appliances

The big news from Red Hat yesterday was its deal with Amazon to host Red Hat Enterprise Linux on its EC2 service (a great move, as Tim O'Reilly notes). Why big? Because Red Hat just significantly raised the bar on ease of adoption for Linux.

In fact, Red Hat just raised the bar for all operating systems/infrastructure technology, and not merely other Linux vendors.

As Red Hat notes:

Linux Automation. The ability to run any application, on any system, at any time. Allowing IT to simplify their IT infrastructure in the process. With the belief that undue complexity and over-architecture will have both short and long term costs....… Read more

The broad strokes of Red Hat's announcement yesterday left a lot of canvas unpainted. Its JBoss middleware, an acquisition that hasn't met Red Hat's expectations, was MIA. And a great deal of management, provisioning, identity, etc. capabilities--essentially the services that span the entire infrastructure--were casually lumped under the Red Hat Network (RHN) umbrella, or handed off to Open APIs, without much in the way of detail. RHN is a capable update and monitoring tool that has become increasingly capable over time. But RHN, even augmented by Red Hat's other infrastructure products, hardly comprises a complete enterprise automation strategy, contrary to what the company seemed to suggest. Overall, it seemed more like a conceptual vision for a strategy than an actual strategy.

For me, more interesting for the near- to medium-term were a pair of other announcements that are more closely related than they might initially appear. One was the Red Hat Appliance Operating System (AOS) that the company plans to make available in the first half of 2008. (The acronym takes me back to my previous life...but that's another story.)… Read more

In case you were wondering, there is a God.

The Dough-Nu-Matic, available via the SkyMall in-flight catalog, is a miniature version of the Krispy Kreme fryer/conveyor belt that forms and fries savory doughnuts.

For just $130, you can make very small doughnuts at the clip of a dozen every six minutes. That means you can eat 120 miniature doughnuts every hour without leaving your home. You can make doughnuts in your bathroom and eat them in the shower. You can place doughnuts on each of your fingers, then eat them off like the magical Mr. Doughnut Hands. You can … Read more

A month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun Microsystems, alleging the server and software company's ZFS file system infringes seven NetApp patents. Sun on Thursday fired back with a suit that claims NetApp violates 12 of Sun's.

Sun's suit also argues that NetApp's patents are invalid and that it doesn't infringe them anyway. And it requests an injunction prohibiting the company from selling any products that infringe Sun's patents.

Patent suits are often expensive and acrimonious proceedings, and they're particularly unpleasant when fought among Silicon Valley rivals who often share mutual customers and sometimes … Read more

A day after Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said his company will sue to have Network Appliances' file-server products removed from the market, NetApp's founder Dave Hitz brushed off the threat and took issue with Schwartz's open-source reasoning.

"This sounds like Sun's broad threats when they sued Azul, but in the end, Sun didn't put Azul out of business or even stop them from shipping products. I'm quite confident that two years from now--or however long it takes this suit to reach court--NetApp will be doing just fine," Hitz said in a blog posting … Read more

Updated at 2:31 p.m. PDT: Sun Microsystems plans to countersue Network Appliance later this week, Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday, a suit that will include a request to remove the company's products from the market.

Schwartz said on his blog that he has "no interest whatever in suing them" and therefore "reached out" to Chief Executive Dan Warmenhoven. But, he said, NetApp's demands--that Sun "retract" its ZFS file system from open-source community and restrict its use to computing and not storage devices--can't be met.

Consequently, "Later this … Read more

Everyone wants to be green nowadays, whether they can legitimately make the claim or not. But how many can say they're products are endorsed by Jane Goodall?

Kenmore, known for the refrigerators and barbecues sold at Sears, is one of them. The appliance maker's new line of energy-efficient washers and dryers exceed 2007 Energy Star standards by as much as 50 percent, according to Apartment Therapy, and one diswasher requires only as much energy as a 75-watt bulb to work. The good doctor was so taken with the performance that members of the Jane Goodall Institute's Roots and Shoots … Read more

Now even procrastinators can serve up tender, tasty meat as if they hadn't forgotten to start marinating until 10 minutes before their guests arrived.

I recently got to test out the Reveo MariVac from Eastman Outdoors, a funky kitchen appliance that looks suspiciously like a rock tumbler and that the company claims can cut down the time it takes to marinate meat to a fraction of the norm.

To use it, you just put raw meat and marinade into a compartment that tumbles it all together for up to 20 minutes. The idea behind the machine is that it vacuums out the air in the main barrel, stretching the fibers of the meat to allow the marinade to soak deeper into the meat in a shorter amount of time. All the while, the barrel turns, tumbling the meat and the marinade together in a messy bucket of flavor and goodness.

The company says the Reveo can do the equivalent of 4 hours of marination in 20 minutes, so I donned my lab coat and safety goggles and conducted a little experiment to see if the Reveo would hold up to these claims. As luck would have it, a co-worker was having a barbecue over the weekend, so I had plenty of potential judges who were more than happy to weigh in. … Read more

Forget about phones and MP3 players--the next designer gadget is the toaster. And leading the way to branded nirvana are, of all things, sportscar dynasties.

Porsche joined the fray with a brushed-aluminum model that looks good enough for the track, and now Bugatti has gotten into the act with an appliance of its own. True to its exacting nature, Bugatti has included "six browning-control options" for its "Volo" toaster, Gadgetizer says, with especially wide slots to accommodate different sizes of baked goods. But it's the red Italian flair that drew us to it, of course.… Read more