Market Dynamics

HBO hates babies and parents and puppies--beware the DRM boogie monster!

I sat on the phone with Tivo for a combined total of 30 minutes this morning (roughly 22 minutes on various stages of hold) to figure out what happened to my daughter's favorite Goodnight Moon show that we Tivo'd off of HBO.

As it happens, HBO encoded the program with DRM--a dated self-destruct mechanism and when Tivo ran it's nightly update and the clock turned over the program was deleted without any interaction from Tivo.

(Side note: Tivo support is really good and very nice. I can't fault the company or the support team for any … Read more

Open Season Episode 15 - Open Source and Cloud Computing

I haven't been able to kick this back problem (2 weeks with a slipped disc) but we did manage to record episode 15 of the Open Season podcast series.

This time we talk about: - The Cloud and why we need Java there - The inevitable fall-out from Microsoft's Yahoo tomfoolery - Google AppEngine - and so much more!

If anyone out there has a better way to record these things we're open to suggestion. Ashlee's latest Skype move (port forwarding and all that) is pretty much crap.

Open Season Series

Zorro, underground master of your open source project

I spoke with Gavin Clarke over at The Register about his piece "Fresh blood - the new fight for open source" several times over the last few weeks about how there are a great many corporate developers creating additions and such for open source projects but how it's difficult for them to get the code out of the corporate boundaries and back into the project.

The real challenge facing open source is how to bring in fresh contributors and code contributions to sustain projects and meet users' needs. Without fresh blood, projects progress relatively slowly and are … Read more

Why is IBM avoiding Open Source in SOA discussions?

Cote at RedMonk noted that IBM didn't once mention open source at their SOA-focused Impact 2008 Conference. My guess? IBM wants the SOA paradigm to remain a rich-man's sport and they want their army of consultants to put IBM products into place. As such they focus on "the Business" instead of just solving the problem.

Instead of embracing open source as a part of SOA, IBM is choosing to push only it's own expensive and cumbersome products, which simply doesn't make sense.

To be puckish, I bet the open source world would have a … Read more

Levanta is dead. Just like LinuxCare.

Levanta, a Linux data center automation company that was reborn from the ashes of Linuxcare, has closed its doors.

I wrote about Levanta and LinuxCare for Slashdot back in December 2005. The company never seemed to get its mojo back from the LinuxCare debacle, despite having a pretty cool product.

The demise of LinuxCare can be attributed to many factors. The first was that enterprises were slow to adopt Linux - in the early '00s, IT spending came to a grinding halt with the dot-com and stock market crash. But the key factor to LinuxCare's spectacular death spiral was … Read more

MacBook Air major annoyance--when sleep doesn't mean sleep

My one major pet peeve with the MacBook Air is that no matter what I do, it seems that this machine never goes fully to sleep. Somehow the battery is being drained (albeit at a slower rate) when I set the computer to "sleep" or when I close the lid.

This has become an incredible annoyance as my main purpose for this laptop was to be able to use it on the fly. Lately I've found that I have run the whole battery out in about 8 hours with less than one hour of actual usage. At … Read more

MuleCon Muffins--food matters at developer events

Our big MuleCon user event started yesterday and continues today, capped off with a Developer Campground that we are hosting with all of the worldwide Mule team attending and answering questions.

So far the event has been a big success and I have been too busy to blog. However, thanks to Cote, who is hosting a few sessions here I now have an update: the muffins and pastries are pretty delicious. Pictured to the left you'll see these oddly shaped (but tasty) mini-muffin loaves that have been the hit of the party.

I just can't repress my love … Read more

Which is more addictive: Blackberry or iPhone?

As I was obsessively checking my Blackberry at OSBC I realized that my usage is no longer about anything but the data. That is, I have no interest in the user experience or how I get from piece of information to another. I only care about the constant flow of information.

Counter that with my experience with the iPhone and an informal poll I did in which iPhone users said that they feel like they are participating with the device, not just consuming it like the Blackberry.

Leaving the form factor aside (I for one, like the BB keyboard) and … Read more

Amazon adds redundancy and geographical resiliency to EC2

Amazon is introducing what is definitely the "must-have" utility for it's EC2 cloud computing offering to become a reality. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service now has an application programming interface (API) that lets developers choose where its application physically runs.

As Martin LaMonica writes on News.blog:

This Availability Zones feature is important because people can now add redundancy to their application. Choosing multiple zones, people can have server instances with separate power, cooling, network access, and physical servers

This is an important move by Amazon and I would expect it to be echoed by … Read more