Gnash-Ville Katt

From: spencer_katt@ziffdavis.com

Sent: Monday, January 30, 2006 12:30 AM

To: eWEEK readers

Subject: Pay as you go; a hill of NetBeans; change agent

"Sounds like everyone is suffering from a little Flash envy," laughed the Lynx when a Penguinista pal phoned to tell him the Free Software Foundation has placed a free GPL-licensed Flash player called Gnash high on its development list. "Between Macromedia touting upcoming developments in Flash and Microsofts ongoing development of its so-called Flash-killer Sparkle, I hope we can all move on from tumbling shapes, logos and techno beats," cackled the Kitty. The Puss phone pal also noted that some folks are wondering if Oracle and Suns recent McNealy/Ellison lovefest really amounts to a hill of beans ... at least as far as NetBeans is concerned. The buzz is that Larrys legion may have more interest in Eclipse and Oracle JDeveloper than in Suns NetBeans.

"Can you hear me now?" queried the Kitty as his cell phone went dead. The Furry One, who still had a few calls to make, freaked when he realized hed have to find (gasp!) a pay phone. The finicky Furball finally found a phone that appeared halfway usable and swabbed the receiver vigorously with some Purell hand sanitizer. The Kitty dumped all his coins into the phone and called a crony at the Black Hat conference in D.C.

The crony said that security researcher Michael Lynns new employers at Juniper Networks decided to pull the plug at the last minute on having Lynn talk at the event. Last year, Lynn caused quite a stir when he pointed out a major security flaw in Ciscos routers, which he said could crash the entire Internet. "Thirty-five cents please," droned a robotic voice. "Please deposit 35 cents." As the near-penniless Puss ran off to seek change, his BlackBerry throbbed in his pocket. The Katt quickly thumbed back and forth with a storage maven who said IBMs acquisition of virtualization biz CIMS Lab could nullify a pledge EMC boss Joe Tucci had made not to incorporate VMware into its products. Armonks acquisition of CIMS appears to make any fear EMC had of a bidding war with Big Blue history, and Tucci and company will probably ramp up its server storage virtualization biz big time. The maven also noted that NBCs Rockefeller Center offices are filling up with Apples Xsan networked storage equipment. It could be an indication that Apple is emerging as real contender in enterprise storage.

Thumbing his pal adieu, Spence ducked in and out of a bank for a roll of quarters, wiped another pay-phone receiver and called back the Penguin pal from whom hed been cut off earlier. The pal claimed Mozilla is making a lot of money from its Firefox distribution deals with Google and Yahoo in Asia. The notoriously cash-strapped company may use the sudden windfall to launch a high-profile U.S. advertising campaign to market the alternative browser to the mainstream public, said the pal. "Public communication has its ups and downs, though," said Spence as he scraped something crusty from the pay-phone receiver.