[Slashdot] Cringely's Bank ShotCringley has a 802.11b network running several kilometers using directional attenaes and a repeater to angle the signal around a hill. Cool.
7:13:10 PM
Ok, this
is cool -- an article about making directional 802.11b antennaes out of
pringles cans... nice.
5:53:35 PM
[Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] WOW! I'm impressed! That was quick. Simon Fell took a look at my vision for a simpler future for Radio users and figured out way to implement this today. I see the integration and ease of use as being better than SCNS could ever hope to provide. I still would prefer to see this integrated directly into Radio, but meanwhile WSDL FM does address the WSDL consumption side more than adequately.
12:44:35 PM
[diveintomark] MSNBC: Tracking spam to the source. "I get at least 25 spams a day in my personal account, advertising every business in the book." I don't. I pay $30 for an annual subscription to SpamCop, for which I get a spam-free email address with POP, IMAP, webmail, and forwarding. Like Yahoo Mail with BulkMail filtering, except SpamCop's filtering actually works, SpamCop doesn't sell my personal information, and there are no ads while reading webmail.
Also, SpamCop has integrated features to reverse-engineer the spam in your "Held Mail" folder and safely (without giving away your own email address) report it to the proper authorities at the spammer's ISP -- even if the spammer forged their return address or went through someone else's open SMTP relay. All my mail (even my old Yahoo mail accounts) forwards to SpamCop now, and I never have to think about spam unless I want to take a few seconds and help get some spammers kicked off their ISP.
11:46:49 AM
[diveintomark] Breaking Oracle. How to Hack into Oracle (PDF) [via The Register]. "Oracle is vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, DoS attacks, and remote exploitation. ... [The author] Litchfield willingly allows that Oracle makes the most secure product on the market, and compliments Oracle for its obvious dedication to security. But as for being unbreakable, well, we all know that nothing is."
This is no surprise. Frankly, I think it's actually moot. If you wanted to break into a database, especially one that backs a web site, usually, all you have to do is crawl around the code for the web site and you'll find a password. Why would you want to sneak in through the back door when you can just as easily walk in through the front.
10:36:11 AM
[Joel on Software] Now that ArsDigita is gone, I think we can officially declare the Internet Exuberance era, which opened with Travels with Samantha, officially closed. Even though the tendency is to blame it on the VCs, who replaced an exciting, charismatic and visionary founder with grey, grey, grey, the truth is that the Internet consulting market was totally wiped out more than a year ago and there's no reason for AD to have been exempted.
By the way, have you noticed how often companies officially sell themselves off (probably for pennies) rather than simply liquidate? That's just to make the executives' bios look better. They can say on their resume, "I was the CxO of ArsDigita which was later sold to RedHat" instead of saying "I managed to turn $40 million of VC and a profitable company into a heaping pile of mineral-encrusted fish tanks." RedHat is a part of the Greylock Keiretsu, too.
And even though nobody ever got the Ferrari, it sure made a big splash, didn't it.
I had an epiphany yesterday. The problem with standards is that they almost always trot out the experts to work on them. The problem with experts is that they actually know the whole set of problems that need to be solved from the beginning and feel compelled to solve them all at once. This creates several problems. They spend too long working on the standard. The standard is so complicated, it takes a lot of time to implement. Once implemented, it takes forever to work out the interop issues.
You'd be much better served by letting some novices with a few very clear and compelling use cases give it the first whack. They'll bang out something simple that can be built in a couple weeks and interop in a couple more. But release the standards more quickly, gated by interop, and adding features only when they are clearly needed.
This seems to be the way SSL worked. I remember when they're seemed to be a new version of the protocol every few months, to account for short comings, vulnerabilities, etc. It's the only widely used security protocol out there. Contrast to SET, with it's panel of experts on crypto, protocols, and payment.
Same thing can be seen with RPC in CORBA vs. Java.
I suspect most of the XML standards are going to end up in the "designed by experts". I personally think the only hope for SOAP is that DIYers bang out q&d services that are simple but useful, and ignore most of the spec (and the half dozen related XML specs).
8:06:44 AM
So, here's my news strategy: NY Times for coverage of national news, US politics, and Editorial content -- it's usually the most thoughtful coverage, in my opinion. Most US papers seem content to recount the facts; NYT puts them in context and gives perspective.
BBC news for coverage of World news (and, sometimes big US stories) -- trying to get an outside perspective on what's going on. BBC seems to be a bit more connected to what's going on. I'd like to use the Economist, but I think their stories require subscription.
Then several trade mags for coverage of the high tech industry. Slashdot and Wired for geek news.
I wish I had some better stuff on business strategy and management. Right now, I think all I have a couple personal weblogs (SJL and John Robb).
7:57:39 AM
[The Register] InterTrust moves to spike Windows XP Update. Injunction bid on XP 'violations' What a sad/small way to make money... It'd be a different thing if these guys had ever turned their patents into a real product that people used (given their ip protecting proclivities, its not surprising they haven't since they don't actually make something their users want to use).
7:42:13 AM
[Dan Gillmor's eJournal] Get a MacA little list of the problems that keep Dan from switching from his Thinkpad to his Macintosh laptop. Mostly, it's Outlook and VPN on OS X .
7:35:16 AM
Doug is planning to build a terabyte of storage in his garage :). A referrence to a useful book on SAN/NAS. He's worried about backup and redundancy. Yeah, backup up seems tough. As does sparing (how do you keep yourself in spares? Will they still be making 100Gb drives in two years :) )? And how do you plan for expansion? Do you still need to? Still think my personal ability to navigate the data is the gating factor. I suppose you could just keep it simple for the first generation.
Business Week: Business Schools (rss)
