ITS News

Open Group Unix 03 certification puts the upcoming OS X Leopard on a par with AIX and HP-UX. Is there any truth to the fearmongering about security? I learned last week that OS X Leopard has passed the Open Group’s certification suite for Unix 03, qualifying it to use the Unix trademark. Kudos to Kevin Van Vechten and the rest of the OS X engineering crew for pulling this off. It’s no easy feat. Leopard’s Unix certification, along with substantial advances in its administrative interface — including Remote Desktop, Mac client administration, standard services such as calendaring, Xsan, interoperability, and security — puts OS X in league with the three big iron Unixes, namely, AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX. OS X’s most notable missing puzzle pieces are its lack of support for virtualization and partitioning. An eight-way Xserve (not yet shipping), even one that’s primarily targeted at small businesses, should be able to be sliced into pieces for consolidation, isolation, and recoverability. But one step at a time. The Open Group has issued Apple a lovely certificate of compliance. I suggest that all Leopard users print it on fine-quality, high-rag paper, frame it, and hang it in their server rooms and… READ MORE

Efficiency has rocketed to the top in server purchasing criteria, but benchmarking has not left the launch pad I’ve been working on InfoWorld’s power and cooling benchmark suite (I call them “Greenmark,” but I haven’t officially cleared that name’s use) for several months. Why, you might wonder, haven’t you seen any published Greenmark results in InfoWorld? Check out the comments thread following Ted Samson’s Sustainable IT blog entry reporting Neal Nelson’s tests showing that AMD is markedly superior to Intel in server power efficiency. It’s remarkable how much emotion the commenters to Ted’s blog invest in their arguments against Neal Nelson’s findings. Some of these people skip technical objections and go straight after Nelson’s reputation, alleging that AMD had purchased the positive outcome. This seems an extreme reaction until you think about the impact that a headline like “AMD servers consume up to 44 percent less power than those based on Intel” can have. Energy-efficiency test reports will steer billions of dollars in IT spending and stock market investment over the next several years. One such headline this, run at an opportune time, can swing several points of market share over a period of several months, and if picked up… READ MORE

JavaScript and HTML aren’t enough to bridge the desktop/mobile divide It’s thrilling to imagine rich, responsive, attractive client applications that run identically on desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices, as well as over remote connections. Java promised us that. Then .Net. Neither really came through with the kind of transparency and interoperability that Sun and Microsoft had led us to expect. Now, it looks like we’ve given up on commercial interests closing the application portability gap. Web 2.0 is touted as the way of applications to come, and on the face of it, it’s all about standards. We don’t have to wait for Microsoft, Sun, Symbian, or anyone to do next-generation software for us. All we need is a browser. We’ll do it ourselves. I wish. A browser should be the perfect place to host an application. Standards such as HTML, DOM, CSS, JavaScript, JPG, WAV, PNG, XML, and MPEG are wired into every Web browser of note on every device that can possibly connect to the Internet. You should be able to take even a relatively demanding application — say, a unified messaging client — and run it on anything with a browser. But you can’t. Once you try to… READ MORE

I wish I could have peppered my iPhone review with phrases such as “at present,” “initially,” or “for the time being.” But Apple doesn’t work that way. If I could be confident that Apple would address the major shortcomings that I saw in iPhone, such as the absence of programmability and the lack of access to even a sandboxed portion of the device’s file system, I’d have given the device a thumbs-up for its platform potential alone. Instead, I had to evaluate iPhone as it is: for the technology, policies, and message that Apple and AT&T are selling today. With that in mind, I judged it to be no match for BlackBerry, Treo, Windows Mobile, and Symbian devices, all of which do what business needs; are programmable and expandable; can be purchased from multiple wireless operators (at discounts); come with data- and voice-only plans; and have replaceable batteries, as well as very nice media players. I’m glad that iPhone is waking so many people up to the potential of professional mobile devices. I urge people who are looking at iPhone to spend an equal amount of time ogling alternatives, because once you get past $200, it’s easy to find handsets… READ MORE

As I expected, you can pull the SIM card from an activated iPhone and place it in any phone you wish. However, all you’ll be able to do is make phone calls. Any Web or e-mail access you attempt with the other phone will be billed to you at $.01/kilobyte, or $10.24 per megabyte. Information Superhighway robbery. I tried attaching a generic AT&T data plan (”MEdia Net”) to the SIM. It seemed to work at first, but then AT&T’s automated daily sweep of subscriber records removed it. The company’s policy stipulates that if an iPhone Data Plan is active on an account, no other data plan is allowed. This is probably no big deal for anyone else, but it’s a show-stopper for me. I need to be able to swap that SIM between phones in order to do reviews. If I want to pay the extra $19.95/month for a non-iPhone data plan, AT&T ought to take my money, don’t you think?… READ MORE

Update: This page has a one-step downloadable tool for Mac users, and it includes the keys that make the directions in the following link easier for PC users to follow. The whole business in the PC technique about decompiling the .net assembly is to dig out encryption keys embedded in that code. The author of the original crack, Jon Johansen of DeCSS (the DVD copy protect crack) fame, didn’t want to make it too easy. You can now buy an iPhone and “unbrick” it (meaning, get past the globe and the activation nag) using a hack that’s not a simple process, and a PC is required, but it is laid out step by step. It comes down to this. You patch itunes.exe, set Apple’s authorization host to 127.0.0.1, and run a mini-server that acts like Apple’s activation server. There are many reports of success and lots of confusion. Once you’re unbricked, apparently you stay that way until the next major release. In other words, every time Apple issues a patch, it’s very likely that it will undo prior cracks. iPhone may become a brick again if it’s activated improperly. Ideally, Apple would let the unbricking crack stick. It gives… READ MORE

Scientists are reverse engineering the galaxy. So why is it illegal to reverse engineer a DVD player or the iPhone? Even the debate pitting creationism against evolution never raises the argument that the galaxy is a secret that ought not be explored. Both sides cite science that looks at our galaxy’s present, weigh recorded history against empirical data, and hypothesize about our origins. So how is it that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — an odious piece of lobbyist-written legislation if there ever was one — can make a crime of reverse engineering? The DMCA circumvents laws governing copyright, patent, property, and free speech by declaring unlawful the most essential right of all: The right to know. If you buy something, you have the right to hook it up backwards, to turn it into a piata, to shoot holes in it with a licensed .357 Magnum, or to plant it on a pike on your front lawn. But in America, your right to take it apart to figure out how it works is in the hands of corporate lawyers. Owning specialized tools for the purpose is okay - even disassemblers that turn software into rough source code or logic… READ MORE

In iPhone: Setting the record straight…, I said that the iPhone SIM should be removed by inserting a hooked paper clip into the hole at the top of the device and pulling. Commenters chimed in to say that the SIM is removed by pressing a paper clip into the hole. This works. There is a push-to-eject mechanism under the SIM tray, but the pressure required to engage it is considerable and the plastic tray is pretty weak. If you’re going to eject the card this way, I recommend using a heavy paper clip bent at a right angle for a solid grip, or use a very thin-shafted screwdriver or a plastic “tweaker.” Hold iPhone in your hand, not between your knees. If iPhone tips over while you’re mashing down to eject the SIM, you’ll destroy the tray…. READ MORE

Ars Technica points to an unconfirmed report in Germany’s Rheinische Post (RP) that Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Mobile won out over rival Vodafone for the right to sell iPhone in Germany. Apparently the rest of Europe is still in play. This makes me wonder which network international travelers with T-Mobile iPhones will see when they power up their iPhones in the United States. T-Mobile has had a roaming agreement with Cingular. I don’t know if that’s still the case, because the area in which my T-Mobile phones once switched to Cingular — San Francisco — now registers T-Mobile as the carrier. I can’t imagine AT&T sitting still for any iPhone connecting to anything but its network in the States. But if each region really is subject to a bidding war, perhaps AT&T doesn’t have a say in who gets to sell iPhone overseas. I do know that Europeans will not sit still for having their phones go dead outside their service area. One portion of the Rheinische Post piece that I did not trouble to translate also decried the fact that Germans won’t get their choice of networks and tariffs (the more accurate term for rate plan). They’re no more… READ MORE

Note: I know that I’m going to catch hell for my iPhone stories because, on balance, they seem slanted against Apple and AT&T. Read, and you’ll find three things: One, that I am laying out the story fact by fact and presenting opinions and guidance based on those facts, two, that I am not advising readers against buying the device, and three, that I am looking after the interests of my readers. And I don’t apologize for having fun with the subject. Even a fact-based account of the iPhone phenomenon is impossible to deliver with a straight face. Not all of the stories on iPhone have their facts right. I’ve got just enough time this morning to transcribe some notes I scribbled down yesterday. I’ll elaborate later. Good: iPhone does have a removable SIM card. Here’s how to remove it. The card is mounted inside a sliding tray at the top of the phone, precisely where you’d expect to find it. There is a telltale hole at one end of the tray that is just the right size for a paper clip. You might expect that jamming a paper clip in there would pop a clip that releases the… READ MORE