One of the Best Blogs on OSS, Linux, M$ and the rest....

Today I came across a blog called Boycott Novell. Yes I frequent Groklaw. But this site is different. There are many a sites that provides the same content, but presented in better way.
I have been there for a while now, re reading about matters that I knew before but it is bookmarked and I can go back later.
I think you should have a look and decide for yourself.

Tags: boycott Novell, M$, Linux, OSS, Open Office

VMware attracts Cisco following Intel investment

PALO ALTO, Calif. and SAN JOSE, Calif., July 27, 2007 - VMware, Inc. today announced that Cisco Systems will acquire an equity stake in the company.

Cisco will purchase $150 million of VMware Class A common shares currently held by EMC Corporation, VMware's parent company, subject to customary regulatory and other closing conditions including Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) review. Upon closing of the investment, Cisco will own approximately 1.6 percent of VMware's total outstanding common stock (less than one percent of the combined voting power of VMware's outstanding common stock). VMware has agreed to consider the appointment of a Cisco executive to VMware's board of directors at a future date.

Cisco's purchase is intended to strengthen inter-company collaboration towards accelerating customer adoption of VMware virtualization products with Cisco networking infrastructure and the development of customer solutions that address the intersection of virtualization and networking technologies.

In addition, VMware and Cisco have entered into a routine and customary collaboration agreement that expresses their intent to expand cooperative efforts around joint development, marketing, customer and industry initiatives. Through improved coordination and integration of networking and virtualized infrastructure, the companies intend to foster solutions for enhanced datacenter optimization and extend the benefits of virtualization beyond the datacenter to remote offices and end-user desktops.

Earlier this month, Intel Corp., the world's largest semiconductor company, also announced it will make a major investment in Palo Alto-based VMware. Intel said it will pay $218.5 million, giving it 2.5 percent of VMware after the initial public offering.

News@Cisco

Tags: VMware, virtualization, IPO, Intel, Cisco

Checkers 500 billion billion possible positions (5 x 1020) computed

Abstract
Jonathan Schaeffer ^1* , Neil Burch ¹, Yngvi Björnsson ¹, Akihiro Kishimoto ¹, Martin Müller ¹, Robert Lake ¹, Paul Lu ¹, Steve Sutphen ¹

¹ Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E8, Canada.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Jonathan Schaeffer , E-mail: jonathan@cs.ualberta.ca

The game of checkers has roughly 500 billion billion possible positions (5 x 10²⁰). The task of solving the game, determining the final result in a game with no mistakes made by either player, is daunting. Since 1989, almost continuously, dozens of computers have been working on solving checkers, applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to the proving process. This paper announces that checkers is now solved: perfect play by both sides leads to a draw. This is the most challenging popular game to be solved to date, roughly one million times more complex than Connect Four. Artificial intelligence technology has been used to generate strong heuristic-based game-playing programs, such as DEEP BLUE for chess. Solving a game takes this to the next level, by replacing the heuristics with perfection.
Jonathan Schaeffer's quest for the perfect game of checkers has ended. The 50-year-old computer scientist from the University of Alberta in Edmonton left human players in the dust more than a decade ago after a trial by fire against the greatest checkers champion in history.

Schaeffer's odyssey began in the late 1980s. He had written a top chess program but IBM was on the verge of pouring its far vaster resources into Deep Blue. "I like to be competitive," he says, so he turned his attention elsewhere. "I naively thought I could solve the game of checkers," he recalls. "You can teach somebody the rules in a minute."

Setting out with 16 megabytes of computer memory, he quickly found that checkers, like chess, was too rich with possible positions to dash off a solution. So he switched gears, vowing to topple legendary checkers champion Marion Tinsley, who had lost only five games in tournament play between 1950 and 1992.

In 1992 Schaeffer's program Chinook took on Tinsley, who had resigned as world champion when the American Checker Federation and English Draughts Association temporarily refused to sanction the man-computer matchup.

The program actually beat Tinsley twice, but computer glitches led to a forfeit that gave the human a 3-2 lead with two games left in a best-of-40 match. Schaeffer set Chinook on an aggressive course to try to recoup, resulting in another loss for the computer that cost it and its creator the match, Schaeffer recounted in his book One Jump Ahead.

Early this decade he decided that improved computer speed and memory had brought his goal of solving the game within reach. The first of the solution's two pieces builds on work begun during the Tinsley days. The Alberta researchers exhaustively checked the final stages of play for any arrangement of 10 pieces or less, identifying which of the 3.9 x 10¹³ positions won, lost or drew.

Next they identified 19 representative opening sequences and searched through subsequent moves for connections to winning or drawing final positions, ignoring pointless back-and-forth moves or those that led to poor positions.

If the sequence of possible moves branches like a tree, the group found that main branch after main branch led to a draw. On April 27, Schaeffer says, the program traced the final branches, completing his 18-year task. He had received his king.
Article credit Computer checkers

Tags: game of checkers, DEEP BLUE for chess, Schaeffer's odyssey, checkers champion, Marion Tinsley, English Draughts

Oracle releases 11G today!

Oracle Corp. released the new version of its database software, adding security features and support for multimedia files to its biggest-selling and most-profitable product.

The program, called 11g, is being introduced at an event today in New York. The new version lets customers track changes made to databases and encrypt data, Redwood City, California- based Oracle said today in a PR Newswire statement.

Oracle makes about two-thirds of its software sales from databases and related programs, and is counting on the new features to encourage clients to upgrade. In a survey of 400 customers, the Independent Oracle Users Group found that 35 percent plan to buy the new software within a year.

``It's usually an 18-month cycle for people to upgrade,'' Ari Kaplan, president of the Chicago-based customer group, said in an interview. ``Most people expect a solid release, and don't see a reason to wait.''

Shares of Oracle, the world's third-largest software maker, rose 11 cents to $19.83 at 9:36 a.m. in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. They had advanced 15 percent this year before today.

The price of the database software is based on the number of processor chips used to run the program. Oracle often offers discounts of 20 percent to 80 percent, depending on the customer, said Donald Feinberg, an analyst with Gartner Inc. in Sao Paulo.

Oracle sells its software primarily for computers running the Unix and Linux operating systems. The company last year had 47.1 percent of the $15.2 billion worldwide database market, compared with 21.2 percent for International Business Machines Corp. and Microsoft Corp.'s 17.4 percent, according to Stamford, Connecticut-based Gartner.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rochelle Garner at rgarner4@bloomberg.net

Tags: oracle, oracle 11g

Eben Moglen Scottish society for Computers and Law annual lecture for 2007.

The lecture, talk or discussion given by Eben Moglen on June 26th to the Scottish Society for Computers and Law, "The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3" is available for reading or listening.
I think it is good for any one who is interested in Open Source to read or listen. I enjoyed reading it.
Here is the link to Eben Moglen's talk.

Tags: Eben Moglen, GPLV3

Google Desktop now runs on Linux!

After getting used to the Google Desktop on my MAC, I sometime wished that I had it for my Linux machines. I use Linux, mainly at my work and home and it seems now I can try Google Desktop out.
According to Official Google Blog post;
Official Google Blog: Google Desktop now available for Linux posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Not only can you rediscover important documents that have been idling on your hard drive for years, but you can also search through emails saved in Gmail or other applications. All office files, including documents and slides created with OpenOffice.org can be easily found. Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean --and it works with many versions of Linux too.
So if it is what you like, you can get Google Desktop for Linux at GDL site.

Tags: Google, Google Desktop, Linux, Google Desktop for Linux

64GB Flash SSD from SAMSUNG

Samsung has announced 64GB Flash SSD(Nand Flash-based Solid State Drive) to be used in notebooks and sub notebooks.
The drive it self is available in 2.5" and 1.8" sizes with 40 pin ATA interface and 50 pin interfaces respectively.
I think it is a boon to mobile users as power consumption drops dramatically with these drives. So does the noise generated by the normal hard drives. But why ATA, most notebooks nowadays come with SATA interfaces and perhaps may be even could be used as boot drive for servers. May be could give a boost to write ahead and binary logs, and for swap drives!

Here are the specifications according to Samsung site.

Unlimited Resistance against Impact : Over 1500G No mechanical parts Extended Operation Temperature Range From -25°C to 85°C The lightest Storage Solution in the world Fast Access Time and Read/Write Speed Sequential Read Sector : Up to 58MB Sustained Write Sector : Up to 32MB <1ms src="http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/FlashSSD/images/Bult_org.gif" alt="" border="0" height="3" vspace="2" width="8">Fast Access Time and Read/Write Speed Under 1msec, No Seek time Built-in EDC and ECC function to correct 2 random bits for each 512 Bytes Virtually no heat generation No accoustic noise or vibration PIO 0~4 mode. Up to ATA5 and UDMA mode 4 (Ultra DMA66)

NASA releases CLARAty Robotic Software under Open Source License

Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy or otherwise known as CLARAty is a collection of that spans over 100K lines of code. And this is on version 0.10. By looking at the capabilities and the scope it covers, this will certainly will grow larger by the time it reaches version 1.0!

With this release, a total of 44 CLARAty modules (~100K lines of code) are now available under the JPL Open Source License. This release is intended to share with the robotics community some of the core robotic modules which were jointly developed with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Minnesota. This first release represents about 10% of all CLARAty modules and 30% of the generic modules planned for future release.

CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program's rover technology developments.

The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov. Also extensive information as how to download, compile and additional tools needed are available here.

Tags: NASA, Robotics, JPL, MARS Technology, Open source robotics, CLARAty

The TeraGrid '07 conference,

The TeraGrid '07 conference theme is "Broadening Participation in TeraGrid." is open to scientists, engineers, faculty, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students, high school teachers, representatives from federal agencies, grid computing industry representatives, and staff from TeraGrid resource providers and partners, in short anyone who is interested in high performance computing.

Register by May 5 to receive a reduced conference rate. Online registration will remain open after May 5, and on-site registration will be offered for walk-ins. Follow the links below to register and discover Teragrid

TeraGrid is an open scientific discovery infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation. TeraGrid combines leadership class resources at eight partner sites to create an integrated, persistent computational resource. TeraGrid provides more than 150 teraflops of computing power and nearly 2 petabytes of rotating storage, numerous scientific data collections, specialized data analysis tools, scientific gateways and user portals to simplify access to valuable resources, and visualization resources all interconnected via a high-speed gigabits/second dedicated national network.

Links;
The TeraGrid '07 conference registration;
The TeraGrid '07 conference

Tags: grid, Teragrid, high performance computing, HPC

Backup and recover MySQL with Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL

I know a lot of people who uses MySQL for their Grid projects and other projects. I use MySQL extensively on Linux and other platforms. It is not only for experimental projects. I use MySQL in production as well.
For many years, I have tried many a backup solutions but recently came across Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL and now I am a happy camper. I can backup all my servers, both local and remote.
Here is some information about this great application;
The latest release of ZRM for MySQL includes enhancements designed to improve support for remote MySQL servers, fine-tune ZRM for optimal backup, and deliver more flexible reporting. New features include:

* Support for incremental backup for remote MySQL servers to reduce the load on MySQL server and network during backup.
* Ability to backup a database across a firewall
* Support for encryption and compression of backup images
* New pluggable architecture
* A scheduling plug-in that lets DBAs postpone backups based on DBA-defined thresholds
* Pre- and post-backup plug-ins that allow a DBA to perform certain actions on MySQL before or after backup
* New, more flexible formatting for backup reports. For example, backup reports can be automatically received via RSS feed making it easier to consolidate reports for a dashboard or any monitoring application

In addition to the above information Zmanda has done backup and recovery benchmarks. Well those benchmarks shows me that ZRM has half the transfer rates as my own home build iSCSI SAN. 2-way Red Hat Enterprise 4 server with 4 GB of memory was able to copy large files with an average transfer rate of 37 Mb/s. I think that is fast!
You can read more about the ZRM benchmark and get the detailed benchmark white paper by following the links below.
Zmanda also provides the leading open source backup solution, Amanda Network Backup and Recovery solution with service and support.

Links;
Backup and recovery benchmarks with Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL
Amanda: Network Backup and Recovery.

Tags: MySQL, Backup, MySQL Backup, Network Backup, ZRM