who dat is?
Who dat is? - So now bidders for AT&T Broadband are getting cold feet. The article mentions issues of debt, but what about the 800,000+ customers that AT&T just screwed? After the Excite@Home fiasco, AT&T is selling a totally different company than they were offering before.
CNET is opining about how Compaq might have to *gasp* go it alone, if the HP merger fails. I still don’t see how it is Compaq that stands to win or lose in this deal; despite some really bad decisions in the past about investing in the Internet bubble, Compaq has extremely strong products. In my experience, loyalty and brand reputation *does* play a large part for people who buy Compaq. I mean, they make great products that everyone wants — how can they be in trouble?
I just stumbled across this article about how to get SQL Server without having to pay the per-CPU charge. The gist of the article is that, so long as you use the database efficiently enough that it will run on a free version, you don’t need to pay for the more powerful version. What he didn’t mention is that, if you use these same techniques and you still end up with enough transactional volume to need bigger servers, you may have to pay for SQL Server licenses, but you’ll save yourself a bundle on hardware costs. The key lesson is that careful design can drastically reduce the amount of resources you need in a database application. The tradeoff of design cost vs. hardware cost is usually a no-brainer; good design is much cheaper than compensating with expensive hardware.
Oracle is crashing into the XML databases space. We now have Tamino, XYZFind, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft who are competing in this wide-open (and remarkably level) playing field. This is a glorious time in the history of IT.
Wow, I had no idea that this stuff is now legal. Adrafinil was pretty advanced, and Modafinil is even less prone to side-effects. Allah willing, the days of sloppy psychopharmacology will soon be a distant memory. It looks like OJ has been smuggling a slightly less-precise pharmaceutical. I am glad during these times of terror that the law enforcement are focusing on the things that sit at the root of society’s problems — dancing and free satellite TV.
This article is yet another oddity from the world of the retro Unix freedom fighters. Red Hat is agressively enforcing some of their intellectual property rights, and in the opinion of some freedom fighters, is doing so at the expense of the sacred GPL. Sort of like “We stand for free software, but don’t you dare distribute our software for free unless you explicitly keep it secret that this is Red Hat software.” It reminds me of a regulation I once saw within some government agency. All disks that did not contain confidential information were required to have a label clearly marked “this disk does not contain confidential information”. So I guess a spy would have looked at a disk that didn’t have a label and got all confused.
I don’t know what Larry Ellison would talk about if Microsoft didn’t exist. He used to allege that we ran Unix, and did so for performance reasons. Now he brings up the same allegations, but since the performance argument has been dicredited, the alleged reason is now security. Unfortunately, this house is made of glass. I am surprised that CNET even writes news articles about this anymore. My perception of university computing systems was that the number of systems on which you could easily get root access far outnumbered the ones that were actually secure. It’s kind of redundant to publish an article saying that kids at college can get root access on their machines and their admin will probably never even patch the holes he knows about.