Nobel winner blames cultural decline on “blogging and blugging”

Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing recently used her time on the nobel stage to state that “blogging and blugging”, in addition to the increase in the use of the internet and television is causing the cultural decline. In the first sense, I completely agree with her, people are beginning to use the internet to receive content, and turning away from print. However, the internet has widened the scope of authors and readers. Content is no longer held in the hands of the elite; the publishers no longer decide who gets published, and who gets sold. What is read is then dictated by those who read, and that which is written is no longer dictated by those who sell. While I think you might see a decrease in the total quality of all works published, you see a widening in perspectives and differing levels of digestion for everyone.

(From Mike)

Tags: blogging, cultural decline

The $100 iPhone/iPod Touch Stand Made from a Piece of Paper

We’ve got a fair amount of iPhones around the office, and what better way to show off your $400 phone than by showing how disposable your income is that you can use it as a stand for your iPhone!

(From Mike)

Tags: iphone, itouch, apple

Digging Deeper: Systems Management

Very interesting post, I think the thing that hits home is that there is the desire to combine the following into a single application. That’s one of the Zenoss key goals.

Monitoring makes us omni-present. It allows us to be constantly aware of change in our environment to which we should be aware and to record data points over a period of time to allow for trend analysis, capacity planning, and fault isolation down the road. Thus, we can divide monitoring applications into 2 categories:

• Data Collection & Reporting Applications. Examples: Cacti, MRTG
• Threshold & Conditional Alerting Applications: Examples: Nagios, Big Brother

(via John M. Willis)

Tags: Systems Management, open source, Nagios, Cacti, Big Brother

Kick the Tires on Zenoss

This article came through the tubes today, and it was a joy to see. Of course we know how easy and simple it is to get zenoss installed and up and running, but to read about long time users of Nagios and other network management tools itching finding for something new, and finding what they need in our project is always good to see. And for someone to say that he’s having “fun” with it, that’s just icing on the cake (although I’m somewhat skeptical).

US states slam Google, Firefox as no match for Microsoft

I think they really missed the mark on this one. While a valid point is made in the OS field, linux based OS’s may not put any dent in the market share of Microsoft, but that does not mean Open Source can not achieve such a feat. We’ve seen from the success of Firefox, that providing a superior product for free to consumers, that people will take the steps to use something more than what Internet Explorer offers. Microsoft no longer acts monopolistic, it does not keep consumers from downloading Firefox, it doesn’t prevent computers from installing Ubuntu or Fedora. You can’t denounce Microsoft, crying monopoly because of it’s market share, because of the laze of IT managers in state agencies, that won’t allow the use of Firefox or Linux, even though it may be completely capable (or even superior) to fulfill the task.

IBM Wants SMBs to Buy i

This one made me take notice, in part since I was suprised a bit that IBM would pick System i, which runs OS/400, to go up against Microsoft in the SMB space, and not one of it’s Linux Systems, like p. This aside, I also found the last sentence very interesting: “IBM believes it can triple the number of new customers in the first year of the new offering.”

It’s interesting because earlier in the article, they say they are lowering the entry-level system i price from ~$20,000 (according to a customer quoted in the article) to $8,000 - that’s a 250% chop. And they predict that this will result in a 3 fold, or 300%, increase in the number of new i customers. So, if a 250% decrease in price results in a 300% increase in unit sales, in economics lingo, IBM expects price elasticity on the i to be just a tad more than 1. This seems pretty conservative given that most observers consider business technology buyers to be very price sensistive. Thought about another way, IBM seems to be admitting that the i will be (or at least will be perceived to be) an imperfect substitute for a Microsoft SMB server. How about you? Are you tempted?

MIT Gets It

I’m going to piss some geeks off with the following statement, and part of this is because way too many people in the technology industry wrongly equate Marketing with Spin, but alas, this is a topic for another time and place.  Here’s the statement:  Open Source has as much to do with marketing as it does with development. Making something that is useful freely available is one of the most powerful ways to build awareness and goodwill that exists. It builds a bond based on trust between the consumers of the good, be it software, information or consumer good, and the supplier. So, MIT Press was totally smart to make freely available their book titled “Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software.” With this, they will gain an advantage over their competition and become more widely recognized as one of the leading centers of thought, if not the leading center of thought, on the topic of open source business and technology.

Sun, Open Source and Religion

Any one of the above three terms might be sufficient to stir a heated debate. Being one to never shy away from controversy, I figure, let’s combine them. I’ve argued for close to a year now that Sun is a changed company that has internalized Open Source to its core and that this metamorphasis will lead to success. Recently I’ve noted, with some guilty pleasure, that the company’s positive financial results support this position, a position that was not widely shared when I first took it. As further evidence of the extent to which Sun has embraced Open Source, this week they anounced that they have released most of the previously proprietary app server features to the beta of the second version of the Open Source GlassFish application server. Ok, so if you’re paying attention, then you’re thinking “so that covers Sun and Open Source, but what about religion?” Well, here you go. This move, and much of Open Source, reminds me of Ecclesiastes 11:1, which says “cast your bread upon the water and you will find it again.” According to people who study this stuff, this scripture has its roots in the agrarian society of ancient Israel, when peasants would toss seeds from their boats into the flooded river, knowing that the surging water would kill the weeds on the flood plain and, when the waters receeded, the seeds would settle into the fertile soil and grow. So, the point is that you’ve got to have faith and take some risks with your valuable goods. If you hoard your seeds, too freightened to toss them into a raging torrent, you’ll miss the chance to turn them into a bumper crop. But if you have a little faith, and you spread your seeds in the swollen river, you’ll reap a great crop. This seems very analagous to Open Source, and especially to previously closed source companies like Sun that have gotten religion. Sun could have kept Solaris, Java and now their numerous app server technologies, proprietary and closed source. Had they chosen this route, they surely would have survived for a while on these seeds. But they would not have prospered the way they are now. And just as Ecclesiastes warns us to know what we can and cannot control, in today’s world of empowered prosumers, as the authors of Wikinomics put it, technology suppliers need to accept that the raging river of users has a will of its own and that the best that can be done is to understand how the river works and harness its power for their own benefit.  The worst one can do is try to fight it.

Music Industry Struggles to Deal with Web 2.0

The WSJ today highlights an entire industry that has so far totally failed to come to grips with peer to peer, web 2.0 and open source - the music industry.  As they cling to their proprietary ways and attempt to sue their customers into turning back the clock, their sales sink.  I wonder which big music label will get religion first and choose to embrace the inevitable instead of fight it.

the free download isn’t a frivolous act

Tim O’Reilly points to an essay by Harvey Danger on why they are releasing their latest album on the net, additional commentary on the free download as well

Users that know to much (and the CIOs who fear them)

The battle continues to wane between the user and the corporate IT department

Don Marti, Nobody reads this stuff

Or never assume malice when incompetence will do. Don talks about the Novell/Microsoft agreement

Zimbra Crosses Six Million Paid Mailboxes

I missed this announcement in January but this is amazing, to see such amazing growth so quickly, we use Zimbra here at Zenoss and it works well for us. Didn’t realize how many other Zimbra users there were out there.

An awesome post from “Creating Passionate Users” that really zeros in on how we want to build a user community for Zenoss. I hope our users feel the same way.

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/how_to_build_a_.html

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a cool post about the new Griffin laptop stands. A few of us here use the iCurve and love it. It keeps the laptop elevated, making more room for a keyboard, and allows the MacBookPros to breathe sufficiently. They also look cool and align better with external monitors. They are replacing it with one called the Elevator that ratchets up the cool factor too!
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/12/20/flickr-find-griffin-elevator/

Unisys VP of Engineering on SOA

Anthony shares his thoughts on SOA and it’s correlation to open source.

Miss Rogue on Crossing the Chasm

Tara talks about the book, and potential reading for start-ups. I am also guessing I was at the same BarCamp she was at when she observed the bastardization of Dr. Moore’s book. She also provides a reading list for start-ups:

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihal
• Getting Real or Defensive Design for the Web by 37 Signals
• The Cluetrain Manifesto by Locke, Weinberger, Searls and Levine
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin

(Tags: Crossing the Chasm, Cluetrain Manifesto, Purple Cow, 37 Signals, Tara Hunt)

Redmonk adds a Red Nun or ThreeMen and a Lady

Redmonk adds another analyst to their ranks.

Turn a Native Install Into a VMware appliance

This very cool, using VMware you can turn a native installation into a VMware virtual appliance.

(Tags: VMware, VMware converter)

Michael Robertson: My Hero Dies

Michael Robertson talks about his hero, economist Milton Friedman. I really like Mr. Friedman’s quote snipped from Michael’s blog:

I asked Milton the question I had come up with. “How do you make the world a better place?”

His answer was, “If you want to improve the world you have to create more capital. While creating non-profits makes people feel better, the only way to fundamentally improve living conditions is to create more business.“

(Tags: Michael Robertson, Milton Friedman)

If Microsoft won’t sue Maybe Red Hat Should
MattAslett references the fact that the uncertainty of IP claims about Linux probably has more power than the actual litigation, he points to Matt Asay’s commentary on why it would be better for us all if Microsoft just fired their last shot, sued the purveyors of various open source projects and then go on with life.

(Tags: Microsoft, Red Hat, IP infringement)

Novell holds IRC Meeting to Discuss the Novell/Microsoft Deal

What do you do when the turkey is gone on Thurssday? Don points out that we can log onto IRC and chat with Novell folks about why the Microsoft/Novell deal is a good thing.

(Tags: Linux, Novell, Microsoft)

Cote:Tagging in Systems Management

The key to improving systems management is to figure out how to engage the user in creating systems with better content. Improving the content and capturing user knowledge is what will make “Systems Management 2.0″ interesting vendor driven systems management has reached a plateau. One way to get the user involved and make systems management tools more useful is through the use of tagging.

And for those of you like me that weren’t fully grokking what REST was all about, here’s an explanation.

(Tags: systems management)