Saturday May 20, 2006
Dear IBM: Please conside Solaris over SE Linux for the NHS.
Dear IBM UK,
I see, thanks to a story on the regiser, that IBM is pushing an SE Linux based MAC (Mandatory Access Control) solution to the UK government and in particular the NHS.
Thanks for trying to bring Mandatory Access Control out of its "hiding place" in the military and trying to put it to use where we really need it in health care.
However, personally, I don't think SE Linux is the correct solution for this. Why not work with partner, Sun Microsystems, and use a Common Criteria EAL4+ (CAPP, RBACPP and LSPP) certified system: Trusted Solaris or better yet our up and comming Solaris Trusted Extensions that layers on top of the award winning Solaris 10. A solution that is known to work and has been developed and deployed in mission critical environments for over 15 years. It even works with our ultra thin and ultra low power client Sun Ray which is ideal for deployments like the NHS where doctors and nurses roam around and power budget is important, and our Secure Global Desktop for remote access to Windows XP systems.
yoursDarren (long time Trusted Solaris fan and consumer of the NHS)
In case it needs to be said this is a PERSONAL open letter to IBM not an official view from Sun Microsystems Inc.
( May 20 2006, 12:23:33 PM BST ) PermalinkIn Black & White: Paying for colour
I find it quite intersting that both Sony and Apple believe, and apparently correctly so, that consumers are willing to pay for a choice between black and white. With the Sony PSP there is an uplift of about 8% to go from black to white based on the value pack (based on pricing at my local GameStation store in the UK). With the new Apple MacBook the uplift to go from white to black (after equalising the disk size) is about 16% (based on Apple UK web prices).
So it appears to make sense to go for the white PSP rather than the black MacBook if you want to colour match spend the least amount of money doing it
I haven't bought either of these products yet but both are very tempting particulary given that I can run OpenSolaris on the MacBook as well as MacOS X. It will be most intersting though when MacOS X 10.6 and Solaris 11 both come out since both should have virtualisation built into the OS in such away that alternate operating systems can run. Parallels looks like a decent solution in the short term for play but I'm told that its performance isn't upto full time use - but I haven't tried it other than on a loaner machine to see it work.
Update:Checking out PSP prices in a few different stores I found that there actually was no price difference on average. It was really more about the fact that the Black PSP (orginal) comes in a base pack but the White PSP only comes in value and above. So I bought one, a white one that is! Very nice machine, pretty cool as a web browser as well, pitty the on screen keyboard is so hard to use.
( May 20 2006, 12:22:08 PM BST ) Permalink Comments [1]
This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
