Q & A: Black Hat, White Hat
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If diethylene glycol is banned as poisonous, why do they allow polyethylene glycol to be sold in products to relieve constipation?
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2007 top science developments, tech flops, and vaporware...Szulik's parting words as Red Hat CEO...Sony Alpha A700 review...copyright tidbits...Toshiba 32nm deal with IBM
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Does a recent stock buyback mean you should get some Red Hat too?
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When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company&#39;s new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst. But Whitehurst&#39;s chief operating officer title at Delta and position outside of the technology industry are misleading; a peek into his past reveals a computer science degree and a passion for open source technology, not to mention a smooth operator who helped bring a struggling airline out of bankruptcy.Still, Whitehurst, 40, has big shoes to fill in replacing Szulik, the man who took a small, unknown company and turned it into a savvy business competitor that made Linux a household name and struck fear in the hearts of much bigger rivals&#160;such as&#160;Microsoft. Today, Red Hat is the leading Linux vendor and is financially sound, but the company is in a pivotal phase of reinventing itself as a broader open source software provider and a multibillion-dollar technology leader that can compete long-term with much larger companies.Whitehurst spoke with IDG News Service this week about the key findings of his first month on the job and where he thinks Red Hat should focus its attention to evolve at a sustainable pace. This is an edited version of that interview.IDGNS: I was surprised to find out that you have a computer science background when I heard you came to Red Hat as COO from Delta Airlines. I didn&#8217;t expect you to be such a techie.Whitehurst: I do have geek cred. For some reason, your reputation is always based on your prior experience. When I was at the airline, people said, &quot;Who is this strategy consultant running an airline?&quot; Now I&#39;m an airline guy running a technology company. I wish I was called an airline guy when I was at the airline!IDGNS: Was this a personal interest in open source that led you to Red Hat? Was Delta a big user of Linux?Whitehurst: Delta certainly uses some REL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and JBoss, but it&#39;s more of a personal interest. I was hacking around with Slackware, one of the early Linuxes that was out there in the &#39;90s, and an early adopter and user of Fedora all the way through when I got the call for joining Red Hat. It&#39;s always been a passion of mine, so the opportunity to get out there to lead is an extraordinary privilege and honor for me.IDGNS: Red Hat is currently in a great position as leader of the Linux market and has been doing well financially, but the company has been called upon by Wall Street to grow and possibly diversify the business. When you look at the company, what are its biggest challenges right now?Whitehurst: Let me start off by saying I&#39;ve only been here a few weeks. The first month [has basically been] going out on the road with customers, employees, with investors, with analysts, with our partners-slash-competitors and really trying to get a sense of the business, what&#8217;s working well and what&#8217;s not. The good news is, most things are working well -- from the standpoint of being a very healthy business growing rapidly with healthy financials.I think you&#8217;re right there are certainly areas where we can do a better job. First off, I would just say the general organizational focus. We actually do a lot of different things, support a lot of different projects. We have to be careful that we&#8217;re focusing on the right things and putting our investment dollars where they&#8217;ll have the most impact. I&#39;m still going through the details of what we do and what we don&#39;t do, so stay tuned on that.A second area where there&#8217;s still a lot of opportunity for Red Hat would be basically [in] processes and systems, including IT systems and governance, especially for a company that&#39;s grown so rapidly. A lot of those processes and systems and ways of doing business are different for a company like Red Hat that&#39;s [US]$500 million on its way to a multibillion-dollar company than they are for a small company. Some time and attention on basic execution to make sure we have the processes and systems in place to grow, and grow healthily, are another area where I plan to spend a fair amount of time.IDGNS: And what about your experience makes you well-suited to help meet those challenges and diversify Red Hat&#39;s products beyond Linux into more of a full open source software provider?Whitehurst: For starters, I am an operator. I am pretty good at getting a company to focus, and focus on a few things. We certainly did that at Delta and did that well in the turnaround. Obviously, having come from a larger company and having run a larger company, I have a good sense of the processes and systems we need to make sure governance [and] processes work well.About whether we need to diversify or not: People are asking, &quot;Well, should we have bought [open source database company] MySQL?&quot; [Editor&#39;s note: Sun Microsystems said last month it is&#160;buying MySQL for about $1 billion.] We are still a very small-share player in the server OS market and a small-share player in middleware [with JBoss]. If you look at the quality of our technology, it&#39;s the best. We feel very good about that. We still have basic execution to do to reach our full potential in the markets we&#39;re in. So I don&#39;t feel the need to diversify until we nail the product and are fully [satisfied] with our existing products. I&#39;m not sure we want to divert our time and attention to other things.IDGNS: A lot of people have been critical of Red Hat for what it&#8217;s done so far with JBoss, and think success with this is key to proving Red Hat can evolve beyond Linux. How are you going to make that business more successful?Whitehurst: Obviously execution and commercial execution will be big focuses going forward [for JBoss]. We fundamentally changed the JBoss business model from a big consulting/support [business] to our enterprise/.org models that we had with REL [on the enterprise side] and Fedora [on the .org side]. It has, without a doubt, proven to be a very successful model, and one could argue it&#39;s about the only demonstrated successful model of any size with open source. In the same way we have Fedora and REL, we have the .org version of JBoss and the enterprise edition. JBoss had a different business model before, but we think our business model has proven the most successful and the most durable. It&#39;s the right decision. It just takes a while.The good news of that also shows that it&#8217;s not easy to develop a good business model around open source, so it&#39;s a relatively defensible model going forward. We feel very good about where JBoss is. ... We think we can grow twice as fast as the core REL business.Red Hat&#8217;s never been involved in any material way in the application components of the stack. We do provide a full open source stack with the LAMP stack. We will continue to do that, so we&#39;re playing there to some extent. In terms of our focus and where we&#39;ll invest our team and attention and dollars, the [market for the] infrastructure component of software worldwide is close to $100 billion. We&#39;re a $500 million software company. I would argue we&#39;ve barely scratched the surface. I&#39;d much rather we make sure we make progress there than get into the CRM business. Once we&#39;ve achieved our full potential in our core businesses, we can open the aperture. But I want to make sure the company is focused on the potential of our businesses in that core market.IDGNS: Microsoft is coming out with Windows Server 2008 pretty soon. Do you see this as a good opportunity to snag Windows customers who may be thinking of upgrading and instead moving them over to Linux? Is there still competition in this space, or will it always be the Linux camp sticks with Linux, and the Windows camp sticks with Windows?Whitehurst: We&#8217;re seeing a lot of migrations from Microsoft to Linux, from Unix to Linux or even Unix to Microsoft. There&#39;s a big battleground out there. Anytime there is a significant upgrade or change, there is an opportunity for us. Anytime a customer stands back and says, &quot;Let me reassess this&quot; and &quot;Do we want to upgrade?&quot; that&#39;s great for us because our value proposition is much more compelling for our competitors. Whenever there is a reason for customers to reassess, that gives us an opportunity to show our value, so we&#39;ll be out there aggressively this year.IDGNS: Much was made of Microsoft&#39;s interoperability deal with Novell in November 2006. Has that deal hurt Red Hat in any way? Do you even view Novell as a major competitor anymore?Whitehurst: There may be a deal or two out there, but it hasn&#8217;t come up to my level. We really don&#8217;t see them that much in the market. They&#39;re not really a factor. Given our market share and certified ecosystems of partners -- [those] really drive our position.IDGNS: Are you worried about&#160;Microsoft&#39;s patent claims against Linux, which were recently&#160;dismissed again by Linus Torvalds?Whitehurst: We&#8217;ve spent a lot of time looking at that, and we have an assurance program for our customers, so they don&#39;t need to worry. Microsoft for years now has talked about 235 patents [that they own that Linux violates], but they&#8217;ve yet to tell us any of them and we continue to ask, &quot;Show us what they are.&quot; How many times can you keep saying it before you pass on the opportunity to do anything? At first people got concerned, but after years and years and years, you recognize it&#39;s a lot of bark and no bite. We never want to take any claims of intellectual property violations lightly, but those have been around so long with absolutely nothing behind them. After a while, it becomes harder and harder to take those seriously.IDGNS: Where would you like to see Red Hat be in five years?Whitehurst: Again, this company is currently the open source leader. Open source is still really a nascent part of the IT infrastructure in corporate America. As the leader of open source, one of the things we need to do, and should do, is foster and further open source awareness and adoption in worldwide IT. My view of success includes how well Red Hat does that in the future as a multibillion-dollar company.We want to see the continued adoption of open source as key technology across corporate IT. [We&#39;ll] continue to foster communities of use in the developing world where we operate, and communities of use where we remain sure that information and software remains free and unencumbered by proprietary formats. When we do well, we do good. We certainly have aspirations for size and growth and profitability, but we do recognize we have a role in fostering adoption and the benefits that go along with that. The great news is, this is a company in wonderful shape with a fantastic brand and market position and extraordinary, high-quality people. It&#39;s up to us not to squander that opportunity.
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Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT), provider of Linux software and support, has issued a security alert to its customers. E-mails are circulating, says the company, that appear to come from Red Hat but actually are phishing hoaxes.
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Students won't have to wear ID badges after all. Also: Intel makes lasers out of silicon&hellip;.  Microsoft plans a new browser&hellip;. and more.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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(InfoWorld) - Red HatÂ has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from OracleÂ and the Microsoft-NovellÂ partnership. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project, and other issues with IDG News Service. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco: IDGNS:Â RHEL5 comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive? Stevens: RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendorsÂ to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there, so we aim to help that. As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5. IDGNS: How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for its Linux support and the partnership between MicrosoftÂ and NovellÂ affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO? Stevens: It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer, you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected. We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open-source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months, and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code. With the Novell-Microsoft deal, we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5, we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay anÂ intellectual property tax on Linux. IDGNS: What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5? Stevens: We'll continue an initiative we started last year around AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments. IDGNS: What else? Stevens: We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.
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Last Wednesday, I went to a pub with some people from work. I wore a t-shirt I picked up at Linux World Boston in 2003. As my co-workers left one by one, I moved to the bar to strike up a conversation with the bartender. It was a quiet night and serving drinks slowed down as everyone left.
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The Motley Fool - Open-source software leader Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - News) reports earnings after the bell today, and analysts are expecting a doozy. With on-again-off-again reports that Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL - News) may enter the Linux market, Red Hat's stock has certainly been volatile, but management has been quite sanguine about further competition from the database giant. Is this one huge strategic misstep or savvy thinking? Read on for my thoughts.
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Q&A with the driver of Motley Fool CAPS.
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By Palenik, Charles John  Question: My office has had a series of "DISCUSSIONS" concerning placement of heat indicators on instrument bags. We need a third party to help m do the light thing.
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The Story: What?s in a name? Back in the days of the Gingrich revolution, the nastiest label you could pin on a politician was ?liberal.? And now that open source has become an essential technology, the quickest way to get a rise out of an open source executive (and to get flamed on dozens of blogs) is to say his or her company is ?commercial.?[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]                                                    No matter what you call them, open source companies have been steadily integrating parts of the hated commercial software subscription model into their business. First it was support, and now it is software access. Say it ain?t so, Linus.MySQL, for example, will charge users of its enterprise edition to use the code, not just for support as has been the traditional open source business model. ?We are looking for ways to extend our offerings in a way that can be monetized,? bluntly says Kaj Arno, the company?s VP for community.Chander Kant, founder of the open source storage software company Zmanda, is likewise frank about the need to drive revenue. Speaking of the open source community as a whole, he says, ?We are not a charity. We need to monetize.?Recognizing that charging to use open source software flies in the face of the original open source premise of freely sharable code open to everyone, Arno is quick to note that the paid version of Workbench has code and features not found in the free version ? and that the free version ?is not crippled.? Arno calls the move an experiment, and acknowledges that MySQL needs to move carefully to avoid upsetting the often quick-tempered open source community.Is this a trend? Red Monk analyst Stephen O?Grady says it is: ?Ultimately when you look at a high-profile firm like MySQL embracing it, it?s difficult to conclude anything else.?InfoWorld blogger (and IBM employee) Savio Rodrigues notes another example. In a recent blog post, he looked at changes to JBoss since it was purchased by Red Hat Software and concluded: ?The Fedora/JBoss subscription is just like the software subscription business model that commercial software vendors have been using for decades.?Does that mean a company that adopts the usage-based pricing model isn?t really open-source? That?s an interesting point, since as Zmanda?s Kant acknowledges, ?the litmus test of open source is control of the code.? Open source software delivered through appliances keeps the access ? and thus control ? away from users, he notes. But code binaries distributed as software remain open to their users ? for now, at least.The Bottom Line: Have MySQL and Red Hat run away from the principles of open source? Who cares. The real point is that the open source business model is evolving away from the ?free? model and toward an alternative development approach for commercial software. If you adopted open source due to its cost, you may not save as much as you thought. If you adopted open source for the access to source code or the community-supported development approach that is supposed to result in better software, it?s not yet clear if the greater commercialization will enhance those aspects or drive away the true believers and make open source no different than the old-fashioned commercial offerings.Complete list of 2007 underreported stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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QUESTION: Good morning. Sir, does it bother you that there's a perception out there that your administration has been one that favors big business and wealthy individuals? And what can you do to overcome that, sir?
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The Story: Sun Microsystems has been in and out of the (metaphorical) grave more often than Count Dracula. The one-time king of the Internet servers suffered a body blow when the dot-com bubble burst, and since then it?s been a struggle to keep the company?s name on the buy lists of enterprise IT shoppers. That struggle has been chronicled by endless stories in the trade and financial press with headlines featuring bad puns like ?The Sun is setting.?                                                    Those days are finally, if quietly, coming to a close.[ Slideshow: 2007's top underreported tech stories ]In less than two years in the CEO?s chair, Jonathan Schwartz has put the company firmly in the black and, after years of bleeding, resuscitated Sun?s flagging software business and storage businesses, and put together a product road map that Morgan Stanley analyst Katherine Hubert calls its strongest in years.?You have to credit Schwartz because he understands the way to combine hardware and software,? says Bud Mathaisel, CIO of outsourced-IT provider Achievo. ?Although Sun?s image slipped from public view, they were making very competitive technology and pricing.?Sun?s line of Galaxy and blade servers are hits across a wide swatch of businesses, and its storage business is growing. Sun has already entered the market for quad-core servers (while rival AMD?s Barcelona remains problem-plagued), and in the next year or so Sun will roll out new server, storage, and networking products. Also, Sun acquired SeeBeyond in August 2007, a $387 million buy that positions Sun to become a vendor of choice in the race to provide the integration tools needed to support enterprises? SOA strategies.The powerful new hardware lineup, plus the enterprise service bus that came with SeeBeyond once again makes Sun core to the datacenter.Not all of the credit goes to Schwartz, of course. His predecessor, cofounder Scott McNealy, poured hundreds of millions into R&amp;D in the dark days of 2002 and created the UltraSparc T1 (or Niagara), the server chip that?s keeping Sun competitive with larger rivals IBM, HP, and Dell.What?s more, McNealy had the foresight to bring back hardware wizard Andy Bechtolsheim in 2004. Bechtolsheim led Sun efforts to design the AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire x64 servers ? better known by their code name ?Galaxy? ? that were key to Sun?s datacenter reentry.The Bottom Line: Sun?s transition from leader to laggard and back to contender has been very painful, particularly because of the deeps cuts in personnel Sun has been forced to make. But the numbers ? four profitable quarters in a row plus record margins ? as well as a growing list of wins, point to a company on the upswing. Sun may not be at the top of everybody?s vendor list, but once again, it?s worth your consideration.Complete list of 2007 underreported tech stories: 1.? Java is becoming the new Cobol 2.? Sun Microsystems is back in the game 3.? Hackers take aim at Mac OS X 4.? There are some threats you can worry less about 5.? Companies may have found a way around H-1B visa limits 6.? Open source?s new commercial strategy 7.? End-to-end Ethernet finally arrives 8.? Blade servers arrive for the masses 9.? BI is dead; long live BI 10. Balance of power shifts to software buyers
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Blog: Winner will be announced at this year's Black Hat conference.