Posts

O’Reilly Radar is publishing a series on how people got into computers. I’ll try to post my story soon, although I assume it’s probably similar to that of many people my age.

Derek Lowe, a drug researcher, says that popular drugs like aspirin, acetaminpphen, and penicillin probably wouldn’t even make it out of the lab today, much less be approved by the FDA. (Via Marginal Revolution.)

You can defeat the XCP copy protection that got Sony on so much trouble or any other copy protection system on an audio CD by covering up the data track with a piece of opaque tape before inserting the CD in your computer.

OnJava.com interviews a number of developers to ask them what they think about the idea that Ruby will, at some point, replace Java as the enterprise language of choice. They didn’t ask me, but I’ll do the interview as if they did. (I should do this for more interviews.) They asked all of the people different questions, so I’ll just use whichever questions I like. 1. Why would you choose Ruby on Rails over J2EE for your next Web project? ...

When the Sony DRM scandal broke, I pointed to a weblog entry arguing that the DRM wasn’t there to prevent customers from pirating music but rather to keep the music off of iPods in order to punish Apple for not supporting competing DRM schemes in its software. Today Joel Spolsky argues that record companies want to force Apple to allow them to price tracks sold via the iTunes Music Store at different levels because it will enable them to exert more control over musicians. As consumers we’re just pawns when it comes to this stuff. ...

Mark Schmitt on whether President Bush might have been deceived by his advisors when it came to intelligence on Iraq: We’re asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration created. By this I mean the whole practice of evaluating all information going into the war not for its truth value, but for whether it promoted or hindered the administration’s goal of being free to go to war. The President could have been given every bit of intelligence information available, and he and/or Cheney would have reached the same decision because they would have discarded, discounted, or disregarded most of it. Information that was Useful to that goal was put in one box, Not Useful put in another. Entire categories of information were assigned to the Not Useful box because their source was deemed an opponent of U.S. military action, or assumed to have some other motive. ...

Bruce Schneier has published a solid wrapup of the controversy over Sony’s rootkit, from its original discovery by Mark Russinovich to Sony’s meandering attempts to respond. He also asks a pointed question – why haven’t antivirus software makers done a better job of responding to this problem? He points out that Symantec’s response has been tepid. The company that makes the anti-virus software I use, Grisoft makes no mention at all of the rootkit on their Web site. (Granted, we’re talking about spyware rather than a virus here, if you want to be technical.) Spybot, the well-regarded anti-spyware tool, doesn’t mention it on their updates page either. Something tells me that none of these companies want to run afoul of Sony’s legal department or be accused of providing tools to thwart copy protection. ...

I read a piece this morning about using Google Base for personal profiles, and how it’s already works as a social software platform. You can enter the same kinds of information about yourself that you can on most other dating/social networking sites, and of course the theory is that once you’ve done so you’ll be easy to find via a basic Google search. I went ahead and entered some basic personal information about myself (not yet published) with the thought that if some old high school or college friend searches for me in Google, or one of the readers of my books tries to get in touch with me, having an entry about myself in Google Base will increase the odds of their actually being able to find me. ...

Yesterday I mentioned that consumers face new trade offs when choosing whether to buy music CDs or DRM-protected tracks from the Internet. Now I read that some companies and government agencies are banning Sony music CDs or even all music CDs as a response to the security problems created by Sony’s copy protection. This copy protection scandal is casting a long shadow.

It sure seems like there’s a nascent trend that involves moving away from relational databases for storage, at least for stuff that will be exposed on the Web. First, Ning released their Web application platform that basically supports PHP and a <a href=‘http://developerfaq.ning.com/group.php?FAQGroup:title=Using+the+Ning+Content+Store">data store that isn’t relational. Then I read Adam Bosworth’s article Learning from the Web, which argues that today’s relational databases do not embody any of the principles derived from observing what works on the Web. ...