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Forget the oil crisis, the dollar swoon or the housing bust. The biggest worry for many in the technology and investment community is the health of Apple's iconic founder and chief executive Steve Jobs. The 53-year-old legend underwent successful surgery for pancreatic cancer about four years ago, and rumors of a relapse started swirling last month when he looked gaunt, pale and far from his usual exuberant self when introducing the new iPhone in San Francisco. But a report Wednesday appeared to calm those fears, saying that "rumors of Steven P. Jobs' health have been greatly exaggerated."
Proponents of the beleaguered Child Online Protection Act suffered yet another blow Tuesday when a federal appeals court deemed the law unconstitutional once again. The 1998 law, known as "COPA," aims to keep children from viewing pornographic materials on the Internet by making it a crime for commercial Web site operators to let children access "harmful" material. Penalties for violators include fines of as much as $50,000 and up to six months' imprisonment.
If you think that a desktop PC has to be big, noisy and expensive -- think again. Linutop shows that it pays to seriously diminish your size expectations with its tiny, energy-efficient Linux-based PC.
Smaller than a CD drive and selling for $440, the Linutop 2 is powered by a 500-MHz AMD Geode LX800 processor. The system comes with 512MB of system memory and 1GB of flash memory storage, of which 400MB is available for use. Without a fan, it is eerily quiet to use, but the system keeps its cool.
Minimalist in the extreme, the Linutop 2 doesn't come with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or an optical drive. There's room to add a 2.5-in. hard drive inside, but the only item that's really meant to be upgraded is system memory; it can hold up to 1GB. The whole thing weighs just 1.25 pounds, allowing you to do something that few other PCs can: Velcro it to the back of a LCD monitor or, with Linutop's $55 adapter, screw it in place.
Don't expect anything more than basic connections. The system comes with four USB ports; microphone, headphone and line-out ports; a wired Ethernet networking port; and an external monitor port. Although the Linutop 2's graphics have neither dedicated video memory nor 3-D acceleration, the system is fine for general use and can accommodate displays up to 1,920-by-1,440 pixel resolution.
The Linutop 2 worked well with a 19-in. Dell LCD screen, and I was able to connect it to a projector, external hard drive, memory key, DVD, printer and USB hub. I also tried it successfully with two sets of wired keyboards/mice and a set of wireless ones as well.
On the downside, the system only works with three Wi-Fi devices: Linksys' Compact Wireless-G USB Adapter (model WUSB54GC), Netgear's RangeMax Wireless USB 2.0 Adapter (model WPN-111) and the TP-LINK TL-WN321G Wireless USB Adapter.
Software is Linutop 2's strongest suit. It comes with Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (a.k.a. Hardy Heron), Open Office 2.4 and enough utilities to work well out of the box. In five minutes, I was nosing around the Web, playing YouTube videos, listening to Internet radio and viewing Adobe Acrobat files. Plus, the system can use and save in Microsoft Office .doc,.xls,.ppt, and other popular formats.
In two weeks of daily use, the system worked remarkably well, showing that less can be more. I could open and use as many as five applications at a time. The system was able to open an image-rich PDF file with charts and complicated formatting in 15.2 seconds -- 20 percent faster than it took me to open the same file with a Windows XP-based Dell Optiplex 740 PC that was twice as expensive.
For those watching the bottom line (and who isn't, these days?) the Linutop 2 consumes only 11.9 watts, about the power draw of a child's night light and one-fifth that of my Dell desktop. In other words, over the course of a year of general business or personal use, it would probably cost less than $4 in electricity, saving you about $15 a year.
Shipped from Paris, the Linutop 2 costs $440 plus $40 for delivery and arrives in about a week. Linutop 2 will never be a performance PC for video editing, CAD or gaming, but is perfect for most office and personal uses that don't require Windows software. Neither too big, nor too small, Linutop 2 is just right.
Brian Nadel is a freelance writer based near New York and is the former editor in chief of Mobile Computing & Communications magazine. A 25-year veteran of technology journalism, his work has appeared in Popular Science, PC Magazine, and Fortune.
The SOAP stack for Web services was branded a failure this week by Tim Bray, a Sun Microsystems technologist and co-inventor of XML, who hailed the REST (Representational State Transfer) mechanism as a SOAP alternative.
"The SOAP stack is generally regarded as an embarrassing failure these days," said Bray, who is Sun director of Web technologies, in an interview Wednesday afternoon at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. "REST does what [the SOAP stack] was trying to do in a much more viable, elegant, cheap, affordable way except that we've got no tooling around it yet."
REST can be used for integration, enabling, for example, PHP Web front ends to talk to a Java manufacturing system, said Bray.
Tools to help developers work with REST are coming from companies such as Sun, Microsoft and Oracle, said Bray. These tools would make it easier to create REST services and test them, he said.
SOAP and the attendant set of WS-*? (ws star) specifications for security, messaging, and other capabilities certainly have had their detractors. Some, including Ruby on Rails founder David Heinemeier Hansson, have called these specifications "ws death star" -- a takeoff on the enemy home base in the "Star Wars" movies.
Analysts at ZapThink, who have specialized in technologies such as Web services and SOA, sharply disagreed with Bray.
"Tim Bray is a REST proponent and he'll say what he needs to, to bash SOAP and promote REST. SOAP is alive and well. There's no widespread movement away from SOAP. If you can find evidence of that [apart from Tim Bray], let me know," said Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink senior analyst.
"It's ironic as well that he's incorrect about the lack of REST tooling. JackBe, Corizon, and others support REST," said Jason Bloomberg, a managing partner at ZapThink.
Bray also cited a need for more and better testing frameworks for REST-oriented protocols and frameworks.
During a keynote presentation at OSCON on Friday, Bray will talk about the "language inflection point," in which various languages such as Perl, Python, and Ruby have been gathering momentum at the expense of the established Java and .Net platforms.
"Up until two years ago, if you were a serious programmer you wrote code in either Java or .Net," Bray said. "[Now], there are all these options that people are looking at and it's really an inflection point."
The Sun-driven Java platform is accommodating scripting languages such as Ruby and Python on the Java platform, Bray noted. Sun has been enabling these to work on the Java Virtual Machine.
"The Java language is not what the cool kids are choosing to use these days," said Bray.
Still, Java will stay around, he said. "The Java language isn't going away. It's the world's most popular programming language," Bray said.
"I think that like it or not, we're stuck with a multilanguage future," he stressed.
Proprietary software vendors, movie companies, and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying, and reselling their CDs and DVDs. It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community.
When stolen proprietary software is used by consumers, that's a lost opportunity for open source software makers to get their own software onto the computer hard drives of new users.
[ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog. ]
So says Louis Suarez-Potts, the community manager at Sun Microsystems for the OpenOffice.org open source project, who discussed the phenomenon here at the 10th annual O'Reilly Open Source Convention.
"Piracy hurts open source because open source asks people to help give back and contribute code, but they say 'why should I help? I have Microsoft Office for free,'" Suarez-Potts said.
Around the world, he said, many national governments are realizing that this hurts them, too, because their citizens are then consumers of stolen technology rather than active participants in open-source communities that can help people gain technology skills that benefit workforces and nations.
By cracking down on software piracy, nations around the globe are starting to see that they can help themselves dramatically by encouraging innovation and creativity -- as well as job growth and richer economies -- through open source development, he said.
"China wants to create workers who can do this and create and sustain wealth," rather than just sell pirated software that doesn't improve the lives of the country's people, Suarez-Potts said. "We will all benefit if they are creating interesting things."
Other nations, including India, are making similar discoveries, he said. "They really quite clearly see that they should have their own intellectual ecosystems. China is now embracing open source and is asking how they can work with the international communities; likewise in India and Latin America."
In a report last week , the Washington-based software trade association, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) , found that six U.S. states -- California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Texas -- make up $3.93 billion in pirated software losses in the U.S., or almost half of the $8.04 billion in national losses to software vendors from pirated software last year.
The BSA also conducts annual studies of piracy in countries around the world ( download PDF ).
The latest version of the OpenOffice suite, Version 3.0, is currently in its second beta version but is expected to be released in final Version 3.0 form by early fall, Suarez-Potts said, nothing that so far the beta version is generating about two million downloads each week.
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
Intel on Wednesday said it is developing more than 15 system-on-chips based on the x86 core used in Intel's Atom chip, which can be found in mobile Internet devices and low-cost laptops.
By using the Atom core, the company is trying to increase performance and drop power consumption on the new chips, said Gadi Singer, vice president of Intel's mobility group, at a press event in San Francisco.
Information and entertainment centers in cars, for example, will be much richer and demand higher-bandwidth connections to the Internet, so chips need to deliver better performance-per-watt, Singer said. The new chips will include subsystems to accelerate applications for video decoding and security.
Intel has already said it is working on an Atom successor codenamed Moorestown, due for release in 2009-2010 timeframe. The platform includes an SOC code-named Lincroft, based on a 45-nanometer Atom core.
The company also has chips based on the Atom core under development for set-top boxes, including Canmore, which will be released later this year, and Sodaville, due for launch next year.
Although the power-efficient design fits well in mobile devices, Intel enters as a challenger, not an incumbent, said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64. ARM is the market leader in the mobile space.
"The issue for Intel is whether can they begin to exploit the ubiquity of ... software environments and technical expertise surrounding x86 to start chipping away at ARM," Brookwood said.
Many other architectures, including PowerPC, used by Freescale and Motorola, and MIPS (million instructions per second), used by Broadcom, are strong players in this market, Brookwood said. The PowerPC architecture has a strong presence in the telecommunication and automotive space, Brookwood said.
Although Intel has been a player in the embedded space for 30 years, in the past it has seen platform and compatibility problems, Doug Davis, vice president of Intel's digital enterprise group.
Intel's earlier XScale chips, built using ARM's core, affected its ability to lead with its own architecture, Davis said. The company ultimately sold the handheld processor unit to Marvell Technology for $600 million in 2006.
By building Intel architecture in the new chips, Intel will deliver compatibility and the standardize software for use across multiple devices, Davis said.
The company also announced eight system-on-chips for set-top boxes on Wednesday. The EP80579 chips, made using the Pentium M core, runs between 600MHz and 1.2GHz, integrates a memory controller, and consumes between 11 watts to 21 watts of power. The Pentium M architecture was used to develop the chips as the design was available during chip development, Davis said. Going forward, all system-on-chips will be designed using the Atom processor core.
Microsoft has built its massive software business by watching other companies take the lead in emerging technology markets and then following fast with competitive products that eventually become dominant once those markets begin to pay out.
The company did it against IBM during the birth of the PC, Netscape during the browser wars, and is currently making a strong showing against Sony and Nintendo in the game-console market.
However, Microsoft's inability so far to capitalize on online advertising and services and its inability to make any headway against Google shows that, despite its huge cash reserves, this strategy may no longer be effective.
On Wednesday in an unexpected move, Microsoft reorganized its Platform and Services division, which oversees its Online Services Business (OSB) and its lucrative Windows OS business, into two groups to separate its distinct online brands. It also announced the departure of the president of the group, Kevin Johnson, who is reportedly leaving the company to join Juniper Networks.
Both the new organizations -- one that oversees its online advertising and search properties and another that runs Windows Live services and Windows OS -- will report directly to Steve Ballmer.
This move shows the CEO taking firm control of a part of Microsoft's business that has been searching for an identity since the company launched Windows Live services in late 2005 -- in part as a complement to its MSN and search businesses and in part as a rebranding of previous online efforts.
"For the past two years, I've been totally confused about [the difference between] Windows Live, MSN and Windows," said Charlene Li, an independent technology industry analyst. "The messaging and product features don't pull together."
She said splitting up businesses is "a good thing" for the company because it will help clarify Microsoft's online strategy. "You start seeing some differentiation between what Windows Live brand stands for and what online services is trying to do," Li said.
The move to divide its online brands follows the news last week on a financial conference call that Microsoft would invest "hundreds of millions of dollars" in OSB in light of its failure to close a deal to purchase Yahoo or at least its search business. OSB has operated at a loss for years and has shown only meager signs of life despite Microsoft's best attempts to revive it.
For Microsoft's fiscal 2008, OSB showed a year-over-year revenue gain of 32 percent, from $2.44 billion in 2007 to $3.21 billion in 2008. For the year, however, OSB lost $1.23 billion in operating income; a nearly 100 percent increase over the $617 million loss in operating income in fiscal 2007.
Last Thursday, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell sketched out some vague plans for Microsoft's investment, which mainly will go into its search business to bolster online advertising revenue.
However, published reports say Microsoft's biggest shareholders aren't convinced that the company's financial bet will yield much of a return. Microsoft is hosting its annual meeting for financial analysts in Redmond, Washington, Thursday, and likely will shed more light on how it plans to revive OSB with the restructuring and with its renewed investment in the group.
Analysts will certainly be looking for some serious clarity on this topic, especially since Microsoft has been throwing money at online services for years.
"Microsoft's execution online has been poor," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "They've never had a runaway success with a product line ... nothing that has dominated the market or changed the game."
To be fair, the online advertising game -- which some analysts estimate will represent about a US$50 billion revenue opportunity in the U.S. alone in the next few years -- is far from over, he said.
Rosoff noted that Microsoft only really began going after Google in earnest three years ago when it launched MSN Search, which was overhauled and rebranded Windows Live Search, and then simply Live Search shortly thereafter.
Microsoft takes a "10-year view of things," he said, noting that Microsoft made more than $60 billion in revenue last year, and the business continues to grow. The company has the "luxury of looking at this as a very long-term business," he said.
"If any other company had thrown this much money away online, they wouldn't be in business right now," Rosoff said. But because of its cash balance and the strength of its business, Microsoft "can invest a lot of money in it without having to worry about the short-term."
Still, Microsoft is facing vulnerability in areas that have been a lock for the company for many years. For example, many attribute Apple's modest growth in computer sales to negative publicity surrounding its Windows Vista PC OS. While the Windows client OS is still a cash cow and is in no real danger of obsolescence, Apple's success shows there are new chinks in the Microsoft armor.
The popularity of the iPod and iPhone may be showing Windows customers that there are credible alternatives, said Greg Sterling, principal analyst for Sterling Market Intelligence.
This so-called "halo effect," combined with Apple's aggressive advertising campaign that exploited problems users had with Vista early on, proves to PC users that they don't have to settle for what may be perceived as a subpar OS if they don't want to, he said.
"To the extent that people are less fearful of using alternative systems -- that gives them a sense they can stray from Microsoft products and still be OK," Sterling said. The growth of Google's search engine and other online services and applications also provides people with alternatives to Microsoft, he added.
This perception could hurt Microsoft in other markets it's attempting to dominate -- such as the one for virtualization software -- even if the company has the cash to play the waiting game.
Microsoft is chasing VMware in virtualization. To combat its giant competitor, VMware said on Tuesday that it would offer a free version of its basic hypervisor product -- similar to the Hyper-V product Microsoft now offers in its Windows Server OS.
If history is any indication, Microsoft should eventually be able to overtake VMware, especially since its hypervisor is tied to such a successful operating system.
But even Paul Maritz, VMware's new CEO and a former Microsoft executive, pointed out on a VMware conference call Tuesday that Microsoft is not completely invincible, especially when another company already has a substantial lead in a market.
Indeed, Sterling said, "I think there is clearly a perception in the market that Microsoft is not the invincible juggernaut it was."
The world of online business communication has introduced two industry-changing elements for small business: more customers and more competitors. Circa 1999, you were ahead of the competition by simply having a Web site to preview your service or products. By 2004, Web transactions were the norm, and convenience was the king. Both those previous core competencies have become expected norms, with social interaction, immediate consumer feedback, and a live and evolving social network and Web presence the new differentiators for cutting-edge online small business best practices.
Never before has the voice of the customer been so loud. And never before have companies been so keen to not only pay close attention to the wants, likes, experiences, preferences, opinions, suggestions and complaints of customers, but to carefully analyze and act upon the information in a systematic fashion. In June, Aberdeen published a benchmark report on customer feedback management that examined the use, the experiences and the intentions of more than 300 diverse enterprises.
We're facing a Web security gap. The Web has become the primary source of infections in enterprises, surpassing e-mail. Although most enterprises do some form of URL filtering on their Web traffic, it's proven to not be an adequate security solution alone. Only 15 percent of organizations are performing the deeper inspection and blocking on Web traffic necessary to protect their employees, according to Gartner. And the problem is growing, with over 9,000 Web sites hosting malicious code being added each day.
Hackers have released software that exploits a recently disclosed flaw in the Domain Name System (DNS) software used to route messages between computers on the Internet.
The attack code was released Wednesday by developers of the Metasploit hacking toolkit.
[ Read the related story on how details of a major Internet flaw were posted by accident. And learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
Internet security experts warn that this code may give criminals a way to launch virtually undetectable phishing attacks against Internet users whose service providers have not installed the latest DNS server patches.
Attackers could also use the code to silently redirect users to fake software update servers in order to install malicious software on their computers, said Zulfikar Ramizan, a technical director with security vendor Symantec. "What makes this whole thing really scary is that from an end-user perspective they may not notice anything," he said.
The bug was first disclosed by IOActive researcher Dan Kaminsky earlier this month, but technical details of the flaw were leaked onto the Internet earlier this week, making the Metasploit code possible. Kaminsky had worked for several months with major providers of DNS software such as Microsoft, Cisco and the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to develop a fix for the problem. The corporate users and Internet service providers who are the major users of DNS servers have had since July 8 to patch the flaw, but many have not yet installed the fix on all DNS servers.
The attack is a variation on what's known as a cache poisoning attack. It has to do with the way DNS clients and servers obtain information from other DNS servers on the Internet. When the DNS software does not know the numerical IP (Internet Protocol) address of a computer, it asks another DNS server for this information. With cache poisoning, the attacker tricks the DNS software into believing that legitimate domains, such as idg.com, map to malicious IP addresses.
In Kaminsky's attack a cache poisoning attempt also includes what is known as "Additional Resource Record" data. By adding this data, the attack becomes much more powerful, security experts say.
An attacker could launch such an attack against an ISP's (Internet Service Provider) domain name servers and then redirect them to malicious servers. By poisoning the domain name record for www.citibank.com, for example, the attackers could redirect the ISP's users to a malicious phishing server every time they tried to visit the banking site with their Web browser.
On Monday, security company Matasano accidentally posted details of the flaw on its Web site. Matasano quickly removed the post and apologized for its mistake, but it was too late. Details of the flaw soon spread around the Internet.
Although a software fix is now available for most users of DNS software, it can take time for these updates to work their way through the testing process and actually get installed on the network.
"Most people have not patched yet," said ISC President Paul Vixie in an e-mail interview earlier this week. "That's a gigantic problem for the world."
Metasploit's code looks "very real," and uses techniques that were not previously documented said Amit Klein, chief technology officer with Trusteer.
It will probably be used in attacks, he predicted. "Now that the exploit is out there, combined with the fact that not all DNS servers were upgraded... attackers should be able to poison the cache of some ISPs," he wrote in an e-mail interview. "The thing is -- we may never know about such attacks, if the attackers... work carefully and cover their tracks properly."
Hitachi, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp and Sony have joined forces with Amimon, a developer of wireless home digital interface technology. The companies have pledged support for the creation of a new interoperable industry standard for audio, video and control that could connect multiple high-definition devices around a home without the use of wires. The group's goal is to enhance the current WHDI technology in order to enable wireless streaming of uncompressed HD video and audio between consumer electronic devices.
Microsoft announced several changes to its Games for Windows Live and Xbox Live services Tuesday. Chief Technology Officer Chris Satchell outlined the changes at the company's Gamefest 2008 Conference held in Seattle. The software maker has removed its fees for Games for Windows Live, so now multiplayer game play functionality is available at no extra cost at all membership levels. Microsoft will also roll out its Games for Windows Live Marketplace, adding a digital distribution component to the PC gaming service, as well as a revamped user interface.
Yahoo disappointed shareholders with its second quarter earnings report, posting declining profits that missed Wall Street's expectations. Its quarterly net income fell to $131 million, or 9 cents per share, from $161 million, or 11 cents per share, a year ago. Excluding certain charges, Yahoo realized earnings of $139 million, or 10 cents per share, falling one cent short of analyst expectations. Quarterly revenue rose 6 percent to $1.8 billion from $1.7 billion a year ago. Sales registered an 8 percent increase, to $1.35 billion from $1.24 billion last year.
The high-profile troubles on the city of San Francisco's computer network continue, despite a dramatic jailhouse intervention by the city's mayor this week.
While the city has regained control of the five devices at the heart of its FiberWAN network, which carries data between city government buildings, administrators are still locked out of the city's VoIP system and local LANs within the Sheriff's Department and the Recreation & Park Department. Assistant District Attorney Conrad Del Rosario revealed the ongoing problems Wednesday at a bail hearing for Terry Childs, the former network administrator with the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services (DTIS) who is accused of holding the city's networks hostage for the past 10 days.
[ Read InfoWorld's scoop on "Why San Francisco's network admin went rogue" | Paul Venezia has technical analysis of the city's case against Childs ]
During that time, the networks have functioned normally, but IT staffers have been unable to make administrative changes to some of the city's critical routers and switches.
Childs' attorney, Erin Crane, had moved for a reduction in the $5 million bail set in the case. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Lucy McCabe denied that motion Wednesday.
Childs' defense has portrayed him as a capable engineer, surrounded by incompetent management, who simply didn't trust anyone with the administrative passwords to the five network devices at the heart of the FiberWAN. On Monday, Childs had a secret meeting with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom where Childs turned over the passwords.
Del Rosario argued against any reduction of bail, noting that Childs handed over the passwords only after a scheduled July 19 power outage at the city's One Market Street datacenter failed to take down the FiberWAN. Because Childs did not store network configuration files on the routers' hard drives, a power outage would wipe this information out of memory, disabling the network until it was reconfigured, he said.
The assistant DA said it was "extremely suspicious" that Childs only communicated with the mayor after the network did not go out of service.
In court filings, prosecutors say they do not know where these critical router configuration files are located.
As the city's principal network engineer, Childs worked on about 1,100 networking devices throughout the city, Del Rosario said. Even with the FiberWAN passwords, there are still questions about the rest of these systems. "We do not know whether we have control of these devices," he said.
Crane said that her client was the victim of jealous co-workers who were upset because his good work made them look bad. "I think the entire thing is specious," she told the judge. "This is a DTIS management problem."
This is not Childs' first time in criminal court. He also served four years in Kansas prison on aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary charges, prosecutors said. Those charges stem from an incident that occurred when Childs was 16 years old, Crane said.
The court also ordered Childs to stay away from several of his former co-workers, including Jeana Pieralde, the DTIS director of security who was allegedly so afraid of Childs that she locked herself in a room in the data center, and his former supervisor Herb Tong, whom Childs felt was undermining his work at the department.
Prosecutors say that police found bullets when they searched his Pittsburg, California, home on July 13.
In a brief appearance before reporters after the hearing, Crane said that she and Childs were "deeply disappointed that bail had not been reduced."
Childs' next scheduled court date is a Sept. 24 pretrial hearing.
Intel is readying a second release of the Moblin open-source platform for mobile computing, with plans set for an alpha-level version in a few weeks, an Intel official said at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. on Wednesday.
Moblin is a project for mobile Linux that is centered on a range of devices, with Intel eyeing Moblin for its Atom processor for mobile systems. "Our focus as a company right now is on the Atom platform, but I'm sure other people in the community will drive it [in] other directions," said Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel.
Intel is putting together the software stack for Moblin 2, featuring a forking off of Fedora and the Gnome mobile stack. "We're going to open this up to the public," Hohndel said. "I want to see the community that really takes this project and runs with it and makes it their project."
Hohndel stressed that Intel was firmly in the open-source camp. "Open source is something that we believe really helps change the game," Hohndel said.
Also at the conference Wednesday, O'Reilly Media CEO Tim O'Reilly brought up two MySQL dignitaries from Sun Microsystems to quiz them on how things were going since Sun acquired the open-source database company earlier this year. The two MySQL officials, Michael Widenius and Brian Aker, waxed positive about the merger.
"It's actually been really rewarding," Aker said.
"Sun has given use more free hands to do what we want to do," said Widenius.
Commenting on Sun's switch from a proprietary to open-source software company, Aker did note that there are inevitable tensions when engineers have to go public with their code.
Aker also called Microsoft "irrelevant." Additionally, he said he wanted a new iPhone but hoped that Google gets its Android systems out fast enough that it works well enough that he could use it.
An audience member asked why the open-source world can not do anything as "insanely great" as iPhone. O'Reilly cited potential developments in that direction, such as Android and Openmoko.
One of the hot topics on the VMware Forums lately has been about the advisability of using virtual firewalls within the VMware Virtual Infrastructure. The main question is whether it's a good idea.
The general answer is yes; they work well enough for most experts to recommend them. However, the more specific answer depends solely on how you have set up your physical and virtual networks and the purpose of the virtual firewall.
[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
Is your purpose to protect all VMs attached to a virtual switch from other VMs on the same virtual switch? You can achieve this with a virtual firewall only if you use portgroups and firewall between different portgroups.
Is your purpose to protect all VMs attached to a virtual switch from other VMs on different virtual switches? You can achieve that by having a virtual firewall between the protected virtual switch and up to three other virtual switches. Why three? There is a limitation on the number of virtual NICs available to a VM.
Is your purpose to firewall a DMZ attached to the outside world from the inside world? This is also achievable with a virtual firewall, however it requires multiple physical NICs attached to different pSwitches or VLANs within your physical network. It also applies the principle of vSwitch to vSwitch protection.
The other big question is which virtual firewall to use? There
