Felipe Alfaro Solana

It seems that the oust of Diane Greene is having big consequences. One of them is that VMware ESXi is now a free product. I see this like a direct attack to Microsoft’s attempt to get into the virtualization market. What does this mean? That there is little reason to choose Microsoft’s hypervisor when you can choose a more mature one that is now free.

Of course, hardware requirements for ESXi still make it hard to afford for small companies, but these are very good news in any case.

The hypervisors war is getting very hot!

Recently I bought an iPod touch. It originally came with OS 1.1.4 and as soon as Apple made the 2.0 software available (and downloadable), I upgraded.

While the new iTunes App Store is a welcome addition, I found most of the applications not very useful to me. While some like Remote, Facebook, Last.fm or eReader are awesome, I have yet to see applications on the store that fully unleash the power of the iPhone/iPod platform. For example, I’m waiting for a PDF reader that can fetch files from the local disk.

Here comes the power of jailbreak. There are so many things one can do with a jailbroken box. For example, with OpenSSH I can upload e-books to my iPod and bypass the limitations of eBook.app (it only likes e-books purchased from two web sites, but I have a few books that I legally downloaded from manybooks.net licensed under Creative Commons). I can also install Light HTTPd to serve PDFs locally that I can browse using Safari. It is very convoluted but it works.

Apple: if you read this, please lift all the absurd restrictions from the iPhone/iPod software and let people unleash the true power of this amazing portable platform.