“Big Blue enters market for software that lets a computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, CNET News.com has learned.” [CNET News.com] And it looks like IBM is very interested in sharing the technology, releasing it as open source and collaborating with the separate Xen project.
Virtualization was big news at LinuxWorld last week, as this article also on CNET news.
In his latest article, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report describes how to “Protect your site from Google’s new toolbar. To the delight of gadget freaks and the consternation of some designers, Google’s new Autolink feature sticks links on your site that you didn’t put there. You can’t fight City Hall, but you can use JavaScript to turn off these “smart” links.”
Slashdot: reports “Broadcast Flag in Trouble.” I hope they are right. Laura and I enjoy our fair use of broadcast shows by timeshifting them to our convenience, and if that privilege is taken away, we will watch less, not more. Vinyl record companies bemoaned that the cassette tape was the end of the recording industry; movie makers said that VHS and Betamax would crush them. It’s evolution, folks. Deal with it.
The Electronic Freedom Foundation suggests “Fight the Broadcast Flag from your Armchair” with the publication of their HD PVR Cookbook (High-Definition Personal Video Recorder) and sponsorships of “Build-Ins” across the country.
Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc. blogs A Biased Headline Twists a Story. “Today’s New York Times has a story entitled “Federal Effort to Head Off TV Piracy Is Challenged” — a headline that gives the entire weight of the dispute to one side.”
A headline tilted the other way would have been “FCC collaborates with Big Media to crush fair use.” As is usual in these cases, truth is somewhere in the middle. The NYT article is far more fair than the headline would have you believe.
Computerworld News reports “New Sober worm moving fast, security company warns. W32.Sober-K-mm, a new variant of the Sober worm, is a mass-mailer that today began attacking computers in Europe and in the United States.”
Meanwhile, OSNews reports that Gartner takes Microsoft to task. “Microsoft should be concentrating on securing Windows instead of trying to challenge security software companies, according to research firm Gartner.”
“Gartner’s MacDonald also rapped Microsoft’s decision to create an updated version of Internet Explorer (7.0) for Windows XP only, hinting that motive for the decision could be to push corporate customers into upgrade their systems from Windows 2000.”
If that’s true, I think it is a risky move. By announcing IE 7.0, supposedly in beta this summer, Microsoft is admitting that their current offerings are insufficient and that patching will not solve the problem. It’s February. Any CIO that wants to be employed this fall ought to be looking at alternatives today: FireFox, Opera, Safari. The option to “upgrade” to Windows XP, a major change management move involving an OS upgrade followed by innumerable patches, is a huge obstacle compared to downloading another browser and installing it.
Scripting News cites News.Com: “Google’s browser toolbar is raising eyebrows over a feature that inserts new hyperlinks in Web pages, giving the Internet search provider a powerful tool to funnel traffic to destinations of its choice.”
Scripting News goes on to quote John Robb quoting Anil Dash: “Google is pushing its ads into content it does not own.”
Like Microsoft’s Smart Tags, that is modifying content that they do not own. If the content happens to be your material, how do you feel about Google infringing on your right to present it as you have chosen? Is this copyright infringement?
I’m pleased to announce that I will again be one of the teachers at the LAMP course at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Center for Training and Business Development. We start teaching on Tuesday night, and will be teaching ten evenings Tuesday and Thursday, 6 PM to 9:30 at the Concord campus. There’s till time to sign up and catch the first class — details are available at the CTBD site. We taught this class in the fall semester and it was a great success. At the end of the course, the students have a simple interactive database-backed web site running on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Jeremy Zawodny waxes poetic on why the world does not need another Groupware “solution” (to what?) as Novell releases their NetMail product as Open Source and suggests some problems that could use another solution or two. JWZ shares a little insight into what killed Netscape.
WARNING: May not be suitable for some environments. Not suitable for those who think the F-word should never be used.
Friday was spent at the client’s delivering the final beta of the first phase of a five-phase LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL=PHP) project. Client was ecstatic! But, of course, I came home with a list of small adjustments to punch through. Hope to tell more as it unfolds. Briefly, it’s a simple data entry and reporting system: 20 tables, 40 web pages, used by an inhouse staff to manage their workflow. This first piece got rid of the worst of their manual labors. Later phases will produce documents to present in a customer-facing web site, and tighten up the workflow tracking. Phase I was 40 hours of analysis and design with customer interviews, document review and resulted in a design document of workflow, prototyped web forms and an ERD (data model). The model was dead-on, requiring just a couple adjustments. Eighty hours of coding produced the forms and got us through the beta testing and demonstrations. Client goes live with a pilot test next week.
Sorry for the light blogging. Spent Thursday at LinuxWorld in Boston; got to see lots of vendors big (IBM, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat) and small (X.org, LTSP.org, GNHLUG.org) and hang out with some cool folks. [Update: fixed malformed link above.]