Blog: Pete Loshin

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June 30, 2008

SmugMug: Amazon Web Services Success Story

Wondering whether Amazon Web Services could be used to build a profitable business? Flickr-killer wannabe SmugMug has built a scalable--and profitable--web service using AWS products EC2 and S3.

SmugMug founder and CEO Don MacAskill tells you all about how they do it on his blog, here: SkyNet Lives! (aka EC2 @ SmugMug).

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June 27, 2008

In Defense of Vista

I'm not sure if this article at Gizmodo is entirely sincere, but it's certainly worth reading if you've got any opinions at all about Vista: Ten Reasons Why Vista Isn't That Bad.

Some of the reasons sound pretty pathetic:

"3. Games work just about as well as under XP." (only a 10% degradation in performance!)
"8. Drivers support isn't as bad as it's made out to be."
"9. It's not any buggier than Windows XP. "

But read the article for the rest of the reasons, the succinct and pungent comments, as well as the link (the first one in the article) to the Youtube video of "lightning bolt, lightning bolt" nerds. Swallow your coffee before you open that one, unless your monitor needs cleaning anyway.

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June 23, 2008

The dark side of OpenID

Are you still keeping an eye on OpenID? (for an introduction, see OpenID: Another Approach to Identities, or OpenID Taking Over the Internet or Yet More on OpenID)

If you want all the "dirt" on the protocol, check out The problem(s) with OpenID. It's all there: the potential for problems with security, privacy, trust, and so on. Just don't worry too much about uptake, as that's already in full swing.

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June 16, 2008

Form Follows Function

If you're an operating system zealot--whether you love Linux or militate for Microsoft--you should read this excellent article: A Tale of Four Kernels. You can get the publication details there, the short story is it's published by the ACM, and it's for real.

What's the bottom line? After examining source code of four leading kernels: FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel (WRK), it turns out that:

The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

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June 12, 2008

Microsoft Follies, again

If you're looking for trouble in Redmond, here are a couple more news items to fuel your schadenfreude:

• Closing the Door to Microsoft Vista is a Business Week piece on the problem facing many big business who don't see much point in upgrading to Vista from XP--and who are planning to wait until Microsoft releases Windows 7 (Vista's soon-to-be long-awaited successor). With that worthy package "due in 2010 or 2011", enterprises that choose to sit out Vista just have to wait another four or five years to upgrade. (And yes, I know the math is off.)


• It's not just corporate buyers who are thinking twice (or more) about Vista. Here's a PC World Business Center report that explains the reasons Coders Tell Why They're Avoiding Vista. Apparently, the new features in Vista really aren't compelling to software consumers, and with so many users hesitating over the upgrade, there's not much point to building Vista-only apps (see above).


• Here's a nice little summary about Microsoft's responses to the Vista blahs, from ArsTechnica: Microsoft: "There is no need to wait for Windows 7". From the article: "Microsoft's argument focuses on the fact that Windows 7 will be much closer to Vista than Vista is to XP, and therefore it makes sense for businesses to ease up the transition process for themselves by moving to Vista first." What? Go through the trouble of a dubious, disruptive and expensive upgrade now, so you can repeat the process in just a couple of years? And those total cost of ownership numbers seem kind of iffy to me, too, especially since they don't seem to include the cost of the upgrade itself.

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June 6, 2008

Microsoft Open Source not so open?

One of Microsoft's tried and true competitive strategies is to "extend and embrace" the competition. With open source, this has taken the form of creating Shared Source Licenses. Two of them, the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) have even been approved as OSI compliant by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

In theory, software released under either of those licenses is as "free" (in the open source sense) as Linux, Firefox, or any other open source software. Meaning that you could look over the source code any time you liked, for example.

That's the theory.

In practice, apparently, it's not so clear, at least in the case of the Sandcastle project. Sandcastle is a documentation compiler for Managed Class Libraries, hosted at Microsoft's open source project hosting web site, CodePlex. You might wonder, What are the requirements for hosting a project on CodePlex? #1: choose a license (per the FAQ link, the implication is you need to choose an open source license), and #3: there must be source code.

Sandcastle, ostensibly released under the Ms-PL, doesn't come with source. Yet. The story came to my attention via Reddit, here. The big questions seem to be whether an OSI-approved license can be used to release software without source code--because the Ms-PL seems to somehow not refer to source code, while still supposedly being an open source license!

Stay tuned for more about this; there will probably be more links to meta-websites where open source issues are discussed, as well as responses from various other sources. I'll have more to say/write about this--let me know what you think!

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June 2, 2008

New category: Microsoft Follies

I'm a Microsoft-watcher, and by "Microsoft-watcher" I mean I like to watch for unflattering news and other stories about Microsoft. This year it's been like shooting fish in a barrel; my favorites are those headlines that just stand on their own--the links I don't have to follow to get the gist of the stories.

Like these:

• Windows is 'collapsing,' Gartner analysts warn. From Computerworld's coverage of a Gartner-sponsored conference this April. From the article: "...analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts." Tsk, tsk.


• Here's a review of Vista, from Infoworld: Fat, fatter, fattest: Microsoft's kings of bloat. The article sub-title gives the bad news: "Our tests show that Windows Vista and Office 2007 not only smash Redmond's previous records for weight gain, but given the same hardware diet, run at less than half the speed of generation XP". Ouch.


• With the big splash the Asus Eee PC made in its Linux versions, it should surprise no one that Microsoft is putting pressure on hardware manufacturers to combat Linux with big discounts on Microsoft products (rather than, say, making a better product). From PC World: Microsoft to Limit Capabilities of Cheap Laptops. Play nice with Microsoft for up to a $10 discount on the Windows license, per machine (current prices: "...US$26 for Windows XP Home Edition for ULPCs sold in emerging markets such as China and India, and $32 for those sold in developed markets..."). With hardware makers' already razor-thin profit margins, $10 per machine is a big deal. No wonder Asus went along with it.

Stay tuned for more, as they come in. And they will keep coming, I'm sure!

Oh, and let me know if you see any good ones that I've missed.

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