Recently, a lot of folks have reported that Firefox 3.5 is the most widely used browser. This is true; however, the statistics do not show that Firefox is most widely used (which most responsible blogs have also reported).

Geeksmack had an excellent article on this topic. Looking at the graph shown there, there are many things that can be seen if you examine the graph critically:

• The loss of market share by IE 7 seems to correspond to the growth of IE 8.
• Firefox 3.0, at its height, had a larger percentage of users than Firefox 3.5 does right now.
• Firefox 3.5 seems to be affecting Firefox 3.0 the most: after Firefox 3.5 was introduced, Firefox 3.0 dropped in user count precipitously.
• In the middle of 2009, Firefox 3.0 lost users to IE 7 for a period of time.

The last thing is that these are all conjectures based on statistical evidence; true correlation may not exist. Truly, statistics must be analyzed with care.

There is a good article over at Blog of Metrics at mozilla.org describing all the places where one can find the current statistics on Firefox market share.

Workplace privacy is in the news again. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear the case of City of Ontario v. Quon in which personal text messages were sent on an employer-provided pager. Are these text messages private? Does the user have an expectation of privacy?

The blogs SCOTUSblog and the Volokh Conspiracy both reported on this, as did the mainstream press, including National Public Radio, the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and many more. The New York Times hosted a written debate about the issue.

Workplace privacy doesn’t involve constitutional rights, as there is no right to privacy in general and the constitution has been held to be specific to the government, not private employers. However, the issue is such that many organizations have focused on this topic: for example, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Publishing Law Center, and the ACLU. The ACLU states that “…the ACLU receives more complaints about workplace rights violations than about any other issue.”

As administrators, these issues affect us directly: it is often administrators who implement and oversee much of the technological surveillance, including digital cameras, email surveillance, web filtering, and more. It also becomes important in terms of protecting privacy as well, preventing data from leaking out from corporate servers. There is also e-discovery in which documents must be turned over during the case of a trial.

Before implementing a new method of monitoring, one should be aware of the laws involved and also implement a written policy that all employees will be made aware of. If this is not done, an admin can find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

This lawsuit has the potential to rewrite the laws on workplace privacy; the SCOTUS Wiki has a nice write-up on all of the details.

Over at Glenn Fawcett’s Oracle Blog, there is a write-up about the speed of Oracle’s Direct NFS (now a few years old) as compared to the traditional NFS client. Glenn wrote about how to set this up initially, then followed up with a report on how to monitor the environment, as well as the results of testing the environment.

Glenn worked with Kevin Closson, who is one of the minds behind Oracle’s DirectNFS. Kevin wrote about the colloboration and about some of the misunderstandings surrounding dNFS with Solaris and Sun storage.

Oracle has a nice whitepaper on this topic, going into detail as well.

There is also an old posting by the Oracle Storage Guy describing DirectNFS in detail, particularly in regards to using dNFS with EMC storage.

The first winter storm of the year is coming to town: time to hunker down.

In the Snowbelt, one better be sure that your power is good and your generators are working well: power outages happen often during winter storms. If you’ve not tested it? You will soon.

Drive carefully – be safe. Maybe I’ll post some pictures – why not?

Is it right for a company or a service to force you to pay in order to be secure? Put another way, you will not be secure from attackers and other nefarious goings-on unless you pay up. The most sinister possibility of these is the chance you could fall prey to identity thieves and spend the next many years cleaning up the mess an identity thief can create.

If you look at a lot of online web services, they will only provide you with secure sessions (using SSL) if you pay. What would be their liability, one wonders, if data sent in the clear was intercepted and used for some ill gain?

Alternately, some computer companies (and even security companies) have taken the stance that, in order to be secure, you must pay for a membership or support contract. If you do not pay, then you will remain insecure (though usually only for a few weeks instead of forever). Thus, patches and notifications of security risks are held back, placing servers across the Internet at risk and affecting thousands of users.

Certainly, enhanced security products may be sold to users and administrators, but what if even basic security requires an up-front payment? Who is liable for the lack of security when even the basic elements are missing?

When is it right to withhold information that would improve the security of servers on the Internet or of users at large? Perhaps the only time is when there is no way (yet) to mitigate the security risk – perhaps.

The recent fourth quarter reports from server manufacturers was dim, and Sun Microsystems was by far the worst (with a 35% loss compared to the same period last year). On top of this, Sun just announced in October (within their 8K filing for the SEC) intentions to lay off 3000 employees in the next 12 months. Infoworld also had a nice piece on this; according to Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, the company is losing $100 million each month the European Union regulators put off accepting the merger.

With the Oracle acquisition in progress, there are a lot of questions about the future viability of Sun Microsystems, and of some of its products.

I don’t think people realize just how important the Sun group of products are, and what an impact it would have if most – or even some – of the products were cancelled. Consider this list of Sun products:

• Java.
• Solaris – and OpenSolaris.
• SPARC – and OpenSPARC.
• MySQL. There was a recent report from the 451 Group that suggests that usage of MySQL may fall off based on the current uncertainty around Sun.
• StarOffice – and OpenOffice.
• VirtualBox (and associated virtual products). Virtualbox also has an open source version, and was just updated to version 3.1 with new features. InformationWeek and eWeek both had excellent articles on the new Virtualbox.
• Sun Modular Data Centers (originally with the codename Project Blackbox).
• The Lustre Filesystem.

Most of the most popular products were mentioned by Oracle in their Sun Acquisition FAQ (PDF), stating that they will increase money spent on each over what Sun spent. These products include: Java, Solaris, SPARC, StarOffice, NetBeans, virtualization products, Glassfish, and MySQL. Other products were not mentioned – such as Lustre, the Modular Data Center, and others.

The list above also does not list the technologies that were spearheaded by Sun – and some still are: ZFS, NFS, NIS (and NIS+), dtrace, containers, and smc.

It would be unfortunate – and materially significant – if Sun were to go under or if any of the majority of their products were to be cancelled. One can only hope this does not happen…

Penelope Trunk wrote an excellent and heart-tugging piece about Asperger’s Syndrome and how it affects her. It is a poignant piece that describes her thought processes, and how a day at the bureaucracy puts her into a tailspin.

I had no idea that she had Asperger’s Syndrome; Richard Stallman (rms) – the person behind the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation – is supposed to have Asperger’s.

A disability such as this is hidden and its effects can be unknown; this leads to a lack of understanding of how a person with such a disability may find themselves hampered in their daily lives (including work lives). Disabilities such as Asperger’s, dyslexia, and others can lead to people not being compassionate or sympathetic when this is what the sufferer needs most.

Now it seems that OpenDNS has some serious competition: Google announced their Google Public DNS service just days ago. The founder of OpenDNS, Dave Ulevitch, responded to Google’s announcement in his blog.

Several things stand out between OpenDNS and Google DNS:

• Google DNS does not misuse NXDOMAIN responses. That is, when you try to resolve an entry that does not exist, you get a “no domain found” response: OpenDNS sends you to their search page.
• Google DNS supports IPv6.
• Google DNS implements a wide array of security tools to mitigate attacks against DNS servers.
• Google will (probably) not redirect valid DNS entries to its own servers.

There has already been some speed testing that shows that, at least in India, the response from Google DNS is much faster than OpenDNS.

CNET had a nice write-up (in the DeepTech blog by Stephen Shankland) on Google’s DNS offering and what it means.

It also appears that the privacy concerns that have cropped up with OpenDNS may not be a concern with Google’s Public DNS (and ironically so). Over at the Slight Paranoia blog by Christopher Soghoian, he wrote a piece about their privacy policy – and received a nice response directly from Dave Ulevitch (the founder of OpenDNS).

Over at The Scream!, there is a forum posting that describes some of this in detail – including the redirection of google.com to google.navigation.opendns.com. The Wikipedia entry on OpenDNS also addresses some of these issues, none of which appear to exist in Google’s Public DNS.

The HP Superdome is designed with a much different basis than most of its competition – and indeed, many computers. The design principles behind the HP Superdome lead to a lesser impact on the environment, and thus are a "greener" choice for heavy computing.

Why? The HP Superdome is designed in such a way that its pieces can be replaced as needed, and the need to replace the entire system (common with other systems, including mainframes) can be dramatically reduced. The HP Superdome is designed with at least a 10-year lifespan, meaning that it when other systems have to be replaced the Superdome will (at most) only need "refreshing" with new cells or perhaps other parts.

For example, in 2009, the original HP Superdome prototype is still running – and even has HP Integrity cells operating.

Most other systems will have to be replaced once or twice before a Superdome has to be replaced. Replacing the system generates, as a result, a certain amount of electronic waste – and a mainframe will create a large amount of waste.

This is on top of the fact that the HP Superdome uses less electricity than a mainframe. It is also possible to only use the cells that you need, leaving the others either inactive via iCap (no power) if they exist at all.

All of these facts suggest that an HP Superdome would be a good choice for green computing in contrast to its mainframe competition.

A update on the recent HP Superdome Tech Day: turns out that Jacob Van Ewyk blogged about it in a two part article (part 1 and part 2) on the blog, Mission Critical Computing. John Pickett wrote about the energy savings inherent in using an HP Superdome on the blog Legacy Transformation.