Sun continues its crusade to kill itself….

Posted on November 30, 2007

You need to read this: An Open Letter to the OpenDS Community and to Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice has been ripped apart, now OpenDS, who knows what else is happening in other open source projects that Sun's involved in. This kills me. I love Sun Microsystems and I'm just sitting here watching it rip itself apart piece by piece. Who is in control? Why has Sun continued to RIF many of its most valuable employees without having a clue. ...

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An Open Letter to the Community: A Proposed Solution

Posted on November 11, 2007

UPDATE, 11/14/07: A motion was informally submitted to the OGB for discussion and endorsement of this proposal. Today that proposal was placed on the meeting agenda however no member of the board was willing to even submit it for discussion or debate. This proposal is therefore, for the time being, dead and this author is saddened by the continued lack of action on the part of the OGB to even advance the discussion. This only further ...

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JAVA (SUNW) Drops 10% Post Earnings Call

Posted on November 6, 2007

Ouch.... nearly a 10% slide for JAVA. See the charts here.

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Dell Plans to Acquire EqualLogic

Posted on November 5, 2007

Announced today... Dell has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire EqualLogic, a leading provider of high-performance iSCSI storage area network (SAN) solutions uniquely optimized for virtualization. The acquisition will strengthen Dell’s product and channel leadership in simplifying and virtualizing IT for customers globally. iSCSI SAN technology represents the fastest growing part of the storage business. Michael Dell ...

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Sun, the Community, and the OGB

Posted on November 2, 2007

We're at a cross roads, a conflict that has been lingering and postponed for some time now that Indiana is bringing to the surface with new viger. So lets get some basic ground rules understood please... "Sun" refers to the corporate, nameless entity. The big black box when no attribution is available. I keep hearing "Sun did this..", "Sun did that..". This has got to stop. We know the players involved. They, despite having a Sun ...

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Praise for Opera

Posted on November 2, 2007

The Opera web browser has been around a long time and its always been a bit player with a hardcore following. I've always thought of it as the BeOS of browsers. But are you using it? To be perfect honest I think that Opera is (now) probly the best browser available. Even more so, its integrated mail client is I think the best mail client available. If Opera had any one fault it would be that it does too much, because at its heart its ...

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Nexenta’s Storage Appliance: NexentaStor

Posted on November 2, 2007

I want to wish a hearty congratulations to our friends at Nexenta for introducing NexentaStor, the first available "OpenSolaris" (meaning Nevada, not Indiana) based storage appliance! From the beginning, Alex Ross and the Nexenta crew have had in mind to build a business around OpenSolaris (meaning the code, not Indiana) and to leverage technology for its own ends. This was something those of us involved with OpenSolaris (meaning the ...

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Thinking ZFS: Keys for success

Posted on November 2, 2007

There are a lot of core concepts to grasp with ZFS. Frankly, power comes at the price of a learning curve. While ZFS makes storage simpler than ever, a solid grasp of the core concepts is really critical to efficient usage. Anytime someone says "multiple filesystems" I cringe. There is no faster way to lead yourself down a confused road than to think of the zfs create command as creating a new filesystem. You're creating a new ...

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Compressed Secure ZFS Archives

Posted on October 27, 2007

ZFS is an amazing technology. Its snapshot capability quickly changes the way you work on the desktop or server. Add replication via zfs send .. and zfs recv .. and life gets even better. Jeff, Bill, and crew, geniuses that they are, did something very special and exceptionally powerful that you might be overlooking... ZFS replication is just a simple stream. Simply brilliant that is, because that means you can dump a ZFS Snapshot into ...

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Userland Cryptography on OpenSolaris

Posted on October 27, 2007

OpenSSL is the old standby solution for all things encryption, but did you know that Solaris provides an excellent array of userland tools to solve your cryptographic cypherpunk needs? There are 3 we'll look at which provide the most basic cryptographic needs: encrypt & decrypt: This pair of tools encrypt and decrypt a stream or file mac: Calculate cryptographic Message Authentication Codes (MACs) for a stream or file digest: ...

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