“We made it a point to hire really smart, visionary people and then let them do their work.
I wanted to delegate and let people be in charge of things. My own decision-making process was to decide who got to decide. To make decisions, you have to first outline the problem, and if you hire really great people, they’re going to know more about the problem they’re dealing with than you ever will.”–Scott McNealy

I have interviewed Scott McNealy. Scott is a Silicon Valley pioneer, most famous for co-founding Sun Microsystems in 1982. We talked about Innovation, AI, Big Data, Redis, Curriki and Wayin.

RVZ

Q1. You co-Founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, and served as CEO and Chairman of the Board for 22 years. What are the main lessons learned in all these years?

Scott …

It’s been released. Use this with NIST::NVD 1.00.00 and you will be able to perform immediate look-ups of CVE and CWE data given a CPE URN. For instance:

cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl Makefile.PL ; make ; make test ; cjac@foxtrot:/usr/src/git/f5/NIST-NVD-Store-SQLite3$ perl -MNIST::NVD::Query -MData::Dumper -e '
$q = NIST::NVD::Query->new(store    => q{SQLite3},database => q{t/data/nvdcve-2.0.db});
$cve_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => q{cpe:/a:microsoft:ie:7.0.5730.11} );
print Data::Dumper::Dumper { cve_list => $cve_list, first_cvss => $q->cve( cve_id => $cve_list->[0] )->{q{vuln:cvss}} }
'
$VAR1 = {
          'cve_list' => [
                          'CVE-2002-2435',
                          'CVE-2010-5071'
                        ],
          'first_cvss' => {
                            'cvss:base_metrics' => { …

For a work project, I wrote a library in perl that can be used to query the NVD feed that NIST publishes here:

http://nvd.nist.gov/download.cfm

Here’s a snippit from the perldoc:

use NIST::NVD::Query;
 
# use convert_nvdcve to generate these files from the XML dumps at
# http://nvd.nist.gov/download.cfm
 
my( $path_to_db, $path_to_idx_cpe ) = @ARGV;
 
my $q = NIST::NVD::Query->new( database => $path_to_db,
                               idx_cpe  => $path_to_idx_cpe,
                              );
 
# Given a Common Platform Enumeration urn, returns a list of known
# CVE IDs
 
my $cve_id_list = $q->cve_for_cpe( cpe => 'cpe:/a:zaal:tgt:1.0.6' );
 
my @entry;
 
foreach my $cve_id ( @$cve_id_list ){
 
  # Given a CVE ID, returns a CVE entry
 
  my $entry = $q->cve( cve_id => …

How many in your household again?

One of President John Kennedy’s most memorable phrases is “ask not what your country can do for you –  ask what can you do for your country”.  I got to thinking about this over lunch with a fellow colleague in the big data space. After comparing named customers for a while, we realized we had forgotten one of the biggest “big data” customers whom we both have in common – the government.

Whether you believe in small or big government, one thing is for certain – it has some very big data on its hands. Some of this is freely available, such as the …

Topics for this podcast:

*Our latest CAOS Special Report – Control and Community
*Red Hat releases RHEL 6
*Symbian and Oracle highlight community challenges
*The latest on government adoption of OSS from GOSCON
*Open core issue continues, now with Linux and evil twins

iTunes or direct download (31:02, 8.5MB)

Back in January 2009, we found out that the Malaysian Government had saved about RM40 million using open source. In a little over a year, that number has been topped: over the past six years, the total costs savings are now quoted to be RM188.39 million (USD$58.54 million)! That’s a hell of a lot of money for software licenses, don’t you think?

Worth noting is that before the OSS Master Plan started, there were zero companies supporting OSS registered with the Ministry of Finance. Now more than half of the 4,000 companies do (53% is the quoted number). For more information, read the latest …

Open source in government. Sourcefire announces relationships with Symantec and Microsoft. EPL supercedes CPL. The cost and potential savings of open source. The origins of open source. IBM and Sun - back on? And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

# OStatic: Why Isn’t Open Source Even Considered at the U.S. State Government Level?

# Simon Phipps: Five Ideas To Get FOSS Into Governments.

# Sourcefire’s 3D system to be bundled as part of the Symantec Managed Security Services offering.

# Sourcefire has also announced a strategic relationship with Microsoft.

# The Eclipse Foundation has …

Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request:

"Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each …

Last week I found out about the Open Source Economy Conference 2008 held in Putrajaya, Malaysia on the 19th of November 2008. Its co-organised by Sun and the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC). Its also the “launch” of MySQL in Malaysia.

I only mention this because I’m speaking - check the agenda out. Don’t hesitate to register now.

Thanks a ton to Xarb who reminded me of pipes in his blog post about filtering out fluffy planet mysql authors.

I should remember Pipes, since I work at Yahoo and I was called in to help out with their DB that first full day they were launched and couldn't handle the traffic, but hey, sometimes things just don't come to mind.

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