(I promise not to try to bring too many alerts to you, but this one seemed spot-on)
If Oracle buys MySQL as part of Sun, database customers will pay the bill.
In April 2009, Oracle announced that it had agreed to acquire Sun. Since Sun had acquired MySQL the previous year, this would mean that Oracle, the market leader for closed source databases, would get to own MySQL, the most popular open source database.
If Oracle acquired MySQL on that basis, it would have as much control over MySQL as money can possibly buy over an open source project. In fact, for most open source projects (such as Linux or Apache) there isn’t any comparable way for a competitor to buy even one tenth as much influence. But MySQL’s success has always depended on the company behind it that develops, sells and promotes it. That company (initially MySQL AB, then Sun) has always owned the important intellectual property rights (IPRs), most notably the trademark, copyright and (so far only for defensive purposes) patents. It has used the IPRs to produce income and has reinvested a large part of those revenues in development, getting not only bigger but also better with time.
If those IPRs fall into the hands of MySQL’s primary competitor, then MySQL immediately ceases to be an alternative to Oracle’s own high-priced products. So far, customers had the choice to use MySQL in new projects instead of Oracle’s products. Some large companies even migrated (switched) from Oracle to MySQL for existing software solutions. And every one could credibly threaten Oracle’s salespeople with using MySQL unless a major discount was granted. If Oracle owns MySQL, it will only laugh when customers try this. Getting rid of this problem is easily worth one billion dollars a year to Oracle, if not more.
Who is driving the petition and what are your motivations?
This petition is driven by Monty Program Ab, which was founded by the creator of MySQL, Michael “Monty” Widenius, and consists of many of the original core MySQL developers.
The short answer is that we want to ensure that MySQL can’t be killed by Oracle and we also want to ensure that MySQL is also in the future actively developed under an Open Source license in a way that meets the needs of all market segments.
A more detailed answer can be found in Monty’s blog that explains his motivations and intentions.
The following list are the Technet Plus Titles I was licensed for as of a few days ago. Just in case you were curious as to what titles were in there You can get into a year of this Microsoft program via
for a bit of a discount, vs. the normal $350, until the end of 2009. Cheers!
For the Betas, there is usually a single key issued (as a MAK, or Multiple Activation Key) that will allow up to ten installs. For Windows 7 Ultimate, for instance, you can generate up to ten individual serial numbers through your account, once you are logged in at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/securedownloads/default.aspx
There are also a number of files that have their key embedded in your media – no need to enter them, your install .iso is “pre-pidded” . . . there is just no convenient way to grep them, etc. so they are not listed below.
SAN FRANCISCO–Pushing several steps farther in the multicore direction, Intel on Wednesday demonstrated a fully programmable 48-core processor it thinks will pave the way for massive data computers powerful enough to do more of what humans can.
The cores themselves aren’t terribly powerful–more like lower-end Atom processors than Intel’s flagship Nehalem models, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said at a press event here. But collectively they pack a lot of power, he said, and Intel has ambitious goals in mind for the overall project.
“The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do,” Rattner said. “They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability.”
Intel is working with companies facing large-scale computing challenges that today require thousands of networked servers. That’s very much a here-and-now problem compared to the more sci-fi challenges of computer vision.
Intel’s idea with the SCC and its ilk, Rattner said: “Could you replace a rack full of equipment today with one or a number of high-core count processors like the SCC?”
Intel CTO Justin Rattner holds a wafer made of Intel’s 48-core experimental SCC chips. (Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
The chipmaker found only one flaw with the chip so far and has booted Windows and Linux on SCC systems. The company demonstrated computers using the processor running Microsoft’s Visual Studio on Windows and other tasks at the event.
No silver bullet for parallel programming
The Tera-scale project doesn’t fundamentally address one of the big challenges in today’s computing industry, though: getting multicore chips to run today’s computing jobs that are often designed to run as a single thread of instructions rather than independent tasks running in parallel. In days of yore, processor clock frequencies got steadily faster, letting single threads execute faster, but overheating issues led chip designers instead down the multicore path for trying to increase computing power.
“This isn’t a full solution,” Rattner said of the programming challenge. He said that from a programmer’s perspective, the SCC is similar in many ways to a server with 48 cores.
While the chip may not have any silver bullets for the parallel programming challenge, it does have the advantage of some compatibility with existing computer designs. It can run ordinary software for Intel chips, unlike the increasingly capable graphics chips touted by Intel rivals Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
“Our thrust is to maintain the compatibility and familiarity of the Intel architecture as we move to more and more performance,” Rattner said. “That’s why we could bring up Windows and Linux environments with relatively little effort.”
The system is different in some ways, though, notably in its lack of cache coherency–technology that keeps data stored in each core’s high-speed memory bank synchronized with the others on the chip. By contrast, Intel’s Larrabee processor, a many-core x86 chip under development for graphics acceleration, is a cache-coherent design that has a large amount of real estate devoted to caching data.
100 chips for research partners
Intel hopes to encourage academics and others to tackle programming challenges on the chip. To that end, Intel plans to share 100 SCC-based systems with various partners in industry and academia.
Microsoft is one such partner. “We’re very excited about this as a research vehicle,” said Jim Larus, director of cloud-computing futures at Microsoft Research.
One major feature of the SCC design is a high-speed “mesh” network that lets each of the 48 cores communicate with others or with the four linked memory controllers. The first-generation Tera-scale chip had such a network, but the second-generation mesh consumes only a third of the power and is accelerated with built-in hardware instructions for minimum communication delays, Rattner said.
That fast communication was designed in part as a response to what Intel industry partners desired, Rattner said. “They were looking for extremely low latency–not just core to core at the chip level, but interchip as well,” he said.
Each link on the chip can carry 64 gigabytes of data per second.
Better power management is one element of the new design. The chip cores can be switched on or off as the chip is running.
“It’s extremely clever, because it means the processor could be run in an adaptive mode. Processors could be turned on and off depending on the applications,” said Jon Peddie, an analyst with Jon Peddie Research.
Overall, the chip consumes between 25 and 125 watts, Rattner said. It’s built using a manufacturing process with 45-nanometer electronics features.
It consists of 24 dual-core modules linked together. A computer based on the chip can accommodate a maximum of 64GB of memory.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank.
I have any number of utilities I might want to use (memtest, partEd, various Linux utils, etc.) as well as system install images (Windows 7 x86 or x64, Ubuntu, etc.). Let’s not forget disaster recovery (Acronis restore, Truecrypt Boot CD, etc.)
Now you really can have your cake and eat it too. I’ve tested this so far only with FAT-32 partitions; it did not want to [easily] transfer itself to an NTFS formatted 16g usb drive.
Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you’re in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.
RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer introduced in the video on the right – a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it’s accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend…
The RepRap project became widely known after a large press coverage in March 2005, though the idea goes back to a paper on the web written by Adrian Bowyer on 2 February 2004.
RepRap Version I “Darwin” can be built by anyone now – see the Make your own RepRap link there or on the left, and for ways to get the bits and pieces you need, see the Obtaining Partslink. RepRap Version II “Mendel” will be released in a matter of days.
Wow, someone emailed me on this one from the Missouri dot Edu days. Seems like a long time ago; many of the listed folks are no longer at UMC.
Side note : I remember attending an IT meeting with Joe Heck (also departed) where a (former) top IT manager was yelling about a new feature for users, and was this going to be easy for everyone to use, etc. (specifically, NS roaming profiles) and I finally introduced myself as the fellow who’d implemented it. Yup, he didn’t even know my name until that point, the fellow responsible for “his new feature”.
Anyway, good archaeological dig for you here Things are moving forward a lot faster now. Xmarks is the only close competitor to the original NS roams, BTW. Cheers!
among others. Currently searching for a reasonable command line (linux) way to push files up to SkyDrive. If you got this tamed, don’t hesitate to send it along and of course I’ll credit you
Unless of course you want to remain an ‘anonymous coward’ <grin>
You can get into a year of this Microsoft program via
Intel’s 48-core Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) processor 
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. 
