Sometimes our beloved analysts get things dead-on…and sometimes their predictions as to where IT trends will take us are very, very off.

In an excellent article, ZDNet traces the non-demise of Windows and UNIX that analysts predicted, the continued dominance of Microsoft on the desktop (which was supposed to have been supplanted by open-source alternatives by now), and generally blisters our inability to predict the future with regard to open source. It’s everywhere, yes, but without the expected dominance that was to come with ominpresence.

One thing it has brought us, however, and that’s a significant shift in how all companies engage open source:

…[Apache, Firefox, and Samba] are token victories that mainly offer new options for home users and small businesses. No other open-source application has enjoyed anywhere near the massive commercial success of Linux through its creation of an entire services and support ecosystem.

Instead, they have served as game-changers - motivators to encourage for-profit vendors like IBM and Microsoft to up their game and offer extra value in their respective products.

… Source:The Open Road

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Filed under: The Blackstone Group, Financials and analyticals, Private equity industry, Shareholders

The Blackstone Group L.P. (NYSE: BX) has reported earnings this morning, and the initial response is lower. The private equity giant posted a GAAP net loss of $246.7 million after items, and its “economic net income” was also a loss at -$93.6 million.

The company stated that its total net reportable segment revenues were $32.3 million, driven down by declines in all business segments from $1.23 billion in 2007. Its GAAP revenues were $68.5 million.

Corporate Private Equity had negative first quarter revenues; Real Estate revenues down 94%; Marketable Alternative Asset Management down 81%; Financial Advisory Revenues decreased 24%

You can look through the entire release, but as the company noted, most business segments were indeed lower.

Interestingly enough, the company now has $113.53 billion in assets under management. It has also decided to make a dividend payment of $0.30.

Shares of Blackstone are down about 4% at $18.70 in pre-market trading.

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Tenable Network Security, the company behind the Nessus open-source project, has updated its business model [PDF] to offer a for-fee subscription to its vulnerability plugin updates for commercial users.

This sounds a bit like Trolltech’s early efforts to get commercial users to pay while leaving non-commercial users free to use the software without paying, but it’s not. Trolltech’s maligned model wasn’t open source, as it discriminates against a class of user (the commercial user).

In Tenable’s case, the code is free, but the information that flows through it (Up-to-date vulnerability information, for example) is not:

… Source:The Open Road

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Tenable Network Security, the company behind the Nessus open-source project, has updated its business model [PDF] to offer a for-fee subscription to its vulnerability plugin updates for commercial users.

This sounds a bit like Trolltech’s early efforts to get commercial users to pay while leaving non-commercial users free to use the software without paying, but it’s not. Trolltech’s maligned model wasn’t open source, as it discriminates against a class of user (the commercial user).

In Tenable’s case, the code is free, but the information that flows through it (Up-to-date vulnerability information, for example) is not:

… Source:The Open Road

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I met with an executive at a Fortune 50 financial services customer of Alfresco’s yesterday. As we talked about his plans to replace various (proprietary) software products with open source and SaaS products, he made the following interesting comment:

We’re going with open source and Web 2.0-type …

Source:The Open Road

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Microsoft must spend some days gazing around in a stupor. The company continues to print money yet its most current product launch of Vista fell on deaf ears. Microsoft of course wants money, but it also wants to be thought of as a leader in the software world, and with …

Source:The Open Road

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If anyone out there persists in believing that Linux isn’t ready for serious prime time, NYSE Euronext’s dependence on Red Hat should finally lay that silly notion to rest. As announced, the New York Stock Exchange Euronext dumped its proprietary UNIX heritage (AIX, HP UX, Solaris) for the …

Source:The Open Road

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Filed under: Multimedia, World wide web Tools

TUAW reader Eric F sent in a note letting us know that “Safari Adblock grants you to watch Hulu programming totally commercial free!” I gave it a try. I downloaded a copy of Adblock from its SourceForge repository, installed it, activated it, and fired up Hulu. A nearly complete episode of Buffy later, I can confirm that I wasn’t shown commercials.

I haven’t give this enough of a test obviously, to be able to say decisively one way or another — especially since I don’t regularly use Hulu — but the news is promising enough that I thought I’d share. Let us know in the comments if this solution works for you.

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Filed under: Software, World wide web Tools

I live in Philadelphia, but I’m a native New Yorker, and for my money there is no superior newspaper on the planet than the New York Times. The Times has really embraced the new realities that the digital age has foisted upon the newspaper business by trying a number of new things (running a great website included).

Sadly, it seemed that the Gray Lady was ignoring Mac users when it first released the Times Reader. The Times Reader, for those who don’t know, is a dedicated application which displays the last seven days of the New York Times. It has many of the benefits that one gets from reading nytimes.com (changeable fonts, searchable content, ease of printing) with the added benefit of not requiring an internet connection. The Times Reader syncs content on your computer, and lets you take it anywhere.

Luckily for me (and I am betting there are some other New York Times fans out there) the Times will be launching the Times Reader Beta for Mac at some point this month. The Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application powered by Webkit and Silverlight (yes, you’ll have to install Microsoft’s Silverlight to use this app). This is not the same as the RSS reader called Times which Mat posted about last week.

This is a beta, and so there are some features that the Personal computer version has that aren’t in the Mac version:

• Resizeable windows: yep, the Times Reader on the Mac only has 4 preset window sizes at the moment.
• Copy and paste of text: this is a pretty big feature that I hope they sort out sooner rather than later.

It isn’t all bad though, the Mac version supports search across all seven days of content while the Computer version only searches the current day’s edition.

During the beta the Times Reader for Mac will be free to use, but once the beta is over it’ll revert back to being free only for New York Times subscribers (though you can subscribe just to the Reader service for $14.95 a month). Check out the blog post for more images of the app.

As soon as I get a opportunity to look at the Times Reader for Mac beta I’ll post an in depth review.

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