WOW – Amazon Traffic Stats

All I could think when I saw these numbers, was…WOW. The company said it set a single-day sales record during the period with more than 2.8 million units, or 32 items per second, ordered across the globe. Visitor traffic peaked at an estimated 700,000 users during a 60-minute period. While I know they use Linux for many (most) things, along with Oracle RAC, I can't seem to find anything more recent than about a year old detailing their infrastructure in any way. If anyone knows and would like to share it, please do contact me. Thanks.
–jeremy

Little LQ Search Downtime

The search on LQ was down for about 30 minutes yesterday, due to this bug. If you are using RHEL, make sure that you do not have a symlink for /tmp when you upgrade to U4. Luckily the sever this happened on was not in a remote colo. The bug was reported over a week ago and no comment from RH yet, which seems odd for a bug that causes a machine to not boot.
–jeremy

Visions of WindowsUpdate, Dancing in their Heads

While many of us were enjoying the holiday season and spending time with family and friends, it looks like many a Windows admin was not. Three exploits on Christmas day…ouch. While Linux security has been far from perfect recently (and make no mistake about it, it never will be perfect), the amount of aggravation that the average Windows admin puts up with is astounding.
–jeremy

Red Hat Profit Soars But Revenue Misses Street View

Red Hat recently released their numbers for the quarter. Revenue jumped 55 percent, but came in just shy of Wall Street's expectations on a net income of $10.8 million, or 6 cents a share. Total subscription and services revenue grew to $50.9 million from $32.9 million, also slightly below Wall Street's estimate. Subscription revenue climbed 80 percent to $39.2 million from $21.8 million. Good to see that Red Hat is able to continue to increase revenue, but with the current pricing structure you have to wonder how long it will be until Red Hat is the niche player (in the high end server market) and no longer the market leader. One has to wonder, 1) Do they care if this happens and 2) Could they sustain the current trends if they no longer were the market leader. I haven't seen any response to the recent call to cut prices and I still haven't heard of any plans to re-enter the consumer market, but this is definitely a topic I'll keep a close eye on.
–jeremy

Canopy Dumps Top Execs

Two top executives of The Canopy Group, the parent company of Unix firm The SCO Group Inc., have unexpectedly left the firm. Two snippets from the article:
SCO spokesperson Blake Stowell confirmed that Canopy had ousted Ralph Yarro, president, chairman and chief executive of the Lindon, Utah-based business, and Darcy Mott, chief financial officer of the company. He was unable to explain why the pair of veteran Canopy managers had been let go. “I honestly don't know,” he said. Calls to Canopy were not returned.
Yarro was a graphic artist who worked for Ray Noorda, founder of Novell Inc. and Canopy. Yarro gained Noorda's trust and rose to Canopy's top position in February 1996. Mott had served as Canopy's vice president, treasurer and CFO since May 1999. Before joining Canopy, Mott worked as vice president and treasurer for Novell.

“It is worth noting that SCOsource [SCO's Unix intellectual property division] revenue has declined significantly from a year ago. If SCO is unsuccessful in its efforts to sue IBM and Novell, the share price of SCO stock will fall further and then a shareholder lawsuit becomes a strong possibility,” Quandt said.
When officers that have been around for almost 10 years get ousted and talks of shareholder lawsuits start, there are only bad things ahead. Should be interesting to see how the new management handles the pending IBM case. One can only hope that this silly charade is almost over.
–jeremy

Happy Holidays…and My Apologies

First, I'd like to wish everyone a Happy Holiday season. I hope whatever you choose to celebrate goes well. Secondly, I'd like to apologize for being so behind. Between the holiday season and a little sickness I am way behind, not only on this blog but in general. Things should be settled down now and I'll start catching up ASAP. If you sent me an email and I didn't respond yet, I haven't lost it and I should be getting back to you “real soon now”.
–jeremy

150,000 LQ Members

As I posted here, LQ just passed 150,000 members. Another milestone that I am quite proud of. As was pointed out to me in a recent review, we now have more members than are registered at the Linux Counter. Thanks again to each and every LQ member. Without all of your support, we couldn't be where we are today.
–jeremy

Scoble asks Gates: can we create an interesting music player?

Brian Scoble has written an open letter to Bill Gates about “Open Sourcing” the product development for an iPod competitor. He outlines an interesting plan that would compete with the grass roots Apple culture head on. Will MSFT listen? We'll see. I think it would be difficult for Microsoft 1) to get into the hardware mp3 business as it would upset some of their OEM's and 2) generate the same buzz that Apple has due to their size/reputation/etc. The post seems to have drawn a lot of heat for some reason, though.
–jeremy

Patrick Volkerding Back to Work

Good to see that Patrick is back and feeling a bit better. Hopefully the health issues are all behind him and he can get back to happily hacking on Slack. Welcome back Pat.
–jeremy

Firefox Ad Runs in the New York Times

Been a busy week, but I'm back ;) The full page ad (which ended up being two full pages) that was coordinated by the Spread Firefox team has been run. You can view a small PNG or a large PDF. Congrats to the whole Firefox team, this was a milestone achievement for an Open Source app. I'm happy to say my name was in there, was yours?
–jeremy