* Posts by Gabriele Bozzi

22 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007

Box o' Flashy virtual machines offered

Gabriele Bozzi
Holmes

A target acquisition for Dell?

The title says it all.

Dell snaps up RNA Networks

Gabriele Bozzi
Holmes

The (re)birth of the fourth stack vendor

....Depending on how do you define a stack vendor you might want to say Dell is fighting to become the fifth one ;-)

Dell has been aggressive in their acquisitions and hirings in the last 18 months.

They are positioning themselves as the makers of the "plumbing" of distributed computing, their effort to integrate smart building boxes the likes of RNA is beginning to pay back.

It seems they believe that simpler is better and sells faster and,albeit a bit dull, Dell is a "no-BS" company that is striving to adapt to a changing market. If their performance has not been stellar in the last quarters, I expect this to change because of their strategic positioning.

IMHO Enterprise IT in the next 5 years will be an game of scale, Dell might be well positioned as the alternative to HP for x86 consolidated architectures.

Where they might have some hiccups is in the "re-factoring" of their sales-force and a related sales approach that is typical of the box-mover. In some countries (like where I live) Dell does not speaks to the CIO or even the CTO because they never positioned themselves as value added providers.

But I know, for sure, they are working hard to change their brand perception and whith much more impetus than one might imagine.

FOSS maven says $29 'Freedom Box' will kill Facebook

Gabriele Bozzi
Black Helicopters

@AC: No high horses here...

... We ate them all during the crisis of 2008.

Thanks for mentioning the list but it only poorly rectifies my concerns: these projects do not create a P2P social network tout court; moreover, the list is not visible on the foundation's website.

I still think that there are too many similarities between Freedom Box and Peerson.

The latter is a real precursor (Started in 2008) and a truly open project who did the hard work of socially motivating a distributed approach on limited commodity hardware. All is visible and documented.

It's true, I cannot prove the idea was stolen but I can't believe that Mr. Moglen never tried to google "peer to peer social network"; Peerson comes third in my browser.

The good guys at Debian might insert Peerson in the list perhaps, that would be nice.

BTW: we used to have a brown Brabançon, he was high but extremely docile.

Gabriele Bozzi
Black Helicopters

Render unto Caesar…

There is a work of a group of European (yes, European... I know it's incredible) that might predate (2009) Mr. Moglen "crusade", it promises to cost less than 29 quids and is even better focused:

http://www.peerson.net/papers/oliver_da.pdf

and, more general:

http://www.peerson.net/publications.shtml

For what I perused in the Freedom Box website, no reference to this project.

The two ideas are suspiciously very similar, swap the word "router" for "box" and you get the same kind of animal.

Is this a blatant case of stealing ideas and not crediting it? If this is the case it's a direct punch to the very principles of Open Source.

HP blackens the skies with Cloud offerings

Gabriele Bozzi
Thumb Down

Pigs and lipsticks

A cloud that relies on shared storage it's not Cloud.

1.000 nodes is a respectable figure (for not-CSPs), however I would like to see the price of the supporting infrastructure to reach that.

Cloud is synonim of near-linear scalability at low price (the latter trending to linearly decrease), I don't see this happening on shared storage architectures.

Heck, even VMWare admits they are looking for alternatives as distributed storage.

Nimbula, Eucalyptus and (on the application side) Hadoop: those are examples, to my knowledge, of scalable "shared-nothing" architectures for the Cloud, moreover, they all implement some sort of data/process vicinity.

Rebranding massive deployment tools as Cloud architectures seems to be the trend of the last months...

Where is a "fake cloud" icon?

Steve Jobs embraces Google's bastard grid child

Gabriele Bozzi
Boffin

Not Mac-minis

A Hadoop cluster as the one needed to manage sheer volumes iAds mightgenerate spans surely multiple racks.

You better have serious networking and decent throughput (net to disk and viceversa) to pump decent amount of splits and spills around your nodes. multiple disks are used natively by the Shuffler in Hadop to spread local I/O on each node.

Definitively this might rule the Minis out :)

Regarding OSX and Hadoop:

The story of "bugs" might affecting OSX and not Linux...pretty weak argument.

Hadoop is mostly Java-based except a10% code needed for stuff like encryption, compression and streams. Installing from source needs some packages but the same might apply as soon as you exit from the most supported Linux distros.

Personal experience is a 15 nodes cluster on OSX, not the biggest of this world, but it works and is even provisioned by Puppet. We noticed, however, that OSX native filesystem is sometimes quirky regarding performances and their NFS implementation needs some reworking.

Biggest advantage of. OSX, at least for my customer, was that nodes can be used as workstations when not crunching logs at night!

App Store II: Steve Jobs sucks Mac's soul

Gabriele Bozzi
Big Brother

Games consoles always did this

Sorry to remind me the obvious but...

Isn't Nintendo using a similar "curated" model to select their games?

At some point it has been saving Nintendo from oblivion thanks to the most "puritan" choice of games of the bunch.

Programmers were guaranteed a marketplace and an educated public, parents and snotty children got cherry-colored games and no explicit violence. Everybody was happy until the iPod came to spoil the party.

I know: the one is a game console, the other is a general purpose system but, fact is, public needs less and less general purpose systems, it must just work...

For me is not gonna work however: already not having Java pre-installed is enough to let me think twice before I purchase a Mac again.

But, after all, I am an old crusty dog, statistically irrelevant.

Google network lord questions cloud economics

Gabriele Bozzi
Paris Hilton

PFFF...

...I can't disagree with Mr. Gill more.

Modern data-centers use elastic computing and dynamic machine provisioning already, either on premise or on the public cloud. The simulation Mr. Gill is proposing is dense nonsense.

Of course this is about bashing AWS IaaS approach and promoting Google PaaS offering.

How much of one's reputation can be thrown to pigs and dogs to support marketing strategy?

No, I don't want to know, actually...

Paris because she has a reputation.

Samsung woos developers with Bada book

Gabriele Bozzi
Jobs Halo

It's just the first part out of four,,

This is what I read on Wiley's website: "Sign up today to receive the first chapter in a 4-part series from ‘Introduction to bada: "

It's not clear if the following three chapters will be offered for free as well.

Anyway, regarding Samsung relevancy: don't forget that we live on the "other half" of this planet. If Samsung is strong worldwide, it's even stronger in Asia and they have plans:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-21/samsung-aims-to-double-its-smartphone-market-share-update1-.html

Don't underestimate them.

Ballmer in the clouds: 'Microsoft redefines, Amazon repackages'

Gabriele Bozzi
Gates Horns

Azure is inter-op!!

I do not agree with comments.

Azure introduces a level of abstraction and has a preferred environment (.Net) that exploits its fiull capabilities, that's fine and it does not differ from any other Cloud/PaaS vendor (look at Goolge, Gigaspace, SalesForce, IBM)

However Azure is much more open to foreign technologies that one might know.. There is a lot of FUD around Azure and this is because is a truly innovating tool.

Examples?

- We run Lucene and Java on Azure and use their Message Bus to distribute content on premise.

- A friend of mine is organizing a conference today, in Belgium, at Microsoft BE on PHP on Azure.

So?..I am not aware of Microsoft having a product based on PHP or Java, I have to assume that Azure is open thus.

And Azure is solid. To date it performed very well albeit in Beta.

Hey, I am not an MS fan-boy, not at all, but we need to give credit where credit is due.

Microsoft: Oracle will take us back to 1970s hell

Gabriele Bozzi
Pint

Stagnation is not that bad, but it won't come anyway..

After all, during the 70s, many revolutionary things have been conceived (think Unix, VMS, Relational DBs).

However the economics today is something else. In the 70s we weren't so dependent from innovation in our everyday life (e.g. Web, Mobile, Geo-services, Augmented reality). Nowadays IT is becoming a mix of business and consumer offerings, the line between the twos is even becoming fuzzier.

Oracle goes proprietary? It always did. I just hope that with SUN they get some decent system integrator because every solution they integrate in their DB has nowhere the quality and stability of the DB itself...

It's friday. My recipe is to have a pint with my best friend and try to avoid speaking of IT for the whole week-end.

Cleversafe beats RAID/replication scale trap

Gabriele Bozzi
Headmaster

Sounds an IDA storage to me

It might be an <Pedantic IT architect> IDA: Information Dispersal Algorithms. </Pedantic IT architect>

Worth to mention that there is a company called B-Virtual that successfully implemented this smart stuff long time ago and it sells it, among others, to Cloud providers.

Microsoft's Mountain man sees Jobsian past in .NET

Gabriele Bozzi
Headmaster

Historical perspective

Sorry but as a long-time Apple fan(boy-no-more) I must comment on the historical perspective of a sentence in this article.

You mention:

"as director of education marketing and sales between 1981 and 1984, he ran Apple's University Consortium program, putting Macs into the hands of students and teaching staff. This solidified the Mac's presence in learning."

Nice.. But the mac has been launched in January1984 being hardly available to mass-market for the first three months. Mr. Lewin (which I profoundly respect for his work) might not have been very influential during such a brief time lapse.

At the time the Apple II was very strong in the traditional educational market (up to high schools); the Mac has been promoted upwards, the target being University and research. Nonetheless resistance has been high in the beginning due to the very limited memory the Mac offered. My perception is that it wasn't until the "Fat Mac" was available that the educational market found the platform of any use.

Whatever. .Net is today Microsoft's best weapon. Redmond (or should I say: Mountain View) is and will be relevant because it offers a continuous development model that starts from the desktop, passes through the Cloud and lands to mobile (some work to be done there but eventually they will deliver).

Gabriele

Acer to be 'first' with Chrome OS netbook

Gabriele Bozzi
Boffin

MIcroprofessor I anyone?

Seems to me that Acer is stealing the news and is becoming relevant in geek-space: Servers, storage, Netbooks, Google.... Enough to raise brand awareness to cult.

Just to tell World + Dog how trendy I am: yesterday I retrieved one of the smallest pieces of my collection from the archives: a Microprofessor I !!!

Did you know that the Microprofessor I is still manufactured (I seem to remember that a British firm is responsible to drag this heavy heritage ).. If this still holds true, it makes the little Microprofessor the longest selling (and only left) microcomputer on this planet!!

IT utilities, the biggest game in town

Gabriele Bozzi
Stop

Sun/Oracle is not limited on Containers

There is a thing called QLayer laying around in the assets of SUN

Latest Vista SP1 tweak open to everyone with a week to spare

Gabriele Bozzi
Paris Hilton

@ C

"the stink was/is getting soo bad, that M$ began trying to cover it up with the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh, which provides a thicker chrome plating for the biggest turd ever dropped anywhere period."

Ask permission to use it as a quote for my (private) email... Your are poetry man!

G B

Paris because it's far more interesting than a SP.

MS-DOS paternity suit settled

Gabriele Bozzi

CP/M predated from previous engineering as well...

Most if not all modern Operative Systems have deliberately copied or have been "inspired" by DEC's 10-11ish interactive OSes.

TOPS10, RT-11, RS-TS all those operative systems made the history of the command line and I seem to remember reading that Mr. Kildall's first real commercial incarnation of CP/M (1.3) used to spot those similarities as a features not as a rip-off.

PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program) is the classical example.

Nevertheless CP/M and RT-11 are two wonderful exercises of effective minimalism: they did their job and they did it well (they do, actually, as far as I am concerned if I want to have some fun I switch on either my Altos 8000 or my 11-23).

GaB

Celebrating the iPhone's Newtonian past

Gabriele Bozzi

Newton? No..no..

Tsk , tsk.

The Newton was launched when no comparable device was on the market. As Brett said: it had to make its own way in a market that (it was 1993) had no space for innovation.

Furthermore: it was a personal digital assistant but no useful source of information was available either online or on the move just to justify its existence.

Th iPhone is.. Well, it's a phone just to start with.

Then it's also something else.

It is marketed with a hype factor that did not exist in '93: yes the Newton was cool but Apple as a brand was barely recognizable and not many people knew it even existed outside the graphic design and IT sectors. Look at Apple today please.

I am not saying this release of the iPhone will move many (small) boxes, maybe not, but I do not see it killed after its n-iteration: I think Apple is going to invest and renew the line as much as they can because they want a successor to the iPod form-factor and they think this particular device could take that place.

Would you be surprised if, in two years, no iPod would ever exist anymore being totally overtaken by iPhones? I wouldn't.

Apple can affod this: they did not invest in games but they are trying to be as pervasive as they can with common devices (and how did they learn the lesson: they even build obsolescence in their products: by making difficult to change a battery for example), just they keep them different and recognizable.

Criticizing an iPhone is like criticizing a Mini (to make an automotive parallel): it's not the fastest, it's not the most confortable and it's outrageously overpriced, but some people like it (me too, even if the original has better taste) and they buy it because they feel it's a product that reflects their need for lust and to stand out of the crowd.

I could not criticize a product that sells, I could dislike it but this is another story.

When, you IT writers, will understand that some markets have definitively escaped IT and that old rules are not equal to everybody anymore?

Why are you still writing about it anyway?

See you on this column in two years from now.

Google cookie cuts $600m data center in Iowa

Gabriele Bozzi

Desktop!! Desktop!!

It's the Desktop assault.

Funny: The Register is the first IT publication that understood what Google plans are.

They are opening in several places in Europe as well and they choose carefully the locations and complacent local politics. The pattern is always the same: an area where there is a backbone, skilled personnel (but higher than standard unemployment rate) and a certain willingness not to consider implications.

Why do they need to de-centralize? My educated guess (for what regards Europe) is that they need to give services with a certain compliance to EU laws. I guess many companies would not move their desktops (and services) to a provider acting under a different legislation. A second factor is marketing and visibility: they need to be present and visible not stay virtual.

Consequences?

They will always employ a limited number of highly motivated and skilled people but they will consistently damage the IT eco-system as we know it.

I do see parallels between IT and retail stores. See Google (and soon MS, and perhaps HP or Oracle) as Wal*Mart of the situation: how many local IT consultancies or professionals would see a drop in their revenue if companies switch to Google services?

And don't tell me it's different or that I am comparing Apples with Bananas: at the end IT will become a commodity and customers will be able to judge by price and after market service.

But it's the way IT seems to evolve and it will generate a clear discriminant between mass-marketed and niche-market quality-driven services.

We all eat our own dog food..

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

Gabriele Bozzi

Send him to us!!

I want him here!..

With 1100 corporate users not "reading the fine line" and in need of being "spoon fed" we all agreed here tech-supp. would raise towards new heights of service accountability.

Oh.. And about Rufu's linguistic and diplomatic talents: did I mention I work for a multinational? It happens that this is indeed the kind of atrocities embedded in our incident requests.

Waiting for you Rufus.

Nivio betas hosted Windows

Gabriele Bozzi

One possible solution to computing for developing countries?

Provided you have the bandwidth: but it would cost less to developing countries to build up in infrastructure and license such schemes instead of buying cheap PCs.

Not to count that the ecological impact would be minimized not having to dump PCs later.

And for "developed" countries (double quotes are mandatory here...): adopting the technology in big companies would save a lot of telecommuting and queues.

I see the benefits there but I am skeptical that enterprise barons or politicians would be so fast adopting this model.

GaB

Lost until translation: a book on maths and magic

Gabriele Bozzi

You can find it here...

The manuscript has never been hidden but, as many other unknown artifacts from that period still, after centuries, pays a tribute to the effective work of the Christian church to keep those things away from the public.

You can find it here anyway, sadly enough the author of these pages has written no intro in English:

http://www.uriland.it/matematica/DeViribus/Pagine/index.html

http://www.uriland.it/matematica/DeViribus/Presentazione.html

Gabriele