Identity Management in Government. This month's issue of Governing Magazine is a special issue on Online Privacy. There's three aticles, one on privacy, one on surveillance, and one on managing identity. All three are topics I enjoy, but the one that caught my eye was the identity article. It starts out: [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

Ellison on Grid Computing: It's Invincible, It's Inevitable. While grid computing has been used in scientific research, it hasn't been applied to business software. At OracleWorld this week, Larry Ellison introduced Oracle's 10g family of products that provide grid computing to all tiers of an enterprise app, aiming to run apps with capacity on demand, at a lower cost and higher level of fault tolerance and reliability. [java.blogs Day's Entries]

XML Converter for various data sources. If you are looking for a product that allows you to convert data from an existing data source to XML, you can take a look at this one http://rustemsoft.com/XMLConverter.htm It runs on Windows platform and easily converts source data types include the following:
Oracle tables or views
MS SQL Server tables or views
Microsoft Excel books
MySQL tables or views
Microsoft Access databases
Microsoft Word documents
Text files(csv, tab-delimited)
You can go their web site for more information.
[java.blogs Day's Entries]

GPS Networkcar. A company called GPS Networkcar promises "complete solutions for monitoring the performance, location, and security of your car." Location-based wireless technology connects to your car's computer and beams data about your car's performance to your "personal vehicle website," and your service provider. This kind of stuff seems to be becoming a more common built-in feature on late-model vehicles, particularly luxury brands (for instance, some of the cool telematics stuff that Mercedes-Benz began offering in 2003). But if your car didn't ship off the lot with such features, GPS Networkcar's service "communicate[s] with your vehicle's onboard computer, interpret[s] the data and transmit[s] important information back to you and your service provider." Here's how it works. Discuss (via unwired, Thanks Frank!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Pro vs. Con On File Sharing And Compulsory Licensing. Salon has decided to set up a little debate between someone who says that file sharing is bad and the EFF's compulsory licensing plan is worse and (of course) someone from the EFF who repeats their pro compulsory licensing response. The first piece has its problems. It's not as bad articles that just call everyone thieves, but it's not great either. It says that anyone who thinks file sharing should be legal needs to lay out an alternative so that we can "collectively" decide which system "we" prefer. Except the world doesn't work that way. It's not an either/or sort of decision. The markets decide as we go - and markets are constantly changing. In this case, the market is speaking volumes about wanting free, unrestricted music. However, his specific complaints with compulsory licensing do make sense. I'm not a fan of compulsory licensing as I think it's the wrong approach, and is something that sounds good on paper, but will be dreadful in practice. Any time you make something "compulsory" there are going to be huge problems associated with "fairness". I still think that the market is going to solve this problem by itself, when people begin to realize that free music is one of the greatest promotional tools around. The only issue, really, is how complicated is the established music industry going to make life for all of us while this plays itself out. They would have been the perfect ones to embrace this vision, but now it will be up to others.







[Techdirt]

XML Journal: Hands-on XForms -m
:: Micah Dubinko 11:14 PM [+] ::
... [Push Button Paradise]