Xen; Copyright Issues

Been playing with the Xen virtual machine monitor over the past couple days, and I must say that it's really cool. The claim that performance is near native is pretty much true, and thus far, I've managed to run multiple Debian and SuSE machines off a single box without too much of a performance hit. As far as I can tell, it's the closest thing we're going to get to zVM on commodity (read "x86") hardware. The only things I have left to try is getting NetBSD to run properly (which really shouldn't be an issue except for the fact that the NetBSD fdisk and disklabel program are really weird - counting sectors, cylinders, and what not) and getting specific hardware like sound and video capture cards working on specific machines. Just for laughs, I may also decide to run VMWare inside one of the Xen virtual machines to see what kind of performance I get; well...that, and I need to learn Solaris but don't want to pay for a SPARC box right now.

Another thing I've discovered: You can (sort of) stream music to yourself by tunneling it through the Windows remote desktop service. It's does fairly well without consuming too much bandwidth (or at least with SSH compression on), but it does skip fairly often. As I said, not immediately practical, but it's always good to build a repertoire of stupid tricks.

In more serious news, there's a good article in Wired called Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize which discusses the problems PBS has (re-)releasing the Eyes on the Prize because they failed to secure the proper licensing for archival footage. While this sort of news isn't really anything new to those who have followed the recent debate over IP law reform, I found especially interesting because of the discussion I had with my family over the holidays. In particular, I think this article well illustrates why we need a public domain and why the privatization of our common culture is a bad thing - even beyond building on existing art and science, the closing of the intellectual commons means hiding a part of our past for contemporary evaluation.