Posts by Kevin

This is not news

This is not news. The Patriot Act in its original form included these things as well. Congress passed it overwhelmingly, and the Supreme Court ruled that these things were not Constitutional and struck them down. That was the end of it, and anybody who believes otherwise needs to head to Roswell on a fact-finding mission. The fact that this is being released is just Obama trying to distract from the ridiculous spending that is happening, with Hoover-esque tax hikes to follow in 2010, and an increase in spending by $1.5T by 2012. He doesn't know how to lead, so he continues to campaign in hopes of making himself look better by bashing others.

JBOSS is good quality and cheaper

My company is finishing a migration from Weblogic to JBOSS for our apps. WL is much nicer, particularly the administrative console and ease of support because of it, but the licensing costs a fortune and the upgrade from version to version was causing way too many headaches for our developers.

This is how all battles are fought

The good guys always have a harder job because they follow the rules. It would be nice to be able to spread cleanup code in the same way that malicious code is spread, but you can't. Just because you are trying to do good does not mean you are exempt from the law. At the same time, would it be such a bad thing for governments to pass laws that allow for cleanup like this? A case by case situation? Sort of deputizing security companies to take down an organized crime institution.

Maybe they'll stop censoring views that disagree with the editors now

I'm glad that wikipedia is going to continue on, but at the same time, I would have rather seen them bought out and get some new management in there. Perhaps new management wouldn't censor so many things, and push their agenda out as "fact". There are way too many biased articles out there, where the opposite viewpoint is censored. See overstock.com for more details, and this is a small example.

This is a great idea, especially to get it rolling early

I know its not perfect now, but this is a really great idea. The latest fad seems to be touchscreens and these completely ignore the needs of the blind. I don't know anyone who is blind, nor can I begin to appreciate the difficulties they must have in this ever increasing technology driven world, but I can speculate at the frustrations this would present when all the latest and greatest new devices don't offer tactile response. I for one, can't stand touch screen because I like to feel the keys under my fingers, but I never considered it a necessity.

Similar idea to Sun's smart card setup

Centralized server that stores your session, accessible from thin clients. Sounds very familiar to Sun's project a number of years ago. Plug your smart card into a thin client connected to the network, and your desktop and files popup for you to use, just as you left it before. The portability between platforms is big difference here, but that was more McNealy's stubbornness than limitation of the technology.

This is nothing new. Just rehashed with a shiny new label on it, and the trendy tag of "virtualization". The same problems that existed with the ASCII terminal, and every thin client before this, will still exist on this one.

Disappointed in El Reg for ignoring the dark side of Apple

In all 3 articles on the Apple report card, there has not been one mention of ethics, and ignored legal problems. I refer to the iPod that revived the company. Nobody argues this, and the graphs in article #2 support it. Apple is making its comeback not because Apple computer users are buying up other consumer electronics, but because purchasers of Apple's consumer electronics are deciding to be Apple-only folks and buying the computers to stay in line. This is most definitely a result of good marketing, anybody who is aware of this agrees.

What disappoints me about El Reg's report card thus far is the failure to even mention Apple's skirting (disregard) for the law. They applied for a patent on the iPod's interface in 2000. This patent application was rejected because it was ALREADY OWNED by Creativ. Apple ignored this and released their product anyways. The result has been Apple's revival as a company, and it can tied wholly to the iPod and good marketing (the "buying into a club" approach). I am disappointed that El Reg has thus far ignored this, and probably will continue to.

It also speaks to the state of the patent system here in the US, and how it is not built to handle the tech explosion of the past 15-20 years. It is an eerily similar situation to Charles Goodyear and his rubber patent that was blatantly ignored and the orders of courts were blatantly ignored. Difference is, Goodyear is still a leader, whereas Creativ is just about dead. What should have been is very similar to Kodak, releasing a Polaroid like camera in the mid-late 80s and being ordered to desist, except that Kodak obeyed the court order and is still viable today for anyone who still uses film.

Apple has ignored everything, with the mindset that they will pay up later (which they did) to Creativ. It has worked very well for them, and the fact that nobody seems to care about it further damages the patent system in that companies know that they can safely ignore them and pay a relatively small fine 4 years down the road.

Nice concept, but...

How do I then archive it off for "reasonable" availability any better than I do now? A good DBA has already taken measures to ensure critical production data is available, and production database access is fast. What if you're in the situation where you're production environment generates 30 million rows per day, that you need to archive off nightly (like my company...) and keep available for 2 years? How does this system improve that? It sounds to me like a very good idea, but if your company has DBAs that are worth a spit, you don't need it. Everything it does is BETTER done by good management of partitions, diskspace, and good backup/archive procedures. Once the procedure is regular, it can be scripted out, like everything else....

Where could this lead?

The decision that a website is not responsible for proactively monitoring the trademark infringements taking place on its site is huge. I bet Google wishes this had been decided regarding Viacom and YouTube

Coincidence

Ironically, I just saw a little bit of a John Denver special last night, and I learned why he is so popular in SE Asia. The way it was said, "If there is one western song that everybody in China knows, it is "Take me home, country roads". Stems from a visit the Premier made to the US, ad the President took him to a John Denver concert. He was so impressed, he asked for 500 copies of the tape, and for a while it was the only western music allowed to play on radio stations. I know this incident wasn't China, but still. SE Asia, and very ironic that I just saw something about this very song.

@tok- typical response from an open source fanatic

I hear your argument, and you make good points, most of all that IBM doesn't contribute as much as they boast. But your point is tainted by your attitude towards it. You sounds like a typical open source zealot that confuses "contributing to open source" with "giving everything to open source". IBM donates, but you're upset because you don't think they donate enough. Well, Ian nailed it, they are a huge company with a lot of people working on things for them, and they would be out of business if they gave everything away. Just because they don't contribute everything they do to open source, does not mean they don't contribute.

If you want to wag a finger, wag it at google. They heavily use open source, and do not contribute their coding to the community. Why? Because technically they don't distribute it, they just use it across the company. They are a prime of example of using and not contributing, "violating" the spirit of open source.

In response to Lance

"Publishing an IP goes against what DNS is for!"

Actually, the purpose of DNS is so you can enter a human readable address, rather than an IP address to get to a website. And no, DNS servers do not handle the load balancing of your web server farm/cluster. DNS will resolve a human readable address to one IP address. The balancing is handled internally, as is the resolution of sub-domains for the big ones. www.google.com will pull up one IP from the DNS servers. Mail.google.com is probably resolved by a google DNS server that received a question for the mail. portion of the known google.com.

Interestingly, this is not the first example of name resolution being used to trick people. In a much more devious manner, Best Buy had an internal web page that matched their publicly available website but with different prices. So, when you go to the store and say you saw this TV at this price online, they can pull up the "internet" and show that you are wrong, when in reality they are pulling up an intranet mirror. They will ask to go home and print it out to prove it. They were caught and have played dumb, we'll see what happens. It should be criminal, but it probably won't some to anything more than a "stiff" fine and a hit in the court of public opinion.