Dice Holdings, the company that now owns Slashdot and runs specialty job boards, seems to have hit a rough patch. An article from earlier this month reports Dice Holdings is
trading down by 4.1% due to disappointing earnings. Yahoo's
stock charts don't make it look like the situation is too bad, but look to Dice's CEO for guidance and you'll be surprised. Turns out Scott Melland is feeling bearish and
recently sold over $500,000 in Dice stock. Here is the
transcript of the earnings call, in which they unleash the bad news about Dice earnings.
Personally, I recommend they plaster Slashdot with
more obnoxious banner ads .
Call it a non-issue, bad journalism, or a hasty backtrack, but for 24 hours, this was a big deal.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that RedHat would not be supporting competing companies products on its OpenStack cloud software :
In its quest to sell OpenStack, Red Hat has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The company's support, which includes providing bug fixes and helping customers if they run into technical problems, is a key reason people use Red Hat rather than free versions of Linux.
Well, queue up the angry competitors with torches and pitchforks. The CEO of Mirantis, whom RedHat seems to have deemed a competitor, was just one of the many outspoken critics.
MegaOm took advantage of the furor to ask, "Is RedHat the new Oracle?" And then, suddenly it was over, as RedHat clarified
its cloud offerings would remain open and available for customers to run whatever software they preferred .
Hasty turn-around? A chagrined CEO back-pedaling as a result of sharply more negative press than he'd anticipated? Or just a Wall Street Journalist getting the story wrong. And anyway,
is RedHat the next Oracle?
In the words of the Register, "see if this sounds familiar."
Not good times for the Dogecoin wallet provider DogeVault. This isn't news hot-off-the-press:
Dogevault went offline on May 13th .
They are hoping their backups work as they attempt to restore service. But who cares? Pundits are already singing their
dirge for Dogecoin , or calling it
doomed to failure .
So: what's next? Dogecoin was a fluke, right? A mirthful riff on the success of Bitcoin, that by luck or happenstance wound up becoming temporarily worth something? If you believe cryptocurrencies are the future, what's the plan, if hacks and wallet thefts become the almost unstoppable future? Or if you believe cryptocurrencies are a passing nerd fad, what comes next?
Every day tech news is rife with stories about the latest and greatest, but some people don't
want the latest and greatest; they want their old faves. The blogosphere is buzzing this week with the
revelation that
George R.R. Martin , the much-admired author of the
A Game of Thrones and more, actually does his writing on a DOS machine running the old, 1970s word processor,
WordStar .
Should that matter?
I don't think so . Not one bit. In fact, WordStar and DOS have a couple of advantages over more modern hardware and software: probably no Internet connection, no icons, nothing buzzing or beeping or flashing at you. In sum, the perfect environment for focusing on your writing. Judging by the success of GRRM's books, it's working!
What old software do you use? Which old technologies do you hang onto even as the rest of the world chases the newest update?
Here's some good news for everyone except Microsoft:
nine out of ten of the most reliable hosting providers in April 2014 use Linux or FreeBSD as their hosting platform. Microsoft only got one of the ten slots, thanks to Netcetera, a provider specializing in WinServer 2012 hosting. Of the nine top sites, five use Linux and four use FreeBSD. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period. More detail on the measurement process and stats is available at
Netcraft .
If I were a despotic ruler, I'd have a fleet of computer-controlled flying death machines I could dispatch at a moment's notice to strike down my opponents. Well, I might not be a despot, but I can still have the flying machines. Check out Awesome Awesomeness, who
created his own (her own?) Quadracopter out of an Arduino board and less than $60 in components. A couple of the parts were created on a 3D printer.
All they're missing is the death-laser and, to build out the fleet, about a million more of them. Now I've just got to practice my
evil, madman laugh .
2014 just might be remembered as the
year of the Chromebook . It will be to me at least. I just bought one, and I'm not alone. So have a lot of other people. A whole lot. From the Register:
According to US market-watcher NPD, during the 11 months from January through November 2013, the platform's share of the computing device market had risen to 9.6 per cent from just 0.2 per cent in the same months of the previous year. By contrast, Apple's laptops accounted for a mere 1.8 per cent of the market in 2013, down from 2.6 per cent the year before. Windows-based laptops also declined, though they remain the biggest seller: their combined share fell from 42.9 per cent to 34.1 per cent. Do the sums, and that means Windows laptops took 75 per cent of the US notebook market, Chromebooks 21 per cent and Apple a measly four per cent. Some 6.6 million laptops were shipped through commercial channels, says NPD, of which just under 1.4 million were Chromebooks. Five Chromebooks were sold for every MacBook.
When first released in 2011, they failed to capture the market's attention, as the hardware remained somewhat limited and the software options weren't appealing, but time has been kind to Chromebooks. This year Google and Intel have
partnered to make sure some compelling new hardware was released, including the
ASUS Chromebox desktop , the
21.5" all-in-one by LG , and 20 other models by the likes of HP, ASUS, Acer, Samsung, and Lenovo. CNET is
hugely bullish on Chromebooks; so is
Richi Jennings over at Computerworld.
As for me, I consider myself a power user and I'm not a huge fan of Google's software ecosystem, but I like my new Chromebook. My HP14 is pretty nice hardware, it's running great, I find the user environment hugely useable, and hell - the price was awesome: under $300. It's hard to believe I paid something like $1600 for a PIII laptop and Win98 in 2000.
There's a great article over at Hackaday about
intelligent roadways .
The idea of a road is relatively simple - a durable path from point A to point B. Development of roadways usable for wheeled carriages has been perfected over the centuries. The Romans, for instance, used a base layer of crushed limestone that would let water flow out, preventing clay soil from turning into mud. Some Roman roads were topped with six sided capstones, also known as pavers, many of which still exist today. The invention of the horseless carriage necessitated roadways that could be used at high speeds. Tarmac, asphalt and concrete roads followed, and thus ends our short venture into the history of roads. Roadways simply haven't changed much since then. Sure, we've painted some lines on them, even etched grooves in some to prevent accidents, but the core technology of the road is the same as it was a hundred years ago. Until now.
Check out the design, built by
Solar Roadways (spoiler: they're
looking for funding ). With minor circuitry, these panels absorb solar energy by day, and stay illuminated at night. A mild current melts snow and keeps them ice-free. LEDs can provide the horizontal signage (cross walks, bike lanes, etc.) The possibilities start there. If I had one of these, I'd pave my driveway with them, with a bright, red "Go Away" at the end from 6PM to dawn.
This just in from the Register: If you're watching a "smart television" containing internet capability and camera/microphone,
your television is also watching you and can be coopted via malware to do all sorts of terrible things. Manufacturers seem to be blind to this, turning out lots of new models of internet-aware devices that risk being "smart" in all the wrong ways.
[Security experts] demonstrated exactly [the vulnerability] just down the road from the Infosec Europe conference, held in London. "Installing the bugging software requires physical access to the device, which is how we did it, or by installing a malicious app," said Felix Ingram, principal consultant at NCC Group. "Malicious apps could be downloaded from the manufacturer's app store. The TV does have the option for auto-updating, so releasing a legitimate app, then releasing a malicious update, is another attack vector."
Why bother buying a Smart TV though, when you can
much more simply make your own using a Raspberry Pi [video]? You control the hardware, you control the software, and for bonus points you don't have to rely on the manufacturer to provide you the occasional firmware update out of the goodness of their hearts.
oSC 14 , held April 24-28 in the lovely Mediterranean port town of
Dubrovnik, Croatia , has
come and gone . If you like
openSUSE , expect more of the same. Don't expect any radical changes upcoming for this steady-and-predictable distro!
The conference
focused on high level questions of packaging, approach, distro lifecycle management, and marketing. There were some interesting presentations on specific topics of interest as well, including [the following are all video links]:
The rest of the presentations are available
here [youtube], and conference photos are
here .
SUSE has been my go-to distro since 2001. I'm raising a glass to the openSUSE team and hoping for more green!