hat

The headline on this Dvice post about Think Geek's Wi-Fi-detecting hat says the cap will make you "king of the geeks." And maybe it will. But you can have that title, my liege; I'd rather get dates.

Not to say your crown isn't cool, technically it is. I mean, it has a fully functional Wi-Fi detector built in. So while you may never know if you've found decent coverage (unless you're staring into a mirror), at least all the girls around you will know. But since they won't be talking to you, … Read more

In 2007 Red Hat stood on top of the Linux kernel contributor list with room to spare. At 12.7 percent of the Linux kernel contributed by Red Hat (measured in terms of lines changed), IBM was the runner-up at a comparatively distant 5.9 percent. In 2008, Red Hat slipped a little but maintained the top spot (11.2 percent), with Novell making a burst into second place at 8.9 percent.

In 2009, things get more interesting, with Intel making a serious challenge to claim the top spot in Linux kernel contributions.

Red Hat, Novell, and IBM all … Read more

Red Hat is at the top of its game right now, delivering quarter after quarter of impressive performance despite (or, perhaps, because of) a global recession. But it wasn't always thus. Despite a meteoric initial public offering in 1999, Red Hat spent years fumbling about for a winning game plan, dabbling in technologies that took it far beyond its core competence in operating systems.

Small wonder, then, that Red Hat today hasn't risen to the bait to move beyond its core competence.

In fact, it may well have been the burden of its IPO that set Red Hat … Read more

It was bound to happen. With the U.S. government promising truckloads of cash to overhaul the U.S. health care system, while simultaneously making positive noises around open source, it was just a matter of time before someone connected the dots.

That someone appears to be Joanne Rohde, former executive vice president of worldwide operations at Red Hat, who has launched the Axial Project, a stealth-mode start-up that aims to "combin[e] the principles of Open Standards and Open Source...to connect all the parties in the Health ecosystem safely and securely."

It's a big task, … Read more

Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady writes a bleak, but likely accurate, eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing. In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those "horses," in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging "Goliath" are slim.

It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business.

Given this fact, … Read more

Could VMware be the next Novell? That's the question Gartner managing vice president and chief of research for Infrastructure David Cappuccio asks in a provocative post, one that bears further discussion. While VMware is at the top of its game, there are several historical analogs between VMware and Novell.

I'll let you read Cappuccio's excellent post for his full argument, but the crux of it is that in the face of dominant but pricey technology, many buyers will turn to "good enough" to fill their needs. For Novell, that competition to its 90 percent market … Read more

Last year it was smartcards and this year it's ATMs.

It's almost security conference season in Las Vegas and with one month to go, a presentation has been pulled from Black Hat and Defcon.

Juniper Networks says it pulled a talk about a flaw in ATM software that one of its researchers was scheduled to give at the security conferences, after the ATM vendor complained.

In his presentation entitled "Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines," Barnaby Jack was planning to discuss local and remote attack vectors on ATMs and provide a live demonstration of an attack on an … Read more

Oracle doesn't want to own Linux. Oracle just wants Linux to be cheap.

That's the insight an analyst shared with me the other day as we discussed why Oracle hasn't made a move to acquire Red Hat (recently, anyway). According to this source, who is familiar with Oracle's Linux plans, Oracle wins eight of 10 deals where the operating system is Linux, and only wins five of 10 where the OS is Windows, a win rate that continues to drop as Microsoft's SQL Server gets better.

Oracle's Enterprise Linux strategy is therefore not so … Read more

For all the hype around cloud computing, two big issues continue to keep CIOs from feeling safe participating: security and interoperability. Red Hat, by announcing its Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program and Amazon's entry in that program, hopes to allay these concerns and claim for itself a significant percentage of the money set to pour into the cloud-computing gold rush.

For the past five years, CIOs have given Red Hat top ranking for value. A significant part of this value, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst revealed on Red Hat's first-quarter earnings call, is the company'… Read more