Chris Matthieu during his WebRTC opening keynote at Internet of @ThingsExpo Silicon Valley 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California. There will be 50 billion Internet connected devices by 2020. Today, every manufacturer has a propriety protocol and an app. How do we securely integrate these "things" into our lives and businesses in a way that we can easily control and manage? Even better, how do we integrate these "things" so that they control and manage each other so our lives become more convenient or our businesses become more profitable and/or safe? We have heard that the best interface is no interface. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Chris Matthieu, Co-Founder & CTO at Octoblu, Inc., will discuss how these devices generate enough data to learn our behaviors and simplify/improve our lives. What if we could connect everything to everythin... (more)

Novell Gets Lion's Share of Unix Revenues

Because of the great SCO brouhaha, the open source community has been thumbing through the SCO Group's old SEC filings and one of them came across this passage in the 10-K SCO filed covering its 2002 fiscal year, which ended October 31. "The Company has an arrangement with Novell, Inc. ('Novell') in which it acts as an administrative agent in the collection of royalties for customers who deploy SVRx technology. Under the agency agreement, the Company collects all customer payments and remits 95% of the collected funds to Novell and retains 5% as an administrative fee. The Company records the 5% administrative fee as revenue in its consolidated statements of operations. The accompanying October 31, 2002 and 2001 consolidated balance sheets reflect the amounts collected related to this agency agreement but not yet remitted to Novell of $1,428,000 and $1,894,000, respe... (more)

An Advanced File System for Linux

As Linux made its way further into the enterprise, a key feature that it was lacking at one point in time was a journaling file system. This was true in 1999, but today there are four journaling file systems that can solve enterprise server requirements. This article focuses on one of them: JFS. The file system is one of the most important parts of an operating system. It stores and manages user data on disk drives and ensures that what's read from storage is identical to what was originally written. In addition to storing user data in files, the file system also creates and manages information about files and about itself. Besides guaranteeing the integrity of all that data, file systems are also expected to be extremely reliable and have excellent performance. Before the year 2000, Ext2 was the de facto file system for most Linux machines; it was robust, reliable,... (more)

Think Tanks vs Open Source: Microsoft Funding is Common Denominator

Linus Torvalds Isn't the "Father of Linux," Claims Headline-Seeking Study The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute’s attack on Linux is just the latest in a series of attacks on Open Source by think tanks. In the grid below I have marked with an asterisk all the think tanks that use Open Source software to power their Web sites. Many of these pieces were disseminated by townhall.com * which is a project of the Heritage Foundation *. Many more attacks on Open Source have been published by Tech Central Station *. It would take far too much space to rebut all their arguments. For example, here are extensive critiques of just the first one. What the think tanks have in common Why are all these think tanks so down on Open Source? Well, the Small Business Survival Committee is concerned that using open source will expose small business to the risk of lawsuits. Citizens Against Gover... (more)

Cloud Expo Expands To Internet of Things At @ThingsExpo

The 15th International Cloud Expo has just expanded its conference program, to bring together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC at one location. The show now has three tracks devoted exclusively to the IoT (with WebRTC present in one of the tracks), a full single track focusing on Big Data, and a two-track DevOps Summit, in addition to four tracks devoted exclusively to Cloud Computing in the enterprise. Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. With Cloud Computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to learn about the latest technology developments and solutions. Attend Cloud Expo Nov 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. Craft your own custom experi... (more)

Logging and Continuous Delivery By @FloMotlik | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]

Guest blog post by Florian Motlik, Cofounder & CTO of Codeship Inc. Why Great Logging Is Key to Continuous Delivery Over the last years Continuous Delivery has gained a massive following with many development teams embracing the style. Companies have chosen (as with many other modern developer tools), to either build their own embrace a hosted service likeCodeship. In the end though, no matter if you go with a hosted service or roll it on your own, the goal is to move faster and build a product that your customers really love. For that you need to iterate quickly, get feedback and iterate again. Successfully rolling out that process depends on many variables. Proper logging is one of those variables, and can be a helpful tool to remove fear. Thou shalt not be afraid As we've moved into the age of cloud software development, it is all about team productivity. Getting ... (more)

People's Notebook Proves Popular

We read in the papers that HP has just started supplying a cheap so-called "people's notebook" based on Linux TLE and an 800MHz Celeron chip in Thailand and the $450 widget is so popular the country's Information and Communications Technology Ministry - the government is subsidizing the push to increase computerization - is worried HP won't be able to meet demand and is reaching out to Dell. Linux TLE is the Thai-language version of Linux. ... (more)

All Hail, the Power Appliance: The Next Next Thing

Well, it looks like we're standing by waiting for a New York start-up by the name of Etagon Inc, that's a year or so old, to deliver some widgetry that it calls a Power Appliance that says is a platform hosting appliance. A hardware-software cross between an all-in-one server appliance and a blade server, the thing embodies several tiers of data-centric applications such as a database tier, security tier, application tier and backup services. All terribly, terribly back-office, enterprise data center and the kind of stuff promised by the majors. It's targeted at financial services and telecoms. We're not exactly talking your father's appliance here. The Power Appliance was specifically designed to support complex architectures, integrated from clusters of consolidated databases, clusters of application servers and clusters of web servers. The widgetry's initially go... (more)

'Linux: Politics or Technology?' - A Linux Lover's Labor Day Cri de Coeur.

It's been suggested to me recently that, today, Linux is all about politics, not technology.   My first instinct was to deny it. Linux is all about the technology! But I just have to look through any Linux forum to know that it's not. SCO, GNU, governments, megacorps, movements, distributions, projects, licenses ... Linux is no longer simply about building the best operating system and tools possible for the sheer joy of it. Our little operating system has grown up and somehow I missed its coming out party. I'm not saying that we shouldn't fight the good fight. But between circling the wagons against outer forces and fighting within the various inner factions, it's far too easy to lose focus. Yes, Linux is a movement. Open source is a movement. Let's just not forget that Linux is born of one part experimentation, one part innovation, and a whole lot of fascination wit... (more)

Linux Kernel Compromise "Was Not Debian Specific."

In a "Debian Security Advisory" dated today, the Debian Project's security team states: Recently multiple servers of the Debian project were compromised using a Debian developers account and an unknown root exploit. Forensics revealed a burneye encrypted exploit. Robert van der Meulen managed to decrypt the binary which revealed a kernel exploit. Study of the exploit by the Red Hat and SuSE kernel and security teams quickly revealed that the exploit used an integer overflow in the brk system call. Using this bug it is possible for a userland program to trick the kernel into giving access to the full kernel address space. This problem was found in September by Andrew Morton, but unfortunately that was too late for the 2.4.22 kernel release. This bug has been fixed in kernel version 2.4.23 for the 2.4 tree and 2.6.0-test6 kernel tree. For Debian it has been fixed in v... (more)

SYS-CON Radio interviews Scott Handy of IBM

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Scott Handy, Vice President of Worldwide Linux Strategy and Market Development for IBM, and LinuxWorld Magazine International Advisory Board member. Listen to the Interview ... (more)