Sunday January 29, 2006 Random ramblings
Sunday January 29, 2006 Rossi to join F1 Valencia test
Rossi apparently will be joining a joint F1 team test at Valencia next week. He'll be driving the older F2004 car, but will (it seems) be mixing it up on track with established F1 drivers from McLaren-Mercedes, Toyota, Williams-Cosworth, BMW Sauber, Honda and of course Michael Schumacher and Massa from Ferrari. Wow 
Software engineering and IRIX 5.1
Via a post on PlanetGNOME, I came across a really interesting email to the Risks Digest which claims to be a repost of an SGI memo entitled "Software Usability II" examining the useability of IRIX 5.1 and how it had been adversely impacted by quality, then examining why. A good read, regardless of whether or not it is an accurate account of what went on at SGI in that period (no idea).
( Jan 29 2006, 01:35:04 AM GMT ) PermalinkJS blogs on GPLv3 and OpenSolaris
Jonathan Schwartz has blogged about the GPLv3, including the possibility of dual-licencing OpenSolaris under both it and the CDDL:
we've begun looking at the possibility of releasing Solaris (and potentially the entire Solaris Enterprise System), under dual open source licenses. CDDL (which allows customer IP to safely comingle with Solaris source code) and under the Free Software Foundation's GPL3. It's early days, but we're looking at two things as we make that decision.
Interesting 
.
The patent-pooling features introduced with the CDDL were some of the key restrictions missing from the GPLv2, as well as one of the crucial incompatibilities between the CDDL and the GPLv3. On that count at least, the GPLv3 thankfully has introduced language to make the GPL compatible with the CDDL. I don't know myself if the GPLv3 and CDDL are fully compatible in all other respects, but it seems closeish. Even if they are not, dual-licencing would settle the issue - presuming the GPLv3 works for Sun. A question which, one can safely assume from JS's post, is being examined very carefully at the moment.
( Jan 29 2006, 12:52:28 AM GMT ) PermalinkRossi does some showboating at Sepang - spinning it up out of a corner while giving a thumbs-up to the photographer.
( Jan 29 2006, 12:38:53 AM GMT ) PermalinkCNet News have a story on UltraSPARC T1's (Niagara) hypervisor capabilities. For those curious, the sun9v HyperVisor specifications are freely available from the OpenSPARC T1 site.
At some stage in the future you will be able to run multiple instances and versions of Solaris on Tx000, hopefully we'll see a Linux sun9v port too, maybe Free/Net BSD? (Not as familiar with those communities). Can't wait.
( Jan 29 2006, 12:33:32 AM GMT )
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