Technology for Mortals

The Oracle/Sun merger is old news, even the approval of it is old news. All the same, I am a bit surprised by how little people fought against it. Look, if it was Microsoft buying Sun, there would be picketing outside the SEC by a zillion people begging for the deal to be halted, on the basis of monopoly. But somehow the protests seemed rather muted. In any event, it is now a done deal, so let’s look at the results.

With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle has just made an end run around IBM to become the big Java shop out there. The big difference is, Oracle hasn’t capitalized well on Java so far. All of their Java related offerings fall under “also ran”, “never was”, and “wannabe”. In fact, the same could be said for just about everything else that Oracle makes, other than their core database product. They are a lot like Sun, in that regard. Other than Java, has Sun been a market leader in anything for the last ten or so years? Nope. That’s why they were going under. Oracle stays in business by extracting gigantic license fees from their mostly unwilling victims… I mean… customers. Given the choice, which do you prefer? Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, or PostgreSQL? Probably not Oracle. Would you rather deal with Solaris or Linux, a BSD, or Windows? Probably not Solaris. Which makes more sense, using “real” Apache or IIS, or Oracle’s hacked up version which is always ages behind? And so on.

Another thing the two companies have in common in the utter ugliness of their products, in terms of living with them. The only installer worse than Solaris’ is the Oracle installer. You know, the installer that for years puts the wrong permissions on the files it installs under Windows, and makes you wrestle with a million Java errors just to get the install going. I have never met someone who actually said, “I like Oracle”. Every single person I spoke to despises it. The only positive thing people have to say about it, is that it is so hard to use that they can justify charging $250/hour as an Oracle consultant. The situation is about the same for Solaris, except few people will be a consultant for a whole OS; instead, Solaris admins get paid such a premium that no one wants Solaris in their server room.

So what we have here is the merger of two really ugly parents who have some good looking kids with behavioral problems (I’m thinking of a mix of The Brady Bunch and House of 1000 Corpses).

And then there is the MySQL end of things. Oracle just went from being one of three major DB players to two of three. That’s pretty scary, and almost makes me want to buy a SQL Server license just to keep things fair. All joking aside, it says a lot about MySQL that folks are considering it just as big of a prize, if not bigger than Java. The fact is, Sun messed up with Java pretty bad. When they kept the development close to themselves, they did the usual “Sun’s magic touch” where they created a marvel of technical wizardry that met no one’s needs in reality. Somehow, Java survived long enough for folks like Spring and Apache to bring enough inovation to the table to make Java an attractive platform, despite all of its problems. Meanwhile, Microsoft, the 80,000 lb. gorilla, has been able to do enough interesting things with .NET that there is relatively little third-party open source for .NET because there just is not enough necessity to birth any invention. Luckily for Oracle, Sun didn’t have MySQL long enough to wreck it.

All the same, one has to wonder what will happen to MySQL with the awful combination of Sun and Oracle’s collective ineptitude when it comes to customer satisfaction. I would not be surprised to see a fork of MySQL at some point, but at the same time, you have to realize that very few people work on MySQL for fun or in the spirit of open source, relative to the number of developers working on it. It’s just one of those projects where people are paid to work on it, because everyone hopes to exploit it somehow. Hopefully, enough people will consider MySQL to be a critical piece of infrastructure (and it is, despite all of its flaws) that they’ll manage to keep Oracle from trashing it or reserving all of the important features for paying customers.

J.Ja

This seems to be a case of hyper sensitivity over Michelle Obama’s recent comments regarding childhood obesity.  Mrs. Obama basically said:

• My Doctor said that my daughter’s Body Mass Index (BMI) wasn’t looking healthy
• I began controlling my family’s meal portions and asked kids to be aware of when they’re full
• I substituted water bottles for sweet drinks in their lunch
• Limited their television to get them to be more active
• Didn’t make a big deal about any of this because they were only minor changes and we just did them
• Doctor was shocked at the dramatic improvement of my daughter and I replied that we only made small changes
• We can all make these small changes too and be healthy

As a parent myself, I listened to her interview and found my self nodding my head up and down because everything she said was sage advice for any parent.  But a few hypersensitive people picked up on this and Drudge Report had the headline of “MY FAT DAUGHTERS” being attributed to Michelle Obama.  It’s almost as if they’re mad about something Mrs. Obama didn’t say but they’re imagining that she said it.

Laura Collins Lyster-Mensh of the F.E.A.S.T (and organization that combats eating disorders) freaked out as if Mrs. Obama had done infinite harm to the first daughters.  Now I don’t want to make light of eating disorders, but it is totally irrelevant to anything Mrs. Obama’s said.  Mrs. Obama did not call her daughters “fat” and she is not putting them on some anorexic diet.  Mrs. Obama isn’t some stage mother screaming at her daughter in public that she’s too heavy.  She put them on a healthier diet with some minor adjustments after she listened to her doctor’s warning and got great results.

Eating disorders are a real problem, but it can go both ways.  Too much food (especially junk food) is just as bad and unhealthy as too little food.  Being a skeleton is really bad for someone’s health but so is being really obese.  Americans of European decent are about 4 centimeters shorter than their European counterparts because they’re eating too much junk food so they’re growing more horizontally than they are vertically.  The first lady’s message is exactly what the country needs to hear.

The bottom line is that we can’t freak out every time someone says we need to moderate our junk food intake.  Save your criticisms for the stage mom Laura, Mrs. Obama is giving the right advice on diet and exercise for children.

Google is beta testing HTML5 for video playback on YouTube, and my initial impressions of the technology are not good at all.  A few months earlier, I couldn’t get Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Google Chrome to run HTML5 video.  I am able to get the latest version of Chrome to render the video, but the results look terrible in its current stage.

Figure 1: YouTube HTML5 beta interface

As you can see in Figure 1, the rendering is horrible compared to Figure 2 in Adobe Flash mode.  The image scaling looks like it merely using pixel duplication rather than something decent like cubic interpolation much less something good like Lanczos3.  That’s why the image looks extremely blocky and pixilated.  There’s no apparent support for 480P, 720P, or 1080P either.

Figure 2: YouTube Flash 10 interface

In Figure 2, we see a mature Flash 10 interface with much nicer quality image rendering as well as higher resolution support.  This isn’t to say that there’s fundamentally something wrong with HTML5, just that the current implementation on YouTube has a long way to go before it can replace Flash.  This is a major issue for iPhone/iPod/iPad users and Steve Jobs is throwing his whole weight behind HTML5 and has no intention of supporting Adobe Flash.

There’s good reason not to like Flash as it is very buggy and full of security holes that expose its host operating system to nasty malware attacks.  Furthermore, the performance of Flash on many laptops and nearly all netbooks is horrible short of having a really fast laptop with rarely deployed dedicated graphics hardware.  Microsoft Silverlight (which has been beta tested on iPhone) performs much better on similar hardware than Adobe Flash so there’s a possibility that HTML5 mode might also perform better.  But until the implementation becomes much more mature and capable, HTML5 doesn’t even appear to be worthy of being beta.

This is huge. Google is looking like they will pull out of China. In a nutshell, someone’s been trying to break into the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists (Google won’t say so, but no doubt it is the Chinese government), so Google is looking to shut down in China if the government won’t let them simply scale back to being an uncensored search engine.

Can’t blame them, if the government is trying to hack your system, hard to do business there… too much risk. Of course, Google will spin this a bit as them trying to do the right thing, and admittedly, that may play into it a bit, but the fact is, no one around the world will touch a Google service if they think that the Chinese government is able to and trying to crack it on a regular basis.

J.Ja

Update – Google ETF is actually $550 on top of the $180 you already paid!  So if you pull out early, you’ll have to pay $730 total!

I know Justin was impressed with the business model Google’s new Nexus One phone, but I really don’t see how it’s any different.  You can buy the phone from Google for $529 without a carrier subsidy, or you can pay $179 with a T-Mobile subsidy.  You buy the phone directly from Google, but how’s that any different than buying an iPhone directly from Apple?

Furthermore, it seems that Google isn’t very honest about the Early Termination Fee.  It’s actually $350 if you break the contract early but Google advertises a $200 ETF.  Verizon honestly advertises a $350 ETF and they’re being persecuted by some members of the FCC and by the so-called consumer advocacy groups who haven’t made a peep about Google’s misleading advertising or the $350 ETF.  Why such an obvious double standard?

The Nexus One is made by HTC and it seems to be fairly impressive with an 800×480 OLED display and a 1 GHz ARM processor.  But according to Michael Arrington, it only gets 1.5 hours of battery life when he games with the display at full brightness.  That’s pretty pathetic considering the fact that a full size laptop gets more than that.

It’s fairly well understood that Google’s idea of “Net Neutrality” is to view the telco as a “dumb pipe” and nothing more. Looking over the barrage of reports of the “Google Phone” that have come out over the last few days, I have come to realize that most analysts are completely blinded by the device itself, and do not see the underlying logic in the strategy. Aside from any technological innovation in the device, aside from any privacy concerns one might have with it, what’s really going on here is that Google is trying to expand their vision of Net Neutrality beyond the basic ISP and into the world of cell phones.

Right now, the cell carriers control the entire user experience, from being able to cut off certain applications (like AT&T can with the iPhone), provisioning other applications (Verizon’s VCAST comes to mind), telling the handset maker what kind of UI it should have (Verizon phones again), what Bluetooth profiles to support, and more. Part of this equation is phone exclusivity. A phone is only sold through one carrier usually. The carrier subsidises the phone, and in exchange for taking the up-front loss, locks a customer in to a 2 year contract where they know they’ll get the subsidy back. Even though the customer is paying a fortune for cell phone service, they don’t care, because otherwise they couldn’t afford the up-front phone cost. I know, earlier this year I had to buy a phone a “full retail price” (I lost the phone I had bought a month after I got it), and I was flabbergasted at the prices of handsets. $100 is the basic minimum for the garbage phone that they give away for free, $300 is the base price to get a phone that you won’t throw out the car window on purpose. How many teenagers, college kids… heck, anyone who isn’t well into “middle class” do you know that can spend $300 on a phone? Even if you are solidly “middle class”, $300 phones are a real deterrent from giving one to your spouse and each of your three kids, that’s $1,500 in phones. Not happening. And this is why the current system works the way it does.

Google is looking to subvert this system with the “Google Phone”. If you read the news reports carefully, you’ll see an interesting tidbit about the sales model. Instead of giving an exclusive contract to a carrier, the carrier subsidizing the phone, and locking the customers into a contract, Google is going with a more European/Asian model. They are planning on selling the unlocked phone directly, and at the time of checkout, pointing the customer to a choice of carriers. Right now, it looks like carriers would be offering discounted plans, to compensate for not having to subsidize the phone. An alternative that I could see as well, would be for the carrier to still subsidize the phone. Regardless, what Google is clearly doing, is trying to shift the balance of power. They controlled the development of the Google Phone without input from carriers. In previous Android phones, the carriers did the work with the handset folks and consulted with Google. This time around, Google did it themselves, in association with HTC. So the phone does not have the carrier’s interests baked into the design (just Google’s, and presumably the customer’s). And along the same lines, the phone is divorced from carrier-specific technologies and features. Is this a new idea? Hardly. It’s the way cell markets work in Europe and Asia. Even in the US, you can buy an unlocked phone to use on the carrier of your choice, but it is too expensive for all but the wealthiest to consider it a viable option (think: $700 phones like the Nokia N97). This is a unique proposition because the “Google Phone” already looks to be a “crave phone” and it’s from a vendor that is currently picking up a lot of momentum in the space.

By offering a choice of carriers, Google is basically saying: “the cell carrier is a ‘dumb pipe’. The only factors left in your choice of carrier are customer service, price, and coverage. You no longer pick a carrier based on the phones they offer (AT&T and the iPhone benefit from this, Verizon usually suffers for it), you pick a phone that you want and then the carriers compete with each other to get your business based on their ability to be a good ‘dumb pipe’.” It’s an interesting idea, and it is one that I fully support.

Does this mean that I am suddenly in favor of the current Net Neutrality legislation? No, because the two ideas are hardly the same. But at the same time, by seperating the phone from the carrier, Google can reinforce in peoples’ minds the idea of a “dumb pipe” cell carrier, which is important in their push on Net Neutrality.

J.Ja

The FCC’s Chief Technologist Jon Peha says that the FCC doesn’t know how the NPRM should be defined and they are seeking answers.  This may help explain why these business models are critical to innovation.

Figure 1: Which “enhanced” Internet models will the FCC NPRM prohibit?

I thought you’d get a laugh out of this one:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/954157.mspx

Somehow, Microsoft hasn’t released a security bulletin for this, and they aren’t calling it a “critical” security problem, or classifying the patch as being security related in the update system, even though it is obviously a security problem!

J.Ja

We decided to try out Microsoft Forefront Client Security, since we get free licenses, and it’s time to end the hodgepdge of third-party antivirus apps we have. Once again, Microsoft has proven to me “the Linux lesson”: just because the software license is free, does not mean that my time working with a cranky system is cheaper than buying something better. In this case, it took me over a week to get it installed! Here are a few of the pitfalls I ran into along the way:

• It will not install on Windows 2008 R2.
• It will not install on 64 bit Windows.
• It is not compatable with SQL Server 2008; only SQL Server 2005.
• SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) is still a pain in the neck to install and get working right. On Windows 2008, you need to go into the IIS Management Console, select the “ReportServer” application for the installation, click “Handler Mappings” and then “Edit Feature Permissions” and enable “Script” and “Execute”. This is the hidden, undocumented trick.
• The “Distribution Server” will not install on 64 bit Windows either, but that’s OK if you have an existing WSUS 3.X install, since that can handle the definition updates. You’ll need to manually deploy (or use SCCM) the client yourself in that scenario, though.

Yes, I basically tried every permutation of Windows 2008, 32 and 64 bit, and SQL Server (the requirements documentation is not very clear on most of this, other than the 32 bit requirement which I overlooked) until I finally got this thing installed.

I haven’t gotten to use it yet, but given the installation nightmare, I already strongly prefer TrendMicro which I had great success with a few years ago.

J.Ja

Spiceworks and Intel have put together a plugin for the Spiceworks network management product that allows for remote power management. This is a useful way for companies to save valuable energy dollars in these tough economic times.

J.Ja