SanGod Shows RAID on a ThumbDrive

While the number of practical applications may be limited, some times it's just fun to think about what may be possible.
On this blog you'll find a picture of how somebody combined a USB 2.0 hub and four thumbdrives to create a 3GB RAID 5 array.
Mostly intended for embedded system applications, who knows what some intrepid soul might come up with for an actual application.

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EMC Technology Leader Touts SOA over iSCSI

You might think the average storage fanatic might be all over iSCSI, but EMC's Mark Lewis says lower level storage protocols are not going to be nearly as significant as the advent of service-oriented architectures (SOA)
In this post, Lewis proposes that the rise of applications based on SOA will lead to the creation of "information services" where applications will store data in a way that is not tied to any particular protocol.
Furthermore, he suggests that some new type of service-oriented information infrastructure (SOII) architecture will the evolve to provide the ability to execute storage policies across hundreds if not thousands of applications.
Looks like Lewis is sending some pretty strong telegraphs concerning EMC's future ambitions -- Michael Vizard

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Schneier Estimates that Real ID Is Going to Be an $11 Billion Waste

Counterpane CTO and noted security expert Bruce Schneier estimates that despite all the political pressure being applied, any effort to create a Real ID is likely to result in at least $11 billion in spending and very little additional security.
Schneier, in this post, says the plan is fundamentally flawed because cards will be forged while other people will obtain cards under fraudulant names, while others still will simply lose their cards. Worse yet, the system would require a network of databases full of sensitive data that in themselves would become centralized targets for every black hat hacker on the planet.
The bottom line argument, according to Schneier, is that the whole concept of secure idnetification cards is little more than a myth that is likley to cause more trouble than it's worth -- Michael Vizard.

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CastleCop.com Turns Five

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the organization that brings us the Phishing Incident Response Team that works with law enforcement agencies to help bring phishers to justice.
It's hard to believe that the folks at CastleCops, a volunteer forum, have been chasing phishers for over five years now given the fact that phishing has only gain national attention in the last two to three years.
In this post by Brian Krebs of the Washington Post, walks people through a brief history of an organization that could probably use a few more volunteers given the ever increasing scope of the problem.

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Vista Clients to Get Link to Small Business Server 2003 A Little Late

Lost in all the hoopla about Vista this week was this post about a delay to the code that links Vista clients to Microsoft popular Small Business Server 2003 edition.
A month long delay may not be all that big a deal, but if Vista is likely to gain an early acceptance it will be among small business customers that tend to be fond of SBS because it's realtively easy to install, maintain and run.
You might think that Microsoft would have all the small business issues surrounding Vista under contol by now, but like everything else in Redmond these days it seems that there are so many dependencies between products that making any of the trains run on time is just impossible -- Michael Vizard

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Sattelite Imagery To Be Used in Search for Missing Microsoft Executive

In his blog, Amazon CTO Werner Vogel, a longtime friend of Jim Gray, the missing Microsoft executive that is considered among other things to be the father of transaction processing, reports that private efforts are underway to use sattellite imagery and online mapping servics to try and find the boat that Jim Gray set sail on three days ago.
The Coast Guard recently reported that it is having trouble locating the missing boat using conventional search methods. Gray, a leading architect of Microsoft's SQL Server database, is widely admired across all spectrums of the technology community that is marshalling its collective resources to help find him -- Michael Vizard

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FCC Filing Offers Glimpse of New Nokia Phone

The nice thing about having a highly regulkated industry such as telecomunications is that it requires everybody to file papers with the government telling essentially everybody who has acces to that filing what any given company might be up to next.
In a post from SymbianGuru.com, we get a glimpse of a sketch from a potential new mobile phone offering that some people are guessing is a replacement for the Nokia 3250. According to some of the phone's specifications, this new model will support the emerging quad-band GSM standard -- Michael Vizard

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Apple iPhone to Boost Mobile Ajax Adoption

One of the leading blogs on mobile phone trends, called Opne Gardens, has posted an analysis of the implications of Apple's decision to use mobile AJAX to build the new user interface for the iPhone.
The user interface on most mobile phones has never been anything to write home about and is in fact one of several major reasons that people don't tend to surf the Web from their phones.
But with mobile AJAX on phones from both Apple and Nokia it looks like the bar on user interface design for mobile phones is finally being raised. -- Michael Vizard

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Vonage Ready to Settle e911 Lawsutis

VOIP Central is reporting that Vonage is getting ready to settle lawsuits stemming from its lack of compliance with e911 regulations to the tune of $500,000.
The lawsuits stem from FCC requirements that require providers to VOIP services make sure that all their customers have access to emergency services. Vonage spent large sums of money getting its customers to register for the service and reportedly is about to come into full compliance with FCC regulations that have been on the books now for a couple of years.
Those regulations in turn gave impetus to a number of lawsuits from states such as Texas over Vonage's inability to deliver access to emergency services numbers. At the moment, it looks like Vomage is getting ready to put all this legal mess behind it. -- Michael Vizard

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SharePoint 2007 to Get Ajax Support

In a service pack for SharePoint 2007 that should be out later this year Microsoft reportedly plans to add support for ASP.Net AJAX, which should allow developers to create a whole new range of iterative applications for the Web on top of SharePoint.
The fact that this is coming relatively early is probably because the folks building Windows Live and Office Live within Microsoft are probably already working out the kinks on the beta given the realtionship between those Web offerings and SharePoint services.
For end users, this means they should expect to see a whole range of new AJAX driven applications delivered through SharePoint probably starting sometime in early 2008 -- Michael Vizard

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Debate Emerges About the Nature and Need for XML 2.0

Given the fact that XML is just now coming into its own in the world of enterprise applications, it may strike some folks odd that there is now a debate on about the need for some kind of XML 2.0 project.
Some developers are starting to ask for an XML specification that is less draconian in its strcuture so that it might actually become easier to build enterprise application based on XML and all its derivatives. Of course, there's another set of people who just say that enought developers havn't taken the time to appreciate the pure beauty of XML and now is not the time to start confusing people with new specifications.
Either way you cut it, XML has been an over night success that has been 10 plus years in the making. As such some of things that were assumed to be required in the 1990s might be worth another look today -- Michael Vizard

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Yo Bill: Dontcha know piracy is the lifeblood of developing countries?

Among the various complications of enforcing copyright laws abroad is that, historically, developing countries rely on piracy to jumpstart their own economies. Case in point: Romania, where president Traian Basescu told Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently that pirated Microsoft software helped the country build a vibrant software industry. Shortly thereafter in Russia, former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev asked Bill to intercede on behalf of a Russian teacher accused of using pirated software in his classroom.

The request is awkward for both Gates and Russia, the latter of which is mounting a high-profile crackdown on piracy as part of its efforts to join the World Trade Organization. Recent casualties of that crackdown include several popular bittorrent sites.

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Apple plugs four security holes

Patches are available on Apple's Web site, but two of the flaws could be used to execute code on an unpatched system.

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Where's the edge of the Web?

John Battelle is wondering, three years in, what the next phase is for the amorphous concept of Web 2.0. The next Web 2.0 conference is this fall. Meanwhile, the Web 2.0 Expo is coming in April.

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Google gets into video game advertising

Google has apparently agreed to buy video game advertising firm Adscape for $23 million, Red Herring reports. News of the on again off again deal broke last month.

The Red Herring article notes industry speculation that Google won't get much for its money except for a few patents.

In acquiring Adscape, Google will be entering a market expected to expand to $1 to $3 billion by 2010. (Perspective: the TV ad market is currently $60 billion.) Also in the market: Microsoft, which purchased in-game advertising firm Massive last year for an undisclosed amount. 

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