Judge: Sonicblue needn't monitor viewing. A district judge overturns a late April ruling that required the maker of ReplayTV set-top box technology to write and install software to monitor what its customers were watching. [CNET News.com]

Yay!  A small victory.  We'll take whatever we can get.  And a good quote from Sonicblue CEO Ken Potashner: "the networks and studios [should focus] on the inevitable evolution of their business instead of attempts to stifle technology."

Another term for "inevitable evolution" is "free market."

Angry White Girl: " DOES THE FBI NOT UNDERSTAND THAT THE INTERNET IS ALL ABOUT ILLEGAL PORN, SWEAR WORDS AND PIRATED SOFTWARE??????? AND KITTENS~!!!" [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

I just read three articles/posts from this site, and I am totally impressed by the sheer volume of vitriol.  I consider myself pretty good a dishing up vitriol when it's time for it, but this girl is prodigious.  Worth a look.

Internet.Com: "Security software maker Network Associates, Friday received a patent for storing metadata on a server."  [Scripting News]

Aw, man.  When are the idiots at USPTO going to wake up?  People have been doing exactly this thing for years, it's not an invention, it's not novel, it's not patentable.  If this keeps up we're going to have to eliminate software patents altogether.

You know Larry Boucher knows what he's talking about because in the EE Times article he said, "super-low latency and super-high bandwidth," in that order.  It's all about the latency.

Larry Boucher makes some choice comments about a the very geeky topic of data blades. "The Internet has changed what we want. Seven years ago, the demand was processing cycles; today it's data delivery. That's a huge change in what we want out of this environment." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

There are some insightful quotes here.  I first realized the importance of aggregate system bandwidth at Fisheye where we faced the daunting task of moving dozens and even hundreds of terabytes of archival-quality images around daily.  A rack of Dell boxes just wasn't going to do it.  We were looking at IBM pServer hardware when we ran out of funding.

From the article: "Seven years ago the center of this system was the processor, but the world has changed. The center of the system is now the switched backplane, and the processor is one more peripheral."

Gone this past weekend, hence no updates to this site.