crystal-studios.com

This is great, but it’s also insufficient. Red Hat announced way back in October 2007 that it had passed 3,000 certified applications, and currently has more than 3,400, according to a Red Hat PR representative.

It’s a fair point, but I find both Novell’s and Red Hat’s use of application certifications somewhat misleading…and useless. Why? For the very reason that Red Hat states:

Update: Response from Novell at the end of the original article.

Now, it’s possible that “more than 2,500″ actually means “more than 4,314,” but I suspect Novell just got its math wrong. Indeed, Novell’s certified application list actually includes 2,549 applications, as of Monday.

Novell has been doing a lot of good things lately in its Linux business, but counting certified applications is apparently not one of them. Novell on Monday announced that it has taken the lead in certified applications vis-a-vis Red Hat, with more than 2,500.

Update: I asked Justin Steinman, vice president of Solution and Product Marketing for Novell, to comment and received the following:

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I was a literature major, so perhaps my math is wrong. But I think this means that Red Hat has 1,765 more certified applications than Novell, which I believe means that it has a lot more than Novell. In most contests, having more points than the opposing team means you’re leading, which would mean Red Hat remains the leader in certified Linux applications, not Novell.

Of course, counting how many applications are certified turns out to be more complicated than you might imagine. And maybe it doesn’t even matter because, where applications are concerned, there’s a classic 80:20 rule in play. In other words 80 percent of customers use the same 20 percent of applications. Provided the 15 applications you need are available the fact that there are several thousand to choose from doesn’t really matter. Nevertheless, it’s fun to count.

In fact, I just ran a search of Red Hat’s independent software vendors catalog and came up with 4,314 certified applications.

Fun, yes, and useful to a point, but the real value of a Linux distribution goes far beyond the number of certified applications it claims. We passed the point a long time ago when the leading Linux distributions achieved critical mass with applications. It’s hard to even imagine most (server) software vendors coming out with an application that doesn’t run on Linux.

In the press release, we state: “Based on publicly available information, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10 have the most certified software applications when compared to the latest releases of all other commercial Linux distributions.” [Emphasis added]

We only analyzed data for the most recent editions of products. Specifically, SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10. Most customers only care about what certified applications are supported by the the most up-to-date version of an operating system.

We relied on publicly available information the same information customers would rely on. We looked at all the major commercial Linux distributions. According to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Software Catalog, there are 2,509 software applications certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 10. You can visit www.novell.com/partner/isv/isvcatalog to view the ISV and relevant applications by platform.

With this in mind, it’s much more valuable to note in Novell’s press release that SAP and Microsoft prefer the SUSE Linux platform (whatever that means…), just as Oracle used to prefer Red Hat, and basically crowned Red Hat the market leader with that preference. It’s no longer quantity that counts, in other words, it’s quality. Novell has a good story to tell there, as does Red Hat. That’s the story that I suspect most buyers care most about.

When we compared the most recent editions of SUSE Linux Enterprise to the most recent editions of all other commercial Linux distros, we came out on top. We defined “recent editions” to be the last two commercial releases of any Linux distribution, so in this case RHEL 4/5 and SLES 9/10.

What with all the virtualization hype, one would think that virtual servers had the option of parting the Red Sea or walking on it.

Regardless of the eventual winner, it’s good to see IT management gaining some sex appeal.

If, instead, you use a single, base image for all of your work–I call these images stem cell images for what are hopefully obvious reasons–and then use a tool like Puppet to configure them, once they’re running, you avoid all of the above problems: you have one image to maintain, and it’s necessarily simplistic, you use the same tool and the same configuration base across all images, and Puppet keeps your machines updated within 30 minutes of any central change.

In other words, the sexier that virtualization becomes, the more important (and, dare I say sexy?) systems management becomes. Suddenly, Hyperic, Reductive Labs (the company behind Puppet), RiverMuse, Zenoss, GroundWork, and other IT management companies take center stage as virtualization, and the cloud-based computing trend it enables, become de facto IT strategies.

His point is good. In moving from physical machines to virtual machines, we’ve tended to gloss over the complexity that this introduces, preferring to focus on all the efficiency gains virtualization promises.

You have significant problems when you rely on golden images (i.e., virtual images complete with all necessary services): image sprawl, updating your images, and image state vs. running state…Maintaining these (virtual) images is more like managing a foil ball: it’s difficult to pull apart, difficult to press back together, and if you get too many of them, they just get into the way.

As this new competition emerges, however, the IT management companies that know the cloud best will do best. So far, crowns probably go to Reductive Labs and Hyperic, as both have aggressively targeted cloud-based computing. Over time, however, this may change.

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It’s perhaps not surprising that Kanies sees Puppet as the answer to this image sprawl and confusion:

While there’s a great deal of promise in virtualization, there’s also the peril of managing virtual servers, as Luke Kanies, founder of the Puppet project, points out in a blog post.

Jerry Yang and John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington wrote that Yahoo needs its Barack Obama, “someone to make everyone believe that a true leader is at the helm, ready to fight. Someone with a believable plan. Someone who can inspire Yahoo–and Yahoo users–to believe that Yahoo can once again become a force on the Internet.”

The reviews of Jerry Yang’s performance at the Web 2.0 Summit have not been glowing. The Yahoo CEO’s interview with Web 2.0 Summit co-host John Battelle this week has been described as a train wreck, self-delusional, and as making a mockery of the vaunted company he helped create.

Watch the full video, courtesy of TechWeb:

He has to convince employees, shareholders, customers, and partners that no matter how difficult the situation, he can lead Yahoo to the promised land. Think reality-distortion field Steve Jobs, no-software Marc Benioff, dancing bear Steve Ballmer, the disarming Howard Stringer, the professorial Eric Schmidt, or the preacher John Chambers. Bill Gates doesn’t have the most charismatic or endearing personality, but he manages to control interviews, delivering the messages he wants.

During the interview, Yang defined Yahoo’s vision as a “consumer brand that allows people to get what they want on the Internet.” Yahoo is a destination site with starting points, such as Yahoo Finance and the Yahoo home page, and is rewiring its platform to be more open and extensible. It serves billions of dollars in ads and is the No. 2 search engine. It’s a sound strategy. Yahoo is not Google or Microsoft and has to double-down on its core assets and 500 million to 600 million users.

He lacks the out-sized personality and charisma that is needed to inspire confidence in battles for the soul of a company. He said he would “go through walls” for Yahoo, but having personal passion and a vision isn’t enough to get others to walk through the walls.

Yang is ready and willing to fight, but the Chief Yahoo needs a new general to lead his troops.

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET Networks)

Yang’s job is to sell that vision inside and especially outside of Yahoo. The problem is Yang can’t sell.

Will it work? Time will tell. But the strategy is more likely to succeed given the pragmatism with which it’s being plotted out.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

There shouldn’t be anything on our price list that requires more than seven engineers. Beyond that “magic” number you need middle management, which would break our agile development model. So, we expect the individual teams to remain somewhat autonomous.

But what about the companies it acquires? It’s by no means certain that they, too, will fit into this model.

In fact, as Ghalimi told me, he views a global geographic spread essential to an open-source business:

Ghalimi’s response is to point to the nature of the companies that it is acquiring: very small organizations that will remain very small organizations. In other words, Ghalimi isn’t concerned with digesting acquisitions, Cisco style: he wants to keep Intalio’s acquisitions somewhat autonomous:

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After talking with Ghalimi, I’m a bit more optimistic on Intalio’s chances with this strategy, for a few reasons.

We know how to deal with geographic disparity. In open source, you don’t get to choose your markets: you need to be where your customers are. The more distributed the better.

First, while growing through acquisition is both art and science, it helps if a company is already used to working in a distributed fashion. Given that Intalio plans to acquire a host of (small) companies across the globe, it’s helpful that it currently employs 60 employees across 10 offices. Intalio, in other words, already knows how to connect remotely.

A week ago I was somewhat dismissive of Intalio’s aggressive acquisition strategy, having been part of a company (Lineo) that tried and failed to significantly scale through acquisition. Intalio has already acquired two companies and is in talks with “five or six others,” according to Intalio CEO Ismael Ghalimi, with whom I had the opportunity to talk last Friday.

But given that few people expect wholesale design changes to the new systems–as were unveiled last October for the MacBooks–an event to highlight new chips might be overkill. In any case, iMac supply is dwindling, according to AppleInsider, so hold tight if you are one of the few people in the world thinking about buying a new computer this year.

It’s as clear as it gets in the Apple rumor business that if you’re in the market for one of the company’s iMacs, it’s probably worth waiting a few weeks.

March came in like a lion, and could go out with an iMac.

(Credit:
CNET)

Several rumors flew across the Internet over the weekend and Monday, hurled by World of Apple and others, that Apple is finally gearing up for the long-awaited refresh of its all-in-one iMac desktop sometime later this month. Such an overhaul is long overdue in the minds of many Apple watchers, who have been hearing about a potential iMac refresh since last November.

Maynard Um of UBS put out a research note Monday saying that one sure bet for the new systems are Intel’s Nehalem processors. The server version of those chips is scheduled to be out relatively soon, which means Apple will probably also have a new high-end
Mac Pro soon, as OSX86 contributor Netkas (via Ars Technica) has uncovered.

Surprisingly, few details are available about what changes Apple is planning to make to the iMac, which could suggest that the changes will be under the hood rather than design-related. The Nvidia integrated graphics chipsets used in last October’s MacBook refresh are a decent bet, perhaps combined with the 9600M discrete graphics card as Apple did with the MacBook Pro.

Also, a photo of a Mac Mini box is making the rounds that features the five USB port design shown in the earlier rumors.

So when will Apple launch these systems? The most common rumor is at an event scheduled for March 24, as reported by World of Apple and My Apple Guide. On the other hand, MacRumors points to a Japanese publication, Kodawarisan, that’s reporting Apple will launch the iMacs Tuesday without one of its trademark events.

UBS’s Um said he was unable to confirm any notion of an event, believing that Apple might just issue a press release for the new systems and be done with it. It would be interesting to see how Apple would go about holding one of its trademark events with CEO Steve Jobs on medical leave, as that could be interpreted as a signal for how Apple plans to handle such events when Jobs eventually decides to retire.

Update 12:40pm - A few tidbits have surfaced since this went live. CNET TV’s Brian Tong was able to confirm that Best Buy has received new part numbers from Apple for new systems that fall in line with the historical way those systems have been entered into Best Buy’s database. Still unclear on the timing, though.

The Mac Mini managed to skate through this latest round of rumors unscathed, but there has been plenty of musing over the last few months about the fate of the smallest and cheapest Mac desktop system. The number of USB ports might be up in the air, but it seems likely that Apple would refresh this model around the same time it took care of the rest of the desktop lineup.

No, the IP concern, while valid, is mostly a canard left over from previous generations of FUD against open source.

Regardless, even if there is a risk of IP violations, those can be resolved at the point of production, not adoption. Hewlett-Packard’s open-source policy is–or was back when I worked with the company while helping to form Novell’s open-source review board under the advice of HP–to set up a review before a product incorporating open source went into production. This left the engineers free to experiment with open source until that point, thereby leaving them free from stifling regulations until the point that it actually mattered.

The magazine article characterizes the primary threat of having 85 percent of enterprises adopting open source, according to Gartner, as a potential intellectual-property landmine. I struggle to see how it’s any different from purchasing proprietary solutions.

Regulation is fine, but let it come at the point that projects are set to go into production, not evaluation.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Enterprises should be concerned if they’re not getting enough open source right now, not if they’re getting too much. The cost savings and often superior software that come with open source are significant benefits that no CIO should attempt to strangle with heavy-handed policies that crimp adoption.

Baseline is suggesting that chief information officers would do well to get “wild” deployments of open-source software under control. I’m not sure that I agree.

The biggest threat to CIOs is not IP risk with open source. It’s that they’ll continue to dump money down the drain with incumbent vendors who demonstrate little ongoing value yet charge ongoing maintenance fees. IP risk is finite. Wasted money is much less so.

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Some may argue that it’s different because you get indemnification with your commercial software purchase. Please. Have you seen how limited and constrained those are, and do you really think that commercial software protects intellectual property better?

Speaking at the TED 2009 conference, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte said that the future of the initiative–which set out to put simple, durable, low-cost laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations–is to become, in essence, more commonplace, to “build something that everyone copies,” according to Ethan Zuckerman, blogging from TED.

The One Laptop per Child initiative seems to have found that imitation isn’t simply a form of flattery, it’s grounds for a new business model.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News)

Last May, as the OLPC sought broader acceptance–and five months after Bill Gates told CNET News that the “OLPC hasn’t done that well”–the group said that it would be working with Microsoft to make a Windows variety of its XO laptop, in addition to the original Linux model.

One month ago, amid harsh economic conditions, the OLPC announced that it would be cutting its workforce by 50 percent and cutting salaries for remaining employees. It also said it would hand off development of its Sugar operating system to the open-source community.

Given the pressure from commercial markets–”It’s sort of a tragedy”–Negroponte said that the OLPC would release and open-source its hardware design and invite others to copy it, according to Zuckerman. Within three years, Negroponte expects companies around the world to be cranking out some 5 million to 6 million such machines every month, compared with about a half-million OLPC machines now in use.

That copying has already begun, Negroponte said, pointing to the surging popularity in recent months of Netbooks–laptops built by a range of commercial PC makers with a focus on low cost and simplicity of design. “They didn’t copy the right things from us, but they exist,” Negroponte said, per Zuckerman. “We had to build the first laptop because no one else would do it.”

Bold colors were a key part of the original OLPC design.

In the early days of the OLPC, the group’s design became famous as the “$100 laptop”–after the target price set for the device–but over time, the price crept up to nearly double that level; the $100 price tag would have to wait for economies of scale that proved elusive. Meanwhile, even before the advent of Netbooks, the price of higher-end laptops kept dropping.

Inauguration Day for Barack Obama will also mark the first day of service for a new presidential limousine–a Cadillac, just like its predecessor. The Detroit News is reporting that the new limo, now in the hands of the Secret Service, will be about the same size as the one it’s replacing, though it will have, at the very least, bigger windows. Beyond that, the newspaper said, General Motors spokesman David Caldwell offered precious little information.

Meet the new ride, same as the old ride.

But a somewhat closer look is on the way. Both the GM and Secret Service spokesmen said they would offer pictures, along with more information, next week. For now, viewing is limited to “spy photos” from the automotive paparazzi, as here on CNN.

Caldwell said he couldn’t give specifications–even the engine size or type–in either the current limousine or the new one. Other facts also are secret like the vehicle’s curb weight, though Cadillac has disclosed in the past that the limo has a 10-disc CD player and hand-stitched leather interiors.

While security-related information is understandably not for public consumption, the automaker apparently hasn’t minded divulging some of the president’s automotive amenities.

Not surprisingly, the Secret Service was, well, secretive about everything but the January 20 date for the Caddy’s debut.

(Credit:
White House photo by Paul Morse )

This limousine carried President Bush on a visit to New Delhi in March 2006.

GM did allow that the 2009 Cadillac Presidential Limousine is the first that doesn’t have a specific model name, according to The Detroit News. President Bush’s lame-duck limo is a 2006 Cadillac DTS. The Motor City newspaper said that GM “is believed” to have built no more than 25 of the new models.

Yep, you read right: The Zen V Plus features a 1.5-inch OLED screen and support for uncompressed AVI and software-transcoded videos. Granted, 2GB of storage isn’t enough to hold much, but it’s nice to have the option if you want it.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

CNET had lots of good things to say about the Zen V Plus (as you can see in the above video), rating it four stars out of five. Creative’s deal is only for the black-and-green model (make sure to select the 2GB version from the pull-down menu), but I think it’s pretty spiffy.

Much as I love seeing an iPod Shuffle for $29, here’s an MP3 deal that’s even better: Creative has refurbished 2GB Zen V Plus players for just $19.99. Shipping will run you 5 bucks, but that’s still an amazing deal on a player that does video as well as audio.

Because it’s a refurb, the warranty expires after 90 days. But, hey, for $25 out the door, it’s hardly what I’d call a risk. And this little player does wayyy more than the Shuffle, so in the bang-for-the-buck department, it’s the clear winner.

Of course, most users will probably stuff the Zen with music (or Audible audiobooks, also supported) and take it to the gym. It’s a good choice for that kind of thing, as it sports an FM tuner, voice recorder, and a battery that can go 15 hours between charges.