I just ordered an Asus Eee PC, the tiny portable 7" laptop.  I got the Black 4G Surf model.  I am psyched to get an ultraportable that runs Debian (Xandros) Linux!

I will blog about it if I do anything cool with it.  It comes with Python installed ;)

Pretty interesting...

via BetaNews article:

"Twice each year, the rankings of 500 of the world's supercomputers are assessed by the University of Mannheim in association with Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Their figures are then sorted by tested clusters' maximal observed peak performance, in gigaflops."

"Intel-based processors walked away with one, if not two, lions' shares worth of the Top 500 list, with a staggering 354 total systems."

"460 of the Top 500 systems were running one flavor of Linux or another, including all of the Top 10."

Wal-Mart unveiled its $200 Linux-based PC.

from the Wired blog:

"It has a 1.5 Ghz VIA C7 CPU embedded in a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software."

I'm not so sure about "unacceptably low-end".  The specs on this PC are substantially better than my home machine.  I have a box at home that I primarily use for web surfing.  It was an old castaway Windows NT machine from an old job.  I run Ubuntu (with Gnome) on it, and it works like a charm.  It's a 933MHz P3 with a 256MB RAM and a dog slow hard drive.

So.. with superior specs, I think the Wal-Mart machine would be a great PC for basic home use.

.. though the "VIA C7" chip scares me a bit.  Any idea how it stacks up against a similar spec'ed Intel or AMD?

Keeping up to date with what's going on in Linux kernel development and what to expect in the future isn't always easy.  The Linux Kernel Mailing List has very high traffic and is very technical.

Luckily, the Linux Foundation has provided the Linux Weather Forecast, which provides a high level roadmap of what's going on in kernel development and where it's all going.

Pretty handy for people depending on future features as well as casual observers that want to keep up to date with major kernel development activities.

Earlier this week, SCO finally lost the infamous Linux copyright infringement case against IBM.  The judge ruled Unix copyrights belong to Novell, not SCO.  A lot of people have forgotten about this case; but when it was originally filed, it really spooked a lot of Free software developers and Linux advocates.

After the ruling, Wall Street punished SCO's stock price accordingly.

5-Day stock price chart for SCOX:

Ouch.  Decimated.  I'm actually surprised it didn't get hammered more... Time to short this rag?

Jonathan Schwartz (CEO of Sun Microsystems) posted an excellent article describing Sun's stark choice of how to re-invent itself.  They stepped towards Free software and embraced Open Source.  Microsoft is taking a much different stance.  They are asserting patent claims over many pieces of the GNU/Linux system.

Jonathan gives some great advice in his Free Advice for the Litigious:

"No amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company. And you will never turn back the clock on elementary school students and developing economies and aid agencies and fledgling universities - or the Fortune 500 - that have found value in the wisdom of the open source community. Open standards and open source software are literally changing the face of the planet - creating opportunity wherever the network can reach."

Can you hear us *now*?

I saw this message from Linus on the LKLM and I thought it was well stated.  I love the way Linus runs the crazy bazaar of Linux Kernel development.  He stays true to technical merit and essentially bases all of his decisions on this.  (though sometimes this is in conflict with the ethics of Free Software).

Linus Torvalds from the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

"One of the most motivating things there *is* in open source is "personal pride".

It's a really good thing, and it means that if somebody shows that your code is flawed in some way (by, for example, making a patch that people claim gets better behaviour or numbers), any *good* programmer that actually cares about his code will obviously suddenly be very motivated to out-do the out-doer!

Does this mean that there will be tension and rivalry? Hell yes. But that's kind of the point. Life is a game, and if you aren't in it to win, what the heck are you still doing here?

As long as it's reasonably civil (I'm not personally a huge believer in being too polite or "politically correct", so I think the "reasonably" is more important than the "civil" part!), and as long as the end result is judged on TECHNICAL MERIT, it's all good.

We don't want to play politics. But encouraging peoples competitive feelings? Oh, yes."

Microsoft has renamed "WPF/E" to "Silverlight":

"Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

It looks like Microsoft is pushing this technology aggressively to CDN's and content distributors:

"Early supporters of the new platform include Akamai, Brightcove, Eyeblaster, Limelight, Major League Baseball, Navisite, Netflix, Skinkers, Sonic Solutions, SyncCast, Tarari, Telestream, Winnov, and more."

Silverlight will work on Windows and Mac OSX.  OK.. so no Linux support?  I think if Microsoft hopes to supplant Flash, it truly needs to be cross platform (not just Windows and OSX).

from the Silverlight FAQ:

"Microsoft is gathering feedback from customers like you on Silverlight and to help determine which platforms should be supported in the future."

Better hop to it boys.. With the proliferation of GNU/Linux, pushing a presentation framework that doesn't run on it is a large oversight.

You need the geeks on board.. lose the geeks.. lose the battle.

I posted some pics of the latest OLPC prototypes a few weeks ago.  Well... I got to see them 2 weeks in a row; so here are some more pics of the machine up close.

... Seems the whole "hand crank" idea is gone.  There is now a pullchord on the external power supply with a 10:1 ratio (1 minute of pulling = 10 mins of computing) for manually recharging power... The keyboard is tiny and soft feeling.  The screen is small but is very viewable in direct light without backlighting (which is probably the #1 power drain on laptops).

OLPC rocks!

Me geeking out:

Old school meets new school...
Gerald J. Sussman (yes, the MIT Scheme guy) playing with the latest OLPC prototype:

Closeups:

.. these machines run a scaled down version of Fedora Linux that is loaded with Python applications.

-Corey

RMS has been on the "GNU/Linux" naming convention rant for years; urging people to give the GNU Project and the legions of contributors credit they deserve.  Afterall, the bulk of Free Software OS userland is made of GNU contributions.

One might think that a company like Sun Microsystems wouldn't grok this concept, since most GNU/Linux distributions themselves don't.

However, some folks at Sun definitely get it:

Tim Bray - Director of Web Technologies (talking about Ian Murdoch joining Sun):

"As of this weekend Ian wasn’t even on the payroll yet and was already in in a peppy little email debate over when to say “Linux” and when to say “GNU” and when to say both."

Simon Phipps - Chief Open Source Officer:

"the combination of the GNU operating system pioneered by Richard Stallman with the inclusive development delivered around the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds has brought a new life and energy to the extended family tree of Unix. The popularity of GNU/Linux bears testament to the vision and skill Stallman and Torvalds exhibit."

Tim Jones gives a brief overview of SMP and discusses working with the Linux kernel:

Linux and symmetric multiprocessing

Tim Jones:

"As processor frequencies reach their limits, a popular way to increase performance is simply to add more processors. In the early days, this meant adding more processors to the motherboard or clustering multiple independent computers together. Today, chip-level multiprocessing provides more CPUs on a single chip, permitting even greater performance due to reduced memory latency.

You'll find SMP systems not only in servers, but also desktops, particularly with the introduction of virtualization. Like most cutting-edge technologies, Linux provides support for SMP. The kernel does its part to optimize the load across the available CPUs (from threads to virtualized operating systems). All that's left is to ensure that the application can be sufficiently multi-threaded to exploit the power in SMP."