Telecom Amnesty

I'm so disappointed, maybe even a little scared.

Does the law mean nothing? Never mind the actual effectiveness of domestic spying -- that's a different debate.

If this was so important, why wasn't it made legal in the first place? Oh wait... it was. There was a system in place that provided the tools and (meager) oversight that allowed domestic wiretapping. There were even provisions for emergency warrant-less spying for time-sensitive operations. They had all they needed.

So why do they need immunity? Well, they clearly overstepped the generous boundaries that the law provided.

Now that they have their immunity, they (the Telecoms and associated governmental agencies) need to fess up to the full extent of their illegal activities. The American People deserve to know, now that we've granted immunity to these commercial entities, exactly what illegal activities they have participated in and enabled.

Then we can let capitalism work.

VMWare in trouble?

News around the web says that x86 virtualization pioneer VMWare is in trouble. A shakeup in leadership and a significant drop in share value beg questions about the future of VMWare and what it might mean for the entire virtualization industry.

I've used VMWare since the early days. Not the early, early days, but for many years now and I have to say that it is, far and away, the best virtualization product available at the moment. That being said... it is way too expensive.

VMWare's position is that the core virtualization component has become commodity technology at this point and that the real market is in the supporting technologies like virtual machine movement, replication, automated management, backups, etc. etc. etc. And they're right.

Given that, why is that core virtualization component so expensive? It costs a couple thousand dollars just to get into the game. Even the "Workstation" version is nearly $200.

Yes, they do have some free products that are available. But these products seem to be second-tier or last-rev versions and as such, don't give a good impression of the performance and reliablility of the current crop of VMWare products. Also, they kind of suck. Virtual Server is bloated and a hog, much more than Sun's VirtualBox or other competitors.

I want a VMWare player that can run multiple instances and create virtual machines. I don't want the extra cruft. I'm not going to run this "in production". I just need an excellent virtualization solution that I can run on my laptop or workstation that can be used as a "lab" environment that can give me an inkling of what the big-boy version is capable of.

The focus of the virtualization market is on the "big iron" x86 stuff, running hundreds of VMs on clustered servers with SAN attached storage with fault tolerant this-and-that and bells and whistles. Cool. The money and plenty of room for innovation is definitely in that space.

But, VMWare, please don't forget about us down here at the other end. There is need for easy and lightweight virtualization at the "prosumer" and workstation level as well. I'd pay (a bit) for an easy, lightweight, virtualization solution. Right now VirtualBox has that space, even though it's not yet feature-complete.

You need mind-share as much as market-share. If these "low-end" competitors gather more mind-share due to their accessibility by balancing cost, features, and usability, it will be harder for you to transform their low-end market success into your high-end product sales.

Netflix reverses on profiles

I know I'm a bit behind in writing this bit of news, but since I complained so loudly in this blog, I need to follow up.

Netflix has listened to its customers and reversed its decision to dump profiles.

Thank you, Netflix.