Why Linux is Alpha and Omega

I'm sure most people remember DEC - Digital Equipment Corporation - that later rebranded itself as the singularly unmemorable “Digital” before being swallowed up by Compaq in 1998, which was itself digested by HP a few years later. But I wonder how many people remember the DEC Alpha chip.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Fearful Symmetry

I've noted before that Microsoft is in difficulty over the ultra-mobile machines like the Asus EEE PC; now it seems that the other half of the Wintel duopoly is also in trouble because of the new triple-P (price, performance and power) demands these systems make:

Two days before Intel CEO Paul Otellini would unveil the Classmate 2 or the Intel-powered XO at the CES, Intel announced that they are quitting the OLPC board.

Intel claims that they are quitting because of Nicholas Negroponte wanting them to stop the promotion of the Classmate/Eee to education in third world countries, but I think that the real reason is that Intel does not have a good enough processor for the OLPC project to use as an alternative to the AMD Geode LX-700.

Intel has not been able to develop a processor to match the price, power consumption and performance requirements of the OLPC project.

Bye-bye Wintel, hello Linmd?

GNU/Linux on the Desktop: Get the Facts

Some say that 2007 is the year GNU/Linux is going to make its breakthrough on the desktop - just like last year, and the year before that. So instead of looking forward at what might happen, why not look back at what did happen?

Linux on the desktop grew and matured in 2006. While some analysts reported a slowing of Linux penetration on the desktop in 2006, a number of significant milestones were reached that promise to continue to move the Linux desktop ahead in 2007. As Gerry Riveros, Red Hat product marketing manager for client solutions put it, "What I think was most important [in 2006] were all of the 'under the hood' incremental improvements that took place around printing, plug-and-play support, laptop enablement and the arrival of the compositing manager that allows for modern graphics."

These and other improvements are setting the next stage of growth for the Linux desktop. A number of projects and teams have moved beyond alpha positioning and ownership to focus on how their efforts contribute to overall desktop Linux objectives. "In 2006, it appeared that developers were aware of how each other's projects help to accomplish the shared goals of all the projects," said John Terpstra, Advanced Micro Devices Linux Evangelist. Over 70 of the key desktop architects have met three times this year to agree on focus areas that would make desktop Linux "just work."

Microsoft is Virtually into Virtualisation

This story about Microsoft moving deeper into virtualisation is interesting for a number of reasons. First, because it reveals one of the worst names for a product that I've heard in a long time:

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager

If you think about all these grey terms too long, your brain begins to deliquesce.

It also contains a good summary of the current state of play in virtualisation:

Virtualization, which today generally refers to the ability to run multiple operating systems simultaneously to make a computer more efficient, is a hot area and one in which Microsoft lags rivals. Even as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices add virtualization hardware support to make the technology mainstream, market leader VMware is exerting price pressure on Microsoft while the Xen project is giving rival Linux a major lead over Windows.

But one thing it doesn't explore - and which will be interesting to follow - is that fact that there are some very interesting licensing issues here. With open source, there's no problem: you want to bung 83 virtual copies of GNU/Linux on a box, you go ahead. But if you do that with Windows, do you have to pay for one copy, or 83...?