The Police are supposed to get a warrant before they spy on you. It's a key element of the laws surrounding the situation. There are controls and accountability.
What controls and accountability are here?
This is a corporation abusing you in a way that you should never tolerate from a government.
my monthly premiums are just over 600 per month (I'm 45 and in pretty good health)
Have you considered catastrophic health insurance? Catastrohpic health insurance has a really high deductible, like around $6000. Then most of your run-of-the-mill health care is just paid out-of-pocket, but if you end up needing a $100k operation, you don't break the bank. It's significantly cheaper, and (I think) is probably a better way to go if you're reasonably healthy.
And with such industrious countries as Liberia & Myanmar that aren't on Metric yet.
UK isn't really on the metric either -- not 100%. Grams / kilos seems to have taken root for lots of things; but most people still measure their weight in stone, for crying out loud. Speed limits and distance signs are still done in miles; pubs still serve pints. Temperature is measured in Celcius, and the younger generation don't have a "sense" for what numbers in Fahrenheit are. Things on the order of a meter are measured in meters, but feet are still bandied about quite a bit.
This is China taking the needs of Foxconn seriously
From the summary, I don't see anything particularly wrong with this decision. One company gained an unfair advantage over its competition by engaging in illegal industrial espionage. If the problem is selective prosecution, then surely the solution is to complain about others who are not prosecuted for espionage, rather than to complain about those who are prosecuted?
What was the chance that any 20-year plan from 1991 would include the internet, or outsourcing to companies in India? Or that any 10-year plan from 2001 would include social networking on twitter and Facebook? Or that any 5-year plan from 2006 would include writing an app for the burgeoning smartphone market?
Stuff is changing at a *much* faster rate than it used to. Some strategic principles and a direction are always good; but anything with enough details to call it a "plan" is just fantasy after 5 years, especially in the technology industry.
No it's not. It's a simple statement of fact. And in other cases of suicide -- where the person is depressed and feels like life isn't worth living -- this is exactly the thing to point out to them. Heck, in "It's a Wonderful Life", the whole point is to show the main character the positive impact he's had on other people, and the loss that would happen to them if he committed suicide. Does he turn to the angel and say, "What should I care about them? I'm the one who's suffering!" No -- he realizes that his impact on other people is part of what makes his life really valuable.
Terry Pratchett is afraid of Alzheimers. He thinks that a life like that is not worth living -- it's not worth the cost to himself or his family and society. I think he's overestimating how bad Alzheimers will be; and greatly underestimating the value of his life while going through it. Moreover, in saying so, he's saying that the lives of all of the people who currently have Alzheimers are not worth living either. That's a pretty dangerous path to start to go down.
What ever happened to walking in front of a train or something like that? Are there no trains in the UK that still run? If people want to die with dignity there should be no fanfare, no drama, just over with it.
Dude, trains still have drivers. I'm sure they already live in dire fear of someone jumping out in front and dying in front of them. If you're just completely overcome with emotion, I can see you not having much compassion to spare for the train driver. But a clear-headed man (as Terry seems to be ATM) should never do something so traumatic to another human being.
It is every person's right to decide how they die. Not the governments.
Why do you think so?
The underlying assumption behind assisted suicide is that some human lives are not valuable. They are not worth living. And when society gets to that point, there becomes a tremendous pressure on older people to commit suicide instead of living. We already marginalize the elderly, by shutting them away in nursing homes. This would make that ten times worse.
My grandmother died of Alzheimers; and her life, even after she was pretty far gone, was valuable. I would have missed a pretty big chunk of it if she had committed suicide while she was still lucid.
The laws against assisted suicide affirm that all human life is valuable. Not only is Terry Pratchet's life valuable, even as he slides into senility, but so are the lives of all of those who are disabled physically and mentally by old age. Those lives are worth protecting.
What do you do when the voters are conditioned and misinformed and the majority is wrong?
One of my co-workers is Italian. He's pro nuclear power in general. But he's against nuclear power run by Italians. He's very pessimistic about the amount of corruption in that country. He is confident that safety will be compromised to reduce costs and increase graft. And nuclear power is not something that you want to be playing around with, safety-wise. He seems perfectly content buying nuclear power from France, even with the reactor just across the border, because the French safety record seems pretty good thus far.
My final point in the introduction was that if I were one of those engineers I'd be haunted by the question of whether I should have called Dan Rather.
Or gone and given an unofficial technical briefing to the men and women flying in the Challenger. Or even camped out on the launchpad.
The fact is that the engineers *could* have stopped the launch that day. But they didn't think they could, because it would require them to do something dangerous and extreme -- they would have to rock the boat in a major way. I'd be willing to bet that most, if not all, of those engineers, in a similar situation, would now be more willing to do "rock the boat" in a similar situation. It's unfortunate that for most of us, to reach that point requires at least one major failure.
I hope your book helps others to learn the easy way, rather than the hard way.
I can't see what's so terribly different about email spam compared to paper fliers through my letter box, except that the latter are harder to block.
One difference is that it actually costs the sender of those leaflets a non-negligible amount per person to send those, which acts as a natural rate-limiter, and also naturally causes the people sending the leaflets to be a bit clever in who they target (i.e,. don't advertise yachts in the slums). Just imagine what your letter box would look like if those leaflets were a million for a penny.
Another difference is that most of the spam is selling things that are illegal to purchase in the US.
Spammers aren't paid to push products, they are paid to deliver n-thousand messages.
If you read the paper, it goes in to quite a bit of detail. People who actually send spam are typically paid via affiliate programs: people who sell stuff make it easy for a spammer to set up a website and ship stuff, so all they have to really do is get click-throughs.
I fire you because you called me a cunt. You turn up to work anyway. I call the police to force you to leave. There's your government force behind the consqeuences of your actions.
That's a ridiculous train of logic. Suppose this. You call your girlfriend a cunt. She breaks up with you. You show up at her house expecting to hang out anyway. The police force you to leave. There's government force behind the consequences of your actions. Does that mean you don't have the freedom to call your girlfriend a cunt? Of course not.
You've put your finger on the source of the inevitable problem. Given the job, you're guaranteed to get this kind of person showing up at least occasionally; just like you get BOfH sysadmins, Wall Street attracts get-rich-quick schemers, the lawsuits attract ambulance-chasers.
The critical question isn't whether these things happen; they will. The critical question is how they organization responds. What will happen to these police, and the department that they work for? Will they be fired and never allowed to work in law enforcement again? Will there be a review of the attitudes of the police department to see if there are other systematic violations of rights, or a failure to provide adequate training or incentives to uphold the law (rather than abuse it for personal gain)? Or will they be given a slap on the wrist, and business continue as usual?
If there are consequences, then it won't be as attractive to this kind of person; or, this kind of person will control themselves because they know there will be consequences. If there aren't consequences, you're going to attract a whole lot more of this kind of person.
The xen.org project has mainly been focusing on server-style virtualization, without desktop graphics (although graphics pass-through is obviously a priority for the Intel engineers).
What you describe really needs not just a single piece of software, but the full configuration and integration with a distribution. If you're not opposed to using software that is partially closed-source but free-as-in-beer, you could try XenClient. It's designed to run on laptops, and specifically tweaked to pass the GPU through to one VM. But there's no reason it couldn't run on a desktop with the right hardware.
My understanding of Xen was that it was a hypervisor, had a dom0 guest VM for administering the hypervisor
dom0 does run under Xen and does the administrative tasks. But dom0 has another purpose: it has drivers for all of the hardware on the system. It doesn't make sense for Xen to try to have drivers for every bit of hardware that's out there -- Linux already does that very well, so there's no point in duplicating effort, especially since device drivers have *nothing* to do with virtualization. So the Xen leverages the device drivers already available in Linux.
That's part of the reason this has taken so long to get in. Basic Linux guest support has been in for years. But making the same source code work on bare metal (where it has to set up all kinds of things itself) work on Xen (where it has to interact with Xen to get things like interrupts and so on) is tricky, and requires some changes in the core kernel code. Kernel maintainers don't care if the code in arch-specific directories is a bit ugly, but they are very picky about core kernel or x86 arch code.
The most contentious bit was merged in 2.6.37; since then other, less contentious functionality (i.e,. not touching core kernel code) is slowly being merged in, with the final piece necessary to be able to actually boot guest VMs merged in for 3.0.
Unfortunately when this e-mail was sent, Jeremy was just about the only developer working on upstreaming the dom0 work for quite a while; and Jeremy was, unfortunately, still learning how to interact effectively with the kernel community. This can be largely blamed on a tactical error made by the people in charge of XenSource before Citrix acquired them. They were hoping to force RedHat to work on upstreaming dom0, so they kept the Xen fork of linux (linux-xen) at 2.6.18, and only hired one developer to work on upstreaming. RedHat initially said they were going to work on it, but instead ended up buying a company that developed KVM, leaving Xen in a bit of a lurch (for which they really only had themselves to blame).
Since that time, more full-time developers have been brought in, both by Citrix and Oracle, and Jeremy, along with the other developers, have gotten more face-time with the rest of the kernel community. Things are still sometimes contentious (as they are bound to be), but the results of this effort speak for themselves.
But doesn't that just make Xen the OS with linux becoming an application? I mean, it is the OS's job to manage memory and devices, and to allocate CPU time.
No, Xen is a hypervisor. A process expects a *lot* more from an operating system than an OS expects from a hypervisor. VMs expect raw hardware and know they have to manage most things (like setting up memory, doing filesystems, and so on) themselves. Processes expect an operating system set up memory mapping for them, give them filesystems (not just raw disks), IP addresses and sockets and TCP (not just raw packets), and so on.
In the KVM case, Linux is an operating system to normal processes, but a hypervisor to VMs. Linux gives memory and time to the guest OS, and the guest OS gives memory and time (along with filesystems, TCP, &c) to guest processes. So in that way Xen and KVM (i.e., Linux-as-hypervisor) are the same.
The main difference is that Xen is only a hypervisor, whereas with KVM, Linux tries to be both a hypervisor and an operating system. That has a number of practical implications. Xen has been widely deployed and tested as an enterprise-class hypervisor. I'm not aware of any large-scale enterprise deployments of KVM, so it remains to be seen whether Linux can successfully be both an enterprise-class hypervisor and an operating system at the same time.
There's been a developing market for desktop virtualization (VDI) -- meaning not "running a VM inside my desktop", but for corporations to run "desktops" as VMs inside of servers and export them to think clients on people's desks.
Citrix has a ton of capabilities in this area. They have decades of experience with handling remote display technologies, dealing with users, dealing with disk images, and so on. So they were in a perfect position to capitalize on this new trend with their existing technology and expertise.
However, to really run desktop software, you need enterprise-grade virtual machine software. Citrix didn't have any. They could recommend people run Hyper-V, but it's a new technology and by most measures not really as good as other solutions. They could recommend that people buy VMWare. However, VMWare have their own VDI solution. If you were an IT exec, deciding what to deploy for your VDI solution, would you run Citrix's VDI controller on VMWare's hypervisor, or would you just run VMWare's VDI controller on VMWare's hypervisor? Odds are that you'd favor buying from one vendor; it's likely that the software will work better together, and in any case you'll never end up in a situation where Citrix says it's VMWare's problem and VMWare says it's Citrix's problem, and you're stuck in the middle.
Not having their own virtualization solution would be a big limiting factor for Citrix's success in the desktop market. So, they bought XenSource. Now they can offer XenDesktop and XenServer together, offering a complete stack of software from top to bottom. That's the synergy they were looking for.
But of course, that buying that stack as a whole only makes sense if XenServer is actually enterprise-grade virtualization -- so they're still keen for XenServer to be a viable product in its own right.
There doesn't have to be a battle -- there's room in the OSS world for two technologies. Xen and KVM are different technologies. For most desktop users, KVM is probably the best option; but on big servers, linux running KVM has to mix scheduling between VMs and processes. Since Xen runs VMs exclusively, it can focus only on algorithms that work well for VMs.
What is Xen? Xen is a virtualization project that is run by four of the top five major cloud providers (including Amazon, Rackspace, &c); a commercial version written by Citrix run by thousands of sites worldwide, including large companies like Tesco, SAP, &c. It's also the approved way of running Oracle databases in a virtual machine.
What does that have to do with Linux? The Xen project is focused on virtualization. But Xen still needs to run on systems with all manner of devices. There are several ways they could have handled this. One is to try to put drivers for all of the devices in Xen. This would require a huge amount of work, mostly copying new device drivers and device fixes from Linux and porting them over to Xen. It would be a colossal waste of time: they would be duplicating effort of what Linux already does well, instead of doing what they want to do -- work on virtualization.
So what they do instead is run Xen as the hypervisor, but leverage the device drivers in Linux. They do this by creating a special VM, called "domain 0" or "dom0", which is booted first after Xen boots, that has drivers to control all of the devices. This domain is a version of Linux that is designed to be able to work with Xen to control and drive devices, while allowing Xen to control memory, CPU, and interrupts (the key hardware required to do virtualization).
Xen has been out for years. Why is this just being announced? The Xen project started out of a University research project. As is typical, they were trying to answer the question "what is possible?", and as a result, felt free to completely rip out and rewrite large sections of Linux code. This code was not upstream-able -- changes were made that were (rightly) not acceptable to the Kernel community.
Since that time, the Xen community has maintained branches of Linux with these intrusive, non-upstreamable patches, and used these branches as domain 0. At the same time, they have worked to try to get support for Linux-as-domain-0 into the mainline tree. This has been a long process, and something that has been a sore point for users of Xen for some time.
But as of Linux 3.0, all of the functionality required to use the mainline kernel tree as a basic dom0 with Xen is in. This means that if you install Xen, you'll be able to use the same kernel you booted with natively as the dom0 for Xen. It means that distributions won't have to maintain two separate kernels, one for booting bare metal, and one for booting on Xen. And it means not having to maintain the xen-linux fork, which has been a lot of painful work for the Xen community.
Just what the hell is the difference between a bare iron hypervisor and KVM?
As far as Linux is concerned, a KVM virtual machine is just another process. So your whole infrastructure-critical server VMs are treated exactly the same as the random daemons that get started up as a matter of course but never used. Worse yet, the same scheduling algortihms are used -- although the VMs have to handle interrupts, while processes don't.
In Xen, there's a scheduler dedicated to scheduling VMs, and the algorithm is tweaked specifcially to deal with VMs.
No, what they pluck out of thin air is what "advanced life" is. Unless they mean "life as we know it".
I suspect they mean something along the lines of "life past a specific complexity" -- i.e., at least of the complexity of an average fish, or maybe or a mammal. Bacteria are surprisingly adaptable, and can be found in extremes of heat, cold, and chemistry; it wouldn't be too surprising to find life on the order of the complexity of bacteria to be common in the universe. But the parameters necessary for that life to develop any more significant complexity are pretty uncommon.
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About the same as here? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy
Have you considered catastrophic health insurance? Catastrohpic health insurance has a really high deductible, like around $6000. Then most of your run-of-the-mill health care is just paid out-of-pocket, but if you end up needing a $100k operation, you don't break the bank. It's significantly cheaper, and (I think) is probably a better way to go if you're reasonably healthy.
UK isn't really on the metric either -- not 100%. Grams / kilos seems to have taken root for lots of things; but most people still measure their weight in stone, for crying out loud. Speed limits and distance signs are still done in miles; pubs still serve pints. Temperature is measured in Celcius, and the younger generation don't have a "sense" for what numbers in Fahrenheit are. Things on the order of a meter are measured in meters, but feet are still bandied about quite a bit.
From the summary, I don't see anything particularly wrong with this decision. One company gained an unfair advantage over its competition by engaging in illegal industrial espionage. If the problem is selective prosecution, then surely the solution is to complain about others who are not prosecuted for espionage, rather than to complain about those who are prosecuted?
What was the chance that any 20-year plan from 1991 would include the internet, or outsourcing to companies in India? Or that any 10-year plan from 2001 would include social networking on twitter and Facebook? Or that any 5-year plan from 2006 would include writing an app for the burgeoning smartphone market?
Stuff is changing at a *much* faster rate than it used to. Some strategic principles and a direction are always good; but anything with enough details to call it a "plan" is just fantasy after 5 years, especially in the technology industry.
No it's not. It's a simple statement of fact. And in other cases of suicide -- where the person is depressed and feels like life isn't worth living -- this is exactly the thing to point out to them. Heck, in "It's a Wonderful Life", the whole point is to show the main character the positive impact he's had on other people, and the loss that would happen to them if he committed suicide. Does he turn to the angel and say, "What should I care about them? I'm the one who's suffering!" No -- he realizes that his impact on other people is part of what makes his life really valuable.
Terry Pratchett is afraid of Alzheimers. He thinks that a life like that is not worth living -- it's not worth the cost to himself or his family and society. I think he's overestimating how bad Alzheimers will be; and greatly underestimating the value of his life while going through it. Moreover, in saying so, he's saying that the lives of all of the people who currently have Alzheimers are not worth living either. That's a pretty dangerous path to start to go down.
Dude, trains still have drivers. I'm sure they already live in dire fear of someone jumping out in front and dying in front of them. If you're just completely overcome with emotion, I can see you not having much compassion to spare for the train driver. But a clear-headed man (as Terry seems to be ATM) should never do something so traumatic to another human being.
Why do you think so?
The underlying assumption behind assisted suicide is that some human lives are not valuable. They are not worth living. And when society gets to that point, there becomes a tremendous pressure on older people to commit suicide instead of living. We already marginalize the elderly, by shutting them away in nursing homes. This would make that ten times worse.
My grandmother died of Alzheimers; and her life, even after she was pretty far gone, was valuable. I would have missed a pretty big chunk of it if she had committed suicide while she was still lucid.
The laws against assisted suicide affirm that all human life is valuable. Not only is Terry Pratchet's life valuable, even as he slides into senility, but so are the lives of all of those who are disabled physically and mentally by old age. Those lives are worth protecting.
One of my co-workers is Italian. He's pro nuclear power in general. But he's against nuclear power run by Italians. He's very pessimistic about the amount of corruption in that country. He is confident that safety will be compromised to reduce costs and increase graft. And nuclear power is not something that you want to be playing around with, safety-wise. He seems perfectly content buying nuclear power from France, even with the reactor just across the border, because the French safety record seems pretty good thus far.
Or gone and given an unofficial technical briefing to the men and women flying in the Challenger. Or even camped out on the launchpad.
The fact is that the engineers *could* have stopped the launch that day. But they didn't think they could, because it would require them to do something dangerous and extreme -- they would have to rock the boat in a major way. I'd be willing to bet that most, if not all, of those engineers, in a similar situation, would now be more willing to do "rock the boat" in a similar situation. It's unfortunate that for most of us, to reach that point requires at least one major failure.
I hope your book helps others to learn the easy way, rather than the hard way.
One difference is that it actually costs the sender of those leaflets a non-negligible amount per person to send those, which acts as a natural rate-limiter, and also naturally causes the people sending the leaflets to be a bit clever in who they target (i.e,. don't advertise yachts in the slums). Just imagine what your letter box would look like if those leaflets were a million for a penny.
Another difference is that most of the spam is selling things that are illegal to purchase in the US.
If you read the paper, it goes in to quite a bit of detail. People who actually send spam are typically paid via affiliate programs: people who sell stuff make it easy for a spammer to set up a website and ship stuff, so all they have to really do is get click-throughs.
That's a ridiculous train of logic. Suppose this. You call your girlfriend a cunt. She breaks up with you. You show up at her house expecting to hang out anyway. The police force you to leave. There's government force behind the consequences of your actions. Does that mean you don't have the freedom to call your girlfriend a cunt? Of course not.
I think I smell a troll...
You've put your finger on the source of the inevitable problem. Given the job, you're guaranteed to get this kind of person showing up at least occasionally; just like you get BOfH sysadmins, Wall Street attracts get-rich-quick schemers, the lawsuits attract ambulance-chasers.
The critical question isn't whether these things happen; they will. The critical question is how they organization responds. What will happen to these police, and the department that they work for? Will they be fired and never allowed to work in law enforcement again? Will there be a review of the attitudes of the police department to see if there are other systematic violations of rights, or a failure to provide adequate training or incentives to uphold the law (rather than abuse it for personal gain)? Or will they be given a slap on the wrist, and business continue as usual?
If there are consequences, then it won't be as attractive to this kind of person; or, this kind of person will control themselves because they know there will be consequences. If there aren't consequences, you're going to attract a whole lot more of this kind of person.
The xen.org project has mainly been focusing on server-style virtualization, without desktop graphics (although graphics pass-through is obviously a priority for the Intel engineers).
What you describe really needs not just a single piece of software, but the full configuration and integration with a distribution. If you're not opposed to using software that is partially closed-source but free-as-in-beer, you could try XenClient. It's designed to run on laptops, and specifically tweaked to pass the GPU through to one VM. But there's no reason it couldn't run on a desktop with the right hardware.
dom0 does run under Xen and does the administrative tasks. But dom0 has another purpose: it has drivers for all of the hardware on the system. It doesn't make sense for Xen to try to have drivers for every bit of hardware that's out there -- Linux already does that very well, so there's no point in duplicating effort, especially since device drivers have *nothing* to do with virtualization. So the Xen leverages the device drivers already available in Linux.
That's part of the reason this has taken so long to get in. Basic Linux guest support has been in for years. But making the same source code work on bare metal (where it has to set up all kinds of things itself) work on Xen (where it has to interact with Xen to get things like interrupts and so on) is tricky, and requires some changes in the core kernel code. Kernel maintainers don't care if the code in arch-specific directories is a bit ugly, but they are very picky about core kernel or x86 arch code.
The most contentious bit was merged in 2.6.37; since then other, less contentious functionality (i.e,. not touching core kernel code) is slowly being merged in, with the final piece necessary to be able to actually boot guest VMs merged in for 3.0.
Unfortunately when this e-mail was sent, Jeremy was just about the only developer working on upstreaming the dom0 work for quite a while; and Jeremy was, unfortunately, still learning how to interact effectively with the kernel community. This can be largely blamed on a tactical error made by the people in charge of XenSource before Citrix acquired them. They were hoping to force RedHat to work on upstreaming dom0, so they kept the Xen fork of linux (linux-xen) at 2.6.18, and only hired one developer to work on upstreaming. RedHat initially said they were going to work on it, but instead ended up buying a company that developed KVM, leaving Xen in a bit of a lurch (for which they really only had themselves to blame).
Since that time, more full-time developers have been brought in, both by Citrix and Oracle, and Jeremy, along with the other developers, have gotten more face-time with the rest of the kernel community. Things are still sometimes contentious (as they are bound to be), but the results of this effort speak for themselves.
No, Xen is a hypervisor. A process expects a *lot* more from an operating system than an OS expects from a hypervisor. VMs expect raw hardware and know they have to manage most things (like setting up memory, doing filesystems, and so on) themselves. Processes expect an operating system set up memory mapping for them, give them filesystems (not just raw disks), IP addresses and sockets and TCP (not just raw packets), and so on.
In the KVM case, Linux is an operating system to normal processes, but a hypervisor to VMs. Linux gives memory and time to the guest OS, and the guest OS gives memory and time (along with filesystems, TCP, &c) to guest processes. So in that way Xen and KVM (i.e., Linux-as-hypervisor) are the same.
The main difference is that Xen is only a hypervisor, whereas with KVM, Linux tries to be both a hypervisor and an operating system. That has a number of practical implications. Xen has been widely deployed and tested as an enterprise-class hypervisor. I'm not aware of any large-scale enterprise deployments of KVM, so it remains to be seen whether Linux can successfully be both an enterprise-class hypervisor and an operating system at the same time.
Here's why Citrix bought XenSource.
There's been a developing market for desktop virtualization (VDI) -- meaning not "running a VM inside my desktop", but for corporations to run "desktops" as VMs inside of servers and export them to think clients on people's desks.
Citrix has a ton of capabilities in this area. They have decades of experience with handling remote display technologies, dealing with users, dealing with disk images, and so on. So they were in a perfect position to capitalize on this new trend with their existing technology and expertise.
However, to really run desktop software, you need enterprise-grade virtual machine software. Citrix didn't have any. They could recommend people run Hyper-V, but it's a new technology and by most measures not really as good as other solutions. They could recommend that people buy VMWare. However, VMWare have their own VDI solution. If you were an IT exec, deciding what to deploy for your VDI solution, would you run Citrix's VDI controller on VMWare's hypervisor, or would you just run VMWare's VDI controller on VMWare's hypervisor? Odds are that you'd favor buying from one vendor; it's likely that the software will work better together, and in any case you'll never end up in a situation where Citrix says it's VMWare's problem and VMWare says it's Citrix's problem, and you're stuck in the middle.
Not having their own virtualization solution would be a big limiting factor for Citrix's success in the desktop market. So, they bought XenSource. Now they can offer XenDesktop and XenServer together, offering a complete stack of software from top to bottom. That's the synergy they were looking for.
But of course, that buying that stack as a whole only makes sense if XenServer is actually enterprise-grade virtualization -- so they're still keen for XenServer to be a viable product in its own right.
There doesn't have to be a battle -- there's room in the OSS world for two technologies. Xen and KVM are different technologies. For most desktop users, KVM is probably the best option; but on big servers, linux running KVM has to mix scheduling between VMs and processes. Since Xen runs VMs exclusively, it can focus only on algorithms that work well for VMs.
What is Xen? Xen is a virtualization project that is run by four of the top five major cloud providers (including Amazon, Rackspace, &c); a commercial version written by Citrix run by thousands of sites worldwide, including large companies like Tesco, SAP, &c. It's also the approved way of running Oracle databases in a virtual machine.
What does that have to do with Linux? The Xen project is focused on virtualization. But Xen still needs to run on systems with all manner of devices. There are several ways they could have handled this. One is to try to put drivers for all of the devices in Xen. This would require a huge amount of work, mostly copying new device drivers and device fixes from Linux and porting them over to Xen. It would be a colossal waste of time: they would be duplicating effort of what Linux already does well, instead of doing what they want to do -- work on virtualization.
So what they do instead is run Xen as the hypervisor, but leverage the device drivers in Linux. They do this by creating a special VM, called "domain 0" or "dom0", which is booted first after Xen boots, that has drivers to control all of the devices. This domain is a version of Linux that is designed to be able to work with Xen to control and drive devices, while allowing Xen to control memory, CPU, and interrupts (the key hardware required to do virtualization).
Xen has been out for years. Why is this just being announced? The Xen project started out of a University research project. As is typical, they were trying to answer the question "what is possible?", and as a result, felt free to completely rip out and rewrite large sections of Linux code. This code was not upstream-able -- changes were made that were (rightly) not acceptable to the Kernel community.
Since that time, the Xen community has maintained branches of Linux with these intrusive, non-upstreamable patches, and used these branches as domain 0. At the same time, they have worked to try to get support for Linux-as-domain-0 into the mainline tree. This has been a long process, and something that has been a sore point for users of Xen for some time.
But as of Linux 3.0, all of the functionality required to use the mainline kernel tree as a basic dom0 with Xen is in. This means that if you install Xen, you'll be able to use the same kernel you booted with natively as the dom0 for Xen. It means that distributions won't have to maintain two separate kernels, one for booting bare metal, and one for booting on Xen. And it means not having to maintain the xen-linux fork, which has been a lot of painful work for the Xen community.
As far as Linux is concerned, a KVM virtual machine is just another process. So your whole infrastructure-critical server VMs are treated exactly the same as the random daemons that get started up as a matter of course but never used. Worse yet, the same scheduling algortihms are used -- although the VMs have to handle interrupts, while processes don't.
In Xen, there's a scheduler dedicated to scheduling VMs, and the algorithm is tweaked specifcially to deal with VMs.
I suspect they mean something along the lines of "life past a specific complexity" -- i.e., at least of the complexity of an average fish, or maybe or a mammal. Bacteria are surprisingly adaptable, and can be found in extremes of heat, cold, and chemistry; it wouldn't be too surprising to find life on the order of the complexity of bacteria to be common in the universe. But the parameters necessary for that life to develop any more significant complexity are pretty uncommon.
You've got the wrong friends.
You obviously don't live where I live.