Sysadmin News

Second Life may be a virtual world, but six entrepreneurs operating there have filed a real-life lawsuit against Second Life users who allegedly copied their products. The suit was filed last week in Brooklyn federal court against New York resident Thomas Simon, who reportedly goes by the name “Rase Kenzo” in Second Life, as well as 10 other as-yet-unnamed defendants. Second Life creator Linden Lab declined to comment on the case since it is not directly involved.

Mini, nano, or classic: No matter what the flavor, iPods are bestsellers. Many love the design Apple’s portable music players while others swear by the simple controls. The database system, which prevents any software but iTunes from stocking the player, is not to everyone’s taste, however. Adventurous types can try their luck with alternative software. They allow for individualization of the player and the installation of additional applications. iPod-Linux is free software that provides users with more than just another way to fill up the database.

Mozilla Labs has begun an endeavor with the ultimate goal of creating an environment for PC users in which Web applications function on the desktop the same way and with the same ease of use as desktop applications. The first application to come from the project is Prism, formerly known as “Webrunner,” software that will allow users to run Web apps directly from the desktop — no browser needed. With the increasing popularity of Web-based applications, personal computing has entered a period of transition, says Mozilla.

When the Pentagon’s research arm first called for innovators to design and race a self-driving car to make warfare safer, a ragtag bunch of garage tinkerers, computer geeks and even high school students answered. No one won the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s inaugural contest in 2004. An encore the following year produced five robots that crossed the finish line, and a team from Stanford University drove away with the $2 million prize.

Curl plans to release much of its code for the Curl Rich Internet Application platform to the open source community to enhance the development of Web 2.0 applications. The company announced Monday the first step in its open source strategy — the creation of a common repository of open source component libraries to support the rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs. Curl’s Open Source projects are provided under the Apache V2.0 License and hosted by SourceForge.

Brad Reiss quit his day job as marketing and entertainment director for a restaurant group in Baltimore to make his living in a virtual world called “Second Life.” “It was a good job I was giving up,” Reiss said. “As I was working there, I started to get into Second Life, and I realized the amazing potential. At the point I quit, I wasn’t even close to making enough to survive on. Once I was able to devote a good 40 hours a week, the possibilities opened up.” Reiss, 28, along with some of the world’s most successful companies, see vast potential in Second Life.

Virtualization — creating logical pools of IT resources not linked to physical devices — can reduce spending on new server and storage hardware, increase application uptime and simplify IT management. However, your organization will get those benefits only if you follow some key steps. Some users purchase storage virtualization for only one purpose, without realizing the other benefits it can provide them, says Mike Karp, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo.

IBM has announced improved storage virtualization offerings for disk and tape, including a new product and enhancements to its Virtualization Engine TS7520 tape solution. The goal in making the changes is to increase the efficiency of its storage virtualization products and bring cost savings to its customers, the Armonk, N.Y., computing giant said. IBM, which has been in the virtualization business for more than 40 years, said it realizes today’s companies want to be able to manage and store information in ways that are “better, cheaper and faster.”

As more organizations adopt server virtualization software, they’re also looking to hire people who have worked with the technology in live applications. But such workers can be hard to find, as Joel Sweatte, IT manager at East Carolina University’s College of Technology and Computer Science, recently discovered when he placed a help-wanted ad for an IT systems engineer with virtualization skills. Sweatte received about 40 applications for the job at the Greenville, N.C.-based university, but few of the applicants had any virtualization experience.

The third version of the GNU General Public License version 3, released last summer, is on the slow road to acceptance. The new licensing conditions usher in numerous changes in how open source software developers regulate what users of their freely distributed programming code are legally able and unable to do. The latest license option was published by the Free Software Foundation June 28 after months of input from the open source community. It succeeds, but does not replace, the licensing conditions established in GPL version 2, issued in 1991.