http://www.kernelconference.net

Registrations are open, and it’s time to get in before the limited seating runs out. The speakers are excellent, the venue is good and you should be there.

Hey, hopefully we can have Oracle XE on Solaris now - that’d be a great start!

Well, I’m sure you’ve probably already heard, but Oracle has moved to acquire Sun Microsystems at $9.50/share.

http://www.sun.com/third-party/global/oracle/index.jsp

Amazing to see the turn-around in El Reg, too - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/20/oracle_buys_sun - perhaps they’re scared Larry will be upset if they kept their usual attitude rolling?

I, for one, am hopeful that this announcement will lead to more great servers running a great operating system and a solid database.

There has been a lot of hot air and noise and consternation lately regarding a potential IBM acquisition of Sun.

This would be Bad for everyone. That’s Bad, with a capital B. Even organizations that have no Sun investment would suffer.

The UNIX marketplace requires competition to drive innovation and features. Sun is traditionally a big spender on R&D, and has rolled some great features of late - Zones, ZFS, dtrace and other big-ticket features.

As soon as those features hit the market, other vendors get to work closing the gap. AIX developed WPARs to keep up with zones, Linux coders have been cranking hard on systemtap and others to keep up with dtrace. This is good stuff. Sun had to do some catchup to AIX features in the past - it’s a good situation where the major players try to keep the best possible offering on the table.

Remove the competition and there’s no drive to compete. No massive spending on research and development. No drive from any vendor to deliver a better product.

The active development of UNIX and UNIX-like platforms in the enterprise boil down to Solaris, AIX & Linux. Take away Solaris and you’re taking away IBM’s need to innovate and compete. You’re taking away Red Hat’s need to drive development. You’re taking away jobs for people to sit down and make operating systems better.

So, even those who aren’t inspired by Solaris or don’t like Sun - having them around and active and rolling new product keeps all platforms fresh and exciting.

Kernel Conference Australia is coming up soon, and shouldn’t be missed.

Excellent speakers already lined up (incl. Bonwick & Moore).

Details at http://www.kernelconference.net

For some reason, MacOS doesn’t seem to include a mixer or similar functionality to route line-in to line-out. This is painful when you want to connect an MT-32 to get authentic music with ScummVM. The solution appear to be from Rogue Amoeba. They have a freebie called LineIn.Enjoy. 

Check the graph - classic Melbourne weather. Madness.

I was reading this article recently, and noted that this seems to basically provide a small subset of the functionality of Sun Secure Global Desktop (SSGD) while having performance described as:

If you’ve ever used VNC for desktop sharing over a network, it will feel very familiar. There’s the same kind of JPEG artefacts that hang on to the edges of the graphics, blurring the definition sightly, and the screen will update in blocks of graphics, rather than a more intelligent window frame approach as used by NX, for instance. But unlike NX, there’s no sound support, although that is promised in a future update.

Wow. The year 2008 has many examples of working remote desktop technologies - SSGD, Citrix, just for starters. Even Windows RDP will work without “JPEG artefacts” [sic]. Yet a load effort puts out yet another me-too, without actually delivering.

When are we going to see innovation, and not just incremental changes or poor imitations of prior products?

So after discussion that made it appear that the Rudd government might abandon their arguably pointless censorship proposal, this article

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,28348,24833959-5014239,00.html

states that they’re looking to increase their scope to cover “peer-to-peer” technologies.

The interesting point here is blocklist and DNS based strategies won’t work here, which pretty much guarantees the only options for review will be Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) based.

Of course, encryption is getting pretty common in peer-to-peer designs now, so I’m not sure how they’re planning on encrypting it without a blanket ban on encrypted traffic. Somehow, banning HTTPS in the name of censorship doesn’t strike me as a well-planned move.

The Jabber/XMPP server at ra.purplecow.org is going down, to be replaced with an identical service at interact.purplecow.org. All welcome.