Happy holidays and make a grid with your family and friends.

I hope Santa will come your way and Your holiday will be filled with laughter and Joy. If you pass by an unfortunate person, please try to make him/her smile. Don't forget that all the Kids are the same!

Best Regards!

Tags: santa, holiday, joy

RIAA and Linux Kernel, Linus delivers it straight

Responding to a statement;
"> Numerous kernel developers feel that loading non-GPL drivers into the
> kernel violates the license of the kernel and their copyright. Because
> of this, a one year notice for everyone to address any non-GPL
> compatible modules has been set."

Linus Torvalds has responded in a lengthy message. Although written because of a discussion of restricting Non-GPL drivers, it applies to most of the projects that are open source.
I will just state some of the Linus' statements that most appeals to me and will redirect you to the article. If you are intersted, then you can follow rest of the thread, which carries some gems like;
Bellyfull of fish
Penguins laying under the moon
Dreaming of wings to fly.

Back to Linus;
"The silly thing is, the people who tend to push most for this are the
exact SAME people who say that the RIAA etc should not be able to tell
people what to do with the music copyrights that they own, and that the
DMCA is bad because it puts technical limits over the rights expressly
granted by copyright law."
"The fact is, the reason I don't think we should force the issue is very
simple: copyright law is simply _better_off_ when you honor the admittedly
gray issue of "derived work". It's gray. It's not black-and-white. But
being gray is _good_. Putting artificial black-and-white technical
counter-measures is actually bad. It's bad when the RIAA does it, it's bad
when anybody else does it."
And lastly;
"There's a big difference between "copy" and "use". It's exatcly the same
issue whether it's music or code. You can't re-distribute other peoples
music (becuase it's _their_ copyright), but they shouldn't put limits on
how you personally _use_ it (because it's _your_ life).

Same goes for code. Copyright is about _distribution_, not about use. We
shouldn't limit how people use the code."

All his statements are very true and drawing a line is hard for developers and thinkers as well. If you think you are confused, I do not even know why I even wrote this post!

Links;
Linus' responses to restricting Linux kernel

Tags: linux, linus, kernel, RIAA, DCMA

Grid Comes to Web Hosting,

Media Temple webhosting services has announced that it is providing Grid based hosting plans. According to the media temple, Grid-Server services provide website hosting for others by means of clustering multiple networked servers. (mt) Media Temple’s Grid- Server services utilizes a completely new hosting platform that replaces yesterday’s obsolete shared server technology. We've eliminated roadblocks and single points of failure by using hundreds of servers working in tandem for your site, applications, and email. The Grid-Server program's on-demand scalability means you'll always be ready for intense bursts of traffic and the growing audience resulting from your online success. All of this power, controlled through our brand new AccountCenter, is available today for a price point unmatched by any competing service.

Then hunting the I found this gem, "MediaTemple Grid Server: Not Good for Sites with Multiple Developers" at No.oneslistening.com
So if you are planing to host your multi agent, multi developer development project on this grid based service.
"Here at N1L, we’ve got a number of programmers who collaborate on projects, some that you’ve heard about and others still in the oven. We were active in the beta program for MediaTemple’s new Grid Server (GS). One thing we found is that the GS doesn’t play well with our projects that have multiple developers. Below, I’ll outline three ways that MediaTemple’s GS is not conducive to a collaborative environment. My hope is that this article provides a voice for change and improvement in the GS."

So follow the link and read the rest of the article that describes individual developer problems.

Links;
Media temple grid hosting
Not Good for Sites with Multiple Developers

Tags: grid based hosting, Grid, Grid Service

LA Grid (LAH GRID) kicks up steam, FAU (Florida Atlantic University) joins the grid.

Florida Atlantic University announced today that it has become the 10th member of the IBM-led Latin American Grid (LA Grid), an effort to create professional IT opportunities for the Hispanic community and to advance research in areas such as life sciences, weather modeling and prediction.
By joining LA Grid, FAU will contribute research scientists and the university's supercomputer based on IBM BladeCenter Systems from the university's College of Engineering and Computer Science.
While joint research programs in hurricane mitigation, life sciences and health care are the priority for LA Grid, member universities can also access the joint supercomputing resources for independent research. FAU, for example, plans to conduct research on the human genome, bioinformatics mapping, computational physics, integrated computation and communications, video processing, computer simulation and information security.
With FAU joining the grid, LA Grid will add another 150 servers to the grid and will have 1,500 available member processors for shared use. IBM's goal is to see LA Grid grow to include as many as 30 universities and 10,000 member processors by 2010.
Current LA Grid participants include Florida International University, the University of Miami, the University of North Florida and the University of Puerto Rico, Monterrey Tech (Mexico) as well as the Universidad de la Plata (Argentina) and Instituto Universitario Aeronautico (Mexico). Additional grid members providing computing power and resources include the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain) and IBM South Florida.

Links;
LA Grid Initiative

Tags: LA GRID, GRID Technology, Gridtech, FAU, IBM BladeCenter