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Wednesday 25 June 2008, 3:58 PM
Tech charity quits Burma following government blocks
I have just received an update that Telecoms Sans Frontieres, a charity that specialises in setting up telecoms equipment in disaster zones has quit Burma in the face of repeated attempts to block its activity by the government.
The group claims that Cyclone Nargis has killed at least 133,600 people and affected at least 2.4m – making it the worst disaster since the Asian Tsunami in December 2004.
However the organisation's requests for authorisation to deploy to two of the most seriously affected areas – Yangon and the Irrawaddy delta - were blocked, leaving it with no choice but to pull out of the area.
This is a major blow to TSF and to the other agencies it supports. Without the telecoms infrastructure to communicate, provided by TSF and similar groups, the activity of other agencies on the ground in Burma will be affected. TSF also provides infrastructure to allow local people to contact relatives abroad – a vital service in the chaos following a natural disaster or conflict.
Here's the release in full:
Pau, 25 June 2008 - After 15 days in Myanmar, Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF) faced an unprecedented situation and decided to leave the country. TSF’s requests for authorizations to deploy to the Irrawaddy delta were not granted and as the organization was blocked in Yangon, TSF’s teams returned to their bases.
On June 1st, TSF obtained its first visas to enter Myanmar following Cyclone Nargis which hit the south western regions of the country on May 2nd and 3rd after having waited for more than a month at the border despite the scale of the disaster. TSF was first in charge of assessing telecommunication infrastructure and needs in the affected zones, particularly in the Irrawaddy Delta as part of an assessment mission of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT). The AIT based in Bangkok is a partner of TSF since 2006. TSF’s Asian base is also situated on the AIT campus and students from the University are regularly part of TSF’s teams responding to emergencies in Asia and the Pacific.
To strengthen the organization’s operation and in expectation of an imminent deployment to the Irrawaddy zone, TSF sent an additional team on June 8th. This team was composed of two telecom specialists from TSF’s headquarters in Pau and one from the Asian Base in Bangkok. In coordination with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), TSF’s objective was to provide technical assistance and install back up communication solutions in three of the four humanitarian hubs in Laputta, Bogalay and Pathein right at the heart of affected zone. This support aimed at benefiting the entire humanitarian community working with those affected by providing all the necessary equipment to communicate and to better coordinate.
The Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC) is led by the World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef and coordinated by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). TSF was appointed First Responder of the ETC in 2006. The objective of the ETC is to mutualise and better coordinate resources from different agencies involved in emergency telecommunications leaving no emergency responder unconnected. Since 2006, TSF already responded to several emergencies in coordination with the ETC: in Indonesia, in Lebanon, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and more recently in Mozambique following heavy floods in February.
For more go to www.tsfi.org
Wednesday 25 June 2008, 3:31 PM
Microsoft Hyper-V ready to go?
Our colleagues at ZDNet US are reporting
that Microsoft's long awaited virtualisation management tool – or hypervisor – may be released to manufacturing tomorrow.
According to Microsoft watcher extraordinaire Mary-Jo Foley, "testers claiming familiarity with the company’s plans", have let slip that Hyper-V will beat the goal which Microsoft set back for it when Windows Server 2008 was launched back in February.
The company gave itself six months to launch Hyper-V following the release of WS 2008 and if this story proves true – and we have no reason to doubt Mary Jo's scoop ability – then Microsoft should have beaten that by a month or so.
Mary -Jo asks on her blog whether any customers are waiting for Hyper-V, and if the results of a recent ZDNet UK poll are to be believed, then the answer is a big fat no.
Our research revealed that many end users are still wary of implementing virtualisation and, when they do so, still view it as separate technology from the operating system.
With survey respondents asked to rank operating-system features in order of importance, virtualisation came last, in eleventh place, with scalability, high reliability and identity management taking the top three positions.
However, despite not viewing virtualisation as a key feature for server operating systems, respondents cited virtualisation and consolidation as key server-management tasks in the next five years.
Interestingly though Microsoft's Hyper-V news comes out just after server OS rival Red Hat announced its own hypervisor product.
Launched on the first day of the company's annual user conference in Boston, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.
The Red Hat Embedded Linux Hypervisor is founded on the Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) project, which has been integrated into the Linux kernel since 2006. Red Hat has claimed KVM supports live migration of virtual machines from system to system in real-time and also has high availability features.
Tuesday 24 June 2008, 6:08 PM
What has The Simpsons got to do with open source?
Good question, and one that Simpsons writer Joel Cohen sort of answered during his speech at Red Hat's user conference in Boston last week which was littered with brilliant one-liners as you'd expect from one of the writers of the best TV show ever made:
"We had one episode set in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, and while they were there we portrayed Rio as the home of kidnappers, pickpockets, shanty town slums, crippling poverty, rats and wild monkeys, and the tourism board of Brazil were furious with us claiming, "There are no wild monkeys in Brazil"
The main reason for him being there was the fact that Red Hat technology was used in the creation of the recent Simpsons movie:
"The show is all hand-drawn and digitally animated, and the movie was too. However, because we were writing and re-writing the movie at such a furious pace, the scenes we would write needed to be seen and approved or revised (or often rejected) before they committed to the very labor-intensive process of hand drawing the cels."
"For that purpose, crudely animated scenes were produced with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Linux animation technology, so our animators were able to show us these scenes incredibly quickly. Once a scene or piece of a scene was approved, it would begin the more traditional animation route; however, the volume and speed of material that was created for the movie could never have been done without that Red Hat-fueled system."
(These quotes were given to Red Hat's official magazine - hence they are a bit self-serving - and I can't help thinking that Cohen must have nearly busted something trying to avoid making any gags about the company's very silly name... I mean Red Hat, come on, why not call it Blue Shoe, at least that rhymes)
Cohen was also there to point how the team behind the Simpsons are at their core a group of creative people – a community – and tried to draw some parallels with the open source specialists in the audience. "We are this creative enterprise and hopefully there is a way to look inside that and see how we go about our business and maybe that applies itself to how you run your businesses," he said.
Cohen also pointed out the importance of standing up to The Man, when it comes to creativity:
"Jim Brooks [Simpsons producer] made sure that there was no involvement from Fox, The only involvement Fox has in the show is through their censor. We have this freedom and the censor is an occasional presence – mostly we just ignore what they tell us."
And also drew some parallels between creativity in jokes and innovation:
"Jokes are pretty good template for innovation. The way most jokes work is that the set-up for the joke is a very understandable situation and the reason we laugh at the punch-line is the twist on the usual. We are surprised – most of our laugh is based on a pleasant surprise. That is the same basis as a good innovation, it is something people are comfortable with and yet it improves on it in a surprising way for a pleasing result."
But the main reason why Cohen kept the audience interested wasn't down to his management analogies, but his undeniable gag skills - and here's a selection:
"Most people think the Segway scooter was an incredibly innovative creative product, however it didn't meet an audience. They said it would eliminate walking and was incredibly fool-proof, we quickly learned it wasn't entirely fool-proof when George Bush tried to ride one."
"Maggie has never spoken apart from one time when she said one word and that word was Daddy but that one word was voiced by Elizabeth Taylor – the Elizabeth Taylor. She didn't ask for any money she did on the condition that she could marry two of the writers and a handy man who lived in his car on the lot. We miss him terribly."
"Matt Groening doesn't have a family member named Bart, but came up with the name from an anagram of Brat. It's early in the morning so I have created a slide to help you through that."
"In 1999 the BBC ran an online poll to name the greatest American and Homer Simpson won. Second place was Abraham Lincoln. If you think about it all Lincoln did was freed the slaves, Homer has been to space, has jammed with the rolling stones, and once had a kind of weird sexual encounter with a Panda."
"Coming on when it did the show is often referred to the show that built the entire Fox network – and for that we apologise."
"We do not air in Japan as our characters only have five fingers and in Japan if you only have five fingers it suggest you are a member of the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia, which also explains why it's so difficult to sit through a Yakuza piano recital."
"All told the Simpsons has generated over $5bn dollars in revenue, if anyone is here from Europe, that's almost 300 Euros."
Thursday 19 June 2008, 10:21 PM
Microsoft admits ODF won
The normal deal with conferences is that most of the interesting stuff happens away from the main keynotes. Red Hat's annual user conference is no different. Today I was lucky enough to drop into a session titled, The OOXML battle: Who really won?
A couple of surprise followed. The first one was that Red Hat managed to convince a Microsoft spokesperson to step foot in its conference which is definitely enemy territory. Even if Microsoft has softened its stance towards open source, there are plenty of attendees at the show who most definitely have softened when it comes to their antipathy towards Redmond and everything it stands for.
The second and even more surprising event was that the Microsoft spokesperson in question, Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee, actually admitted that ODF had won out over OOXML or words to that effect.
"I have been involved in this battle, and it has been a battle for quite some time," he said. "ODF clearly won. You mentioned Microsoft implementing ODF and we made a commitment through translators to support ODF, but we have a ship cycle and our ability to implement ODF in the middle of our ship cycle was not possible and the idea of implementing it to a level where our customers could open and use a document easily – we couldn't do that in the middle of shipping Office 2007."
McKee continued:
"I think ODF is a winner – being a Microsoft product – whether people like it or not, there are hundreds of millions of users of that product and if you are there then you are clearly going to get some more visibility."
There is a lot more from this session that I need to digest – not least the accusation from the floor that Microsoft is simply pursuing its normal strategy when it comes to a product or company it opposes – namely, embrace, extend and extinguish? The questioner asked McKee to justify why Microsoft's apparent climb-down over ODF wasn't simply the embrace stage at play.
McKee danced around the issue to some degree, as might be expected, but eventually said this:
"The important thing to remember about Microsoft, and I am not looking for an apology or to make excuses, 30 years ago when Microsoft came onto the scene, people said to Bill and Paul, 'You are out of your mind for trying to sell software – there is no market for software'. The market today is based to some degree on that decision – although there are lots more companies involved now."
He continued:
"Embrace and extent, markets change and they shift. Are we in the process of Microsoft embracing? There are over a dozen formats natively supported in Office today -- there is going to be dozen plus one shortly because ODF is now part of that. RTF, Txt, PDF, - why isn't Adobe here?. If our intention was to extinguish it would take years and years and years. I can tell you that ODF is going to work as well as Ooxml – it will change and evolve. I think one of the biggest questions is will those two formats unify – I don't know. Extinguish I don't think is going to happen – we don't control it."
So does that mean if Microsoft did control ODF then it would extinguish it? There are a lot more interesting points raised in this session which I will try and pull out into a more lengthy article in the next few days.
Thursday 19 June 2008, 9:26 PM
Novell stickers it to Red Hat
Every journalist loves a running story – basically when one article seamlessly leads to another. This might not be Pulitzer material but it amused me.
Having pointed out the cheeky banner that Novell hung outside rival Red Hat's annual conference in Boston, I later found out from Red Hat's chief executive Jim Whitehurst that Novell also put a "big sticker" on the floor outside too but Red Hat managed to get it removed.
Well surprise, surprise, I got an email today from Novell with a nice image of the sticker in question and what a sticker – it must be twenty feet across – I wouldn’t like to have on the crew that had to lay that let alone remove it.
And remove it they did, and Novell has some interesting views on how that came about:
We've been running the campaign for some time now (as you probably know, Boston is our headquarters) and removed the ad at the request of the management company at the Prudential Center -- they said they'd got over 20 calls, including one from the Mayor's office, all instigated by Red Hat.
I didn't actually realise Novell was based in Boston – I thought that their hometown was in Utah but turns out I am slightly out of touch and they actually relocated in 2004. If that is the case Novell – why do all your Brainshare user conferences still happen in Salt Lake City?
Anyway – hopefully this running story isn't over yet and we'll see Red Hat take some retaliatory action against Novell – maybe hiring a couple of hundred actors in Red Fedoras to troop past its rival's HQ.
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