Practical Technology

I told you so. I told you back in late June VMware was about to get its block knocked-off by the one-two of open-source virtualization and virtualization being baked into operating systems. On July 8th, VMware’s rump hit the canvas.

That was the day Diane Greene, CEO and co-founder was fired and replaced by former Microsoft. executive Paul Maritz. Officially, VMware’s board gave the usual executive song-and-dance about needing to “bring in new leadership with the experience and operational breadth to capitalize on the opportunities in front of VMware as it scales up from its current place to a billion-dollar software company.”

Scale up!? Please!

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Some of us thought, based on the lack of any real evidence in his trial, that Hans Reiser might be innocent of the supposed murder of his wife, Nina Reiser. We were wrong. On July 7th, Reiser led representatives of the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, and Oakland Police to her body.

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What part of “Yahoo doesn’t want a thing to do with you” did Ballmer not get? The new lord and master of Microsoft seems to be deaf, as well as dumb, in his latest attempt to try to buy Yahoo.

Microsoft, along with billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who at 72 seems to be losing his business smarts, confirmed that they still wanted to buy Yahoo. All that Yahoo has to do, to get in on this new deal, is fire its board of directors.

In other words: “Dear Yahoo leadership. You recently turned our offer down to buy your company. Then, you decided to turn down our offer to buy the search part of your company. Please quit your jobs so we can replace you with people who will take our lowball offer. Thank you very much. Ballmer and Icahn.”

Just how stupid is Ballmer? The deal is dead.

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Mozilla’s successful attempt to set a world record for downloads of a single program, Firefox 3 was dumb. It was also incredibly successful.

Does anyone really care about how many copies of a program are downloaded in a day? In 2008? When a program can be downloaded from hundreds of different sites? When BitTorrent and other P2P (peer-to-peer) networks makes measuring file ‘downloads’ more of an exercise in speculative fiction than a science?

I guess so because, not even counting the fuzzy downloads of P2P networks and the like, Firefox was downloaded 8.3-million times in one day. This is spiffy. Meaningless in and of itself, but spiffy.

Having said that, I will say Mozilla’s pounding the drum for downloading Firefox did do one good thing. It did a great job of marketing Firefox.

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Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux may only be a beta, but it’s one heck of a beta.

I didn’t care for Adobe Flash video at first. It was just another proprietary audio/video format in a world already over-flowing with them.

Three things have happened to change my mind. First, Adobe made it possible to use the open H.264 video and HE-AAC (High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding) audio standards in Flash SWF (Shockwave Flash) files. Then, they made the Adobe Flash player available on Linux, and, this May, Adobe announced that it was opening up the SWF and FLV/F4V (Flash Video) formats and dumping the format’s licensing fees. At about the same time, Adobe also released the Flash 10 beta for Linux, as well as some other desktop operating systems you may have of heard of: Mac OS X and Windows.

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