Even in “retirement” I’d add Matthew Szulik who is such a beacon for many of us. I’d also add Eben Moglen because it is his legal vigilance that clears the way for open source to flourish as a business. Ditto for Mark Radcliffe who fuels the open-source startup pool with legal advice. Lonn Johnston at PageOne PR who gets their stories told. Glyn Moody and Matt Aslett for blogging them so expertly? I’d even include Richard Stallman because I can’t think of a more ardent capitalist. Seriously. The GPL is a software capitalist’s best friend.

“Ashamed” because I have such profound respect for Marten Mickos, Larry Augustin, Jonathan Schwartz, Stephen O’Grady and the Redmonk team, etc. that I think the LinuxWorld team must have made a mistake. Regardless, it is what it is. I would have had a slightly different list, but unreasonable minds can disagree.

Or what about Peter Fenton, David Skok, Kevin Harvey, Robin Vasan, and others who fund open source? Or other open-source CEOs who build viable businesses (Dave Rosenberg at MuleSource; John Powell at Alfresco; Javier Soltero at Hyperic; etc.)?

LinuxWorld has just named its top open source business leaders for 2008. I’m a little ashamed to acknowledge that I’m on the list.

To live up to that billing, I think we’d also need a few more:

Without argument the economic effects of open source are likely to reach well beyond the cash paid for products and services. As the industry grows there are a select group of business leaders that are making the industry what it is today and will be responsible for the direction and success of the industry going forward.

OK. OK. I guess any list is going to be imperfect and a list that includes everyone is…Google. I’m just proud to be named with such great leaders. We have a revolution to finish. Better get back to work.

Give me a break!

Let’s hope he’s playing cute. In the meantime, the hired help in Washington do read their mail, so here’s a great opportunity to e-mail and Twitter them to death until they get the message. For once, government bureaucrats have come up with a good idea–one which is long overdue–and here’s to hoping they don’t live down to expectations and screw it up.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a $267 million loan to a Denver, Colo.-based company called Open Range. The idea: build out broadband service for 518 rural communities in 17 states

The loan represents one of the federal government’s biggest ever public-private investments in broadband service. Considering Uncle Sam’s miserly approach, to date, that’s not saying much. But here’s what caught my eye: Those without service will have access to broadband and other technologies for the first time in their lives.

Andrew F. Haughwout of the Brookings Institution has a interesting piece analyzing the track record of public investments over the years. What you’ll find is that the estimates are all over the map so people will pick the expert closest to their political persuasion.

Something more. The Gordon Gekko types may demur but the fine print in the social contract I subscribe to says society ought to intervene when fate throws folks a curve ball. We can save the philosophical shouting match for another day. In the end, there’s no convincing rationale for leaving folks stranded as second-class digizens.

“.. research on the effects of infrastructure investment on firms’ and households’ location decisions tends to find that the benefits of new investments are localized. They are highest near where the investments are placed. This finding makes sense, particularly for public works like playgrounds, parks, or public buildings: the farther someone has to travel to use the facility, the less its net value.”

Makes sense to me. You lay a foundation in the right way and the government ultimately reaps benefits in the coin of increasing annual GDP. I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but we’ve passed the point where the Internet has attained quasi-utility status. Think how different your own lives would be without it. Or how governments and private companies near you would function if they were shut off from the grid.

Unfortunately, there’s still no consensus about the impact of public capital investment to expand broadband’s reach. What it will take is a champion, someone to bulldoze the idea through the government. Something like the mid-1950s push by President Eisenhower and Congress to create the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

They must be kidding, right? Over the years, the agency has invested billions of dollars on all sorts of infrastructure projects deemed vital to the public, such as water and waste pipes or electrification. That it’s taken so long for broadband to win similar consideration is stunning.

The ads will appear in the
Xbox 360 version of the game in 10 states, most of them hotly contested: Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Colorado, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

The game in question is called Burnout Paradise, which was released in January for the
PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. It features an open-world design that gives players the flexibility to explore (well, race through) the virtual landscape of Paradise City.

Ads for Democratic politician Barack Obama are appearing in an Electronic Arts high-speed racing game. This appears to be the first time that a presidential candidate has bought in-game advertising.

Update Wednesday, 10:45 a.m. PDT:
National Public Radio reports that the ads, which target men between 18 and 34 years of age, are running in a total of 18 video game titles from EA. Those titles also include the popular and timely Madden NFL 09 football game, along with games targeting Nascar, NBA, NHL, and skateboarding fans, the the AP says. The company would not say how much it is charging for the ads.

Being safe while you surf the Web is extremely important, yet safe surfing sometimes seems like an oxymoron. For users of the
Firefox browser, downloading security extensions can help increase your level of protection from worms, hackers, phishers, and the like.

Web of Trust Web of Trust tells you about risky Web sites that deliver malware or send spam before you’re affected. When you surf to a site, Web of Trust displays a colored icon giving you its rating. Green means it’s safe. Yellow means you should proceed with caution. And red means you should avoid the site. Those icons are displayed next to search results or as an overlay on a site that is considered dangerous. It’s an important tool to have, if you want to be safe online.

1. NoScript

Password Hasher If you’re concerned that your passwords aren’t as strong as they should be, Password Hasher is the tool for you. After you install it and create a master password for the service, it will automatically generate strong passwords for the sites you specify. You can pick how strong you want the password to be (light to heavy), and Password Hasher will do the rest. It’s a great tool for important sites.

BlockSite BlockSite gives you the option of blocking a Web site that you deem unsafe or unsuitable for the family. The extension even disables all links to the sites you might find in search results. When you access the extension’s menu, you need only to add the site’s URL to the blacklist. You won’t be able to access the site, unless you remove it from that list.

I should note that even with these extensions installed, you won’t be perfectly safe. Visit sites only of trusted sources, and don’t download unknown files.

The top 3

Safer browsing ahead

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET)

Ghostery Ghostery gives you alerts whenever a Web site is “watching” you. When you have the extension on, it constantly analyzes the site to determine if it’s running hidden scripts that track your behavior. If it does, it will alert you to it. You can then decide to leave the site or stay.

FormFox You think you’re on a familiar site while filling out an online form, but you’re nervous about whether the trusted source will actually receive it. That’s where FormFox comes in. The add-on gives you the exact URL destination of information you’re submitting to a site. So when you input your name, address, and other information, you can mouse over the Submit button and search boxes to find out exactly to where you’re directing the information. You might be surprised to see where your data is going.

BetterPrivacy BetterPrivacy protects against long-term tracking cookies that can’t be deleted. The extension makes you aware of those objects and deletes them for you. You can then sift through those cookies and selectively decide which you want to delete. It’s a simple but effective tool.

NoScript NoScript is a handy tool that permits JavaScript or Java to run solely on trusted sites. It helps prevent cross-site scripting attacks and clickjacking. It sits in the status bar, giving you the option to allow or block JavaScript on the site you’re browsing. It’s a great tool.

Dr. Web Anti-virus Dr. Web Anti-virus enables you to verify that any file you’re downloading, or any page you’re browsing, isn’t installing malware onto your computer. Once you right click on a link or file path, you’ll find the Dr. Web Anti-virus option in the menu. Click it, and the path will be scanned to determine if there is any malware being added to your computer.

Locationbar Phishing scams are a real concern for Web surfers. Locationbar helps solve that problem. The extension decodes hidden URLs and displays where a particular link would redirect you to. You can even click on different sections of the URL, if you want to go back to the site’s home page or go to the site you intended on visiting before you clicked on a phishing path. It’s a useful extension.

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET)

Web of Trust lets you know when a site is scary.

Locationbar lets you see where you're really going.

BlockSite lets you block sites you don't like.

If you want to be safe, installing these extensions is a good start:

3. Locationbar

2. Web of Trust

(Credit:
Don Reisinger/CNET)

Now Sun has rolled out its promised dual-socket version of the UltraSparc T2–aka "Victoria Falls" or the UltraSparc T2 Plus–in 1U (Sun Sparc Enterprise T5140) and 2U (T5240) server flavors. In essence, it replaces the two on-chip 10-gigabit Ethernet ports with four coherence channels that tie together two UltraSparc T2 Plus chips into a single SMP system. So you get twice as many cores and threads, and about twice the processing power. Sun has also tweaked other server capacities a bit higher. For example, the 2U box now supports up to 128Gb of FB-DIMM memory (using 32 DIMMs and a new memory riser card) and up to 16 disk drives.

The only notable tradeoff is that the T2 Plus systems move networking from the chip to the board, "slightly lowering" (in Sun’s words) networking performance. Networking should otherwise work identically; this includes the virtualization-savvy packet classification and routing that falls under the overall "Project Crossbow" architecture. All things considered, this is a reasonable tradeoff for what has become a more general-purpose system.

For utility applications and network-facing systems, much of the IT universe has long since adopted distributed x86 servers as their platforms of choice–especially as you move out of mission-critical datacenter backends. That’s the big challenge faced by Sun with the Niagara line (and indeed anyone selling anything other than scale-out x86). But these are solid systems that can handle big loads with aplomb.

The big thing that the new servers bring is, not surprisingly, performance. While not all workloads scale with core count, those that these servers target mostly do. After all, if an application doesn’t do well in a multithreaded environment, it’s not a very good candidate for Sun’s CMT line in general. And Sun has released a nice passel of benchmark results to back up its performance, price/performance, and performance per watt claims. Interpreting benchmark claims in as apples-to-apples a manner as possible is always a tricky undertaking (and it’s not like vendors make the task any easier), but Sun’s overall numbers look strong. For example, the T5240 outperforms a quad-socket Xeon system on a two-tier SAP Standard Application SD benchmark, and turns in a SPECjbb result over 2x another 4-socket x86 system. While one can always quibble with individual comparisons (and we frequently do), the overall picture is an impressive one.

commentary

Niagara 2 (formally the UltraSparc T2) was a big step forward for Sun Microsystems’ chip multithreading (CMT) efforts. It’s not that there was anything really wrong with its Niagara 1 predecessor, but 90-nanometer process technology imposed some fairly severe restrictions on what could be crammed into each of the eight cores. As a result, Niagara 1 was well-suited for a relatively narrow range of network-facing workloads. Niagara 2, by contrast, was able to leverage 65nm process technology to spread its wings considerably–which it did by significantly beefing up the threading, floating point, and other capabilities of the individual cores, in addition to adding on-chip I/O. (Our full report: Niagara 2: More Heft in the Weft.)

Basically, with this patch you get most of the new features expected with Wrath except for the new zones, quests, dungeons, battlegrounds, the new Death Knight class, and the ability to level to 80. We’ll still have to wait another month for that, but with all the new talents and achievements, at least the wait will be an interesting one.

Of course, about an hour into playing last night (after waiting more than two hours for the patch to download), my server came down for a not-too-surprising emergency maintenance, ending my night prematurely.

New animations for all three Warlock drain spells (in addition to many other other new animations)
Noncombat pets and mounts no longer taking up space in bags
Battleground tokens and Badges of Justice no longer taking up space in bags
The new currency tab

In addition to these major changes are many, many small ones. Some of my favorites are:

New talents and spells for existing classes (all talent points have been refunded!)
The implementation of barber shops for players
Two new arenas featuring more dynamic terrain than previous arenas
Guild calendar
The Hunter pet skill revamp
A new profession: inscription
The new achievement system
Spellpower consolidation

If you’re excited about the next World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, then you’ve probably already downloaded the latest WoW patch–3.0.2, released Tuesday. If for some reason you haven’t done so, then I implore you to, as the game sees many positive changes with this latest update.

So after speccing my Warlock as close to SL/SL as I could, I headed into Battlegrounds for some PVP action. I was not prepared for the bloodbath that ensued. Every class seems to be doing more damage and as a result, clothies like Warlocks, Priests, and Mages have never been easier to kill.

Retribution-specced Paladins are the ones to blame here for the most part. My newly 70 Warlock has about 180 resilience and is constantly getting two-shotted by these pricks. They (and to a lesser extent Arms Warriors) are like walking Cuisinarts. Luckily, they’ll be hit with the nerf bat soon enough. (end nerdtalk)

OK, this next paragraph will get fairly hard-core and nerdy. if you’re interested, have your WoW friends translate for you. You’ve been warned.

Three of my team vs. one Paladin and she still managed to slice through us like a hot knife through butter. Bring on the nerf bat.

The World of Warcraft patch 3.0.2: Echoes of Doom brings a number of changes and new features. Among them are:

Regulators in Germany slapped Microsoft’s local subsidiary with a fine of 9 million euros ($11.8 million) for improperly influencing pricing of Office during a retail promotion.

Russia recently announced that it was considering adding Microsoft to a list of companies with high market share that might be subject to additional scrutiny under that country’s antitrust laws, while the European Union has also issued a preliminary finding that the inclusion of a browser within Windows violates antitrust laws.

The agency said that Microsoft unduly influenced pricing of Office Home and Student 2007 at a particular retailer as part of a fall 2008 promotion with office supply stores, which included financial support from Microsoft.

The German agency said that Microsoft has “accepted the fine.”

“Even before the launch of the advertising campaign in mid-October 2008, employees of Microsoft and the retailer in question had agreed on at least two occasions on the resale price of the software package,” the German regulator said. “Not every contact between supplier and retailer regarding resale prices constitutes an illegal concerted practice within the meaning of Section 1 ARC. However, this must not lead to a form of coordination where the supplier actively tries to coordinate the pricing activities of the retailer and thus retailer and supplier agree on future actions of the retailer. In the present case, this boundary has been crossed.”

“We respect German competition law and are committed to running our business in full compliance with all German laws and regulations,” Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said in a statement. “We will use this case as an opportunity to review our internal commercial processes and ensure that we are in full compliance with German law.”

With the option of sending a pretty, well-designed electronic invitation now out there, they become more of a viable alternative for organizers of higher-end events who happen to be conscious of environmental impact, cost, or efficiency. “Not having to use paper is huge when you’re trying to be eco-conscious,” Celia Chen said. “It’s better for the environment, it’s cheaper if not free, and you’re collecting the majority of your RSVPs in a place where there’s no human error. People either hit ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘maybe,’ and it’ll download into a list.”

“I would’ve been hard-pressed to come up with an example where (electronic wedding invitations) would be acceptable except when real life intervenes,” he added.

“If you really know your guests and you really know it’s a preference for them, I think that’s great,” Lowe said. “Absolutely times are changing, and what is appropriate changes.”

But people are going digital, and Chen said that recipients have grown acclimated to it, especially as the younger generation grows up. “I think it’s generational,” she said. “People always wanted to speak to the hostess when they made a reservation at a restaurant. Now they just use OpenTable.” Indeed, a 25-year-old getting married in 2008 likely had an e-mail address before he or she had a driver’s license. Teenagers celebrating bar mitzvahs and Sweet 16s can’t remember a time when the Internet wasn’t everywhere.

But Lowe acknowledged that for efficiency’s sake, as well as to fit the culture of the digital age, sometimes there are reasons to try and bridge the gap. He suggested that for events like weddings and bar mitzvahs, organizers could send out an electronic “save-the-date” in advance that would allow guests to opt out of a paper invitation if they preferred the digital route.

Electronic wedding invitations aren’t exactly Adam Lowe’s cup of tea.

No way, that’s tacky
Sure, it’s eco-conscious and convenient
Only in an unexpected pinch

But “real life” gets in the way in more ways than we think, and people like Lowe may be in the minority soon. The eco-consciousness movement is encouraging us to cut down on unnecessary paper use, and tough economic conditions compel us to be thrifty. And when technology is able to cut down on hours of guest-list organization, the digital route is an obvious one–especially for a generation of young adults that has always used Google search in lieu of the Yellow Pages.

Manners expert Lowe still isn’t convinced, saying that the chance to be economical isn’t enough to sway him. “There are always ways to do (paper invitations) in a cost-effective way,” he said. “You can get paper, print them yourself, hand-write them.” As for being environmentally friendly, “(that) point is actually quite well-taken because it does create quite a lot of paper waste. What might be interesting is to see if there are people or companies that come up with very low-impact ways of generating invitations that are either easily recyclable or directly reusable.”

But if you look at the ultimate gauge of formal events–weddings–things are certainly changing in favor of the digital. “A large, not quite a quarter yet, but about 20 percent of our events are actually wedding-related,” Lorien Gabel said, saying that plenty of bachelor parties and bridal showers show up on Pingg.

As host of the popular Modern Manners Guy podcast, Lowe attempts to marry–pun completely intended–the culture of traditional etiquette with a digital world that increasingly threatens to subvert its longstanding norms. And he admits up front that he thinks using the likes of Evite and MyPunchbowl for formal occasions is “a terrible idea” for the most part; except when difficult circumstances demand it, as was the case when he received a digital wedding invitation recently. There was an illness in the groom’s family, and the date of the wedding had to be pushed up to the point where there was no longer a wide enough time frame to order formal paper invitations. “(They) changed to Evite for expedience’s sake,” Lowe explained.

One of the biggest drawbacks to electronic invitations for an event planning veteran like Chen was that they were neither attractive nor customizable enough for upscale or formal events. Facebook invitations cannot be modified beyond the social network’s blue-and-white design, and Evite still pretty much relies on clip art. Though Evite still owns the lion’s share of the digital invitation market, with stats from Hitwise showing that its traffic far eclipses that of its smaller rivals combined, alternatives like MyPunchbowl, Renkoo, Centerd, and Socializr offer different looks and feels for different kinds of events and hosts.

“In the past, I never would have thought to use an electronic invitation, because I don’t know if it was as much of a formality as it was about brand awareness and being so protective over how the brand was portrayed,” said Celia Chen, a former luxury-brand event planner who now writes the blog Notes on a Party. “Image was so important: the paper stock, the font. We would have invitation designers, and we’d go through multiple edits.”

News.com Poll E-etiquette for weddings
Would you consider sending out electronic wedding invitations?

Chen has since started using Pingg, an invitation start-up geared toward a more discerning crowd. “There was a whole segment of event types that people just did not want to use electronic invitations for,” Pingg co-founder Lorien Gabel said of his rationale behind creating the company, which gives the option for hosts to accompany their digital invites with print versions for all or some of the guests. “I’d like to believe that because of how we do things you also get the aesthetic aspect of it, you don’t have to sacrifice it.”

Online invitation services like the InterActiveCorp-owned Evite, the Events application on Facebook, as well as smaller start-ups like Socializr and MyPunchbowl, are nothing new. They’ve more or less taken over the RSVP duties for backyard barbecues, Halloween parties, birthdays, and even holiday cocktail soirees. Paper invitations still reign at the upper echelon: weddings and high-end corporate events, as well as other formal occasions like bar mitzvahs, proms, and charity fundraisers. But at this point, there are only a few tenuous standards of etiquette that are keeping this relic of the analog age alive and kicking.

“At New York Fashion Week, you’ve got 12 days of shows and events and it’s highly, highly competitive,” Chen said. “If you don’t send out a paper invitation, (it doesn’t work). There’s something about it landing on someone’s desk and having it be tactile.”

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Proponents of digital invitations admit that there are lingering reasons, beyond etiquette, that sometimes compel hosts to stick to paper invitations. Chen said that the occasional client would raise the question that e-mail invites might not make it past a spam filter, and added that others were concerned about how much of a splash an e-mail could possibly make in an age of clogged Outlook inboxes.

Dilger did not respond to multiple e-mail requests for comment, but unless Apple’s security fell down on the job, he must have been a shareholder to enter the auditorium. The thing is, he does not disclose that he is an Apple shareholder anywhere on his site, which is notoriously pro-Apple. I’ve been on the receiving end of one of Dilger’s blasts on at least one occasion.

Daniel Eran Dilger was the first person to approach the microphone following the close of official business during the Apple meeting, where a nonbinding proposal to give shareholders more input into executive pay was approved. He identified himself by name, but failed to note that he is the author of Roughly Drafted, an Apple blog that covers the company and the media who follow it very extensively. He proceeded to ask Jobs perhaps a half dozen questions, returning to wait in line for the microphone several times.

Shareholders, of course, are free to enter the main auditorium and pose questions of Jobs and other executives. At the meeting, shareholders were required to register in one line, while press members who didn’t hold shares were directed to a different sign-in sheet, and escorted to the overflow room.

Roughly Drafted runs ads on the site, and Dilger says he had 4.3 million page views over the first two quarters of 2007. He has posted extensive coverage of Apple’s iPhone event this week, although nothing from the six or so questions he asked of Jobs on Tuesday.

I’m fully aware it’s a brave new world out there in the journalism industry, but holding stock in a company you cover is still a big no-no in many quarters. The standard among some of the other major bloggers seems to be disclosure, disclosure, disclosure: make readers aware of any potential conflicts of interest you may have and let them decide whether those conflicts are influencing what you write. It seems to me if you hold stock in a company that you passionately defend against any perceived attacks, and make money doing so, perhaps you should disclose that defense might just be influenced by your financial portfolio.

Apple, like many companies, does not allow the press nonshareholders to ask direct questions of company executives during shareholder meetings. Some companies don’t even allow the press into the building, but Apple admits the press into an overflow room near its main Town Hall auditorium as observers.

A wide range of questioners, from grandparents to children, stepped up to the microphone to ask questions of Apple CEO Steve Jobs during Tuesday’s shareholder meeting. They included a prolific Apple blogger who, taking advantage of his apparent status as a shareholder, asked repeated questions of Jobs.

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Correction 11:45 a.m. PST: This blog initially misstated the day of the week Apple held its shareholder meeting. It was Tuesday. Updated at 12:45pm with link to Roughly Drafted.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, flanked by Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller, takes questions at Thursday’s iPhone event in Cupertino.

On the other hand, Google is just trickling out its platform-as-a-service with support for Python. Support for other languages will follow. Whether Google would support other databases in its cloud remains to be seen.

On top of that, you will be using the “Webapp framework” that Google built that makes writing Python applications really nice–but good luck porting that to another language or putting it on a machine of your own.

(Credit:
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet) Garett Rogers looks at some of the pros and cons of entrusting our applications to Google’s cloud. The major issue he cites is getting deeply tied into Google’s infrastructure:

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon’s approach to providing infrastructure services to Google’s. He found that Amazon’s set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google’s App Engine.

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.