What to Look for in Open Source Systems Management Products

"You could call them the "Little 4," a play on the "Big 4" systems management companies: BMC, CA Technologies, HP, and IBM.

"The Little 4 may be smaller in terms of their bottom lines, but in terms of systems management capabilities, there's nothing little about the open source offerings from Zenoss, Hyperic, GroundWork Open Source, and The OpenNMS Group.

"This is a biosphere within the open source ecosystem that has seen a lot of flux in the past few years. In 2006, Zenoss was one of six vendors (the others being Ayamon, Emu Software, Qlusters, Symbiot, and Webmin) that launched the Open Management Consortium (OMC), "an effort to promote the adoption, development, and integration of systems and network management software based on open source and open standards technologies."

Hard Drive Caching with SSDs

The hard drives we use today are very complex beasts. Cramming that much data onto a very small space while insuring that the data will be there when we need it, is not something easy or simple. The pace of data density increase in hard drives has been nothing short of amazing. At the same time, we all want faster and faster performance from our drives. To help improve hard drive performance, manufacturers introduced a small amount of RAM to the drive. It can be used to hold data for a period of time before writing it to disk, allowing the drive to tell the operating system that the data is actually on the disk, improving application performance. It can also be used to pre-fetch data for reading. In either case, a small amount of RAM can make a very large improvement in performance. If you don’t believe me, run some benchmarks with the disk cache turned on and then off and compare the two results.

Google Chrome OS tablet headed for Verizon?

HTC is building a Chrome OS tablet for Google, set for a Verizon launch on Nov. 26, an industry report claims. Meanwhile, Pandigital released its second seven-inch Android-based e-reader tablet, with more memory than before plus a smaller, lighter design.

According to a report by DownloadSquad's Lee Mathews, Google's Chrome OS tablet will be as to tablets what the short-lived, HTC-manufactured Nexus One was to Android smartphones. This would suggest another foray into Google branding, as opposed to sharing the glory with HTC or Verizon. The story is based on an unnamed source, and no image of the device was supplied.
The tablet will likely incorporate an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, which includes dual ARM Cortex-A9 cores clocked to 1GHz, says the story. The screen size was not listed, but Mathews says that the tablet will offer a 1280 x 720 multitouch display, which would suggest a device that is at least as large as the 9.7-inch Apple iPad.

The tablet is expected to offer 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of SSD storage at a minimum, with the possibility of a multi-card reader. Other "likely" features include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, GPS, and a webcam, says DownloadSquad.

Lawsuit Raises Questions about Open Invention Network, Linux Foundation

I agree with Brian that the LinuxFoundation per se can't be expected to act as a peace broker. That's not its mission statement, although peace among its members would be in its own best interest.

Concerning the OIN, the article describes only one of its three functions and doesn't mention the other two.

Brian correctly notes that the OIN is "a patent holding company that buys up patents and, once purchased, grants licensees royalty-free rights to use [them]".

Brian doesn't mention that mutually assured destruction is also part of the OIN's mission. It wants to be able to assert those patents against entities attacking Linux. The OIN doesn't say so on its website, but it has indicated this in press releases and everyone in the industry who talked to OIN member companies will have been told that it should serve as a deterrent.

Even more importantly, Brian completely omits the fact that the OIN doesn't have only a bunch of patents and six owner companies but around 150 licensee companies. The OIN License Agreement constitutes a non-aggression pact among all licensees (not only the six "members", i.e. owners).

It is the OIN's plurilateral cross-licensing agreement that has failed here because both Google and Oracle have accepted it. So theoretically, Google and Oracle are prohibited under that agreement from suing each other (or other licensees) with respect to what the OIN calls "the Linux System."

It's absolutely incorrect that OIN only has the patents it acquires. It also constitutes a cross-license deal among its 150 licensees and, therefore, also relates to the patents that those companies hold with respect to what the OIN calls "the Linux System."