Free Soft
Oct 28
We made some big announcements this week at our annual developer forums, CommunityOne and JavaOne. I thought I'd highlight a couple in particular.

We announced the first commercial release of OpenSolaris - targeting high speed developers and development teams (not consumers...). OpenSolaris focuses on developers wanting to be freed from proprietary software models, who see innovation and automation in operating systems as a source of competitive advantage.

If Solaris 10, OpenSolaris's older brother, is for IT departments prioritizing carrier grade stability over rapid innovation, OpenSolaris targets the exact opposite - developers, from high performance computing to social networking, that prioritize a constantly refreshing repository filled with community innovations (and ZFS-based automated rollback) over an unchanging qualification target. Go to OpenSolaris.com to download a free copy, or click on the OpenSolaris logo to have a bootable CD delivered to you (free of charge). Or if you want a simpler way of trying it out... just go to Amazon!

We also announced a partnership with Amazon, through which we've made OpenSolaris, alongside MySQL and Glassfish, available with commercial support on Amazon's elastic computing cloud. From where I sit, this is a profound change in the industry - the world's most popular database is now available, and commercially supported, as a cloud service. As is the fastest growing Java container, and a redefined OpenSolaris for the modern world.

The traditional software industry, first revolutionized by open source, next by software as a service, is now embarking on a third revolutionary change... infrastructure as a service.

Sure feels like the clouds are parting.

(And again, if you'd like a free copy of OpenSolaris sent to you on a bootable, "live" CD, just click on the OpenSolaris logo above.)


Tagi: innovatis, software models, amaz, coue, glassfish, amazon, social networking, target, developer forums, profound change, bootable cd, proprietary software, rollback, software industry, competitive advantage, repository, high performance, clouds, operating

Oct 28

PwnageTool 2.0.3 is available. This version provides support for iPhone/iPod firmware 2.0.2 5C1, it has an updated Installer.app beta (b6) and contains a new .de localization for our large amount of German friends. The application SHOULD ONLY be downloaded as a .tbz file from our servers and should NOT be decompressed using the application called â??the unarchiverâ?? (this breaks permissions within PwnageTool) just use the standard OS X built in â??Archive Utilityâ?? to decompress. The SHA1 sum of PwnageTool_2.0.3.tbz is 91e670e0c623cd43f5e8cfbfaae6c23d98d8f31b

Also released today is the â??150â?? beta update to the Windows QuickPwn application, this contains a revised GUI from Poorlad that has tighter integration into the the main updated QuickPwn executable which has fixes for YouTube and provides BootNeuter support for the unlock of 2G iPhones, remember this is still beta software, use at your own risk. The updated tool is available for download here NB: QuickPwn Windows doesnâ??t work well with virtualization as there are some problems with the way USB resets are handled, so we wouldnâ??t advise trying it, we have had reports of some success with VMWare Fusion 2.0 Beta 2, but this shouldnâ??t be relied on, use PwnageTool instead, or wait for QuickPwn Mac.

QuickPwn for Mac is being tested right now by a group of testers and weâ??ll release this when it is ready for public beta (this wonâ??t be within the next 24 hours, but should be within the next week).

There are no significant updates with regard to the 3G baseband unlock, most of us have been busy with real life, when we get any further weâ??ll let you know.


Tagi: ipod firmware, beta software, archive utility, german friends, adve, youtube, vmware, b6, rk, 3g, os x, regard, servers

Dec 4

I've been a fan of Dan Appleman for about as long as I've been a professional programmer. He is one of my heroes. Unfortunately, Dan only blogs rarely, so I was heartened to see a spate of recent blog updates from him. One of the entries asks a question I've often wondered myself: can you really rent a coder?

Over the past year or two I've kept an eye on the various online consulting sites - Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, oDesk. I've actually used RentACoder once (as a buyer on a very small project) and was satisfied with the results -- though I suspect I spent more time writing the spec and managing the programmers than I would if I had done the work myself.

I'm surprised Dan opens with such a sunny outlook on these services, because I've heard almost universally negative things about them. As professional programmers, I think we're all naturally inclined to see these sort of low-bid contract sites as cannibalizing and cheapening our craft. It's roughly analogous to the No-Spec movement for designers.

The odd thing is that, despite the sunny outlook, the article Dan wrote on this topic comes across as quite cautionary:

  • You'll be competing with people around the world. In fact, you'll be amazed at how little people in some parts of the world will bid. ThatÂ?s because a few dollars an hour can work well in a country where the average wage is a couple of hundred dollars a month.

  • Many of the projects posted are unrealistic. For example, people asking for a clone of ebay for under $500. What ends up happening in these cases is that usually somebody ends up getting ripped off (either the client or the consultant who underbid or fails to deliver).

  • A lot of projects go bad. They get cancelled. Or the consultant who bid on the work never delivered, or delivered poor results. Or the client has unreasonable expectations, or doesnÂ?t actually know what he wants.

Maybe it's just my natural bias talking, but these sites seem awfully impractical to me.

Simply sorting out the DailyWTF project pitches from things you could actually deliver -- at ultra-competitive offshore programming rates, no less -- would require the patience of a saint and the endurance of an olympic athlete. Specification documents are hard enough to write when everyone involved is a coworker sitting in the same room. I can't even imagine the difficulty of agreeing on what it is you're building when the participants are thousands of miles away and have never met. But then I thought Amazon's Mechanical Turk was a failure, and it seems to be enjoying a moderate level of success.

Dan has a small chart comparing the services of these online freelance/consulting sites. It's too easy to write these sites off as an affront to software engineering. I guess they're sort of like dating sites -- they might be one way to find a client relationship, but I'd be highly suspicious of any professional developer who can't find a stable, long term relationship with a client eventually.

If nothing else, we should be looking at them for research purposes, as a baseline. Surely you can demonstrate better value to your employer than the random, anonymous programmers on Elance, guru.com, RentACoder, or oDesk. And I'd certainly hope that the projects you're working on are more sensible and rewarding (in both senses of the word) than the stuff that appears on those sites.

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Tagi: natural bias, apeman, sunny outlook, coue, rentacoder, ebay, average wage, low bid, spate, pitches, ly, programmers, guru, programmer, heroes, designers, peoe

Dec 4
A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Googleâ??s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers. But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been [...]

Tagi: joining yahoo, google, coue, security team, limelight, microsoft, yahoo

Dec 4
A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Googleâ??s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers. But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been [...]

Tagi: joining yahoo, google, coue, security team, limelight, microsoft, yahoo

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