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Linuxworld Fun
The Linuxworld Expo is now in full swing, and there's a variety of news. The BBC has an overview. Microsoft has a booth at the Expo in the section intended for "new, up-and-coming companies". Sun is rolling out servers running Linux. And VA Software - Slashdot's owner - is moving Sourceforge.net to IBM's database software.
I'm just waiting for someone to start defacing the Microsoft booth. This will make us look REALLLY good to the corporate world.
Now, I'm no real Microsoft Affectionado, but this is probably the single most insightful thing I ever heard from a Microsoft representative. People don't want to fiddle with anything on their computers, just use the standard apps. Heck, most users don't even change their background nor their colours (God help them, the day they get XP!).
I know this is going straight against the mantra on slashdot "choice-is-good", but normal users have no base on what to make a "choice", and there inflexibility is good: it makes the normal user feel "good" about his (non)choice. How many times have I told people to switch from Lookout Express to a better email client (especially when they just got infected by the virus/worm of the day), but it doesn't help: they are familiar with it, it comes with the computer and everyone uses it. That's infexibility, and the users are inflexible, hence they need inflexible software. Sad but true.
What if the upgrade to DB2 and WebSphere improves the performance of the site? Does it automatically suck because it doesn't use open source software? If the functionality you get is still there, what is the difference? Open Source people have got to show a little maturity if they want people to listen to them, taking all your toys home is not a good response to this. Making MySQL better than DB2 IS a good response.
quite simply, VA is preparing to be bought out by IBM.
four-oh-four
Speaking as someone who's worked with another RDBMS which uses memory based locking (Ingres) for over 10 years, I can say that this can scale and scale very well.
Your application designers need to have concurrency issues in mind - but then that tends to make for better applications anyway. There's more to concurrency than simply the number of locks available in the system.
Ingres has always used memory-based locking and has only been extended to 64-bit addressing in the last couple of years. There are people using Ingres with databases in the hundreds of Gb or higher and with thousands of concurrent sessions.
I guarantee that any system of that size Ingres, Oracle, DB2 or Bob's own DBMS would need to consider concurrency pretty carefully regardless of how locking is implemented.
And VA Software - Slashdot's owner - is moving Sourceforge.net to IBM's database software.
I think this is a much bigger story then linux kernel 2.34.56 is released, yet its a one liner? Next time you wanna bury a story throw it into a slashback or a jon katz story.
four-oh-four
Well duh! It's a Sun box because it costs a hell of a lot more than you would normally pay for home brewed box with the same hardware.
Who is John Galt?
http://savannah.gnu.org/phpsysinfo/
OK EVERYONE move all their projects from VA's 8+ high end servers and bandwidth with a compile farm attached, to the 1 server (with ide drives) that savannah has. I'm sure savannah can take the load. look their system has 20 gigs of space to use (not in the audio-video dir), don't you think that it can hold all the worthwhile free software? Come on everyone! grab your files and GOOOO sf is obviously sucky now since they are going to use... *GASP* a paid for program.
I mean seriously guys.. no one else can replace what sf.net does for our community so SHUT THE FUCK UP unless you have a good pipe, a pile of servers, and some time to take the sf.net code base and modify it to your microcosm of a vision for how it SHOULD be done.
I have two projects on SourceForge. Please tell me when exactly should I expect problems. I hadn't single SourceForge problem yet.
Not exactly into being proactive, are we.
The concerns are (a) difficulty to extract meta-data from SF (already mentioned), (b) the uncertainty of whether or not the free (beer) SF service will be around for the forseeable future, even for non-commercial, free projects, and (c) the uncertainly as to whether or not VA will be around to offer the service, in any form, for the forseeable future.
Contrast this with the FSF, which is a charity that has been around since the eighties (at least), isn't going to 'go under' like the rest of the dot bomb anytime soon, if ever, and will never pull the kinds of stunts SF does to make obtaining and extracting one's information more difficult over time, or to change the conditions of use.
It isn't about predicting trouble with certainty, it is about recognizing a vulnerability and doing something about it before the problem can arise.
But it is your project, so if you prefer to wait until trouble actually arises, that is your perogative, and in the end, your fault.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't mean to burst your bubble, but Microsoft knows everything it needs to know to "offer ways for both systems to peacefully coexist."
On the technology front, the source for anything linux is there. But why would they need that? They have been involved with writing UNIX programs for quite a while. Its code is in SCO unixware. Hell, they wrote Xenix, their own UNIX operating system!
Peacefully coexist!? They could start by NOT building anti-GPL verbage into their license agreements.
Look, the bottom line is that Microsoft wants to destroy this open source community.
rhadc
No, they want to have the corporate version of sourceforge run on DB2 and WebSphere. My guess is that VA Software won't be migrating sourceforge.net. Like you said early sourceforge.net handles a ton of activity, and it does it with PostgreSQL and PHP. Migrating to a totally new technology would almost certainly cause problems, and the last thing that IBM wants is for VA Software to switch sourceforge.net from Free Software to their expensive commercial software and have the new setup be buggy or have performance problems.
The corporate accounts paying for the commercial version of sourceforge are undoubtedly dumber than a box of rocks. They would rather purchase a reimplementation of sourceforge.net on a different technology base than download the software that is good enough for sourceforge.net for free and learn to set it up themselves. Heck, they could even pay someone else to set it up for them (the folks at savannah.gnu.org have some experience in setting up sourceforge). In my opinion these are precisely the type of customers to target. It is almost trivially easy to make money from people who have more money than sense.
I'll get flamed for this, but...
Microsoft would get a much better reception if they went to the expo with actual Linux products.
Think about it. They have (or have had) a copy of IE for linux kicking around internally. IE exists for other unixes (too lazy to go check which at the moment tho). They have a media player for unixes (or they did). Wouldn't it be nice if they went to the show and released those, or annouced something about them, rather than hawking Visual Studio
Just my
from the article:
"This isn't about trying to get people to move from Unix to Microsoft products, it's about offering ways for both systems to peacefully coexist," Houston stressed.
Then why aren't the office formats open?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
No biggie, really.
.asp extensions that are only experimental in Apache so the whole works ended up on and NT server. This stuff is always contracted out and means nothing regarding the whole webserver debate. It's just a matter of what tools they are comfortable using.
Wagner LLC did some backend work for Linuxexpo as a level II sub contractor for IBM (a big shout out to the chief IBM tech Pablo Cruise in the design lab!!!) and it turns out the company who did the webpage design/artwork was a photoshop/Windows only shop and needed the new
Warmest regards,
-Jack
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
I think what we can all laugh about is their absurd new licensing program, or their ridiculous notion that they could acheive the critical mass necessary to put Palladium into effect, or that stupid "Tablet PC" crap.
Incidently, who the fuck wants a tablet PC? Seems like a neutered laptop to me, but for 85% of the price. No thanks. At $200, they'd be a great toy, nothing more.
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