and System p (to use the product line names in use prior to this announcement), sprang from wholly different roots. System i, long known as the AS/400 (although its lineage actually goes back further to the System/36 and System/38), was long an independent thread of IBM systems development based in Rochester, Minn.

Midwinter trips to AS/400 headquarters were not eagerly sought! It was a competitor to low-end and midrange minicomputers from the likes of ... Read more

I've already written positively about my experiences at Microsoft's MIX08 conference in March. It had a wholly different feel from any Microsoft event I've attended in years.

There were lots of interesting sessions but I wanted to draw your attention to one in particular: The Story of the Ribbon, given by Jensen Harris. The video is online (requires Silverlight). The reason I liked it so much is that Jensen gives a really great historical tour through the evolution of the Microsoft Word interface and explains why and how Microsoft decided that they needed to start with a (mostly) clean sheet of paper.

Microsoft hasn't gotten the credit it deserves for breaking with the past in Office 2007. In fact, they've taken a lot of heat and generated no small glee in competitive circles for putting users through such a dramatic user interface shift. However, it seems unfair to, on the one hand, consistently harp on Microsoft's lack of innovation (and many do, with some justification) and then turn around and hit them with brick bats when they do head off in a new direction.