Another Solaris 10 disappointment

You might have heard that Sun Microsystems claims that Solaris is the greatest operating system ever (especially relative to Linux), but it also has caused its share of disappointments.

Not only is Solaris not true open source (yes, the CDDL licence is approved by OSI, but that's how far I would say this goes). And now it turns out that she smokes too. What a turn off!

Next thing you'll find vodka bottles hidden behind the software containers and inside the registry.

Cebit in pictures: Monday's hangover

During the weekend CeBIT traditionally gets taken over by consumers and end users, hunting for free T-Shirts, pens and bouncy balls. It's great marketing, but most exhibitors come to CeBIT to do business – and for that you need enterprise users, IT managers and resellers. So today (Monday) the show went back to business…

Right?

Wrong.

Not over at the Siemens Mobile booth, where Ronaldo made an appearance and caused a major (foot-) trafficjam.

Surrounded by small army of bodyguards, a lucky few received an signed football shirt from the Real Madrid player.

I'm not claiming this photo is so great, but unless this lady is holding something similar to Samsung's new 7 megapixel phonecam, you know this picture is going to turn out horribly.

Comdex uses CeBIT to test the waters for a resurfacing

Representatives from MediaLive, the organisation that used to throw the famed (but now defunct) Comdex trade show in Las Vegas in November, are recruiting exhibitors here at CeBIT in Hannover to show up at a new Comdex.

The new show won't be called Comdex however, your Silicon Valley Sleuth found out. The name has too suffered too much damage, the exhibitors were told.

As Las Vegas is the epitome of America's consumerism, Comdex became the symbol of the internet hype and the IT industry's tendency to over-promise and under-deliver. At its peak the show attracted 200,000 visitors. The last time the event took place in 2003 it attracted a mere 40,000 delegates. By then Comdex' parent company Key3Media was forced into bankruptcy, from which it emerged under the MediaLive brand.

The 2004 edition of Comdex was canned, but MediaLive talked about a "postponement", vowing that the show would come back. The company now has decided that there is nothing to "postpone". Seems that all that will be left of the old Comdex is the mailing list and some fade photographs next to the coffee maker in MediaLive's coffee maker.

Sleuthing for the bigger picture

Is this year's CeBIT all about mobile gadgets? Or maybe security took centre stage? If you read some of the news reports out there, either story could be true. But I could just as easily charge that the trade show is about HD TV, flat panel displays or the surge of Egypt as an outsourcing partner.

With the trade fair taking up 27 exhibit halls, the only constant factor at CeBIT is that it's big and that everybody and their grandmother are here. The only constant factor here in Germany is that the weather is awful across every 27 of those halls. Anyone who tries to convince you something else is going on is flat out lying.

Disgruntled IBM workers take it to CeBIT's streets

As CeBIT got to its busiest days around the weekend, IBM workers treated visitors to a different kind of demonstration than the tech demos on the showfloor. On Saturday protesters gathered at the event's north gate to protest against job cuts in two of Big Blue's customer support centres Hannover and Schweinfurt in the southern part of Germany.

Around 500 jobs will be outsourced to German companies as well as China and Hungary, one of the protesters told IDG News.

Another worker blamed a contract IBM won in 2002 with Deutsche Bank. Under the terms of the deal, IBM employed 900 of the bank's IT staff. The company doesn't have enough work for all of them but contractually isn't allowed to fire any the Deutsche Bank employees.

Cebit in pictures: hottest items from the show floor

"You buy our border control system. We have Pakistan government as reference customer!"

If you're blond, it doesn't matter that you don't play the violin that well. Blonds DO have more fun.

Germans taking it too far with copy levy, says Acer

It must be great to be a copyright holder these days. You can whine and moan about how internet pirates are stealing your bread and butter. How the whole world is against you. And then you hold out your greedy hand and ask for a little help, similar to the way homeless people beg their way to their next score.

In Germany the copyright holders have come up with a great new way to further exploit their pain and misery: a new €54 levy on new computers.

But this time they are taking it too far, said Oliver Ahrens, general manager for Acer Germany at press event at CeBIT.

"It gets a never ending story. Next will be the DSL modem and then the mobile hard disk? It looks a bit like a cash collection game."

"Acer's impression is that the copyright association is trying to find out how far it can go."

All fairness is lost in the way that the copy-lobby is exploiting its misery. "You can not have fees on the media and on the scanner and the pc and the optical device. You have to decide."

I suddenly got a warm feeling for Acer inside.

The curse of Apple

Apple’s an odd company; it’s done a lot of things right and a whole heap of things wrong. One of its most endearing habits, although not to its shareholders, is coming down on the wrong side of technological standards.

Take connection technology. Apple enthusiasts may rave about FireWire, but then Apple enthusiasts would rave about the kitchen sink if Steve Jobs stuck a logo on the side and told them all the cool kids were buying one. Everyone else chose USB and it is now the most common connection standard in the world.

When the rest of the world’s computer manufacturers standardised on DVD+RW Apple was the only one to decide that DVD-RAM was the place to go.

And let’s not forget Jobs turning down a plea from a younger and nerdier Bill Gates to licence out the Apple OS to PC manufacturers in 1985 so they could write development tools for it. He refused and we are still burdened with Windows code and Microsoft stamped Jobs into a bloody puddle on market share.

Apple call it ‘Think Different’, the rest of us call it a nuisance.

But Apple may have picked a winner this time by joining the Blu-Ray Alliance. Blu-Ray may be the more expensive option compared to HD-DVD but its discs offer three times the capacity, the geek in me says it was a more elegant solution and judging from the names signing up so do a lot of people.

That being said, with its record, the curse of Apple could strike again.

Translation difficulties

CeBIT is a solidly German show, and this year more than ever you’ll hear less than half the conversations on the show floor in English. This is no bad thing – as technology goes more global we should expect that Anglo-Saxon will cease to be the de facto standard.

The Far Eastern countries are here in force, the Israeli’s have occupied a large space in the halls and Eastern Europe is also making a strong showing.

But the language difficulties in press conferences have lead to some comic misunderstandings. Somehow I doubt the president of a $10bn corporation really wanted to ask the assembled journalists “for your continuous love now and in the future.”

Putting the renaissance in its place

You get a lot of hot air at CeBIT; enough to float Richard Branson’s next ballooning effort. We’ve heard a lot of overblown rubbish in the show but the classic so far has to be the president of Samsung’s little offering.

He was talking about the convergence of technology on mobile phones and predicted that this would lead to a new social and economic revolution comparable to the renaissance in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages.

Now call me a cynic but this analogy falls down faster than a journalist at closing time. Having a camera and media player on a phone isn’t going to lead to a flowering of rationalism and scientific method any time soon.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe there are a million proto-Galileo’s out there waiting for a fast wireless connection and a copy of Britney Spears’ ‘Toxic’ (the show’s favourite ringtone it seems) before wowing the world but I doubt it.