First Linux Mint PCs go on sale By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | June 10, 2012, 4:03pm PDT

First Linux Mint PCs go on sale   From zdnet Today-
(PS: I am writing this on new MINT 13 based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Debian Sam Cohen)

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols | June 10, 2012, 4:03pm PDT

Summary: The popular Linux Mint desktop distribution has just released its first official PCs.



The Mint Linux mintBox PCs are ideal for both hobbyist and business use.

I love the Linux Mint desktop distribution. Lots of people love Mint. Mint’s my current favorite Linux desktop distribution. But, like most distributions, to run it, I had to install it myself. Now, Mint, in conjunction with CompuLab, is selling its first Mint-branded PCs.

True, you could buy a PC or laptop from ZaReason and a handful of other Linux PC vendors with Mint Linux, but the two mini-PCs that Mint and CompuLab are offering are the first to have Mint’s official blessing.

Setting up Mint 13: 2012’s Best Linux desktop

These PCs, the fit-PC3 basic and pro models are now available with Linux Mint branding under the name “mintBox.” According to Clement “Clem” Lefebvre, Mint’s founder, “The mintBox is amongst the toughest computers on the market. It features a die-cast solid-metal case which acts as a giant passive heatsink. Although the metal makes the mintBox heavier than other devices its size, it makes it feel really unique, robust and well engineered. More importantly, it cools down its components without needing any fans. Other than the noise coming from its internal 250GB hard-drive, the mintBox is completely silent.”

The mintBox comes with four USB ports: Two in the front, and two in the back. Two of these support USB 3.0. It also has a pair of external serial AT Attachment (eSATA) ports; two mini-Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) sockets, plus a mSATA port, and a good old RS-232 port. This tiny computer, smaller than a Mac Mini, also comes with Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Gigabit Ethernet. Both models also come with an HDMI port and a DVI adapter.

As you might guess from that construction and all those ports, the mintBox started life as an industrial computer. And, indeed, CompuLab is an embedded and industrial computer specialist.

The mintBox Basic, which list for $476 plus shipping, duty, and value added tax (VAT) comes with a 250GB hard drive. For a processor, it uses an AMD APU G-T40N. This is a 1GHz dual core, which includes an integrated ATI Radeon HD 6290 for graphics. This is an Intel-compatible embedded system unit. This system comes with 4GBs of RAM.

The higher end mintBox Pro retails for $549 plus shipping, duty, and VAT. It is identical to the Basic except it uses the higher-speed AMD APU G-T56N. This is a 1.65GHz dual core CPU and comes with an ATI Radeon HD 6320 for graphics. It also comes with 8GBs RAM and a ribbed metal case for better heat dissipation.

Lefebvre also claims that one of the highlights of both models are how “easy it is to open it. Both the RAM and the HDD are accessible from underneath the box. Use a standard screwdriver to open the bay and you can upgrade your RAM or switch the HDD for a SSD drive without any hassle.” This makes both ideal for people who like to upgrade their systems.

The mintBox, according to Lefebvre, with its Kensington lock and 4 small dents underneath it for the mintBox to be mounted on a VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) mount bracket and their low-power consumption “(respectively idle and full load: 8-17W for the basic model, 9-24W for the pro model) make the mintBox an attractive device for companies, hotels and cybercafés where it can be placed or mounted on walls securely and significantly reduce noise levels and electricity bills.” In other words, the mintBox is meant both for serious computer hobbyists and for serious business use.

The system has been tested with both Linux Mint 12 and the latest Linux Mint 13. According to a note by Lefebvre, it appears that the mintBox will be shipping with “Mint 13 OEM 64-bit, the big question is whether it’s Cinnamon [Mint's own GNOME 2.x style desktop based on GNOME 3.x) or MATE [A Gnome 2.x fork] by default and with or without ATI drivers. Both editions work out of the box on the hardware without drivers, except the sound output via HDMI.”

Audio via HDMI requires an AMD/ATI driver, fglrx. If not supplied in the system this can be installed via Mint’s Software Manager. I imagine this driver will be pre-installed as CompuLab and Mint ramp up production.

Both mintBox versions are available for purchase today. US and Canadian orders are shipped from CompuLab’s US office in Florida. Expected delivery time from “in-stock” is two weeks. In the rest of the world, the units are shipped from CompuLab’s Israeli offices. 10% of each sale goes towards Linux Mint.

Related Stories:

2012’s Best Linux desktop: Linux Mint 13

Fedora 17 & GNOME 3.4: Return to a useful Linux desktop (Review)

Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 8: Five points of comparison

Mint’s Cinnamon: The Future of the Linux Desktop? (Review)

Linux Mint 12 Debian Edition Slideshow

Cloud Technology- What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud Technology

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing delivers IT as a service. It is about creating Efficient IT to enable greater responsiveness to business needs. It might be your own private cloud accessible only within your organization, the public cloud of an external provider or a hybrid cloud that spans both.
Features of a cloud include:

• Virtually unlimited processing and storage capacity
• Abstracted, pooled resources
• Elasticity (the ability to scale up or down easily)
• On-demand, self-service provisioning
• High level of automation
• Consumption-based billing
• Above From Dell, Thanks

Breaking News - IBM to acquire Vivisimo Software

Mark Register Special Edition Breaking News - IBM to acquire Vivisimo Software

IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Vivisimo, a leading provider of federated discovery and navigation software that helps organisations access and analyse big data across the enterprise. Vivisimo is a privately held company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Vivisimo software excels in capturing and delivering quality information across the broadest range of data sources, no matter what format it is, or where it resides. The software automates the discovery of data and helps employees navigate it with a single view across the enterprise, providing valuable insights that drive better decision-making for solving all operational challenges. Today's news accelerates IBM's big data analytics initiatives with advanced federated capabilities allowing organizations to access, navigate and analyse the full variety, velocity and volume of structured and unstructured data without having to move it. The combination of IBM's big data analytics capabilities with Vivisimo software will further IBM's efforts to automate the flow of data into business analytics applications, helping clients better understand consumer behavior, manage customer churn and network performance, detect fraud in real-time and perform data-intensive marketing campaigns. Please read the related press release or the frequently asked questions document and stay informed about all acquisition news by visiting the IBM Software Acquisitions Portal on PartnerWorld. Continued success, Mark Register Vice President Software Business Partners and Midmarket IBM Software Group

Ubuntu 12.04 Delivers 5 Years of Enterprise Linux Desktop Support

Ubuntu 12.04 Delivers 5 Years of Enterprise Linux Desktop Support/ thru datamation

By Sean Michael Kerner
April 26, 2012

For the first time in Ubuntu Linux's history, a desktop Long Term Support (LTS) release will be supported for as long as a server release. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS was officially released today, providing five years of support for both desktop and server releases.
Ubuntu 12.04 introduces a new Linux desktop for LTS users, while also providing a new way to more easily access non-Linux applications.
"In Ubuntu 10.04, we only had three years of support on the desktop, but in response to customer requests, for 12.04 we're standardizing for five years on both the desktop and the server," Steve George, VP of Communications and Products at Canonical, explained to InternetNews.com. "The reason for that is corporate customers generally rev their hardware every three years, but it often takes a year for them to get a large deployment upgraded, so they were looking for longer than three years of support from us."
"George stressed that having five years of support on the Linux desktop is a key milestone on the path to being able to deliver to corporate environments, something that is stable and secure.
"With an eye on corporate deployments of Linux desktops, Ubuntu 12.04 is also making it easier for enterprise users to access their non-Linux applications." VMware, Citrix and Microsoft Remote Desktop technologies are now all supported, providing Ubuntu 12.04 users with a way to access enterprise applications. George noted that, for example, if an enterprise migrated to Ubuntu Linux but they still have a single business application that they were not able to migrate, the new remote desktop integration will be a big help.
"Previously you could access, for example, a Citrix server remotely, but you'd have a separate window," George said. "Whereas with 12.04, it will be embedded in the operating system."
"So as far as the end user is concerned they can simply click their application icon in the Ubuntu Linux Unity interface and it will open up the Microsoft application seamlessly. Microsoft RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) support is directly integrated with Ubuntu. Citrix and VMware support is something that end users will have to take an extra step to acquire and download and install clients themselves.
"We've been working closely with the Citrix and VMware guys to make that available," George said. "By delivering this capability, we think it will be a lot easier for people to make the progressive transition across to Ubuntu as their default operating system."
"Licensing of Citrix and VMware clients is still handled on the server side, while the end clients are being made freely available.
"We've had examples of corporate customers that want to move across to a Linux desktop but the problem is they have one or two legacy applications that hold them back," George said. "So making the process of connecting to and using those applications really seamless from a user perspective is an important step."

Unity

"Perhaps the biggest user-visible change for corporate users of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will be the Unity desktop interface. The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has the GNOME 2 desktop as the default interface.
"The Ubuntu 11.04 release was the first time that Unity was included in an Ubuntu release, though that was not an LTS. Over the last year, Unity has been improved such that it's now ready for corporate users. The desktop has also now been improved for power users by way of the HUD (Heads Up Display) which provides a new way to control and access application functions.

Lenovo CEO: ‘We’ve never been so close to the top’

Lenovo CEO: ‘We’ve never been so close to the top’    from zdnet see Lenovo IdeaPad

By Zhang Xiaonan | April 18, 2012, 4:17am PDT

Summary: At Lenovo’s fiscal 2012 pep rally, president and CEO Yang Yuanqing reveals the company’s objective in the coming fiscal year: To be number one in global PC market.

On April 11 in Beijing, Lenovo held its fiscal 2012 pep rally with the title “Wow! Begins Now”. At the ceremony, Lenovo’s president and CEO Yang Yuanqing revealed their objective in the coming fiscal year, “Our goal is to be No.1 in global PC market. It’s the first time we’ve ever been so close to the top.”

April 1 was the first day of Lenovo’s fiscal 2012. According to a April 11 Gartner report, in the first season of 2012, HP’s shipments were 15,305,413 with a 17.2% share.

Meanwhile, Lenovo’s market share was 13.1%, only 4 percentage points from that of HP. Gartner’s report showed that Lenovo experienced the strongest growth among the top five vendors, as its shipments increased 28.1 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Lenovo has been enjoying healthy growth in the professional market, while the company successfully expanded into the consumer space.

However, it is widely known that low profits prevail in the PC market. In its lasted fiscal season, Lenovo only had a profit margin of 1.8%. With the aim to take the biggest share in the market, which means further expansion, will Lenovo have an even lower profit margin in the future?

When asked this question, Chen Xudong, senior vice president of Lenovo Group and president for Lenovo China Region, said, “This pressure will push Lenovo to stretch from the red ocean of PC and sail into the blue ocean of smart TV and smartphone.”

Lenovo calls it “PC+ Strategy”, which covers terminal products like PCs, smart phones, table PCs and smart TVs.

Yang Yuanqing said, “Lenovo’s smartphones have been among the Top 3 in the Chinese market.” In the Lenovo Earnings press release of third season ,2011, Lenovo’s smartphones were a 2-digit market share. The price of Lenovo’s smartphones is 1,000 yuan RMB(US $159) each. In fiscal 2012, Lenovo will release 40 new models of mobile phones and expand its business to overseas markets.

In the field of tablet PCs, Lenovo’s third generation tablet PC has been advanced: 8.7 mm thick, 580 grams and 20 hours of standby time (including peripheral circuits). As the only partner of Microsoft and Intel in the domain of tablet PCs, Lenovo will be the first to release its tablet PCs with Windows 8 system in Oct 2012.

Lenovo’s smart TV ideaTV K91 will be officially released on May 8, which adopts the voice-control technology.

Despite the greater profits and opportunities promised by the blue ocean, Yang Yuanqing stressed that the PC will always be the backbone of Lenovo.

In the PC market, Lenovo’s firmest support still comes from China. With a 35.3 % market share, Lenovo has been on the top among its rivals and set up the goal of 40 % market share this year. Outside China, Lenovo has 2-digit increase in 13 emerging markets with a 14 % market share in India, while in mature markets of America and European countries, Lenovo PC sales are weaker.

On April 2, former Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci was appointed Lenovo’s senior vice president and head of EMEA(Europe, Middle East and Africa). Lanci said Lenovo will try to be among the top three in these three regions — Europe, Middle East and Africa.

At the ceremony, Yang Yuanqing said, “I personally love the statement of Lenovo made by an American press, that Lenovo is a combination of Apple and Starbucks in the fast developing China. But it’s not enough for us to be just like that. Hopefully next time when this press reports the situation of Lenovo, they will change ‘in China’ into ‘in the world’.”

Nokia loses global cellphone lead to Samsung for first time since 1998

Nokia loses global cellphone lead to Samsung for first time since 1998

By Matthew Miller | April 26, 2012, 9:32pm PDT

Summary: Samsung is a force in the smartphone world and just ousted Nokia for the global cellphone lead, which Nokia has led since 1998.

The first quarter is always a bit slow after the big holiday mobile phone season, but today we see data that brings a tear to my eye. According to IHS data, Nokia lost the global cellphone lead for the first time since 1998 as Samsung overtook them with 92 million cellphones shipped in the first quarter of 2012. Apple still leads in smartphone sales, but Samsung is in second there too and is the new force to be reckoned with.

I have been a fan of Nokia phones for about 10 years, but the times are changing and I have to admit I was a bit surprised by this news. I know that Nokia has fallen quickly in the smartphone market, but thought their Series 40 cellphones would keep them in the global cellphone lead for some time. Samsung now claims the title of global cellphone leader and I imagine that will continue to grow with their feature phones and Bada phones.

This quote from the report is quit telling, “Smartphones represented 34 percent of Samsung’s handset shipments in the first quarter. In contrast, smartphones accounted for just 14 percent of Nokia’s shipments.”

In the smartphone market, Apple shipped 35 million phones with Samsung right behind at 32 million. Nokia is down 39% to just 12 million smartphones sold in the first quarter and has their work cut out with their focus on Windows Phone that is having serious issues gaining consumer adoption. IHS stated that there was no data provided yet for HTC or Motorola since they haven’t posted their first calendar quarter results for 2012, but neither of these companies will be fighting it out for one of the top two spots anyway.

With the Galaxy S III announcement coming next week and a new iPhone likely several months away, it is likely that Samsung will pass Apple in the smartphone market soon as well.

IBM Pure Systems Flash News April 11 2012

IBM Pure Systems Flash

See the Link on chanasystems.com Business Page for IBM Products
On April 11, IBM introduced our first two IBM PureSystems family offerings; IBM PureFlex and IBM PureApplication Systems . We launched these unique expert integrated systems across North America in more than 67 local cities and virtual events to 7,000+ clients, Business Partners and IBMers – with more than 20,000 clients and Business Partners reached globally. In addition, there were more than 40,000 mentions across the web, including Twitter, blogs, and Facebook posts.

What is all the excitement about?


This announcement radically simplifies the enterprise IT. Backed by a $2 billion R&D effort, IBM's new PureSystems family will make corporate computing easier, more secure and less expensive to manage.

Also, PureSystems are ready for the cloud and they tightly integrate computing, storage and networking into a single, ready-to-run machine. This approach makes it much easier for clients to install and manage than traditional servers and associated components.

Each of the IBM PureSystem family offerings have three truly unique attributes:

1. Integration by Design: Deeply integrating and tuning hardware and software in a single, ready-to-go system with built-in security and reliability designed for multiple architectures. The systems are modular and based on open standards.

2. Built-in Expertise: Providing flexibility, choice, simplicity, and agility to drive business velocity. IBM PureSystems capture and automate what the experts have typically done from infrastructure to application.

3 . Simplified Experience: From setting up the system, to operating, maintaining, and upgrading over time, IBM PureSystems simplify every part of the IT lifecycle.

A tale of two distros: Ubuntu and Linux Mint

By Terry Relph-Knight, ZDNet UK, 10 February, 2012 10:47 

 

Seeing is believing
Regardless of operating system, the user experience is always mediated through the user interface, or UI. Since Mint is based on Ubuntu, comparisons between the two OSs for desktop use come down almost entirely to the UI.

Ubuntu 11.10's Unity desktop

The Linux Mint 12 desktop
Beginning with version 11.04, Ubuntu switched from a purely GNOME environment to its own Unity shell running on top of GNOME with the long-term goal of replacing GNOME and its reliance on the X Window system with the Wayland display server.
Mint, on the other hand, has chosen to follow the path of GNOME development and has gone with GNOME 3 and the GNOME shell with MGSE — the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions. This is quite significant since it marks the largest divergence between Ubuntu and Mint since the latter's inception.
One of the primary functions of a user interface is to provide a method of navigation. Both Unity and the GNOME shell mark a transition from task-based cascading text menus, augmented with small icons, where the emphasis is on the text, to an application-based UI with arrays of large icons, augmented by small text, where the emphasis is on the icons.
This move has been prompted, at least in part, by the advent of devices such as smartphones and tablets with small touchscreens, and the need for an operating system that provides a more consistent user experience across a wide range of form factors. However, in their current form such interfaces look a little out of place on large desktop displays.
Where next?
Designing a successful new user interface isn't easy, particularly when you're trying to persuade established users to adopt new paradigms. Unity and GNOME 3 both abandon the old text-based cascading menus in favour of a graphical icon-driven system. Both UIs present an array of large icons with a small line of sometimes curtailed text underneath. This may work well on smaller devices with touchscreens, but on a desktop system with a large non-touch monitor even a small number of application icons quickly fill the screen area. As as result, the eye has to travel further to scan and identify the required application from a square grid, and much bigger mouse movements are required to select the intended application than would be necessary with cascading text menus.

Ubuntu's icon-based Unity interface is better suited to small touchscreen tablets than desktop PCs with large non-touch monitors
Text menus occupy a relatively small area, with the text precisely describing each menu choice. Navigating cascading text menus does not require a lot of mouse movement. The disadvantage is that once the menus become extensive and several layers in depth, navigation to the desired menu choice becomes more difficult. Text menus don't work well on small displays.
Both Ubuntu's and Mint's developers are making efforts to improve their navigation and selection process, and are working on extending their user interfaces. Mint 12 has MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions), which is a desktop layer on top of GNOME 3 that reinstates the experience of cascading text menus. Mint 12 also offers the still-experimental MATE desktop environment, which can be chosen by clicking on the gear-wheel icon at logon. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 shell with its own independent group of developers, who disingenuously describe it as "a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users, using the traditional computing desktop metaphor".

Linux Mint 12 shell extensions: MGSE (top) and MATE (above): both appear at the bottom-left of the desktop when the Menu button is clicked
The Mint developers are planning to go further than MGSE with a new shell called Cinnamon. This is planned for adoption as the default desktop in Mint 13, which should appear sometime in May following the April release of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin). Version 1.2 of Cinnamon is already available, and can be installed in Mint 12 through the Software Manager. As with any of the alternate shells, it can be selected from a drop-down menu at logon by clicking on the gear wheel icon.

The Cinnamon shell 1.2 running on Linux Mint 12
The Ubuntu developers recently announced the slightly oddly-named Head-Up Display or HUD — a feature it's hoped will make its way into the upcoming 12.04 LTS release. Here, the term 'heads up' is used more in the American idiomatic sense of an advance alert, or in the sense of targeting a required behaviour. HUD uses a fuzzy logic system so that when the user types in a fragment or phrase expressing what they intend to do, HUD produces a response. This could be an application selection, or a command that hopefully matches the user's intent. For example, in the vector graphics program Inkscape, typing 'drop shadow' could result in the system offering a shortlist of commands that manipulate shadows. HUD can be seen as an extension of the predictive text that's already present in the Unity and GNOME shell interfaces.
Here is what Mark Shuttleworth has to say about the HUD in his 24 January blog:
"The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV's and phones. So it's exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy "power" users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces...Say hello to the Head-Up Display, or HUD, which will ultimately replace menus in Unity applications."
Shuttleworth also says that the adoption of the HUD fuzzy logic system could be the precursor to the eventual adoption of voice control in Ubuntu. For trial purposes, the HUD repositories for the experimental code can be added to the software sources of Ubuntu 12.04 alpha via the PPA — ppa:unity-team/hud.

Ubuntu's Head-Up Display (HUD) locating the Bookmarks command for the Firefox browser (see this blog post for more details)
Both Ubuntu and Linux Mint have evolved considerably since their beginnings. The future could well see Mint abandon its connection with Ubuntu to grow closer to its roots in Debian and GNOME, while Ubuntu has already decided to move away from GNOME and may continue to diverge from Debian.
Which distro is for you?
Ubuntu and Linux Mint are both stable, mature distributions with a wide range of compatible applications. If you're a business requiring commercial-level support for which you're willing to pay, then Ubuntu is the obvious choice. Home users who want out-of-the-box support for a wide range of media and can put up with the slightly later release dates might well prefer Mint.
Some people take a rather dim view of Ubuntu's default earth-tone colour palette, and Mint certainly provides an appropriately cool green-and-grey alternative. Ubuntu does offer desktop themes in alternative palettes, although the default 'orange'-hued Ambience theme arguably has the most polished appearance.
Then there's the choice between Ubuntu's Unity interface and Linux Mint's modifiable GNOME 3 shell. As we've seen, the UIs for both distros are works in progress, and in practice both offer an easy switch to variations on the earlier GNOME 2 if you don't get on with the default offerings.

---

Test setup
I have been using and writing about open-source software for about four years and have used Ubuntu as my main operating system since version 9.04. Although aware of Linux Mint, I had not previously tried it, simply because it's based on Ubuntu.
For this comparison I needed a Mint system, and rather than run it as a virtual machine, or on another computer, I decided to install it as a bootable option on my main work PC — an AMD Athlon64 X2 system with 2GB of RAM running on an MSI K9N motherboard.
I had an empty bay in my hot-swap drive cage and a spare 500GB drive, so I plugged the drive in installed Linux Mint to it and then opened a terminal window and ran the command 'sudo update-grub'. This added Linux Mint to my boot menu, so I could then choose between Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit, Windows XP or Linux Mint 12 64-bit at boot time.

Comments on Ubuntu Linux

 Canonical Survey Reveals Worldwide Ubuntu Server Trends

Feb. 17th, 2012 by Christopher Tozzi

from :  the varguy 
http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/02/17/canonical-survey-reveals-worldwide-ubuntu-server-trends/ for the complete article.
Who uses Ubuntu, where and why? That’s a question a lot of parties in the open source channel likely ask themselves. It’s also one that’s hard to answer, since public data on Ubuntu deployment is scarce. But it became a little less so recently with the publication of the results of Canonical’s latest survey of Ubuntu server users. Read on for the highlights.
The stakes surrounding the deployment of Ubuntu on servers are high. They’re a measure of Canonical’s success relative to other competitors in the open source channel such as Red Hat and Novell. They also say something about the health of Linux as a whole. And last but not least, they reveal a lot about technology trends in the open source ecosystem and beyond — where open source is being deployed, what kind of applications are popular and where the channel’s momentum might lead it in the future.

Ubuntu Server Edition Survey 2012

On Feb. 14, 2012, Gerry Carr, Canonical’s director of Communications, posted results of the latest survey of Ubuntu server users. This is the third time the survey, completed on a voluntary basis on Ubuntu’s website, was taken. The last one was in 2010.
The full report is available here, but some notable highlights that help reveal how Ubuntu is being used — and where it might be headed in the future — include:

• Traditional applications — web, database and mail servers — constitute the clear majority of current Ubuntu deployments. That suggests users trust Ubuntu for high-volume, mission-critical services, although it also means Ubuntu may still have room to grow when it comes to more novel server technologies, such as those related to the cloud.
• And on that note, when asked whether Ubuntu is a viable platform for cloud-based deployments, a whopping 70 percent of users declined to answer (of the remainder, 27 percent answered yes and 3 percent said no). Canonical interprets that trend as evidence that many users currently lack sufficient experience working with the cloud, which may be true, though that still seems like a huge number of abstentions. Whatever the explanation, it seems clear that Canonical needs to work harder to encourage Ubuntu use for the cloud — as indeed it has been — to avoid being left behind in this growing segment of the IT world.
• Interestingly, most Ubuntu servers are running on traditional desktop PCs. As the report pointed out, “the prevalence of the tower PC probably reflects the number of hobbyist and home users responding to the survey.” I also wonder, though, if this suggests that Ubuntu may still lack as strong a presence in the server rooms of large organizations as some of its competitors.
• More than half the respondents were located in Europe, and barely a quarter were in North America. According to the report, other data (which Canonical has not shared) suggests that in fact most Ubuntu server deployments are in the United States, with Europe overrepresented in the numbers released Tuesday because the survey was better publicized there. I’ll take the report’s word for that, but assuming it’s true, the higher response rate among Europeans nonetheless may be linked to the stronger presence of Ubuntu among governments and other large organizations in Europe.
• Although the data on users’ perceptions of the compatibility of Ubuntu with other platforms is a little hard to make out, since it’s presented only in a graph, it looks like most respondents believe Ubuntu works pretty well with other systems. In addition, there appears to be no major difference in its perceived ability to integrate with open source vs. proprietary platforms, suggesting that Ubuntu has done a good job of building bridges into the closed-source world — no mean feat given the many hurdles to integrating open source technologies with proprietary ones.
• Last but not least, KVM is now more popular than Xen as a virtualization hypervisor among survey respondents — but both still lag behind VMware. And surprisingly, VirtualBox ranked relatively high given that it’s mostly a desktop-oriented solution. (Perhaps this finding, however, also reflects the fact that many respondents are hobbyists who may be running server technologies alongside desktop ones).

Free exchange

Shake it all about

Which emerging economies have the most monetary and fiscal wiggle-room?

Jan 28th 2012 |

THE downturn in the euro area and the wobbly recovery in America have already taken their toll on the emerging world. Setting China’s still-bouncy economy to one side, the average growth rate in other developing countries is estimated to have slumped to an annual rate of less than 3% in the fourth quarter of 2011, from 6.5% in the first quarter. Some of that slowdown was the result of policy tightening to cool overheating economies and curb inflation, but it also reflects weaker exports and reduced capital inflows. If the euro-area debt crisis worsens, things will get nastier for emerging economies.
The good news is that whereas most rich countries have little or no room to cut interest rates or to increase public borrowing, emerging markets as a group still have lots of monetary and fiscal firepower at their disposal. That room for manoeuvre served developing countries well during the downturn of 2008-09: monetary and fiscal easing was more effective in boosting demand than it was in the rich world, thanks to healthier private-sector balance-sheets. Although the emerging markets have less room for easing now than they did in 2008, when they collectively ran a small surplus on their budgets, their average budget deficit last year was only 2% of GDP, against 8% in the G7 economies. And their general-government debt amounts on average to only 36% of GDP, compared with 119% of GDP in the rich world.
A healthy aggregate picture masks some big differences, however. Some governments have much more scope to loosen policy than others. An analysis by The Economist ranks 27 emerging economies according to their monetary and fiscal wiggle-room.
We began by using five indicators to assess each country’s ability to ease monetary policy. The first was inflation, which ranges from 2% in Taiwan to 20% or more in Argentina and Venezuela (using private-sector estimates for the former rather than the government’s dubious figure). Lower food prices have reduced inflation in many countries, but it remains above 5% in half of them. Our second measure is excess credit: the gap between the growth rate in bank credit and nominal GDP over the past year. This looks most alarming in Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong and Turkey. In contrast, Chinese bank lending is now rising more slowly than GDP.
The third monetary indicator is the real interest rate. This is negative in about half of the economies, but is over 2% in Brazil and China. Fourth, we look at currency movements against the dollar since mid-2011. Nine countries, including Brazil, Hungary, India and Poland, have seen double-digit depreciations, with the risk that higher import prices could push up inflation. Our final gauge is the current-account balance. If global financial conditions tighten, it would be harder to finance a large current-account deficit, and so harder to cut interest rates. Turkey is the most vulnerable country on this measure, with a deficit of 9% of GDP forecast for 2012. India, Poland and South Africa are tipped to have deficits of around 4% or more.
We graded each country on all five indicators. We then added up the scores to produce an overall measure of monetary manoeuvrability (rankings for the individual indicators can be found here).
Next we devised a fiscal-flexibility index, combining government debt and the structural (ie, cyclically adjusted) budget deficit as a percentage of GDP. The most profligate governments, by emerging-market standards, are those of Brazil, Hungary, Egypt, India, Pakistan and Poland, with debts close to 60% or more of GDP. The last four countries also have huge structural budget deficits of 6-9% of GDP, leaving governments little room to respond to another downturn. In contrast, Russia, Singapore and South Korea have ample scope for a fiscal stimulus.

Our interactive index ranks these 27 emerging economies across all six individual indicators

Some economists argue that China could not be saved by a big fiscal stimulus like that in 2009. Although its official government debt is only 27% of GDP, this excludes bank lending to local governments, which could push the total above 60% of GDP. But the Chinese government also has vast assets, notably its shares in state-owned enterprises, so its net fiscal position remains healthy.
The average of these monetary and fiscal measures produces our overall “wiggle-room index”. Countries are coloured in the chart according to our assessment of their ability to ease: “green” means it is safe to let out the throttle; “red” means the brakes need to stay on. The index offers a rough ranking of which economies are best placed to withstand another global downturn. It suggests that China, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have the greatest capacity to use monetary and fiscal policies to support growth. Chile, Peru, Russia, Singapore and South Korea also get the green light.
Red alert
At the other extreme, Egypt, India and Poland have the least room for a stimulus. Argentina, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey, Pakistan and Vietnam are also in the red zone. Unfortunately, this suggests a mismatch. Some of the really big economies where growth has slowed quite sharply, such as Brazil and India, have less monetary and fiscal firepower than China, say, which has less urgent need to bolster growth. India’s Achilles heel is an overly lax fiscal policy and an uncomfortably high rate of inflation. The Reserve Bank of India has sensibly not yet reduced interest rates despite a weakening economy. In contrast, Brazil’s central bank has ignored the red light and reduced interest rates four times since last August. In its latest move on January 18th, the bank signalled more cuts ahead. That will support growth this year but at the risk of reigniting inflation in 2013. Desirable as it is to keep moving, ignoring red lights is risky.
^{Economist.com/blogs/freeexchange}