Archive

The last three weeks have provided the biggest news stories to hit Linux in a long time, raising many questions and stirring speculation. What does Oracle have in mind -- cutting into Red Hat's revenue for its own profit, or weakening the enterprise Linux leader for acquisition? What will its partne...

I've been rereading David Brin's first Uplift series -- as astonishingly self-consistent a vision of galactic life as any science fiction writer has ever offered and quite appropriate to the Christmas season. In Brin's imaginary universe, a mysterious and long-gone race known as the progenitors set ...

Until quite recently, Oracle's salespeople would recommend Sun hardware because SPARC offered the memory, processor speed and reliability needed to make the database product seem pretty good. Today, however, Oracle sees Lintel (Linux on Intel) as its route to a bigger share of the customer's budget....

If a couple of guys build a company from scratch and then do a billion dollar IPO, where does the market value come from? More importantly, what does the valuation process mean to the typical business employee? I got to thinking about this during a review of online gaming a couple of weeks ago becau...

The newly released Solaris 10 includes a radical new technology called DTrace which lets you look inside the usual black box of a running production application to see exactly where the bottlenecks are and what their impact is. As a result, I've been telling clients with big Solaris operations that ...

A few weeks ago, I wrote a commentary on electronic voting for the Washington Dispatch in which I argued that what makes it possible for conspiracy theorists to use e-voting as the basis of an attack on the legitimacy of an expected Bush victory on November 2 is the client-server architecture, not t...

I've never gotten the hang of casual chit chat, and I blew it again the other day. We were at one of those things preceded by a wifely lecture about my behavior, and I really thought I was doing pretty well when the "conversation" meandered to I Robot. Since this was the first movie mentioned that I...

As con men the two pitiful rascals in "Huckleberry Finn" made their living by pretending to be what they were not, and then charging the gullible to share the illusion. A cynic might see parallels to Red Hat here: pretending to open source ideals while actually charging the MSCE community for the pr...

About a month ago, I compared the cost for Apple's desktop, server and laptop products to their nearest Dell equivalents and discovered that Macs generally cost less than comparable PC products. That was a bit of surprise, but the truly astonishing thing that came out of the comparison was that Dell...

We can learn some lessons from reality TV. For instance, many disputes can be settled without lawyers. If your brother-in-law owes you money or your neighbor's tree drops fruit in your pool, you can simply vote them off the island. Or fire them. Either way, working it out on your own is a cheaper al...

If you ever feel in need of a lesson in humility, try reading through the TCP/IP RFCs and related literature. I have two questions I have no idea how to answer but rather naively expected that reading this material would help. It didn't, in truth because I didn't understand most of it; so now I'm as...

Open source in general, and Unix in particular, appears to be far buggier and less secure than is Microsoft's code in general and Windows XP in particular. You might not believe that, but any count of security vulnerabilities reported since about mid-2001 will lead you to the same conclusion. Mentio...

The news is out: SCO is losing money. Fast. Considering that SCO has no revenue and lots of expenses, the news is not surprising. Raising revenue and cutting expenses might help, but neither will be easy. The company reported a significant net loss in the third quarter, which it blamed mostly on a l...

With a flair for the dramatic even Shakespeare might appreciate, commentator Larry Seltzer recently predicted that Sender ID -- a spam-filter technology some call the "king of the e-mail security mountain" -- would soon be history. "It's a tragedy," Seltzer wrote. "Microsoft's uncompromising licensi...

Michael Newdow may not be a household name to the open-source community. The California atheist sued a Sacramento school district to prevent his third-grade daughter from having to recite or listen to the Pledge of Allegiance because it includes the words "under God." But Newdow's case has some inte...