Just a quick update to let everyone know that Sun finally found a buyer in Oracle. Who really knows if this will help either company in the long run, but surely it can't hurt. Financial info about the transaction can be found at Fox Business. Sun closed up on the news so there must be at least a bit of a positive feeling about the purchase.

Continue reading...

Sometimes companies do things you just can't believe. Here we have Monster Cable deciding that Engadget has endorsed their product...if the quote is taken completely out of context. Surely they can't be expecting to keep anyone's trust when they do things like this. Are they having that much trouble coming up with real, true endorsements for their products?

As an aside, in my opinion Monster sells VERY overpriced cabling. If you really need any types of cables you'll find better deals online rather than in local shops. Evidently the local folks use these items as their cash cows with giant markups. A couple of places I've heard good things about are Blue Jeans Cable and Newegg.com. If nothing else, you can stay away from companies that employ tactics such as this to try and fool unsuspecting customers into purchasing their products.

Technorati Tags: IT, advertising, marketing

Continue reading...

After getting off to a slow start behind Hulu in the professionally made content arena, it looks like YouTube is finally getting serious. Depending on the relevance of the content they negotiate, we could finally have some serious competition in the streaming media market.

This is all well and good, but both services now fail in one department: the iPhone. I don't know whether it's AT&T or YouTube and Hulu, but it is simply inexcusable to continue having no access to this content on my mobile. I understand that flash seems to be a buggy, bloated POS, but somehow regular YouTube videos play just fine. I wonder how well Boxee will handle this "new" YouTube format?

Continue reading...

It's nice to see a human side to the people who are now the industry leaders. Take this story about one of Bill Gates earlier ventures called the "Traf-O-Data." Aside from having a terrible name the idea actually ended up as a moderate success. The first real demonstration, however, ended in Mr. Gates begging his mom to explain to the demo participants that it actually worked earlier.

As we all know, Microsoft was later founded and the rest is history. Just because one idea doesn't pan out exactly the way you hoped it would is no reason to completely give up. Technology changes rapidly and new opportunities show themeselves all the time.

Continue reading...

The founders of The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of breaking copyright laws and sentenced to 1 year in prison and ordered to pay damages to copyright holders. We can all sleep well at night knowing that the boogeyman got his.

Continue reading...

I am a college graduate. I received my degree a number of years ago and I have been working in my chosen field for most of the years since my graduation. I attended 3 different schools as I floundered about trying to decide exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I learned very little that was of real value. This begs the question: why do most people continue to push kids to go to college?

Attending college or not was never really in question for me, I was placed on the path very early on. There was no debate about it...I was going. I took all of the advanced placement courses offered in my school and decided on the vague profession of "engineering" as my aim. I knew basically nothing about what I was doing and I was about to spend massive amounts of someone else's money (scholarship!) on this decision. Naturally I hated everything about these courses within two months of beginning and I found my way out of there and eventually into information systems.

Somewhere over the years there seems to have been a shift in the perception of education in the US. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this shift started, but the results are evident. You may have seen the "Education Connection" advertisements on television. According to them you will potentially earn ONE MILLION more dollars over your lifetime with a degree than someone without. Has college become merely a glorified vocational school, is it sliding into complete irrelevance, or is everything A-OK?

Technical education has started to present a very unique set of problems for higher learning institutions. Look for posts about these issues later on, perhaps as part of a series.

Continue reading...

This looks like an outstanding piece of backup software for Linux. According to Lifehacker, all of the crontab and rsync commands are set for you by a great UI. Currently I run OS X as my home server but Linux on my laptop, and while Time Machine is very easy, there aren't many options you can set. I'll be installing this tonight to see how well network share backups are supported.

UPDATE: Well, I've followed the steps outlined in the comments section of the Lifehacker post to update synaptic with the backintime sources. Installation was a breeze, and backups are simply a copy of the files and directories chosen to your selected location. Very simple as advertised. The interface seems intuitive and easy to use. I still need to configure a network location for testing, but based on the location selection abilities of the application, this shouldn't pose any issues. I have also not tested restore capabilities yet.

Continue reading...

The EFF has a great example of how people fear what they don't understand. This one is amazing. How many of us have ever used an operating system that was "a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on" before?

EVERYONE. All of the popular PC operating systems have this functionality. How do they know he didn't just have a command prompt up in windows maximized to full screen? I just don't understand how this type of insanity continues to be perpetrated within the court system. Blatantly invalid technical details seemingly run rampant.

I think any law activity (warrants, trials, etc.) that includes anything with this much technical detail should be reviewed by someone with at least a slight inkling of what the jargon means. This abuse would have been caught almost immediately if the officer or judge had any training as to what they were attempting to do in this arena.

Continue reading...

I have been in the software development industry for a number of years now and I consider myself a moderately seasoned developer. I have experience with several different languages and I try to learn something new every day. I have seen most types of code, and sadly a large majority of it is crap. I understand that sometimes you simply must make an app work and work now, but there is no way that this happens often enough to merit what I've seen throughout my career.

I'm not under any delusions about the causes of this bad code; there are a million reasons. The deadline was too short. The requirements were too vague. We just hired a whole group of COBOL developers to write our enterprise level Java app because they were cheaper (and no, I'm not joking on this one). While these are likely the biggest issues, there is another that could be stopped before it begins.

This post got me thinking about the topic. Besides the code I've actually seen and had to deal with, I have now been part of more interviews on the "I've already got a job" side of the table than the "please hire me" side. The years of experience listed on the resume usually mean nothing at all. Occasionally you will hit on the right combination, but normally there are numerous caveats that come along with those "15 years of .Net experience and an expert in SQL." The saddest part of this is the developer in question generally believes they truly have loads of experience they are bringing to the table. 

If someone with the attitude of knowing more than anyone else in the room is brought in, it can easily become toxic to a development team. Any insight that comes from an outside source is quickly objected to even before any discussion begins. Where is the motivation for anyone else on the team to put any of their ideas forward in this situation? This will lead to poorly executed projects and crap code in most cases, and this could have been prevented on the front end.

How can you get through to someone who falls into the perpetual novice bucket?

Continue reading...

While most of my professional work has been ASP.Net based and quite IE centric, I've found that utilizing Firefox for troubleshooting makes development far less tedious. Here are 15 add-ons for Firefox designed to assist with development work. I have used a number of these in the past and they were quite helpful.

The ones that look the most interesting to me are LinkChecker, Web Developer, FireBug and Colorzilla. If I were a PHP developer I'd check out FirePHP for sure.

Continue reading...