Apple

I was on the road most of the day today, so I must have missed this news earlier.  Apparently, Sun Microsystems and Network Appliance have had a little spat over ZFS and WAFL, and now NetApp is suing Sun for patent infringement.

Dave Hitz explained the situation in a blog entry:

This morning, NetApp filed an IP (intellectual property) lawsuit against Sun. It has two parts. The first is a “declaratory judgment”, asking the court to decide whether we infringe a set of patents that Sun claims we do. The second says that Sun infringes several of our patents with its ZFS technology.

Dave Hitz goes on to attempt to differentiate NetApp’s actions from the IP lawsuit(s) of SCO infamy.  Personally, I wouldn’t place NetApp and SCO in the same situation, although I am strongly opposed to the current system of software patents.  Patent reform is desperately needed, before things get worse than they already are.

In any case, this turn of events is unfortunate.  I’m not technical enough to be able to provide any sort of opinion with regards to whether or not ZFS actually does infringe upon NetApp’s WAFL patents (or the other way around), but I do hope that Sun and NetApp can settle things amicably and move forward with more innovation, rather than getting stuck in an argument over who owns what.  That’s the last thing either company needs right now.  In addition, ZFS’ status needs to be settled quickly, before more companies decide to try to adopt a supposedly open sourced file system and incorporate it into their own products (as Apple reportedly did with ZFS and Leopard).

For more information on the lawsuit, see this eWeek article or this report from The Register.  I’d also be interested in hearing anyone else’s feedback on the situation.  What’s your take?

I’ll start out by saying that I am neither a security expert nor a statistician.  With that disclaimer in hand, I wanted to briefly share my thoughts on the “days of risk” assessment that has recently been used to compare the security of Windows, Linux (Red Hat and SuSE), Mac OS X, and Sun Solaris.  Before continuing, I encourage you to have a look at the actual report itself, along with a few related articles:

• Days-of-risk in 2006 : Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows
• Days of Risk in 2006 : Client OS Products
• Recount: Windows Still Safest, Tops Mac OS X, Linux and Sun Solaris - But are statistics a true measure of security?
• Windows v Linux - Days of risk in 2006

In summary, the Days-of-Risk (DoR) assessment showed that Microsoft patched vulnerabilities in Windows more quickly than Red Hat, Novell, Apple, or Sun patched vulnerabilities in their products.  This is true even when only High Severity issues are taken into consideration, although the gap between Microsoft and the other vendors narrowed in that analysis (with the exception of Sun).

OK, that’s all well and good, but we all know statistics can be made to show just about anything.  I’m not saying that Mr. Jones deliberately limited his data to present a favorable outcome for Microsoft; Microsoft has done a very admirable job of improving their security responsiveness, and in that regard the other vendors would do well to improve their own responsiveness to the disclosure of security vulnerabilities.  No, my thoughts are more centered on the question: Is this data the right data to accurately and objectively represent the security profile of an operating system?

I would contend that, in addition to DoR, information on the following areas would also need to be included in order to more accurately depict an operating system’s security profile:

• Number and severity of exploits published or otherwise made available for vulnerabilities
• Number of viruses, trojans, rootkits, or other malware readily available or in active circulation

Now, before you say something like “Well, of course Windows is going to have more viruses and more exploits because it has a larger installed base!”, let me also say that these values should be correlated and weighted according to the installed base of the operating system as well.  This allows the values to account for the fact that Windows is in use by a much larger base of users than Linux, Solaris, or Mac OS X.

Again, I’m not a statistician, but surely there’s a way to correlate this data (including DoR) and start presenting some sort of objective guide, based on measurable facts, regarding the security of an operating system.  Then the vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Novell, Sun, Red Hat, and others) can stand on equal ground and be able to make some sort of reasonable comparison regarding the security of each product.  Isn’t that what we really need anyway?

Just yesterday, I was asking if Unity—the Coherence-killing feature that was soon to be added to VMware Fusion—was real or rumor.  (Of course, yesterday I was also getting updated by the Fusion developers that this is indeed not rumor and is definitely real.)  Now I’m here to tell you that I have experienced it with my own eyes.

VMware Fusion Beta 4 has been released (get it here), and with it comes Unity.  In a word: Wow!  It’s pretty disconcerting to see Windows applications (like a command prompt, Internet Explorer, or Visio) running side-by-side with Camino, Mail.app, and NetNewsWire.  Interleave windows?  Not a problem.  Drop shadows?  There.  Minimization effects?  Yep.  Aside from the window decorations, you would be hard-pressed to tell which applications were running natively in Mac OS X or in virtualization.

And that, my friends, is the heart of what I described ages ago (OK, perhaps it only seems like ages ago) as application agnosticism.  With virtualization technology and UI integration like this, who cares what OS an application is written for?  Of course, we still have a ways to go to fully realize application agnosticism, since Unity is only available for Mac OS X (not Linux or Windows), but this is a powerful step in the right direction.

My hat is off to the Fusion developers.  Well done!  A lot of people were predicting that Parallels had too much of a lead in Mac virtualization, but all of you have definitely proved them wrong.  Keep up the good work!

<aside>Boring technical question to any VMware developers, Fusion team members, etc:  Is Unity debuting on OS X because of some advantage within Mac OS X itself, or simply because of the timing and the competition?  I am a Mac fan, after all, and was curious if my favorite OS had a leg up on the competitors that made it easier to create Unity.</aside>

Back in September of 2003, I made the switch from Windows XP Professional on an HP laptop to Mac OS X (10.2, or “Jaguar”, at the time) on a 15“ 1GHz PowerBook G4.  Over the next three years, I upgraded the laptop to Panther (using the ”Archive and Install“ method) and Tiger (using a clean build), and throughout it all the laptop performed without any issues.  I used it everyday up until the day I purchased my Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pro.  At that time, I gave the laptop to my daughter to use at college.

Upon getting home from work yesterday, my daughter came to me and said, ”Dad, can you look at my laptop?  It won’t start up.“  Convinced that the problem was a loose nut behind the keyboard (think about that—you’ll get it in a minute), I set out to fix the laptop.  Quite some time later, I came to my final conclusion regarding the status of the laptop:  it was dead, the victim of a failed hard drive.

Well, a failed hard drive is never a desired event, but in the grander scheme of things this was actually good thing.  After all, it could have been the motherboard, or the screen display, or any number of other things that could have failed.  At least the hard drive is (relatively) inexpensive and straightforward to replace.  After all, had it been the display the entire laptop would have been shot.  At least this way we can still salvage the laptop.

So, sometime in the next few days, I’ll need to purchase a new laptop hard drive and crack open the case of my PowerBook G4 to replace the failed drive and then re-install Tiger and all her applications.  (Fortunately for her, no critical data was stored on the laptop. Thank goodness for that, because she hadn’t been backing anything up.)

I’ve started looking for replacement hard drives, but does anyone have any recommended vendors or models to consider?  Price is more important than capacity or performance here…we have to do this on a budget.  Any suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

UPDATE:  I found a new Hitachi 60GB 5400RPM drive from Other World Computing for about $68 (after tax and shipping) and installed it a couple of nights ago.  The process only took about 10 minutes and went flawlessly.  I’m now in the process of reinstalling all the software, patches, updates, etc., which is a far more time-consuming process.

The development team at VMware has released Beta 3 of VMware Fusion, and I had the opportunity to download and install the new version earlier this morning.  Based on what I’ve seen so far, this is a solid improvement over earlier versions and the development team is making good progress on the product.

New to this version of Fusion are some of the following features (more information available in the release notes):

• Improved performance (debugging can be turned off)
• Support for Boot Camp
• Host-only networking support
• Improved hardware editor

Particularly useful for me, coming from a VMware ESX Server background, is the ability to access hardware settings directly from the Virtual Machine Library window (the main Fusion window).  This was a key complaint of mine from earlier beta versions, and I’m glad to see it addressed now in Beta 3.  Performance seems much better, which I’m sure is due to the ability to turn off debugging, but I’m also sure that there is still additional tuning to be done by the development team before the product reaches final release.  It’s pretty doggone fast now in my opinion, so I’m really excited to see how much faster it may get.

It’s also nice to see the development team throw in “little” things like support for packages, a Mac OS X-specific thing that allows us to manipulate groups of files as a single item.  (Mac users will know what I’m talking about.)

There are also little UI polishes here and there, like a fade in-fade out effect when suspending or resuming a VM, and graphic overlays on a VM window to run or resume a paused VM.

Users of previous versions, especially the very early releases (I’ve been using it since before public beta), beware of one problem I’ve run into and reported back to VMware:  the early sound device presented by Fusion may cause problems in this release.  I had the UI for Fusion keep crashing due to this problem (the VM still runs in the background).  Manually editing the VMX to remove the sound adapter and then re-adding the sound adapter in the UI fixed the problem.  This will only be an issue for users of very early builds of Fusion who, like me, have kept the same VM throughout all the new builds.

If you are an Intel-based Mac user, you owe it to yourself to have a look at this product.  This is especially true if you have co-workers that also use VMware virtualization products, like VMware Workstation, on Windows or Linux, as this allows you to move VMs between platforms with very little effort.  Right now, that’s an advantage that VMware has over its competition, and a definite plus in my book.

I know that no operating system is perfect, that every operating system and application has its security flaws, and that no vendor should be casting stones at another—you know, that whole “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks” thing.

Now, having said all that…this is just plain funny.

I coined the term “application agnosticism” in the context of the discussion surrounding virtualization and its impact on the future of the operating system. Virtualization proponents, such as VMware, say that virtualization means the end of the general purpose operating system and instead point to the rise of virtual appliances. In the virtual appliance realm, the operating system exists to provide services to the application, and unnecessary components of the operating system are stripped away. This is a good solution in the datacenter, but is it an equally valid approach on the desktop?

My view is that the forces that shape the desktop market are going to push operating systems and OS functionality in a different direction. This is not to say that virtual appliances don’t have a place in the personal desktop world, just that they won’t have the same level of importance. This is also not to say that virtualization doesn’t have a place in the personal desktop world. Virtualization does have a place and will play an important role moving forward. The functionality of virtualization will just be put to use in a different way.

Simply put, application agnosticism is the ability for a general purpose operating system (such as Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X) to run any kind of application without regard to operating system for which that application was designed. Want to run Linux applications on Windows? Or Windows applications on Mac OS X? Application agnosticism would allow that functionality. There are a number of components that play into making application agnosticism possible:

• Convergence on x86 hardware: For better or worse, the hardware industry is converging on x86-compatible hardware. (Fortunately, we aren’t tied to just one vendor in that regard, but that’s another story for another day.) This means that coding for many different platforms isn’t as necessary today, nor is it quite as likely to have applications written for many different CPU platforms.
• Application-specific subsystems: Like the POSIX subsystem in Windows NT and successive generations, the OS/2 subsystem in early Windows NT generations, or the X11 application in Mac OS X today, these application-specific subsystems provide the necessary resources to run applications not specifically designed to run on that particular OS. Windows seems to be moving away from this functionality, having removed the OS/2 subsystem and (I believe) the POSIX subsystem as well. Mac OS X, on the other hand, seems to be moving strongly in this direction, with the BSD subsystem and X11 support. API emulators, such as WINE, are also forms of application-specific subsystems (more on that in a moment).
• Virtualization: Virtualization is a key enabling technology for application agnosticism. As vendors such as VMware, Parallels, and Microsoft move to provide greater integration between the host and guest environments, this role becomes more evident. Excellent examples of this type of host-guest interaction are the drag-and-drop file sharing of VMware’s Fusion beta, the Coherence feature in Parallels Desktop for Mac, and the ability of the now-defunct Microsoft Virtual PC for Mac to launch the PC guest environment when a user double-clicked on a PC file type in the host environment.

In the datacenter, these kinds of host-guest interactions are not only unnecessary, but actually undesired—very few would actually want the ability to drag and drop files between a host server (assuming there’s actually a host OS present) and a guest server, especially if that guest server is running in a “headless”-type scenario in the background. On the desktop side, however, these kinds of interactions are quite useful, and help extend the desire and ability of users to actually make use of these kinds of technologies. It’s these kind of forces that I believe will drive virtualization on the desktop in a different direction than virtualization on the server, and what will bring about application agnosticism.

In the initial discussions of application agnosticism, I mentioned that I believed Mac OS X to be further along the curve to embracing application agnosticism than other general purpose operating systems. If you look at the components that make application agnosticism possible, it appears to me that Apple embraces and utilizes more of these components than some of the other major operating systems on the market. Without this devolving into a discussion of one operating system versus another or which OS is better, allow me to mention the ways in which this appears to be the case:

1. Mac OS X currently utilizes application-specific subsystems:
• There is a BSD subsystem that allows many UNIX command-line applications to run without modification. Some require a simple recompile in order to run. Future versions of Mac OS X are seeking certification as an “official” flavor of UNIX from The Open Group, further increasing the compatibility and usefulness of this subsystem and its ability to run command-line UNIX applications.
• Likewise, there is an X11 subsystem for Mac OS X as well, allowing users to run native Mac OS X applications side-by-side with X11 applications. Of course, this is certainly not an advantage possessed solely by Mac OS X as there are X11 subsystems available for Windows, and X11 is “native” to Linux distributions.
• Future versions of Mac OS X (the next version, code-named “Leopard,” in particular) may include technologies developed years ago by Apple. Called “Red Box” at the time, these technologies would allow Mac OS X to run Windows applications at near-native speeds. Like the Intel version of Mac OS X that was buried for years before resurfacing at the start of the Intel transition, it’s very possible that Red Box could rise again in Leopard and enable Mac users to run Windows applications on their Macs. A number of others have written about this possibility; see here and here for more information. And let’s not discount WINE, which currently runs on Linux and is being ported to Mac OS X. Both of these could be considered application-specific subsystems designed to support Windows applications on Mac OS X.
2. Mac OS X seems to be at the forefront of host-guest integration:
• Parallels Desktop for Mac offers a Coherence mode, which I mentioned earlier in this article as well as here; this allows you to run virtualized applications side-by-side with host applications. No separate desktop environment, or windows inside another window. Just applications running.
• VMware’s Fusion product, now in public beta, offers drag-and-drop interaction between the host and guest environments. Again, drag-and-drop is a function that users on the desktop have come to expect, so embedding this into a virtualization solution makes perfect sense.
• The now-defunct Virtual PC for Mac, from Microsoft, offered a number of very innovative host-guest integrations during its lifetime. I mentioned guest file type registration already, in which guest file types that were double-clicked in the host environment caused the guest environment to launch and load the document. If I’m not mistaken, Virtual PC also offered clipboard integration as well. (I never used Virtual PC on the Windows platform, so these features may have been present or still be present in that version.)

Take a moment and think about an environment utilizing a virtualization engine with all three of the functional integrations I described above—drag-and-drop between host and guest, side-by-side host/guest windows in the same windowing system, and the ability to double-click a file in the host and have it launch in a guest. In that kind of environment, a user could easily run just about any application for just about any operating system and not have to really worry about the details. (Of course, this glosses over little details like installing the guest operating systems and the applications for those respective guest operating systems.) Being able to do that is what application agnosticism is all about. In my humble opinion, application agnosticism is virtualization’s “killer app” on the desktop.

So there’s my thoughts. What about you? Do you buy into the idea of application agnosticism? Or do you think that virtualization on the desktop is headed in a different direction? Speak up in the comments and let me know.

Over at Virtualization Daily, Kimbro Staken pulls together a variety of views about the future of the operating system.  Citing such forces as Web applications, virtualization, and ever-increasing hardware power, he and others believe that the general purpose operating system as we know it has no future.

I do agree with these conclusions on at least one point:  The general purpose operating system as we know it will cease to exist in the next 5 to 10 years, perhaps sooner.  I do believe that the release of massive development projects such as Windows Vista won’t be the norm moving forward and that, in fact (as others have predicted as well), Windows Vista will be the last of its kind.

Notice I didn’t place Mac OS X in that list as well.  Why?  Because I think that Apple is capitalizing on an architecture and a convergence of technology that allows it to make Mac OS X into what Windows NT was supposed to be.  (Go back and read the stories about the development of Windows NT and look at Dave Cutler’s vision for the operating system—an application environment-agnostic system in which OS/2, Windows, and POSIX-compliant applications could all run without modification.)  Does that sound like anything else we have these days?  With Mac OS X today, I can run native Macintosh applications, command-line UNIX applications (sometimes straight “out of the box”, sometimes needing a quick recompile), and X11-based applications.  Add in something like WINE (the open source Win32 API implementation) and we gain the ability to run many (but not all) Windows applications.  Add in a virtualization solution such as that created by VMware or Parallels and you gain the ability to run any Windows application.

I alluded to this in an earlier post about how virtualization on the Mac was heating up.  My purpose here is not to rehash these thoughts, but instead to place them into the context of Kimbro’s thoughts (and the thoughts of others) with regards to the future of the operating system.  Is the operating system dead?  Is there a future for the operating system?

I guess that depends on how you define the operating system.  I tend to agree that virtualization is the future.  Operating systems as they exist today simply can’t take full advantage of the powerful hardware that is coming out of Intel and AMD, with even more powerful hardware just around the corner (think quad-core CPUs).  This is especially true in the datacenter, where VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure shines.  In the datacenter, where multi-socket multi-core CPUs, gobs of RAM, and terabytes of SAN storage reside, virtualization (in my opinion) is a given.  But what about on the desktop?  Is it a foregone conclusion on the desktop as well?

I think so, and here is where I think that Apple and Microsoft have positioned themselves very differently.  Microsoft claims to be working on a hypervisor (a virtualization engine, so to speak), but their architecture just isn’t designed to really take advantage of that—not now, anyway.  In the old days of Windows NT, when you had the Win32, OS/2, and POSIX subsystems running on top of the “operating system,” then adding a virtualization engine there and then leaving the ability to create new “application subsystems” would have been great.  Now, Windows is just too monolithic.  That may all change with Longhorn, but it’s still too early to tell just yet.  Linux is in better shape, but still a bit immature in many regards.  UNIX?  Too fragmented still, although Solaris/OpenSolaris is looking pretty good.  Honestly, I think that Mac OS X is best positioned to take advantage of the virtualization wave.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least (despite claims to the contrary from Cupertino) for Apple to buy Parallels and build virtualization right into the OS.  Then, they have a platform (both hardware and software) that capable of running just about any application on the planet right out of the box.  Windows applications sitting side by side with X11 and Aqua (native Mac) applications?  No problem.  On the desktop side, this seems to be a much more likely scenario.

So I guess the future of the operating system depends on your perspective.  If you’re an operating system guy, you’ll say that the OS has a bright future, and point to developments such as built-in paravirtualization and bundled hypervisors to prove your point.  If you’re a virtualization guy, you’ll say that the OS is dead, and you’ll point to developments such as third-party paravirtualization and independent hypervisors to prove your point.  Which of these two is correct?

The Apple Support page that describes the firmware update states that after the update, the Boot ROM Version will be reported by System Profiler as MBP11.0055.B08 (for 15-inch MacBook Pros) or MBP12.0061.B03 (for the 17-inch MacBook Pros).

OK, fair enough—but System Profiler on my 15-inch Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Pro reports the Boot ROM Version as MBP22.00A5.B00.  Now, unless I’m reading that wrong, that would appear to be a newer version than what the firmware update is reporting.  That, in turn, implies that the newer MacBook Pros should not apply this firmware update.  However, that information is not disclosed anywhere that I have yet seen.

Does anyone have more information on this?

There were two concerns I had about buying a MacBook Pro, neither of them huge concerns but sufficient enough nevertheless.  The first was the heat; there were just so many reports of MBPs running hot.  (Yes, I know that this was primarily early-run MBPs.)  The second was the performance of non-Universal applications.

I’m happy to report that both of these concerns are unfounded.  I’ve had my MBP under some fairly significant loads in the last few days; just today, for example, I had VMware Fusion running (with a Windows XP Professional VM running Visio 2002 Professional), Mail, iCal, Camino, NetNewsWire, Address Book, Terminal, Microsoft Word, ecto, and four Remote Desktop Connection sessions all running simultaneously.  The MBP was a very warm above the keyboard, but not any more so than my old PowerBook G4 and certainly not enough to make me really worried.

Even on previous occasions, when I’ve had Cyberduck, multiple SSH sessions and tunnels, X11, and tons of applications open, it still hasn’t gotten hot enough for me to be concerned.  Warm?  Yes.  Overly hot?  Not in my opinion.

The second concern, the performance of PowerPC applications under Rosetta, has proven not to be a real concern either.  It’s true that the applications are a bit slower than Universal applications, but the non-Universal applications that I run aren’t heavy hitters like Photoshop or Illustrator.  Therefore, the performance penalty isn’t really a big deal for me.  If these applications were my lifeblood, then I would certainly be more concerned.  Dealing with a minor slowdown in Microsoft Office isn’t enough to really be worried about (at least, not for me).

Battery life has been good, a bit less than I had hoped but I haven’t really had time to train the battery yet.  The wireless range and performance is also good.  I’m also really pleased with the brighter display and the higher resolution, the backlit keyboard, and two finger scrolling.

Overall, I’m very happy with the new laptop.