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The Onion reports about the introduction of the new MacBook Wheel:



This is the notebook for the twitter generation - you don´t want to type in messages longer than 140 chars this way ...

There is an article at tech crunch about the dislike of Intel in regard of a 12 inch notebook with Atom proc. I think it´s not only the loss of sales for bigger mobile procs. The problem is more wide-ranging.

The cheap x86 procs for servers are largely subsidised by the desktop sales. It´s almost the same die, thus the development costs are shared, the manufacturing costs are shared. It´s classic economy of scale ... it´s the reason, why a Intel Xeon is cheaper to produce than a RISC CPU. Without the desktop sales you have to increase the price of your server CPU or reduce the margins (server CPUs are an high-margin business)

Now let´s assume you have a different architecture with different design targets, thus it isn´t possible to share the development costs. This can severely disrupt your business modell. You can´t share the costs of your server procs with all the desktop sales. As i wrote before: The current dominance of x86 servers are an result of the decision of a finnish computer science student and many gamers, because the fact that the dominant gaming os runs on it x86 only. Thus Intel has a vast interest in not selling Atom in all possible markets. I perfectly understand Intel that they don´t like 12-inch netbooks. 10 inch displays are to small for many people, but 12 inch is a different story.

This the upcoming netbooks and nettops have may have an interesting effect to unrelated markets by changes in the cost models due to decreasing sales.

Recent layoffs (besides the Sun RIF):
Lenovo - 2500
IBM - 16000 (rumored)
Unisys - 1300
Microsoft - 15000 (rumored)
Logitech - 500
SGI - 225 (15%)
EMC - 2,400 (7%)
Dell - 1,900
HP - 24,600 (announced in September 2008)

Tough time at the moment ...

Goldman Sachs put Sun on the sell list. The reasoning behind this move is interesting. Regarding to this article on a german financial news portal we are to focussed on telecom, banks and manufacturing. Thus the analyst (Mr. David Bailey) assumes we have more problems with the recession than other competiors with a wider customership. Let´s assume he is correct with his assumption. Can somebody explain me, why a wider positioned competitor has any advantages about a focused company when the complete economy is on it´s way downhill to recession?

PS: Goldman Sachs was an investment banking not long ago ... no normal customers ... focused when you want to think so ... they got an different status, not by choice, they were forced to do so. When you sit in a glas house, you should choose the restroom in the basement.

Peter Reiser pointed me via a tweet to Tweetdeck.



Tweetdeck is a Twitterclient based on Adobe Air ... perhaps this is the reason why this UI looks a little bit like Lightroom. At the moment i use this client and don´t want back to Twitterific.

Storagebod wrote an article about the various available virtual storage appliances. In Appliance of science he wrote about Fishworks the S7000 Storage Simulator (it´s just that, andi it´s not optimised as a virtual storage appliance):

Just recently, I've decided to give a few more a play; I've just built a Fishworks environment. Easy-to-use, easy-to-configure, a tad resource heavy but a really nice GUI. I think I could grow to really like this environment. I think I could get a decent amount of disk for me to use for my home environment, I need to reconfigure the virtual environment but definitely useable. [...] Actually Fishworks could give both EMC and NetApp a run for their money if it was shipped as a fully supported VSA. It could be very disruptive at the low-end to start with.

Storagebod is the blog of a storage manager working for a large media company in UK, so he has some experience with storage stuff.

I didn´t wrote an article yesterday and this morning , albeit there was much to report. For example the Q-Layer acquisition. Or about the new IPMP in Opensolaris as a part of the Clearview project. But i´m really frustrated at the moment ... disappointed by the mankind.

As i wrote before, i visited my parents at christmas and friends for new years eve in a city nearby. As i prefered to travel by train i asked my brother to take my luggage by car. So far no problem. But on his journey a thief targeted his car (we don´t know when, why, where, we suspect on a rest stop). The consequence: A trolley with clothes (an expensive shirts and my best pair of shoes away, rest wasn´t that expensive) and my CEC2007 backpack was stolen from the luggage compartment. The real neckbreaker was the bag: 1 Wii, 2 Wiimotes, 3 games, 2 Nunchuks ... damage round about 400 Euro. Interestingly they left the balance board in the car. 2 minutes later a shock hit me as i remembered that i´ve put my camera in this bag as well: A Canon 40D, a wide-angle (stabilized - read: expensive) and n tele-photo (stabilized - read: expensive) lens, one tele-converter stolen. At the end all the stolen parts have an summarized value of .. well ... round about 3000 Euros. I hope you understand, i wasn´t in the mood to blog yesterday. BTW: It´s really disturbing, that there weren´t any signs of a break-in at the car except of a sluggish lock.

Dear thief, i hope the stroke will hit you while sitting on the toilet and the curse of everlasting stinking socks may hit your family for the rest of time. I hate you!

But to see the good things in the disaster: I thought about switching to Nikon ... now i can do the switch ... all left from my DSLR are two inexpensive primes. I´m glad that i postponed the switch to the L-class lenses again and again...

From the release notes of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE:

>The DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework and dtrace(1) userland utility have been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

(via Tim Bray)

Ben Rockwood wrote a great article about the usage of Crossbows vnics and virtual switches in conjunctions with zones: Crossbow Experiements and Elation. A must-read.

An tweet on twitter lead me to some thoughts. The question in this tweet was "What will be after Linux?" At first this seems as a question of a Solaris fanboy and obviously you would expect that i would opt for Solaris in this article. I have my opinion but i won´t discuss it here. I won´t even give a hint because honestly spoken, i have no idea. It´s relatively easy to look 6 months in the future, it´s much harder to do this for 12 month and it´s outright impossible to do this for a point in time in a 5 years interval (okay, when you make your predictions in a generic way, it´s easy).

When we look into the history of computing, we see many technologies with a vast amount of market share having problems later on. Mainframes are such a example. Yeah ... Sun is such an example ... nobody expected in 1998 that Solaris would have the role of something else than the market leader in web services 10 years later. Many thought of Longhorn as the next big thing killing all other OSes. We´ve got Vista. In ten years we will think about Vista in the same way as Windows 98SE. Otherway round we see many systems which were almost dead with a bright future today. Think about MacOS 9 and MacOS X. Apple was pretty much a few years ago and today the market share on notebooks looks as near to 50%, at least when you walk through the train between Hamburg and Berlin. Other way round: 5 or 6 years ago the Palm Pilot was the unconquered leader of it´s market ... today ... the complete market was sucked up by cellular phone vendors and the vendor of a mp3-player on steroids. Apache vs. lighttpd or nginx. Sendmail vs. Postfix. Ingres vs. Oracle. CP/M vs. DOS. dBase vs. Access et al.

This example should show us one thing: There is no thing in IT that keeps it´s lead forever. Comebacks are possible. Complete removal from the market place is possible. It´s foolish to assume that any piece technology is excempted from this rule.

So Linux will encounter the same lifecycle. Think this is impossible? What would happen, if Linus Torvalds decides to take his midlife crisis and starts to do research on real penguins in a polar station. What would happen, if one of the large proponents (Red Hat, SuSE, Canonical) would collapse under the weight of this or the next recession? That´s not a linux-only thing ... just think about the "Steven Jobs is ill/dead/the new iGod" rumours.

In my opinion Linux is already on the downward path. There wasn´t an innovation in Linux that gave me the thought "Wow, that´s cool" for a long, long time (And to be honest: For many features i thought as cool features in Linux in my early UNIX years i´ve learned later on that they were implemented somewhere else (IRIX, Solaris, some old BSD et al) before) ... but your perspective may vary as your milage. This is nature of opinions. Dbase was moved out of market by other competitors making a faster transition to Windows. lighttpd is used by admins, who think that Apache httpd has grown to far to result into a stable and efficient webserver.

Furthermore: The user communities in the open source world are more fluid. The Microsoft ecosphere is a little bit different. Microsoft is only able to survive it´s constant underdelivery in regard of their operating system because of their applications. You have to use Windows, if you want to use MS Word or MS Excel. But as i wrote a while ago: In Open Source the binary of an application is just a Makefile away. Thus there is no application-enforced vendor lock-in. When people don´t like their old OS (out of whatever reason) anymore or just want features of another OS, it´s just an rsync to the new away. Commercial IT would take a little bit longer because of already existing runbooks and processes. But Unixes aren´t that far away from each other to make this impossible.

Despite what many want to think: Linux isn´t immune to this. So the interesting question is ... what will be after Linux? LinuxNG, OpenSolaris, BSD, Windunix? That´s an interesting question and i have no answer to it. Just an opinion. It the next Linux a already known operating system. Or a completly new operating environment?

What would be the path of Linux after such an downward path ... it´s a community development. The next interesting question is: Are highly dispersed development communities capable to restart a franchise? Like other restarts: MacOS 9 to X (non-opensouce), like Solaris 9 to 10 (open-sourcE). Both restarts were triggered from large companies with a large interest in the restart and deep pockets to pay developers. Or would the community just move to another prefered development platform moving Linux into a niche, like the BSDs today?

After writing this article i had an additional answer to the question of a customer: "Why does Sun still develop Solaris instead of supporting Linux the development" aside from all the technological and commercial reasons: Because Linux needs Solaris. Without a strong, innovative competitor the downward spiral (as the innovation would be just limited to supporting new hardware) would just go faster and this would open an opportunity to other systems. The otherway round Solaris needs Linux ... Solaris 10 would look different without the large impact of Linux in the market and the balance of power between Windows and. Unix would look differently. It´s the same with MacOS. The Apple developers were in need of an improving Windows to restart the MacOS franchise with X. Without it Apple would be a large part of computer history, but not of contemporary IT.

So, we should think about the time after Linux as well we should think how Linux gain strength in such a phase. But as i wrote at start, it´s hard to think about it, when predictions are such a hard business.

Es ist eine interessante zeitliche Koinzidenz, denn ich wusste nichts von dem Vorhaben, in Muenchen eine OSUG auf die Beine zu stellen, und ich glaube auch nicht, das die Münchener Kollegen davon wussten, das ich ähnliches für Hamburg angedachte habe, da ich vornehmlich im Hamburger Umfeld darueber diskutiert habe. Die Zeit scheint irgendwie reif fuer das dedizierte Netzwerken in der Solaris-Userschaft zu sein.

Sei es drum: Am 12.1. findet in der Sun Geschäftsstelle in München das erste Treffen der Munich OpenSolaris User Group statt. Für weitere Informationen konsultiert bitte die Webseite der MUCOSUG. Die Ankündigung des ersten Events findet ihr ebenfalls dort.