Yesterday, Scott and I went up to Charm City to sit in on tutorial day of RailsConf 2011. It was a good enough day. As I don’t know Rails — at all — I went to the Rails for Idiots track. Otherwise known as Rails For Zombies and a live review of the Ruby on [...]
Nope. You almost certainly paid lots of money for a license use the software, not the software itself. The 9th circuit appellate court reversed the earlier trial court’s decision, effectively revoking the doctrine of First Sale for software. Starting with the standard observation of I Am Not A Lawyer, I think the law is wrong [...]
SAP is offering 5 and a quarter billion for Sybase. Besides saving a troubled RDBMS manufacturer, it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out for SAP sales. One of SAP’s selling points over the years has been their ability to reside in varying database platforms; sure, they had their own database, but [...]
I’ll be up front; I don’t get it. Why is there this massive affinity for Apple in the Open Source community? Apple may be many things, but they are pretty much the antithesis of open source. A while back, I was at the NoSQL East conference. As you may imagine, this is a very open [...]
You know, I was actually a wee bit worried when the buzz about the iPad started. I just plunked down a whole host of cash on a laptop, and it might have ended up obsolete before it even arrived. Had the Apple tablet been as much of a game changer as the iPhone, that is. [...]
In the 20+ years I’ve been a techie, I’ve never bought a laptop. I’ve had several, but it’s always been on someone else’s nickel. I have lots o’ reasons for it: By virtue of the size restrictions, you get significantly less power/memory/disk space for the cost (as the laptop can only be so big and [...]
Another article on deduplication has come out and I still have the same concerns as I always have. Deduplication occurs by analyzing the data, hashing it into a mathematical tag and then normalizing the tags to save storage. And that’s great — in theory. Until you add in the hash collisions (the MD5 one, the [...]
Today at Oracle’s OpenWorld, Scott McNealy mentioned the Sun F5100 Flash Array, which is a RAID comprised of flash devices rather than magnetic media. I had this idea a few years ago, but both the COTS flash devices were insufficiently robust and I didn’t have any funding. But Sun seems to have to put things [...]
Today, I found two links which got me thinking about software patents. First up, RedHat has filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court basically asking for all software patents to be ended. On the other side is Gene Quinn who is a devout defender of software patents. Red Hat’s position is: “Software patents form [...]
Um, WANT! A Personal Supercomputer. If you could only see me, my propeller is spinning so fast, I’m about to achieve liftoff. SGI has been through some tough times, but they still are winning the cool points war with the other hardware vendors. Since they bought Cray, they have some really spiffy tech. It’s too [...]
Jason Kottke has an article about the iPhone that really bears further thought and analysis. Titled Your Company; There’s An App For That, it talks about ways in which smart phones in general — and Apple in the particular — are in direct competition with lots of companies that might not quite know it’s coming: [...]
It’s looking like October’s going to be a travel month. First, Oracle OpenWorld out in SF for a week, then to Atlanta for NoSQL. OpenWorld should be interesting; I’ve been a time or two before. Usually, they have a big thing to push (NetPC, 10g, 11g, etc.). I’m not sure as to what it’s going [...]
From Salon, a story about some of the numerous problems with the iPhone: As I spoke to the clerk, much of what’s infuriating about iPhone culture instantly became clear. Both the Apple salesmen and the company they work for (which, instead of apologizing for the exploding phones, called them “isolated incidents”), give the distinct impression [...]
The iPhoneblog has an interesting take over the brouhaha regarding whether or not Google Voice will be allowed on the iPhone. I made this analogy yesterday and I’m sticking by it — IBM licensing DOS for the PC killed IBM and gave birth to Microsoft. Google has a near-monopoly on search-based advertising, the cash cow [...]
I was never going to buy RealDVD (I am exploring other solutions), but I think this is a real mistake being made by the studios. Unable to learn from the repeated failings of the RIAA, Hollywood seems quite bent on driving any potentially legal offering underground and will thusly encourage a situation where consumers are [...]
While these thoughts are based on making a compelling display-based advertising campaign, the same principles apply to making a compelling product (along with my thoughts): Research, research, research.: You have to know where to sell your ad.My Take: In just the same way, you have to know a lot of things about a work product: [...]
Marco Arment from Tumblr shares his experience with Apple: Apple thinks reviews can take 8-30 days and web-capable apps need nudity warnings and the management interface can be buggy as shit and they don’t need us to be able to reach them and nobody really needs to take any of this very seriously. Because it’s [...]
In Belgium, one of the Google datacenters has abandoned use of chillers to cool the air within the system. Rather, ambient air from outside the building will be used; if the temperature gets too high, load will be shifted to other data centers until the temperature is back within the nominal range. Two thoughts: Assuming [...]
As a follow up to the medical records startup, an article on a plethora of
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