Italians don't beat you, you lose to them.
- Johan Cruijff
So, just the
then.
It is not often you see the better team on the night lose one of those games, but that was the case last night, as it was in 2005. I can't compare Milan's achievement last night to Liverpool's triumph of the imagination two years ago, but good luck to Milan, if you win it fair and square you deserve it.
I wrote with no little fantasy back in February that it would be wonderful for the city of Liverpool to be home to both European capital of culture and European football champions in 2008. The capital of culture project is moving ahead and the city is clearly energised by it all ("culture of captial" my dad calls it, in reference to the giant and superfluous shopping centre being built in the centre of Liverpool). And tonight, incredibly, Liverpool face AC Milan in the final of the Champions League -a rematch of the greatest game of recent years: the 2005 final.
It isn't just the fact of it being a rematch that I find romantic about the occasion. It was the AC Milan team of the late 1980s that really made it clear that Liverpool (at the time excluded from European competition after the terrible events of Brussels in 1985) no longer had a claim to be the world's best team. I can still remember the radio commentator, the night Milan beat Steaua Bucharest 4-0 to win the 1989 European title, saying, "Let's face it, not even Liverpool could have lived with AC Milan tonight".
Well, let's hope that they can this night. See you in the morning.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer, who may be cheering for Milan.
It is with regret that I read Sam Varghese's critical report of Sun
this week, Solaris
can never be Linux. This wasn't just any old nonsense from a
blogger posing as a jornalist after all, but the man, the Varg.
Is there a better writer out there?
Nexenta shows how successful Solaris with GNU tool...s can be. If Ian's Indiana project is similar, the prospects of success look good. Solaris has a heritage of compatibility with various flavors of tools, and this GNUification just continues this proud history. As a software developer I don't much care which kernel sits under the hood so long as "top", "ps", "ls", "pwd", etc, all work like normal and I can ship my code out of the door working.
Like many, I was tremendously excited to try the new Ubuntu release, Feisty Faun (7.04). So excited, perhaps, that I may have cut the usual corners, like backing up critical data on my laptop. Well, one gets so blase, doesn't one? The machine (an Acer Ferrari 4006) has Win XP on one partition, Ubuntu Dapper on the second and Solaris Express Developer Edition on the third.
Anyway, this morning I bravely plunged in with my freshly burned copy of Feisty, and hit the wall imemdiately. And this, really, is my error. So used have I become to Ubuntu practically installing itself that I was surprised that I actually needed to read instructions during the process. Unbelievable. After 20 minutes of swearing and repeatedly trying the same, failed operation, I read the instructions and actually specified my root partition as requested...and the rest was as easy as ever.
What I had not realised, however, was that the GRUB boot loader that a GNU/Linux OS installs does not work with Solaris. Naively, I had just expected to edit the GRUB menu from Ubuntu and bobs-your-uncle, triple boot again, as I have done so many times from the GRUB menu in Solaris. Not so. What I understand, having spent a thoroughly objectionable hour this morning (and naturally, entering into the same spirit myself) is that Linux's GRUB won't recognise the Solaris file system, which judging by the error messages I have researching (can one say regoogling?) this morning, adds up.
Anyway, I'm happy to say, docs.sun.com came to the my rescue. If, like me, you upgrade a Linux partition on a machine with a Solaris partition, and, like me, you're an idiot, here is what I recommend you do:
0. (Because I forgot to) Write down the GRUB entry for your Linux image
1. Boot one of the OpenSolaris live CD distos (Belenix works very well)
2. Mount your Solaris root partition
3. Reinstall your original GRUB using /sbin/installgrub
4. Reboot into your Solaris environment and add the Linux entries to GRUB
Really, I was quite surprised that Ubuntu's GRUB doesn't support Solaris filesystems. Apparently the fix has been submitted to the GRUB project and will be integrated eventually...
Anyway, someone once said, experience is knowledge, everything else is merely information.
So, Feisty's up, and it's very impressive. It is fantastic to be able to apt-get Java packages, it's full of nice surprises (and naturally, one or two disappointments), and generally feels very polished indeed. I do, however, rate the chances of getting my Broadcom wireless card up on a ndiswrapper or getting Beryl up on my ATI card as slim-to-narrow, at least, not before bedtime.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
pps. if anyone manages a more cack-handed install than that, please do let me know
But what makes it truly outstanding is that the commentator then says, "he bangs it as hard as he can, nothing fancy". Mmmm. I find that when I just kick a football as hard as I can it tends to curl viciously inside the top right corner leaving the 'keeper no chance, too.
What will poor David Beckham feel when he gets to the US, unfurls his party piece and has it described as "nothing fancy"?
p.s. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer who may also be strangely ambivalent about Dwayne De Rosario's amazing free kick.
This is great: I was delighted to see a pet peeve get top billing here - the fact that to install iTunes on WinXP you also have to install QuickTime which then appears in the system tray and - not mentioned here - has to be configured from the Control Pan
I reckon I'm the first person ever to get a kicking on LugRadio for using Linux. But yes, I quite agree with Jono that you should eat your own ***ing dogfood (as he put it. I believe that the phrase used around here is that we "fly our own planes"). This is why I do boot Solaris Express, Ubuntu and Win XP on my laptop. Windows only to evaluate software and to use Second Life - the Linux Second Life client seemed flaky as you like to me.
Anyway, thanks for the clarification, chaps. Solaris Express definitely is ready. I'm using it almost exclusively for work, and Dapper for play.
Is Red Hat Acting Like Microsoft? was the question posed by eWeek this, er, week, in relation to this blog, accusing Red Hat of distinctly Redmond-like behaviour. Specifically, Red Hat sent a cease and desist letter about the use of a trademark to a Mr Bill Dudney whose company is offering training courses on Hibernate, a Red Hat-owned JBoss product. Mr Neward concludes,
Folks, RedHat has officially moved into the "Big Corporate Entity Seeking Profit At Any Expense" category. So much for the Open-Source-Can-Really-Make-Money-Too-We-Swear poster child, if you ask me...
After appearing in the trade press, Mr Neward has gone futher, claiming that the issue isn't about the use of trademarks (which he sporadically confuses with copyrights and "IP issues", whatever they are), but that the use of the trademark "Hibernate" appears to denote a relationship with RedHat - which sounds like the use of a trademark to me.
Trademarks have really had a bad press recently. Naomi Klein's influential No Logo made trademarks (and brands) the object of ire for a generation disaffected with the evident results of globalisation. I don't hold with Ms Klein, thinking that sweatshops and extreme (and even mild) poverty and inequality are the things we should fight against and that free trade, in most forms, is a good thing (although I'm dubious about the coerced liberalisation of foreign capital markets). Of course, Ms Klein's book helps those in the west react against globalisation by giving them something near at hand and easily identifiable (by design) to attack: logos. In my view a better take on the potential harm of globalisation (from an economic perspective, rather than a cultural one), would be Joseph Stiglitz' fascinating Globalisation and its discontents.
As for trademarks which facilitate brands, they play an important economic role:
Trademark law... was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.Richard Stallman
Some brands have, as we know, taken on their own cultural significance for better or for worse, but by and large they help us identify who we are doing business with and they help us hold them to account. And accountability is important, a point apparently lost on the three conference attendees who asked not to be identified in the eWeek article. (of course, anonymity is important too). Trademarks require a degree of policing. Google know this, as do DuPont (nylon) and Otis Elevators (elevators).
And why is accountability especially important to Red Hat? Open source represents, from a certain perspective, the liberalising of the software market. It vastly reduces barriers to entry for suppliers, and barriers to exist for users. This is a good thing. Given that a company is supplying open source software which is, in theory, able to be compiled to binary by any Tom, Dick or Harry, how do you differentiate? It's your trademark. That's the brand that certified your operating system is supported, and that applications are supported on your operating system. And that is the value that Red Hat brings to its customers and it's what their business is and it's why I agree with Mark Shuttleworth (and the rest of the known universe) that it will be tough for Oracle to fork Red Hat. I don't consider this anti-community. Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all, and Red Hat surely have a right to their trademark without being labelled "seeking profit at any expense".
Although the actions of large competitors like Oracle might well explain why Red Hat are twitchier about their trademarks than might otherwise be the case, allegations that Red Hat is behaving like Microsoft are surely wide of the mark - they are behaving like a company who is concerned about the use of its trademark. There is such a thing as "fair use" of a trademark (whether or not it is applicable is lost on me though, not being a lawyer), but any question about the Red Hat's behaviour is about wisdom, and not morality. It is surely about the extent to which they are able to encourage a community for their technology at any (as perceived by them) expense of the integrity of their trademarks. Not something I'd know about.
What I do know is that there needs to be an open source equalivalent of Godwin's Law. As an open source companies mature, the probability of a comparison involving Microsoft approaches one.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer, I am not a lawyer and know nothing of trademark law (this is advice to no one), and I don't mean to specifically associate Microsoft with any totalitarian ideologies of the mid 20th Century.
No disrespect to Microsoft employee Brad Abrams who makes a lot of good noises according to this article in Internetnews, but he makes the oft-repeated mistake (amplified by the reporting journalist) that open source style guru Eric Raymond's famous essay, "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" makes a simple distinction between proprietary software development (cathedrals) and open source development (bazaars).
During a morning keynote, Abrams declared that Microsoft is not the cathedral and that open source isn't really a bazaar when it comes to AJAX, a claim that undermines one of the core underpinnings of the open source movement...Among open source's many core tenants the book highlighted is that proprietary vendors such as Microsoft are closed, monolithic structures – the cathedral -- while open source operates in bazaar fashion where things are all done out in the open and with the community.
Those who have actually read Mr Raymond's essay (and I would tend to think that this includes only a minority of people who refer to it in conference keynotes) know that the distinction being drawn is actually between different project governance models and that they may apply to software development in any context: proprietary will tend towards cathedral-style development, but there are plenty of open source projects that follow the model too. It's neither a core underpinning, nor a core tenant.
The brilliance of Raymond's essay is, at least in part, that it uses a metaphor for the title which lets everyone feel they've understood it before they've read it. One might question Mr Raymond's views on politics, race, religion, firearms, sexuality and software package management, but he certainly understands a thing or two about marketing.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
There's lots of coverage in the media about the greatly respected Ian Murdoch joining Sun as Chief Operating Platform Officer. With the kind of informed insight for which The Register is famous, it has a bash at interpreting Ian's comments on the importance of usability.
We guess that means getting a Solaris install down from a day to about an hour.
Well, maybe it's me, but with the recent updates to the installation process, I found the install of Solaris Express Developer Edition not too bad at all. I backed up my user account, repartitioned my disk, and did a new install in just over an hour. I did it last Sunday while looking after my baby daughter. Now it certainly isn't as easy as Ubuntu, but I had more problems when I tried Fedora (not a dig, by the way, just a confession of incompetence). I urge Drew Cullen of The Register to give it a go.
Elsewhere, and as Barton says, at the risk of seeming a suck up, I also saw that eWeek anointed my boss the 58th most influential person in IT. I'm not saying Simon is demanding, but I am sure he will want to know who got 57th place. (Kidding Simon!).
Meanwhile back in the Register I read this story about a Mr Paul Trinder, who it seems was flying first class from Delhi to London and was inconvenienced no end by the grieving relatives of a woman who had died on board ("Then the relatives were allowed to sit in First Class and spent the next five hours wailing and weeping"). No doubt it was an unpleasant experience for all concerned, but it seems that Mr Trinder's first class ticket didn't just cost him £3,000, but also any sense of empathy and compassion.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
I had to doublecheck the date on this article again. Former Sun employee Adrian Keward has been busy laying into, er, Sun. According to Techworld, Mr Keward "knows where the bodies are buried -- and he's been showing us around the graveyard."
I took against this piece for two reasons. Firstly, when did this use of double hyphens come in? I see it all the time -- these days. What's the purpose of this redundant punctuation? Anyone know?
Secondly, I think that any independent observer would say that there has been a sea-change at Sun, in Solaris, in open source and in hardware, over the last three years. Mr Keward's perception of Sun's failings circa 2004 is hardly news. (Incidentally, Mr Keward appeared in the first season of LugRadio, while still at Sun. Respect. You can hear him here.)
Quickly, or as quickly as possible, let's rehash his arguments. He was responding to my colleague, (and I should say friend and fellow Liverpudlian), Jim Craig who made the point that Solaris is being adopted on the x86 platform and that sometimes, people buying what they think is a substitutable Linux distro on a white box are not realising all the benefits they expected. (Red Hat on Itanium, anybody?). This, of course, gets reported as "trashing Linux".
Anyway, Mr Keward's less than cogent argument is says that Sun's focus is hardware and that software is entirely subservient to this, that OpenSolaris is an act of desperation, that Sun is pushing a proprietary platform and that support outside US is not good enough ("there's only two people in the Europe").
He goes on to say that Sun has lost $5bn and is "propped up" by "Microsoft patent money" (not the first time I've seen a Novell employee try to confuse their own controversial deal which rather circumvents the spirit of the GPL with Sun's out of court settlement for antitrust and patent issues).
Well, my goodness me. Do you think that George Bush will get reelected? I wonder what effect the expansion of the EU will have. Looking forward to the Athens Olympics?
Sorry for the whithering sarcasm, but this is laughable and I'm astonished that it's reported without moderation. Mr Keward is apparently out of touch with Sun's x86 and x64 hardware lines, the GPLing of the T1, Sun's great investment in Solaris prior and subsequent to OpenSolaris, Sun's leading position in eco-responsible hardware, the hundreds of sustaining engineers that Sun employes across Europe. And the $5bn? Clearly, he's overlooking Sun's recent acqusitions, including Storagetek ($4.1bn).
But it was the end of the article really raised my eyebrows. Mr Keward describes Sun's approach to open source as "opportunistic" and expresses a hope that Sun will "do the right thing", but sadly, "the market's moved on."
How, I wonder, does he explain 4 consecutive quarters of market share growth and a return to profitability? And, (even) closer to my heart, how can he describe Sun's enormous contribution to Free software as "opportunistic"? And lastly, what should Sun learn from Novell in order to be "doing the right thing"? I'm all ears.
ps. the views expressed here are not necessarily those of my employer
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