DarkStar Spouts Off

I'm Down With Black

OK, I will support Black businesses or Black efforts when they provide good service and seem sensible. I'm sorry to say that I don't think Black Bird (powered by Mozilla) meets the last criteria.

Blackbird was developed on the simple proposition that we, as the African American community, can make the Internet experience better for ourselves and, in doing so, make it better for everyone. Primarily we believe that the Blackbird application can make it easier to find African American related content on the Internet and to interact with other members of the African American community online by sharing stories, news, comments and videos via Blackbird.

Why not create a plug-in with a skin and let people know what it is, instead of creating a plug-in with a skin and then re-brand as a new browser?

Government Accountability

Someone is saying the government has to be held accountable.

That same person used a free commercial email service for government business and included their spouse in the cc-list to say the email is personal and, therefore, not releasable to requests about government business. This information was known BEFORE the person's email account was "hacked" and email posted on a website.

People are rightly upset about the hacking, but the same people are not saying diddly squat about circumventing government accountability which is this person's mantra in speeches.

My Desktop & Windows SP3

[ UPDATE ] I found a fix! I've also noticed Google hits on this post so I'm making it a feature article for a few days

Windows XP, SP3 update got downloaded.
I clicked install.
I friggin' music file, Beethoven.wma couldn't be copied over.
The entire install failed because of it.

A. Friggin. MUSIC. FILE!!!!!!!!!

Desktop is now hosed.

[ UPDATE ] 9/5/2008

In this case, the beethoven.wma file resides in the "\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents\Shared Music" folder. However, the "All Uses" directory had NO permissions set. To fix it, right click on "All Users" and click the "Security" option.

Click the "Security" Tab.

(When I did this, the list under the "Group or user names" was empty.)

Click "Add..."

Click "Advanced..."

Click "Find Now"

In the list at the bottom, do a multiple selection click (control click) to select:

• Administrator
• Administrators
• "Your user name"

Click ok all of the way out and try again.

Lawd, I'm Already Drinking The Kool-Aide

I'm already drinking the Google Kool-Aide, I don't think I'll take another swig of this one:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

I think I'll pass.

The Start Of The ISDN Model

This is the start of the ISDN pricing model for residential users of broadband. If you aren't familiar with the model, it is simple. You pay for the amount of data transferred. When you exceed a limit, you are charged more and it is at a higher rate than the average rate if you stay below the limit. (Did that come out right? I'm tired. I've worked A. LOT. OF. HOURS. and I'm exhausted! Mrs. D.S. is going to be happy with the check though).

Comcast Corp., the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, Thursday said it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.

On Oct. 1, the cable company will update its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of traffic per month, the company announced on its Web site.

Comcast has already reserved the right to cut off subscribers who use too much bandwidth each month, without specifying exactly what constitutes excessive use.

"We've listened to feedback from our customers who asked that we provide a specific threshold for data usage and this would help them understand the amount of usage that would qualify as excessive," the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Sure, just leave "excessive" hanging out there at some arbitrary figure, and then when people, rightly, ask what that limit is, you say you have gotten so many requests to define it, so you define it and say the customers requested it! This is why I am looking at homes in areas which have FIOS. COMCAST is a blood sucking leech and I really don't want to give them my business EVER again.

YouTube exists because of the lack of download and upload caps on residential bandwidth. People pay more for the speed of uploads and downloads, not on the amount of data transferred. If the ISDN model was put into play when residential broadband first came out, YouTube may not exist. How many jobs were directly and indirectly created because of YouTube, including jobs at COMCAST?

Is The U.S. Ready?

Is the U.S. ready to fight a cyber-war with Russia considering what the Russian Mafia has done to Best Western?

The Best Western Hotel Group had more than bathroom towels ripped off over the past year. According to reports over 8 million guest records were nabbed by hackers and, according to authorities, many of the hotel patrons personal information, including home addresses, phone numbers, place of employment and credit card details, are now for sale by the Russian Mafia.

I'm just askin'...

Dead 3 Year Old Laptop

The Toshiba laptop I've had for THREE years died. Folks, that's THREE FRIGGIN' YEARS!

Somewhere I read where the new laptops for Toshiba are a good choice. No. I'll NEVER by a Toshiba computer again.

Dell? With there poor customer service and suspect quality, even if PC Magazine has one rated highly, I don't think I can go in that direction.

HP? Sony? Something else?

I do development on my laptop. Anyone have any suggestions?

Kinda Tech Stuff

Time Warner Cable tries metering Internet use

NEW YORK (AP) -- You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?

Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.

Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.

Matt Drudge

Now, as Obama and Sen. John McCain look toward the fall, Drudge has emerged unexpectedly as more of a threat to the Republican than to the Democrat. This, combined with the rise of left-leaning sites such as TalkingPointsMemo.com and HuffingtonPost.com — both of which have proved effective in promoting and amplifying a Democratic message — reflects a major shift from the last two presidential elections, a matter of open alarm to Republican strategists and surprised satisfaction to Democrats.

“The MSM is already sending love letters to Obama,” said a GOP operative who worked for the Bush-Cheney reelection. “That’s something that has traditionally been countered on the Republican side with talk radio, blogs to a lesser degree but especially Drudge. If those tools are not part of the Republican vehicle for message delivery, that’s crippling.”

The Drudge Report is no ordinary compendium of news stories. It is a heavily trafficked gateway to all corners of the Internet, a portal composed of links largely to breaking news from traditional media like The New York Times (as well as newer entrants like Politico). Most of the content is without any obvious ideological attachment. But operatives of both parties have long believed that his choice of links — along with occasional posts of Drudge's own reporting — have reflected a rightward tilt, and they assumed a preference for Republican candidates.

Windoze 7

In an effort to avoid a repeat of the compatibility problems that plagued the launch of its Windows Vista operating system last year, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has ordered computer and other hardware makers to begin testing their devices on the forthcoming Windows 7 OS as soon as the first beta version becomes available.

Hardware makers that don't comply with the edict won't qualify for Microsoft's Windows Logo certified compatibility program for Windows 7 or Windows Vista. "Beginning with the first beta of Windows 7 all Windows Vista submissions must include a complete CPK with tests logs from Windows 7," Microsoft said in a 61-page bulletin to its hardware partners last week.

H1-B Visa

The Bush administration's recent decision

The opponents argue that the administration exceeded its legal authority by stretching the rules for foreign students by extending the length of the visas from one year to 29 months.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., by the Immigration Reform Law Institute and joined by The Programmers Guild and other groups, charges that the administration's decision in April to extend the work period for students under the Optional Practical Training provision is little more than an effort to get around the H-1B cap limit.

GMail And FireFox

From some visual changes I see, I gather Google updated GMail. Unfortunately, GMail on FireFox on an XP platform, seems to mean FireFox takes 98% of the CPU.

Toys: Home NAS and GigE

Right now I have slightly "advanced" home wireless setup. The Verizon FiOS connection comes into a wireless router, which has an Ethernet connection to another another wireless router that is now just a wireless switch. I have an Ethernet connection from the wireless switch to my development machine and a Linux server that I use for Unix-like development and as the home file server/backup.

Why do I have 2 wireless routers? Well, the FiOS wireless router provides crappy wireless connectivity. My wife's machine always gets a poor connection to the FiOS router, so I set up the previous wireless router as a wireless switch, and all is well.

I want to get network area storage (NAS) to replace the Linux machine for file server/backup functionality, so I can reclaim disk space and upgrade Linux to what I need. Plus I'm fearing the pending death of the drives.

I'm looking at home NAS solutions. My requirements are that they are Window$ compatible, of course, but also Linux compatible. The products have GigE connections, so of course that means that I "have" to upgrade the network behind the FiOS router to GigE, right? Right? RIGHT? ;-) With this setup I can attach a printer to the NAS and have a network printer for the house. Believe it or not, this would get some use.

Maybe that's what the congressional bribe will be used for. ;-)

The HD DVD War Is Over. WalMart Declares The Winner

The HD format war is over.

Everyone can go out and buy the Blu Ray DVD player of their choice or the game console that supports Blu Ray. We have a winner in the format war, and the knock out hay maker came from WalMart:

February 16, 2008
Taps for HD DVD as Wal-Mart Backs Blu-ray
By MATT RICHTEL and ERIC A. TAUB

SAN FRANCISCO — HD DVD, the beloved format of Toshiba and three Hollywood studios, died Friday after a brief illness. The cause of death was determined to be the decision by Wal-Mart to stock only
high-definition DVDs and players using the Blu-ray format.

There are no funeral plans, but retailers and industry analysts are already writing the obituary for HD DVD.

The announcement by Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest retailer of DVDs, that it would stop selling the discs and machines in June when supplies are depleted comes after decisions this week by Best Buy, the largest electronics retailer, to promote Blu-ray as its preferred format and Netflix, the DVD-rental service, to stock only Blu-ray movies, phasing out HD DVD by the end of this year.

Keep it moving folks. No more here to see. It's just another dead technology littering the highway. Move on. No more rubber necking....

Tech Buy Outs

Sun Microsystems is buying MySQL -- I have no idea what this means for MySQL. I use MySQL for learning technologies that require a database, for prototyping purposes, and for development purposes before putting software on the "real machines" and using Oracle. At home, I downloaded the Linux and Windows versions and installed them to do what I need to do. What this means for MySQL is unknown. What this means for Sun, I assume, is more money from the service side of MySQL.

Oracle is buying BEA Systems -- Oracle had its own application server for awhile and that didn't work out so they brought a company which gave them a better application server, Orion. Now they are buying BEA Systems and they get a better application server, business process management software that uses the application server, web services software, web portal software, a good Java Virtual Machine, and other software. I think BEA got the best of the deal because their software is too damned expensive and is battling open source software that is of decent enough quality for production use. Having dealt with BEA sales representatives and having used BEA software, I hope the quality of some of it improves and the cost goes down, but I doubt it. Just say NO to BEA portal software!

Here is a link to a company pronouncing the death of J2EE software. Gigaspaces is actually on the list of software that I feel the need to evaluate.

Paying By The Byte

For 4 summers, I worked for AT&T before the break up. The first summer I was a clerk in a telephone office that serviced a government agency. One day the manager came in and said the telephone world was going to change. AT&T was pushing for a break up of itself to allow it to get into the long distance game. In short, AT&T got what they thought they wanted.

When I first got an Internet connection, I had dial-up. I got a second line so I wouldn't miss calls while I was on-line. Then, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), wanted to charge me a business rate for the second line because I told them the line was for the Internet. The person I argued with told me they really want the ability to charge by the minute because the telephone network was designed to handle calls that lasted, on average, for about 10 minutes.

Later, before cable Internet was available, I looked into getting an ISDN line. I decided not to do it because they charged by the amount of data transferred and, at the time, my consulting business was new I and wasn't sure if I could recoup the cost. But I remembered the discussion with the telephone person saying they wanted to charge Internet use by the minute.

Now, comes this and I think it is inevitable. Home users being charged by the amount of data transferred is going to happen:

Time Warner Cable Will Do Trial on Setting High-Speed Internet Charges
Based on Usage

NEW YORK (AP) -- Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.

Here it comes but the cable company is going to be the first to really try it. When it sticks, watch Internet innovation come to a crawl.

This Can't Be Accurate Reporting: RIAA

The Washington Post published this:

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.

"I couldn't believe it when I read that," says Ray Beckerman, a New York lawyer who represents six clients who have been sued by the RIAA. "The basic principle in the law is that you have to distribute actual physical copies to be guilty of violating copyright. But recently, the industry has been going around saying that even a personal copy on your computer is a violation."

RIAA's hard-line position seems clear. Its Web site says: "If you make unauthorized copies of copyrighted music recordings, you're stealing. You're breaking the law and you could be held legally liable for thousands of dollars in damages."

Not placing the files ripped from the CD into a shared folder for "all" to get access to, but just COPYING?!?!?!?! That can't be right.

RIAA Says You Can't Rip CDs! NOT!

I got this bit of information off of Slash Dot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing — contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster — that the defendant's ripping of personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement. At page 15 of its brief (PDF) it states the following: 'It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies... Virtually all of the sound recordings... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use... Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies...'"

[ UPDATED ] Please note that the MP3's were placed on the SHARED drive which makes them available to anyone if file sharing is not turned off. In other words, RIAA is doing the same thing RIAA has been doing. It's going after someone who they believe are sharing files. They are NOT saying that ripping a file to MP3 format is illegal. If the files had been ripped to a non-sharable drive, here would have been no issue.

Spring Framework

I've read about the Spring Framework, so conceptually, I understand what it is about. However, as a result of interviewing people for positions, I decided to learn enough of it to ask strong technical questions about it. In learning it, I am realizing exactly what the positive hype about it is, and not just as another web tier framework.

There are some good things behind the hype. In fact, something I helped develop seems like a perfect fit for the Spring Framework. In fact, I'm making a reference application to demonstrate how the existing application may be slowly retrofitted with Spring.

iPhone Cry Babies

When I buy a computer, no matter how much I load it up or get "the most powerful" system components out there, I KNOW that in a few weeks or months time, the price of the system will fall and there will be a more powerful system out there for the same price that I paid for my system. This is just a fact of electronics gear. It happened with my plasma television. It was a better model and I paid around $3200 for it. Today, the replacement model for what I have costs around $2000. That's just the way it is.

So while I can understand people who brought iPhones in the last week being a little mad, those who rushed to get it the first day would be out of luck if it were up to me.

I have to give Steve Jobs some respect for offering $100 credit to those folks, but then again, it's not a REFUND it is a CREDIT.

C/C++ and JavaScript

Back when I was regularly programing in C and/or C++, I regularly had to use #define and #ifdef statements to account for differences in operating systems the code may execute. A simple example is:

#ifdef _SYS5
printf("%s\n", "This is a Unix System 5 system");
#end
#ifdef _DGIX
printf("%s\n", "This is a Digital Unix system");
#endif
#ifdef _SUNOS
printf("%s\n", "This is a SunOS system"); 
#endif

What the above means is when the code is compiled, only the code relevant to the system type is included. Above, if the code was running on a Unix System 5 system,

"This is a Unix System 5 system"

would be printed. If it was a Digital Unix system,

"This is a Digital Unix system"

would be printed. If it was a SunOS system,

"This is a SunOS system"

would be printed. It was hard, to me, to read code that had a lot of #ifdef's in the code, so what I started to do was write one file for each system. If the code was portable across all systems, there would only be one file. If there was code that had to have different code, I would create files for each system. I used a naming convention such as, "calculate_sys5.c" for System 5 code, "calculate_dgix.c" for Digital Unix code, etc. Essentially I would #ifdef the entire file. I also had a "default" file that would be compiled if none of the systems matched. I always purposefully generated runtime errors in that code so I would know I messed up with the #ifdef. People hated it but it made it easier on me.

So what does that have to do with JavaScript? Well, with the number of browsers out there, when you create JavaScript methods, many times you have to determine what browser and what version of the browser the code is running in before you can make certain calls, especially when you have to get to the DOM. Frankly, just like the #ifdef took some fun out of programming, so does worrying about browser versions and operating systems in JavaScript. Only with JavaScript, I think it is much more aggravating. So, unless I have to, I leave the client side alone.

iPhone == DOS?

This is funny!

The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke University.

The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the Durham, N.C., school's pervasive wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cause of the problem remains unknown.

"Because of the time of year for us, it's not a severe problem," says Kevin Miller, assistant director, communications infrastructure, with Duke's Office of Information Technology. "But from late August through May, our wireless net is critical. My concern is how many students will be coming back in August with iPhones? It's a pretty big annoyance, right now, with 20 to 30 access points signaling they're down, and then coming back up a few minutes later. But in late August, this would be devastating."

That's because the misbehaving iPhones flood the access points with up to 18,000 address requests per second, nearly 10Mbps of bandwidth, and monopolizing the AP's airtime.

More at the link.

Market Forces: India

Market forces at work. You have to love it:

The company, which is behind visual shopping Web site Like.com and specializes in image recognition software, had maintained offices in both Bangalore and the U.S. despite the difficulties of being based in locations 12 time zones apart because low wages and a strong pool of talent in India meant the company still saw a significant return on investment.

But in his company blog, Riya chief executive Munjal Shah, said: "Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first five years of his career to get from 1 percent to 10 percent of his equivalent U.S. counterpart.

"He then jumped from 10 percent to 20 percent of his U.S. counterpart in the next 1 year. During his time with us (less than two years) he jumped to 55 percent of the U.S. wage. In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75 percent just to 'keep him at market.'"

Shah added: "In general this wage inflation is really good for my employees and great for India."

But the increase in Bangalore wages had "destroyed the ROI" that was the rationale for maintaining the otherwise difficult two-continent operation. The company has now moved to consolidate its engineering and research work at its California headquarters.

This is too funny!

This Gets The Nerd In Me Going!

This gets the nerd in me going!

Thousands of Leonardo Da Vinci's drawings and scientific theories will soon be viewable for free on the internet.

Until now the majority of the manuscripts have been seen only by scholars but the National Museum of Leonardo in his hometown of Vinci has promised to scan about 12,000 pages and create an archive.

The European Union is funding the website www.leonardodigitale.com, and 3,000 pages have been scanned so far.

The drawings, from the late 15th and early 16th century, demonstrate the artist's incredible range, touching on geometry, astronomy, botany, zoology, the art of warfare and the flight of birds.

This is a GOOD thing. Period.

How To Make A Mint

This is how you can make a mint if you are into technology:

1. Develop some product for the "enterprise", making sure it
incorporates enough buzz word standards to get people interested.

2. Create a simple ass demonstration using the simple buzz word
standards slightly modified from the simple examples that demonstrate the use of the standards.

3. Write voluminous documentation that is convoluted and make the documentation "web enabled" for "easy searching" there by making it difficult to read.

4. Don't list the price anywhere on your web site. When the suckers get into pricing, quote the "list price" of $20K/CPU but then "negotiate" down to $8-10K/CPU but don't negotiate the yearly "service contract" of $5-10K/year.

5. Provide basic support under #4, but provide "professional services" from your "professional services division" or through "partners" that have to pay for the "privilege" of being a "partner." Of course, they may give the enterprise software developer a kickback commission.

6. Charge $100-300/hour for the professional support, but have a "deal" for something like $100/hr.

7. Watch the dough roll in.

Adobe Acrobat Standard

Acrobat reader really stinks, especially with the Fire Fox browser.
Acrobat Standard isn't much better.

They both are buggy.

Micro$oft Bring$ Out The $hark$

Microsoft takes on the free world

 

Microsoft claims that free software like Linux, which runs a big chunk of corporate America, violates 235 of its patents. It wants royalties from distributors and users. Users like you, maybe.

By Roger Parloff, Fortune senior editor

May 14 2007: 9:35 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant.

A broad community of developers, from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working to improve it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers.

But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsome competitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won't be free anymore.

The conflict pits Microsoft and its dogged CEO, Steve Ballmer, against the "free world" - people who believe software is pure knowledge. The leader of that faction is Richard Matthew Stallman, a computer visionary with the look and the intransigence of an Old Testament prophet.

Caught in the middle are big corporate Linux users like Wal-Mart, AIG, and Goldman Sachs. Free-worlders say that if Microsoft prevails, the whole quirky ecosystem that produced Linux and other free and open-source software (FOSS) will be undermined.

Microsoft counters that it is a matter of principle. "We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property," says Ballmer in an interview. FOSS patrons are going to have to "play by the same rules as the rest of the business," he insists. "What's fair is fair."

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith and licensing chief Horacio Gutierrez sat down with Fortune recently to map out their strategy for getting FOSS users to pay royalties. Revealing the precise figure for the first time, they state that FOSS infringes on no fewer than 235 Microsoft patents.

It's a breathtaking number. (By comparison, for instance, Verizon's (Charts, Fortune 500) patent suit against Vonage (Charts), which now threatens to bankrupt the latter, was based on just seven patents, of which only three were found to be infringing.) "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement," Gutierrez asserts. "There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed."

 

It was only a matter of time.

Protection Issues

I have Zone Alarm Pro and Norton Anti Virus 2004 running on my laptop. I needed to renew my subscription and decided to upgrade to NAV 2007. After removing old Norton and rebooting several times, and installing NAV 2007 and rebooting several times, I was at the point to start it up.

Lo and behold! A message that indicates ZAP and NAV 2007 aren't compatible and Norton recommends ZAP be removed from the system.

OHHHHH... That sounds so familiar.... Like I had a problem with Windows 95 and a Micro$oft tech said remove all non-IE web browsers!

Norton? You want to play like that? OK, I'll go with AVG. How you like THAT!?!?!?