So, I have merged all my posts about our last holidays in Calvi / Corsica / France. A kind of “all-in-one”.

[click]

[via TimesOnline]

The first Chinese car to be sold in Europe has scored zero — the worst-ever score — in safety tests.

The JiangLing Landwind was displayed at the Frankfurt Motor Show last week and is expected to arrive in British showrooms within months. It is already on sale in Holland, Germany and Belgium and has been billed as the vanguard of a new invasion of Chinese vehicles.

The two-ton 4×4 scored zero stars in crash tests last week by the ADAC, the German automobile club, which carries out tests for Euro NCAP. “It had a catastrophic result,” said a spokesman for the ADAC. “In our 20-year history no car has performed as badly.”

Testers calculated that a driver would be unlikely to survive a head-on collision at 40mph, and in a side-on collision at 30mph the driver would suffer severe head and chest injuries due to a lack of side protection.

[via BetaNews]

eBay announced Monday that it would form a strategic alliance with VeriSign in order to strengthen security on its PayPal online payment service. As part of the alliance, eBay will also purchase VeriSign’s payment gateway business.

The online auction site will pay VeriSign $370 million for the payment gateway in cash and stock. The service is expected to generate an additional $100 million in revenue for eBay, the company said in a statement.

VeriSign’s gateway would be rolled into PayPal’s already present merchant services, and will give users a wider choice of processing options for online payments. VeriSign’s gateway processed more than $40 billion in volume during 2004.

Account security will be strengthened by VeriSign’s two-factor authentication, which gives customers a one-time password or digital certificate that will help them prevent identity theft. The new process is expected to be implemented sometime next year.

[via InformationWeek]

Some *very* good thoughts in this article, have a look!

As large companies move in [the Open Source] direction, they’ve got some issues to deal with. First and foremost, they must find a way to integrate open source into their commercial software environments and support it on an ongoing basis. They want reassurances that open-source code won’t be subject to intel- lectual-property lawsuits. They need procedures established to avoid violating licensing terms that are different from what they’re used to. And, as they move up the open-source “stack” of operating systems, databases, and application servers, they have to decide where to draw the line. Are open-source applications in their future?

Much of the work companies are doing with open source revolves around their key Web-site applications and increasingly around those applications’ underlying databases. There are no sales figures for software that can be downloaded for free and is often introduced into organizations by developers acting on their own rather than going through purchasing departments.

Licensing is one of the greatest challenges for open-source users. “The fact that software is open source doesn’t mean a company can use it in the way they want to use it,” Yahoo’s Zawodny says. Different licenses have different requirements in terms of distributing and modifying code. Yahoo has designated an employee to manage open-source licensing terms and legal issues. “It shouldn’t be scaring people away; people just need to know what they’re getting into,” he says.

It’s a different story at Sabre, which five years ago embarked on a $100 million project to move its air-travel shopping and pricing services off mainframes and onto 13 HP NonStop servers and a cluster of 45 HP Itanium database servers running the open-source MySQL database on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux. The move was calculated to help the company keep up with growing customer demand for online services.

The initial success of Sabre’s migration toward open-source technology spurred further adoption. Over the past 18 months, the company has migrated more of its services off mainframes to run on 48 Intel Xeon-based HP servers and 177 AMD Opteron-based HP servers running Linux. Sabre’s experience with open source extends to The Ace Orb, or TAO, a Corba 2.5-compliant C++ object request broker, as well as JBoss and Tomcat. Sabre now considers open source whenever it has an IT project up for review.

What a beautiful day :-)

[via Jeremy]

And this could have quite a big impact on MySql…. I haven’t known that Innobase is so deeply integrated in MySql, thanks for this input Jeremy ;-)

As reported in several sources (Slashdot, InfoWorld, AP on Yahoo, Reuters), Oracle has acquired Innobase Oy for an undisclosed sum of money. This appears to be a strategic move by Oracle to put MySQL between a rock and hard place.

Innobase is the company that provides the underlying code for the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL. It’s the de-facto choice for developers who need high concurrency, row-level locking, and transactions in MySQL. For many years now, MySQL AB and Innobase Oy (founded by Heikki Tuuri) have worked closely together to make that technology a seamless part of MySQL.

Like all of the MySQL code, InnoDB is dual licensed. That means you can freely use it under the GPL or buy a license for it if your usage would violate the GPL.

I’ve always wondered why MySQL AB didn’t buy Innobase Oy years ago. It always made complete sense from where I sat. But I’m hardly an insider when it comes to the relationship between those companies. Needless to say, that relationship just got far more “interesting.”

I hope, for the sake of the community and the company (I’ve known many MySQL employees for years), that Oracle is true to their promises. But it is Oracle, so I’m naturally skeptical.

[via Jeff & BetaNews]

Sure, Google couldn’t avoid to launch an RSS reader. Have a look at the Google Reader. You need a Gmail account. Really slow, but they will surely solve that in the near future ;-)

Google took the covers off a Web based RSS reader at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco Friday. The tool, appropriately dubbed Google Reader, serves as an aggregator for Web feeds and is designed much like the company’s Gmail service with Starred favorites and keyboard shortcuts.

[via BusinessWeek]

An interview of Linus Torvalds in BusinessWeek.

Hardware companies are selling more than $1 billion in servers to run Linux every quarter, while sales of servers running proprietary software continue to fall. And now, slowly but surely, Linux is making inroads on the desktop as well. According to IBM, 10 million desktops ran Linux in 2004 — a 40% jump from a year ago.

[…] What you see is that new blood tends to concentrate on the things that the old projects didn’t do, and thus the horizons for open source keep on widening.

The applications and services [companies] are just a sign that the core competencies of open source have grown up enough that these things make sense. It certainly wasn’t something you could do five years ago; the infrastructure just wasn’t there.

What about Linux on the desktop? Why hasn’t it taken off?
Oh, it has absolutely taken off, but some people seem to think that “take off” means that suddenly everybody is running it. That’s clearly not true. It’s a very slow conversion.

[via Jeremy]

So, first the introduction of Jeremy :-)

Several years into this whole blogging thing, the technology and tools designed to facilitate this global conversation all suck.

Then, his conclusion.

The promise of the blogosphere is a loosely connected global network of conversations with an incredibly low barrier to entry. The reality is that the tools are still far too immature for the current scale of this growing network. Worse yet, most aggregators are designed to mimic e-mail or usenet news clients rather than embracing the highly connected nature of blog posts and comments, not the mention the typically short “decay” periods associated with the discussion around most posts.

I must say…I agree with this analysis. We need a kind of quantum leap in this field… Blogging means a *lot* of manual processes, which are all quite time-consuming.

[via InformationWeek]

Six interesting learnings about the usage of Open Source components in big companies.

1. Most large, multi-billion-dollar companies don’t know how much open source they’re actually using. It’s introduced into the IT environment by developers looking to build the best applications in the shortest amount of time possible.
2. Most companies don’t have a budget, per se, for open source. Open source is often used to help launch side projects that otherwise would stay on the shelf because there isn’t enough IT money to go around.
3. Open source is responsible for changing the character of large IT operations even more than it is changing the composition of these operations. […] Perhaps the greatest driver of open source adoption is that programmers like it.
4. There seems to be a consensus among large companies that open-source is a superior model for avoiding per-CPU software licensing fees that quickly add up in the data center.
5. There’s an awful lot of the open-source JBoss application server and MySQL database being used by large companies. […] One of the reasons open source has been successful, particularly in large businesses that have already made significant IT investments, is that companies can pick and choose the pieces they want to use, Fleury [CEO of JBoss] pointed out, adding, “A mark of the success of open source is that it’s modular by design.”
6. Big companies don’t want to get pinched by intellectual-property lawsuits over open source. […] Essentially JBoss will replace any code found to be in violation of intellectual-property rights.