Vista consumer virtualization ban lifted

Finally Microsoft gave up and - contrary to what I reported before - now DOES allow all Vista Editions on virtualization platforms:

Microsoft relents: Vista consumer virtualization ban lifted:

"It only took them a year longer than it should have, but Microsoft has finally relented and approved the use of Windows Vista Basic and Premium Edition in virtualized environments, for both 'consumers' and business users. Among other things, the change means that Mac and Linux users can now run Windows Vista in a VM without having to pay for the more expensive Business or Ultimate editions. This is a boon to anyone who needs virtualized environments for testing and development."

On the relative importance of MySQL

Since the announcement of Sun buying MySQL recently we (Sun) of course had a lot of conversations with customers, partners and Sun internally about the value and position of MySQL.

To show the relevance of MySQL I searched for a couple of database products (or their names) on some job portals (jobfinder.at, jobfinder.de, stepstone.de, monster.at, monster.de, monster.co.uk), the (not new) idea being, that the number of job postings does correlate to the importance of a platform or system.

I know that this is not representative... but it gives a nice overview. And the ranking of the databases on the various job portals is consistent. (All figures rounded, and those 5 were the only ones I looked for... so it is strictly not percentage of the DB market but it gives you the relative positioning)

So:

#1	Oracle (to be expected)	50%
#2	SQL Server	29%
#3	MySQL (!!)	13%
#4	DB2	6%
#5	postgresql	1%

I did the same on amazon.com on books which gives a similar, but not identical picture:

#1	Oracle (again)	85%
#2	SQL Server	6%
#3	DB2	6%
#4	MySQL	3%
#5	postgresql	1%

Not really surprising that DB2 ranks before MySQL here... What does surprise me is that almost all books seem to be on Oracle.

Also of course there is a skew towards Oracle, since I only search (literally) for “Oracle” so the results might contain jobs and books about Oracle applications or (in case of books, not jobs I guess) the Oracle of Delphi, or other totally unrelated Oracles ... see the Wikipedia disambiguation page for a list of oracular things in this world.

Anyway: the results to me are clear:

MySQL has more importance than DB2 today (this of course kind of hurts me, me being an old DB2 fan) and is not that far off from SQL-Server... half of its “value” in both book and job search.

Europe: Your IP Address Is Personal

Finally someone said it... glad to live in Europe.

Europe: Your I.P. Address Is Personal - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog:

"Nonetheless, Peter Scharr, Germany’s data protection commissioner, told a hearing of the European Parliament that I.P. addresses should generally be seen as personal information, according to a report by The Associated Press. Under some laws, and much industry practice, information that can identify an individual is often subjected to tougher standards for how it can be recorded, stored and transmitted than information about anonymous users and groups of users."

share.opml.org, retired

Dave Winer reports on Scripting News:

"We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be"

It was a nice and interesting idea and service, and I got some interesting patterns and information out of it, but hardly anyone used it.

To be frank, I haven't uploaded my OPML in months (years?)...

What I Read

In the right column of this blog you may have noticed a new little feature called "What I read"...
Basically this is a little javascript to embed that lists the books I am currently reading (and nicely links to Amazon, of course).

Amazing what you can do with a little jscript...

Currently this is a manually created thing, but I'm working on a nice little Java (web) application at home that will help me create and upload this jscript file automatically, e.g. search title from amazon (using the amazon webservices) and fill in the author and ISBN details, etc, etc.

Stay tuned.

Yahoo to start supporting OpenID

Yahoo! backs! OpenID! | The Register:

"Yahoo! has pledged to support OpenID from the end of the month, giving a massive boost for the online identity framework that aims to cut password headaches."

Smart move for Yahoo.
Good move for everyone.

Some reactions on Sun buying MySQL

Here are some select comments on Sun buying MySQL from my blogroll:

The Register: Sun pulls MySQL into its orbit
Ars Technica: Sun targets open source LAMP stack with MySQL acquisition
Read/Write Web: Sun Dives into Database Market: Buys MySQL
c|net news: The best decision Scott McNealy ever made (being more about Jonathan than just the acquisition)
NY Times: Sun to Buy Swedish Software Firm for $1 Billion

Today is Acquisition day: BEA agrees to Oracle offer

BEA finally says yes to Oracle - for $8.5bn | The Register:

"Oracle has signed a definitive agreement to buy BEA for $8.5bn."

No cheap Vista for Desktop Virtualization?

I just got a pointer to this litte know fact (at least I did not know it) from the VMware site:

Microsoft Virtualization Licensing and Distribution Terms - VMware: "Restrictions on Virtualization and Vista:

Microsoft has recently announced a prohibition on virtualizing the less expensive versions of Vista (Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium). Microsoft’s explanation has been that virtualization is not broadly usable by consumers or other mass market users, and therefore should be restricted only to the more expensive versions of Vista"

This means that you cannot use a cheaper version of Vista for desktop virtualization (VDI) ...

And this in return means, that Microsoft is afraid of VDI. That simple.

Jonathan Schwartz: Sun to buy MySQL (AB)

Jonathan Schwartz's Blog: "We announced big news today - our preliminary results for our fiscal second quarter, and as importantly, that we're acquiring MySQL AB."

Wow.

Dopplr and city data

Dopplr is a great service... I really like it.
However, the quality of the city/location data ... well ... sucks.
At least for Austria.
Try Saalbach (major skiing resort) or the city of Krems ... totally unknown to Dopplr and replaced with nearby villages that don't make any sense.
Dopplr say that rely on data from the GeoNames project, but Geonames has all those data...(try Saalbach or Krems)... so why doesn't Dopplr know about them...

Strange.

Sudo make me a sandwich

Oh, this is better then all thinkgeek t-shirts combined ;-)

Offline for a couple of days

Am Weissensee
Originally uploaded by roetzi24

I'm enjoying some days off at lake Weissensee in Carinthia, Austria - pondering how to implement an idea for a flickr application I had.

Anyone know a good site with hosted Tomcat or - even better - glassfish ?

Wien 2.0

Vienna's 11th district goes Web 2.0 ???




(Well I kind of helped with the Dopplrgasse, it is of course Doppler...)

Flock featured on Mahalo Daily

Flock - my favorite Flickr and YouTube browser just got featured on Mahalo Daily.

Watch it here and

Word of the Year - w00t

via UserFriendly

Bugzilla RSS vs Google Reader

I've been monitoring the Mozilla Lightning bugs in bugzilla for a while now using an RSS feed of bugzilla into my Google Reader.
I frequently noticed that the information on some bugs was not complete, but did not really care.
Today's view however, was the best so far and comes with quite some aesthetic touch:


You can really watch as Google Reader tries to retrieve the feed and fails, tries again 3 hours later, gets some more date, and fails ... etc etc ... ad inf.

But it looks great.

Le Web 3 Videos online

The videos of the Le Web 3 conference from Paris are online here:
leweb3

New Flickr Uploadr

Flickr released their new version (3.0) of the upload tool, aptly called uploadr.
2 technical details worth mentioning:

1. It is open source.
2. It is based on XULRunner, the mozilla runtime.
   (and therefore Windows and Mac OS-X)
   

Actually it is the first XUL application (except for Mozilla and all the direct spin offs like Flock) I came across "in the wild".

As for the features:

• you can now manage a lot more attributes offline, i.e. still on the PC
• the user interface and layout are a lot more clear than in previous version
• since it is XUL it has - like Firefox and friends - an easy online update feature.
  

Sadly, though, the most important "Upload Photos" button vanishes unpredictably from time to time (for me). Hope this gets fixed...

Or no, it's open source, so I'll just check out the source myself, wont I.

Home PC power consumption

I'm doing some math around the power consumption advantages of thin clients, namely the Sun Ray, versus regular PCs (spell: green IT).
So I borrowed a power meter from a colleague and just checked my own PC, a fairly regular, non-game, non-graphics PC:
2 GHz Athlon, 1GB RAM, 2 HDs, Radeon 9000 on-board graphics, and the usual peripherals like Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers... nothing fancy.

Without the monitor the PC uses the following power (measured right at the power plug):

• 0W when totally switched off at the back-side
• 2,7W (!!!) when switched off only with the front side switch (or shut-down menu),
  as well as in hibernate mode
• 7W (!!!) in stand-by mode
• 115-130W when in use

I could not find a clear correlation between the power consumption and CPU or disk usage. It would just oscillate between 115 and 130W...

So - again without the Monitor - over a whole year, with my regular PC usage at home this amounts for 328kWh or about 6% of my electricity bill.