Blackmoor Vituperative

On May 31, Red Hat’s sponsored and community supported open source Fedora Project released the latest version of its distribution: Fedora 7. Besides being a cutting edge Linux distribution, it features a new build capability that enables users to create their own custom distributions.

Fedora 7 now boasts a completely open-source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances and distributions that can be targeted to meet individual needs.

Max Spevack, leader of the Fedora Project, stated: “With our new open source build process, our community of contributors will enjoy much greater influence and authority in advancing Fedora. The ability to create appliances to suit very particular user needs is incredibly powerful.”

[…]

In addition, Fedora now supports live CD, DVDs, and USB devices. Spevack believes that this capability, combined with the new development toolchain, will make Fedora very popular with those that want to create software appliances.

[…]

In addition to the new, open build system and live media support, Fedora 7 supports KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Qemu virtualization technologies, as well as Xen. The Fedora graphical virtualization manager can be used to manage all of its virtualization programs.

(from Linux-Watch, Highly flexible Fedora 7 Linux arrives)

Time to upgrade my servers again… 🙂

Microsoft is back with more vague threats and bogus claims concerning their patents being violated by open source software.

In an interview with Fortune, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel, claims that the Linux kernel violates 42 of its patents, the Linux graphical user interfaces run afoul of another 65, the Open Office suite of programs infringes 45 more, e-mail programs violate 15, while other assorted free and open-source programs allegedly transgress 68.

(from eWeek, Microsoft Claims Open-Source Technology Violates 235 of Its Patents)

You first heard this noise back in 2004. It was piffle then, and it’s piffle now. The fact that a company would continue to make empty threats like this, year after year, should be enough reason for you to stop doing business with them.

That’s aside from the practical ramifications of using Microsoft’s software. Anyone who runs a mission-critical server on a Windows machine rather than a Linux or Unix machine, anyone who runs a web server on IIS rather than Apache, anyone who chooses to use Microsoft Office instead of OpenOffice, anyone who chooses to use Internet Explorer rather than Firefox — these people are all technological illiterates who shouldn’t be allowed near a computer keyboard or an IT architecture meeting.

In a new effort dubbed “Luke’s Binoculars” — after the high-tech binoculars Luke Skywalker uses in Star Wars — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is setting out to create its own version of this science-fiction hardware. And while the Pentagon’s R&D arm often focuses on technologies 20 years out, this new effort is dramatically different — Darpa says it expects to have prototypes in the hands of soldiers in three years.

The agency claims no scientific breakthrough is needed on the project — formally called the Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System. Instead, Darpa hopes to integrate technologies that have been simmering in laboratories for years, ranging from flat-field, wide-angle optics, to the use of advanced electroencephalograms, or EEGs, to rapidly recognize brainwave signatures.

[…]

Darpa’s ambitions are grounded in solid research, says Dennis McBride, president of the Potomac Institute and an expert in the field. “This is all about target recognition and pattern recognition,” says McBride, who previously worked for the Navy as an experimental psychologist and has consulted for Darpa. “It turns out that humans in particular have evolved over these many millions of years with a prominent prefrontal cortex.”

That prefrontal cortex, he explains, allows the brain to pick up patterns quickly, but it also exercises a powerful impulse control, inhibiting false alarms. EEG would essentially allow the binoculars to bypass this inhibitory reaction and signal the wearer to a potential threat. In other words, like Spiderman’s “spider sense,” a soldier could be alerted to danger that his or her brain had sensed, but not yet had time to process.

(from Wired, Pentagon to Merge Next-Gen Binoculars With Soldiers’ Brains)

Adobe Systems has announced its plans to open-source its Flex Web development framework.

The San Jose, Calif., company is releasing its Adobe Flex source code to the open-source community to enable developers throughout the world to tap the capabilities of Flex and participate in the ongoing development of the technology.

Flex is a framework for building cross-operating system RIAs (rich Internet applications) for the Web and enabling new Adobe Apollo applications for the desktop, the company said.

“We’ll be open-sourcing Flex with the next release of the technology, which is code-named Moxie,” said Jeff Whatcott, vice president of product marketing in Adobe’s Enterprise and Developer Business Unit.

Whatcott said Adobe will introduce the first public pre-release version of “Moxie” in June, “and we’ll be providing public daily builds of the technology starting at that time. We’ll also be launching a public bug database, so it’ll look, act and feel like an open-source project” even then.

However, the technology will not be open-sourced until “Moxie” is released in the second half of 2007—most likely in the fall, Whatcott said.

Upon release, the open-source Flex software development kit (SDK) and documentation will be available under the MPL (Mozilla Public License), Whatcott said.

Using the MPL for open-sourcing Flex will allow full and free access to source code, and developers will be able to freely download, extend and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler, components and application framework.

Adobe will also continue to make the Flex SDK and other Flex products available under their existing commercial licenses, allowing both new and existing partners and customers to choose the license terms that best suit their requirements.

Whatcott said the MPL “strikes a good balance” for developers, particularly those who want to take a staged approach to working with open-source technology.

“This is the culmination of a long path toward opening up Flex,” Whatcott said.

(from eWeek, Adobe Open-Source Move Sets Showdown with Microsoft)

I have it on good authority that Flex is going to be the Next Big Thing. If you like to stay abreast of web technology, this is the time to start gearing up with Flex.

Silverlight isn’t even an also-ran.

Red Hat’s JBoss division is planning to move in June to a model similar to that used by RHEL/Fedora model, said sources close to the company.

The move would mean that JBoss would deliver a Fedora-like community edition of its core software that only looks forward. As with the Fedora Linux project, no backward compatibility is guaranteed — Fedora is focused on the future and new features.

Typically, a Fedora release is targeted as the next Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. RHEL forks or branches a specific Fedora release. The RHEL team stabilizes the Fedora code tree it branches, productizes it and certifies it for a number of different platforms.

However, the difference with the JBoss Fedora-like offering will be that the JBoss source code control system will be public, sources said. RHEL’s source code control system is private and not available to the community, although the source code itself is published. And RHEL binaries are only distributed to subscription holders.

According to sources, JBoss will follow the same model except that the source control system will be public. And community releases — JBoss’ Fedora equivalent — will have binaries distributed.

(from eWeek, Red Hat’s JBoss to Adopt Fedora Model)

If God can do anything, can he make a mountain so heavy that God himself cannot lift it?

The computer requirements to run the Energy Department’s performance program for a national nuclear waste repository are so complex that they may thwart state review of the government’s work, a Nevada official said.

A simulation that aims to forecast whether Yucca Mountain can safely hold thousands of tons of nuclear waste needs a network of 30 master servers and 298 process servers – or a total of 752 processors operating in tandem, said Bob Loux, chief of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects.

“No participant can reasonably expect to duplicate” the computer cluster, Loux said in a letter sent Tuesday to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein.

“The model is so complicated and so large, and takes so many computers to run it,” Loux said, “that it is fundamentally not checkable by any third party, including the NRC staff.”

(from Nevada Appeal, Nevada Appeal)

While corporate IT departments spent countless hours and dollars updating IT systems for the March 11 move to daylight-saving time (DST) in the U.S., the largest cost of the time change to companies involves business meetings — some of which are still susceptible to DST-related scheduling errors.

[…]

“The biggest cost is the hidden cost of confusion over the time of meetings,” Ferris wrote in a subscribers-only Web bulletin yesterday. “Almost everyone involved with U.S./Canada meetings will miss some, or show up prematurely.” Those missed connections waste an average of half an hour to one hour per person, he said, and with about 100 million electronically connected workers in the U.S., that will cost about $3 billion in lost productivity.

“A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money,” he said.

(from Computer World, The corporate cost of DST? $3B, says analyst)

This doesn’t even begin to approach the real cost, factoring in the time wasted by normal people in their everyday lives, running around fiddling with clocks, missing appointments, and so on. Why, on my personal laptop (which still runs Windows — Windows XP Pro, to be exact), the time change required a patch from Microsoft which played hell with my calendar, turning around 1000 appointents and scheduled items into two-day events.

It would be very easy to blame Microsoft for that. Hell, it’s not like they haven’t done enough things worth blaming them for. But this wasn’t their fault. There should have been no need for that patch, because there was no need to fiddle with the time to begin with. So, on top of the hour or so that it took me to straighten out my calendar (and I’m not the only one, by the way — this was a pretty widespread problem), how much did Microsoft and other companies spend to patch and update software just to comply with this idiotic, useless, and completely arbitrary change in the display of our clocks? And that’s just one way this absurd Daylight “Saving” Time fiasco costs us all time and money.

A hack for Microsoft is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (aka “FUD“) concerning GPL3. This is no surprise, since that’s primarily what hacks for Microsoft do.

Here’s some fun stuff:

PC World’s The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time

Computer World’s Don’t Believe the Hype: The 21 Biggest Technology Flops

The early onset of daylight saving time in the United States this year may have been for naught.

The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort.

But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.

“We haven’t seen any measurable impact,” said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation’s largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

(from ZDNet, Daylight saving shift fails to curb energy use)

Gee, what a surprise.

The problem with people is not just that that they are stupid. They are, but by itself that is not a large problem. The real problem is that people are stupid and that they want to force others to obey them. That’s where the real problems of a society come from: people having the power to force other people to do stupid things.

As for Daylight Saving Time, I like this analogy:

“It’s like cutting off 6 inches from the bottom of the blanket and sewing it on the top because your shoulders are exposed.”

Yes, that’s exactly what it’s like.