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VMWare: Time to pay the Open Source Piper
VMWare needs to consider open sourcing its hypervisor to beat back the 800 pound twin gorillas of Microsoft's Hyper-V and Linux-based virtualization solutions.... Continued »
September 7th, 2008
102 Minutes That Changed America: “Mesh” reporting comes of age
This week, in commemoration of the 7th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the History Channel is releasing an unusual documentary, entitled “102 Minutes That Changed America“. If you are a DIRECTV subscriber and have access to their On Demand service, you can actually download the program to your DVRs now. If not, you’ll want to set your TiVo’s or tune in at Thursday, September 11, 9PM EST or Friday September 12, at 1am EST. This is a show you absolutely do not want to miss.
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September 7th, 2008
To Boldly Go Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before
Google’s new Imaging Satellite aboard a Boeing Delta II Rocket. Source: GeoEye
I don’t know what it is about rockets, but I don’t know a single man, hetero or gay, who isn’t extremely turned on or even intimidated by them. I’ve never seen a space launch in person, but Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are now members of a very exclusive club that have seen one up close and personal.
This weekend, Google launched its own imaging satellite, on top of a Boeing Defense Systems Delta II booster rocket, in partnership with GeoEye, the space imagery company which already provides data to Google for Google Earth and Google Maps using its existing IKONOS and ORBVIEW satellites.
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September 4th, 2008
Red Hat draws its line in the virtual sand with Qumranet
The caves of Qumran, located in in the highly disputed region of the West Bank that sits between Israel and Jordan and is populated by both Palestinians and Jews, is where the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. The scrolls are said by many Judaic scholars to be written by the Essenes, a rogue sect of Judaism that existed in the 1st Century AD. The Essenes rejected traditional Jewish thinking and the Temple establishment at the time and went into hiding — perhaps in the harsh landscape of Qumran.
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September 3rd, 2008
On stupid mascots and closed source browser plugins
Everyone’s been harping on Google this week with the release of Chrome, so I thought I would be different — today I’m going to give Adobe some love. Because I bet they feel left out.
Adobe’s Flash and Acrobat Reader plugins are some of the most key components to the end-user Internet browsing experience. It’s pretty hard to imagine rich multimedia sites without Flash, although Microsoft is trying very hard to displace it with their .NET and Silverlight technology.
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September 2nd, 2008
What’s Chrome for? Ain’t it obvious?
So during lunchtime today I got to play with Chrome a bit. It’s got a nice clean implementation, and it’s fast. Sure, it doesn’t do everything that either Firefox or Internet Explorer does yet, but hey, it’s a beta. I like it.
The burning question a lot of analysts and my ZDNet comrades may have, however, is why do we need another browser? I mean both Internet Explorer and Firefox are robust, right? And Safari and Konqueror are perfectly good browser platforms too.
I think we all know what the answer is, but we’re afraid to say it — Google is taking an entry directly from the Microsoft playbook: Embrace and Extend.
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September 1st, 2008
The Technological and Economic impact of a New Cold War
Cummings of the Daily Express, 24 August 1953, “Back to Where it all Started”
The events of the last several weeks surrounding Russia’s invasion of Georgia and its recognition of the rogue provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have threatened to spiral into another Cold War and set US and Russian relations back to the early 1960’s. No, let me rephrase that — I think we already HAVE set U.S. and Russian relations back to the early 1960’s. It’s time to bring Henry Kissinger back into active duty, folks. The bad ‘ol Russia is back.
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August 29th, 2008
My father, the casemodder
I love hearing about these wacky aesthetic computer modifications that people do. While a lot of them definitely have the “cool” factor, most aren’t exactly useful or practical. But when I heard about one particular “casemod” from one of my readers, I was intrigued. It just so happened that this particular ZDNet reader was my dad.
My father, a retired family dentist from Great Neck, New York, who now resides in Boca Raton, Florida, is far from the average sedentary senior citizen. He plays tennis (although he managed to get himself a nice knee injury recently and needed to have surgery because he was playing too hard) and teaches at the local dental college. In particular, he teaches students how to use dental software and the dental school’s Intranet site. He has also been a tinkerer and a modifier of practically everything he can get his hands on for as long as I can remember.
Being a general practicing dentist or oral surgeon requires the use of a lot of specialized equipment. It’s a profession where being good with your hands is an absolute necessity, and I’m not just talking about working inside someone’s mouth. The motorized dental chairs themselves cost many thousands of dollars and when they break, you really don’t want to have to call a technician in to fix them, you need to be self-reliant. If you’re a dentist, you’d better get to know the guys at the local hardware store and Radio Shack real well. He also used to treat chronically ill elderly patients in nursing homes, and although it wasn’t actually part of his job, would make special modifications of wheelchairs to fit special patient needs. Before he retired he was also an avid boater, which involved a lot of 12-volt and marine electronics repair and constantly fixing stuff that deteriorates because its sitting in salt water and exposed to the elements.
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August 25th, 2008
One Router to Connect Them All
Sunday afternoons are the few times I actually get some peace and don’t have to think about major IT problems. I fire up my Weber smoker, throw on a couple of racks of ribs, fire up a bucket of hardwood charcoal and fruit wood chunks, and I chill for a few hours watching TV and otherwise vegetating, patiently awaiting tender BBQ goodness. That’s how I wanted to spend this last weekend. In peace.
So at 2:30PM, while I was munching on a bowl of popcorn and watching some brainless action movie in the living room, savoring the odor of the slow cooking meat wafting in from the deck, the phone rings. My wife, Rachel, answers it. I can tell by the level of annoyance in her voice that I’m going to be given the handset any second.
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August 24th, 2008
Google and Sirius XM: Build my “Dream” Handheld
The current rumor-mongering seems to indicate that HTC’s “Dream” will soon be making landfall in the US. Based on the initially leaked specs of this device, it still sounds like it doesn’t do what I really would want it to do in order to replace by Blackberry 8820.
My true “Dream” device would be a lot closer to the “Global Link” handheld in the late Sci-Fi series “Earth: Final Conflict“, for those of you dorks that remember it. It had a pull out flexible wide screen and all sorts of cool Star Trekky interface stuff on it. The show really jumped the shark in the final season after the Taelons blew up in the volcano (where have we heard that plot before?) and they introduced that stupid Atavus race but I digress.
Back in February 2006 when the first generation iPhone was announced and Android wasn’t even a blip on the radar, I wrote on my personal blog Off The Broiler that my ideal $500 digital convergence device would have the following characteristics, and would be fully doable using current, not Star Trek or alien licensed technology:
• Built in Wi-Fi peer to peer mesh networking that would allow you to trade songs and videos and other files with people wireless, directly access the Internet and download music, videos and software without the use of a PC.
• A nice screen like the PSP so you can play Internet-aware multiplayer games and watch videos
• 40GB hard disk with Secure Digital slot
• 1024×768 SVGA full motion digital video camera on swivel mount (2MP or better) with integrated stereo microphone, high quality speaker and USB 2.0 connector
• High capacity lithium-ion rechargeable, removable battery pack.
• High-speed 4G cellular for doing your phone calls, digital teleconferencing (with the built in camera) and data service when you aren’t within Wi-Fi range, and VOIP integration like a built in Skype or Google chat client.
• An Open API developer tool set using open source components so anyone can write applications for it
• A great end-user interface that ran on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops
• A sleek, innovative industrial design that would smash the hell out of proprietary units like the iPod.
Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.
August 22nd, 2008
Episode 61 - The Smelly Laptop
If you haven’t heard the news, Jerry Seinfeld has recently been hired to do an entire campaign of advertisements for Microsoft. When I learned of this, I thought of a classic Seinfeld episode that could be re-enacted, with only a few minor dialogue changes to bring it up to date. Enjoy.
[Opening Monologue, in comedy club]
JERRY: …And who aaaaaare these Mac and Linux people, anyway? They have to be so different from everyone else? What’s with this whole “Alternative Operating System” thing? I don’t get it. Can’t they just use Windows?
[Scene 1: Jerry and Elaine are at a computer store’s ”Repairs and Upgrades” desk. Jerry had to get his laptop fixed, and is waiting to get it back.]
(The technician comes back with the laptop. Jerry boots it up to see if everything is ok. Soon, they discover something is definitely amiss)
JERRY: Boy, do you smell something?
ELAINE: Do I smell something? What am I, hard of smelling? Of *course* I smell something.
JERRY: What is it?
ELAINE: I think it’s Vista!
JERRY: What?
ELAINE: It’s Vista. The *technician* must have put Vista on it.
JERRY: It *can’t* be. Nobody has an Operating System that smells like this.
ELAINE: Jerry. It’s *VIS-TA*.
Click on the “Read the rest of this entry” link below for more.
Jason Perlow is a technologist with over two decades of experience integrating large heterogeneous multi-vendor computing environments in Fortune 500 companies. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Recent Entries
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