Sean Michael Kerner

Convergence is now here with mobile, data, voice and video all going over Internet infrastructure. In particular the promise of TV delivered via IP is gaining momentum globally the more the Internet merges with consumer electronics, especially televisions. But plenty of challenges remain, not the least of which is the pending depletion of the IPv4 […]

From ‘it’s a sad day’ files: I remember well the day in 2006 when I saw Nicholas Negroponte (image: left)  take the stage at LinuxWorld Boston (the last time the show was ever held in that town) talking about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) aka the $100 laptop. There was tremendous optimism then, both for […]

Cisco CEO John Chambers has a plan for attacking the consumer marketplace, and it’s one that he’s not going to be quiet about anymore. At a Webcast press conference at the 2009 Consumer Electronics (CES) show in Las Vegas, Chambers outlined his vision for how Cisco’s strategy for consumers is coming together. It’s a strategy […]

While networking giant Cisco is well known in the enterprise and carrier networking spaces, it is using the 2009 Consumer Electronics Shows (CES) in Las Vegas to launch a number of new initiatives aimed at the home. Chief among those is out a white-label social networking software platform, called EOS, designed for other companies to […]

From the ‘it’s not there yet‘ files: In my opinion, one of the greatest innovations of the Firefox 2 release was the inclusion of Tab Overflow. For the first time I could actually handle as many open browser tabs as I wanted. While Mozilla introduced Tab overflow in 2006, here we are in 2009 and […]

The open source FreeBSD operating system is out with its first major update in nearly a year. FreeBSD 7.1 includes numerous improvements over its predecessor FreeBSD 7.0, including Sun Microsystem-developed Dtrace technology as well as new boot options and scalability improvements. The FreeBSD 7.1 release comes as FreeBSD developers push toward a FreeBSD version 8.0 […]

From the ‘people in glass houses…’ files: Debian developers have voted in favor of a General Resolution that will allow the Debian Lenny release to go forward. The hangup as I wrote about a few weeks back was over the inclusion of potentially non-Free software. Debian has some strict language and policies as part of […]

From the “what? so soon?” files: Just yesterday I blogged about the Mozilla Ubiquity 0.1.3 release – today Mozilla is out with 0.1.4 which is labeled as a hotfix release. Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs project that provides a Firefox add-on with semantic web-type capabilities. Mozilla developer Atul Varma noted in a posting that 0.1.4 […]

The lawsuit between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Cisco may be critical in shaping the future of the open source ecosystem, according to legal experts closely watching the saga’s next stages. The FSF filed its legal complaint against Cisco last month, alleging that the networking giant violated the terms of the GPL, or General […]

From the ‘not everyone was on vacation‘ files: While many people were out last week (myself included), Mozilla Labs developers were not. In fact they managed to push out Mozilla Ubiquity 0.1.3 on Dec 30th which provides a slick user interface overhaul for the semantic web tool. Basically Ubiquity now can be easily skinned by […]

From the ‘what’s in a name‘ files: Red Hat’s Fedora Linux is currently in the process of developing Fedora Linux 11, but first the new distro will need a name. So in the spirit of openness Fedora has opened up the naming of Fedora 11 to a vote. The names under consideration are: Blarney, Brasilia […]

In the beginning, there were .com, .net and .org. Created in 1985 at the dawn of the Internet era, the three marked the first original generic top-level domains (gTLDs). In 2003, the .org gTLD was split off from VeriSign to fall under the auspices of the Public Interest Registry (PIR), marking a new era for […]