Now why would a site that covers the broadband scene care about this? Speed. Cheaper development.

The latest kernel 2.2.26 has three items going for it —

1) Improvements in the KVM module. It now supports the base line for paravirtualization.

2) The native chipset speed in a virtual environment.

3) Preliminary support for 802.11s wireless mesh networking.

That means the boys in the labs are going to start looking at multicore multidrop routers not bound by single cpu threads. It also means that some other engineers will be working on a multicore multiband mesh wireless system in linux. Enough to test the bandwidth processor capabilities.

More at InfoQ.

Diane Greene is pitched overboard as the Ship VMWare sails on. They pick up Paul Maritz, a former Microsoft exec in midtack. Regardless the stock plummets by 1/3rd. Like always a lot of boardroom intrigue that will be reported on for the next week in the tech press. But does it really matter? I say no.

A causative agent –

People said when Linux deployed KVM companies would fall. And they were right!

Well maybe not quite that dramatic but the notation is apt. The latest kernel release supports virtualization thru the service module KVM. Yes Mildred as in free, as in beer. That simple fact just jacked up the entry fee for being considered a ‘modern OS’. A term the tech press likes to throw around from time to time But it alters the virtualization marketplace.

The Industry Result –

The virtualization industry could be roughly broken down into two types — OS inclusive and OS exclusive. I use these terms rather than the typical Hypervisior vs Container based virtualization. The reason will become readily apparent.

First the OS exclusive players. This group is made up by firms like Parallels and VMWare. Their products are add on externals to the OS in most cases. Second are the OS inclusive players. This group is comprised by the likes of Microsoft Virtual PC, Xen from XenSource [now part of Citrix] and of course KVM for Linux.

The difference in the two camps is important. Those of the inclusive group will be melded into the OS of their respective mother products. So it would be quite possible that Win7, when it comes out, will have virtualization as a standard feature of the OS. Starts to sound like a repeat of the IE inclusion in Windows doesn’t it? Well folks that’s the way it will play out in the marketplace.

So when all the OS’s have their respective inclusive virtual tools in place wither the exclusive players? Extinction or marginalization. There will be a niche for folks like Parallels in the IA32 and OSX space for quite some time. Even VMWare will have a fair run providing their Desktop virtualization products. But the long term is not going to be favorable to the exclusives.

The Inquirer has a dilly of a piece on the move by Nokia to take the Symbian handheld OS Open Source. Link here. As the lede intones, I think there are a few hurdles. –
 
 
 

Is this a good move? Well if the Foundation is open to all AND they move eventually to a GPL based licensing I would say yes. Is it a Android killer? Time will tell. Android has not hit the market yet in a physical manifestation. Till we see a head to head comparison in the marketplace all bets are off. But I would offer the following — if Android is even close to Symbian in capability, the advantage is to Google. They have a nest of free development providers and Google Widgets to support warp speed deployment cycles.

But there is one thing I agree with in the Inquirer article — MicroSoft’s Mobile Phone platform is in trouble. No developer is going to pay when they can use a competing tool for free.

ThirdPipe has said before that Open Source willl be a disrupter in the telecommunications market. But hey don’t take our word for it –

Open source is about to hit the cell phone industry hard. It may even take with it one of the early darlings of US smart phones — a halfway station to open cell phone technology — the iPhone. Apple will be announcing the results of opening up the iPhone to third party developers next week at Apple’s WWDC 08. But the iPhone SDK is accessible only to existing Mac developers. That’s not open enough. ABI Research is estimating that somewhere near one quarter of the world’s smartphones will be Linux-based in 5 years. (http://www.abiresearch.com/abiprdisplay.jsp?pressid=1109) This is the iPhone’s real competition: Linux.

Where Linux goes, the consumer wins.

Were this discussion a poker reality show, I would open with Android, raise with community development and check with free community support. Like the man says, “… the consumer wins.”

Linky

What can I say? As time marches on the cinematic quality of CGI improves. All you have to do is compare the run of Pixar films over the years to see the improvement. Do you think that Open Source has a chance here? If you said no think again. Watch this trailer –

Oh and the free full run movie is here. The movie was done totally with open source tools. [eg. blender]

For the carriers this just another example of open content that is going to rain on their parade. I don’t think we will see Big Buck Bunny on the pay per view channel anytime soon. But Mom will be watching it with the kids. When there are thousands of Big Buck Bunny content sources their income model for premium content will crumble.

Interesting times.

HT: Tech Source Bohol.

Generally we would cover this in our sister publication Tightwad Technica. But the changes on the wireless front for the Ibex release of Ubuntu deserves a mention here. Mark Shuttleworth breaks it here –

During the 8.10 cycle we will be venturing into interesting new territory, and we’ll need the rugged adventurousness of a mountain goat to navigate tricky terrain. Our desktop offering will once again be a focal point as we re-engineer the user interaction model so that Ubuntu works as well on a high-end workstation as it does on a feisty little subnotebook. We’ll also be reaching new peaks of performance - aiming to make the mobile desktop as productive as possible.

A particular focus for us will be pervasive internet access, the ability to tap into bandwidth whenever and wherever you happen to be. No longer will you need to be a tethered, domesticated animal - you’ll be able to roam (and goats do roam!) the wild lands and access the web through a variety of wireless technologies. We want you to be able to move from the office, to the train, and home, staying connected all the way.

My view is that this capability should have been part of the Hardy Heron LTS desktop release. I mean really, even preppy Puppy Linux had wireless enabled since the 3.0 release 18 months ago. XP has had the capability since what? SP1? That’s some 3 years ago.

But this release may bring some benefits. The configuration setup for the drivers may bring some convergence to the whole wireless drivers front. Right now it is a bit of a mess as each distro essentially develop their own methodologies for implementing the user interface. Linux would benefit from a Anaconda-like tool kit for wireless.

Further reading on Ibex here. Ibex will be in release come October of this year.

New research shows that younger people like to use use their mobile device as a second window into their online lives and personal computer. It’s not just the young. Go to any office park eatery at noon and you’ll see lots of smart phones and crackberries getting a workout from middle aged as well as youthful users.

A report from In-Stat points out that millennials, the generation aged 8 to 27, use their mobile phones to access their social networks wherever they are.

This is great news for a variety of companies attempting to bring PC content to the mobile. As content is pulled to mobile devices, publishers will pay to make sure it arrives in a readable format and quickly enough to satiate user demand, meaning content delivery networks, providers of transcoding services and services that render PC content accessible to mobile phones could benefit. (GigaOm)

Now, here’s an idea: Build devices to use an open pipe (Clearwire?). The open source handsets you will use have VPN capability, with VoIP and unified messaging. It all fits neatly only one screen with a single interface. If you have a Gmail account, you already unified messaging capabilities with single login. Just do a handset interface. No need to leave the “phone mode” and hop over to the “internet mode” or “text mode”. No trying to keep track of the various nickel and dime and dollar charges for each, you just rent the pipe and you use it for whatever app you like. It could happen in the next year on Wimax or something like it. If however, we rely only on AT&T and Verizon , it will only happen in time for the next generation to use it.

Entire new businesses and communities have been built around user generated media. While the devoted amateur could always find a way, the declining cost of good production tools along with the ease of web distribution brought UGM to the masses. The blog you are reading now was enabled by a collection of free and easy to use open source products. As of today, the lines have completely blurred between producer and consumer as so many of us are both.

Applications may be the next wave. Imagine anyone who has learned how to use a few simple tools being able to create the next Digg or Facebook. Unlimited free to cheap utility computing becoming available in the cloud, combined with easy to use tools will supercharge the most devoted non-coder, and inspire many more casual users to create apps for themselves and share them. While the tools that powerful are not here yet, they are progressing in that direction. An open source project called Open Mashups may be on the cusp of that next wave.   If you’d like to automate some of the ways you use the web, or have a glimpse of what the near future holds, Open Mashups is a free download.

There’s more to keeping the web free and open than encouraging fierce competition between access providers and equally impartial treatment of traffic. Free and open also extends to software technologies that enable and extend our use of the net.

When it comes to software, we like free. Free insures quick adoption by those who have a compatible platform. Free and open is better, but in the case of the net, open is a necessity to insure continuous development, improvement, and availability to the broadest range of platforms.

According to Mozilla’s Tristan Nitot :

“proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over”…”So far, there has not been a problem,” Nitot said. “Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They’re not here for the glory; they’re here for the money.”Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft’s discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe’s long-standing refusal to “provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users.” He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are “sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms.” (Cnet)

Adobe’s recent move to partly open Flash is an improvement, but does not go far enough. Closing software that is dominant also causes stagnation. Windows is a great example of that.

Adobe may be close to discovering the fact that going open source is the only way to insure long term wide spread adoption of Flash. At least the Open Screen Project takes a step in that direction.

The Open Screen Project, supported by Adobe and several “industry leaders” and announced today, is supposed to foster the creation of a “consistent runtime environment” that will “remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices, and set top boxes”. The idea is that such a runtime environment will provide the best performance across a wide range of operating systems.

As part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe announced several changes in their policies towards Flash, “to open access to Adobe Flash technology”:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

(OS News)