Month: April 2003

It looks like I4U has been h4x0r3d:

Q MERDA HEIN ????? IRONIC BOYS OWNZ YOU ADMIN. TOMA MAIS CUIDADO COM A SUA

Here’s one more reason to stay away from the *nukes.

CNet:

Palm is getting ready to launch two handheld devices, one with built-in wireless and the other with a digital camera, say sources–features that mark company firsts for the industry leader.

The Milpitas, Calif.-based handheld device maker will introduce the latest editions in its Tungsten and Zire product lines towards the end of April, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.

 

Werner:

Starting today  the Rotor Community Site at http://www.sscli.net is open for the public. The site has been set up in a collaboration between my group at Cornell and CollabNet, with some help from the folks at the Rotor team and MSR Cambridge.

Very cool.  It will be interesting to see what comes out of this community site.

So I just got an email (actually two identical emails) from Oracle this afternoon.  The subject of the email is the title of this post.  I was kinda confused, as $5,000 per CPU for anything feels like I’m getting ripped off.  But don’t worry, it’s a great deal, cause the email says so:

The new Oracle9iAS Java Edition offers all of Oracle’s enterprise J2EE products for just $5,000 per CPU. It’s the real deal: full-featured, award-winning Java software—not stripped-down versions that could leave you stranded.

[…]

Get enterprise-class Java at an incredible price. Boost your productivity with the fastest develop/test/deploy cycle. Take advantage of the latest technologies in clustering, persistence architecture, and load balancing. Imagine the possibilities.

I’m personally quite happy with MySQL 4.x and various open source solutions.  They don’t cost $5,000 per CPU.  And Ant rocks my develop/test/deploy cycle, thanks.

My, I’m in a bitter mood today.

CNet:

The company is a couple of weeks away from introducing a new chip for servers–this time it’s the Opteron, a product that analysts and computer executives believe could establish the microprocessor maker as a major player in services. But at the same time, AMD is swimming in red ink, and the company’s comeback depends on the success of the new microprocessor.

Well, if they’d ship the damn things, they’d be successful.  A less sucky name could have helped a little, but it’s too late for that.  At least they’ll be using Athlon64 for the desktop stuff.

The rest of the article has some informative Q&A.  Geeks everywhere are excited and just want to get their hands on the gear.  As long as pricing is right and the supply is there, AMD would have to try really hard to muck this one up.

Will Cox stumbled upon Netcraft‘s redesign, including an RSS feed and what has to be a MovableType backend.  The March survey is here.

Newsforge:

Cupertino (April 7, 2003) – The openMosix Project has announced the completion of its port to the IA-64 Intel(r) Itanium(tm) family of processors.

64-bit openMosix is the first native SSI clustering platform released into production for the IA-64.

openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image (SSI) clustering that allows building a cluster from ordinary networked computers. Applications benefit without modification specifically for openMosix.

Hmm.  I wonder how hard an x86-64 port would be.  Mmm, x86-64.

I imported the 250 some RSS feeds that I follow regularly into SharpReader this afternoon.  The threading and interactions are really wonderful.  I found myself just exploring the interactions for awhile.  (Mental note: the community needs a way to visualize these interactions graphically or some other way to be able to easily wrap our heads around it.)

My favorite part is that you can click on a collection of feeds and then keep tabs on all of those feeds at once.  That’s crucial when you’re keeping track of a ton of stuff.  The only problem that I can see so far is avoiding the temptation of hitting the refresh button every 5 minutes or so.

The sad thing is that my workday revolves around the top of the hour when my news aggregator updates.  That is not going to change, as all the machines at work are Widnows 98, so no SharpAggregator there.  I’m giving SharpReader a test run at home though, and so far I like it.

I know that I have just violated some kind of techblog taboo, but above is Collin, our new kitten.  I’ll be quiet now.  In fact, to counteract such kitten silliness, here’s a picture of my 1U server before I put the heatsink/fan on:

My babies.

John Udell:

The world’s full of smart people who have, collectively, a lot of the intellectual bandwidth needed to absorb and master open-source infrastructure. It’s the scarcity of expertise with the software that has made open source uneconomical in a lot of cases. As people in India and Russia and elsewhere dig into open source technologies, they can broker that expertise and help bridge the gap between the theory and the practice of reuse. [Full story at InfoWorld.com].

Typo fixed.  Oops.  Thanks, Will.

Adam Curry:

In the first few days, BitTorrent delivered over 10,000 copies of the Red Hat 9 ISOs.

I4U reports that when 5.1 audio on your computer isn’t enough, go 7.1:

Japans M-Audio announces availability of its Resolution 7.1 sporting a 192kHz/24bit DAC.

The Revelution 7.1 features 7.1 DVD digital output. It uses the new Envy24HT audio controller.
The Card supports Dolby AC-3, Dolby DTS, Dolby Pro-Logic and Dolby EX, SRS TruSurround and SRS Circle Surround II.

Additionally it supports the following software systems. DirectSound3D, A3D1.0, and EAX1.0/2.0.
The Card supports Mac OS X and Windows XP with Windows Media Player 9.

The anticipated price, 16,625 Yen, is about $140USD or about $130 Euros.  Not too shabby.

This is a cool project that I stumbled upon at freshmeat today:

Darwin’s Tic Tac Toe uses simple evolutionary techniques to evolve a set of randomly-connected Neural Networks, with random weights, to play Tic Tac Toe (Norts and Crosses). To speed up the process, it has been written in a client-server architecture. Clients can connect to the server and grab a small batch of neural networks, do some processing, and send the results back to the server.

Wow.  Via Sam Ruby, Sharpreader looks like it has potential.

If falls under the YA3PA (Yet Another 3 Paned Aggregator) category, but I like the threaded comment feel to it.  Screenshots that contain my name (this one is on a comment) are also a bonus.

Warning:

We picked up a kitten today.

You have been warned.

I forgot to enable devfs in the kernel I compiled yesterday.  The system booted fine but told me that it would be much happier with devfs compiled in.

I’ll make it happy this afternoon.

Update: Kernel is recompiled, I rebooted the box and it came back up SSHable.

Mental note: when running a Gentoo machine that will never run X, change your USE statement to USE="-X" which will make sure that stuff like Xfree86 isn’t installed when you try to install PHP.  Oops.

OSNews reports that Steve Jobs is the highest paid CEO in the US.

Of course, in 2001, he got paid $1 and a jet.

Slashdot:

The director of the Army’s simulation technology center said that Ender’s game influenced how and what they will build for future training.

Scary, but at least it comes from some great sci fi.  For the record, I haven’t had a chance to read Shadow Puppets yet, but I will as soon as I stumble upon a hardcover deal or it comes out in paperback.  I’ve read everything else in the Ender series.

I’m also looking forward to reading Darwin’s Children, the sequel to Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear.  Darwin’s Radio was a bit technical but read as quick as a Crichton novel for me and was great.

eWeek:

Microsoft Corp. unveiled on Wednesday its planned six-SKU lineup for Office 2003.

The six editions on tap are Professional Enterprise, Professional, Standard, Students and Teachers, Small Business, and Basic.

Computerwire:

IBM Corp is to work on behalf of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to build a 1 petabyte data storage grid that will support CERN’s efforts to better understand the particle physics behind the Big bang theory.