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Monday, July 21, 2003 |
DHS had little choice but to sign Microsoft deal. The fact that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded Microsoft Corp. a US$90 million enterprise software deal two days after Bill Gates met with DHS Secretary Tom Ridge in Washington is more than sheer coincidence. It's now a major security headache for a mammoth new agency that security experts say lacks the wherewithal to have considered alternative sources for its software. [MacCentral]
The implication at the end of this article is that Open Source is less secure because everyone can read the source code and find the weak points to exploit. Closed source Windows is not out there for everyone to pick through and find holes, the hackers for Windows got to randomly pick and stab at things they think are vulnerable. And for the most part they have found tons of buffer overflows in every application and at every level of the OS and in different apps. So I personally don't think it matters if it's closed source or not, if most of the exploits are overflows, then the OS is vulnerable. All people have to do is pull on everyone window and door until they find it. I agree that really nasty exploits might come from people poring over Open Source C and C++ code, ones that are harder to detect and protect. But the opposite is true, too in that things like Honepots can be made that allow you watch the hackers in action as they break into a machine they think is exploitable. There is no silver bullet.
8:02:49 PM 
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Samsung debuts 'world's fastest' PDA CPU. Beats XScale by 133MHz [The Register]
Samsung has out-Intel'd Intel! They now own the title of fastest CPU in the PDA space (533Mhz). Who'd have thunk the CPU's would scale up so damned fast? I'm non-plussed and look forward to revs. of Pocket PC and Palm OS that can talk full advantage of the new chips. I know that the 400Mhz Xscale from Intel has more or less languished as a real performance delivery product. Pocket PC needed to be updated to take full advantage of it, so nobody saw any difference between ARM's at 206Mhz or Xscale's at 400Mhz. Hopefully that won't happen to Samsung in these early stages, and everyone will crowd towards the new ARM chip. I'm looking forward to seeing how things evolve on Pocket PC. That's the one I'm laying my money on.
7:42:15 PM
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Dell axes high-end server. The PC maker cancels plans to sell an eight-processor server, but it says it's not backing out of the high-end server market. [CNET News.com]
Always bet on Dell to play the conservative card in these high stakes card games. SMP is still frowned upon, and seen as absolutely unnecessary. Just like the seemingly useless IA-64 architecture from Intel, Dell is shying away from anything larger than 4 processors. The problem lies in Dell's inability to engineer their own chipsets for anything larger than 4 CPU's, the development time was so long, that new Xeon's clock speed more than made up for the aggregate across all the CPUs in an 8 CPU box. Blame Intel for that one I'm afraid.
7:21:32 PM
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TV history 'lowering standards'. Academics say the growth of history documentaries is damaging historical skills among students. [BBC News | Entertainment | TV and Radio | UK Edition]
Becuase of the job where I work, I quickly identify certain keywords related to education. The one in this article that caught my eye is the word, "module". In Britain there is a feeling that spoon-feeding students the subjects they study in modules is leading to an overall lowering of standards. Online learning is generally split into these modules, in order to make the material fit the delivery method a little bit better. Whole lectures don't fit in well with a compelling online experience. This is what we are told at all the educational conferences I attend. So, the first thing everyone does is analyze the material, break it down into smaller pieces, and this is something that history TV programming does too, due in part to it's similarity I think to computer and network based delivery mediums. Once it's electronic, you have to break it into pieces. That is the nature of the beast, and a side effect may be that students are pandered to, and spoon fed. I don't know an easy way around this side effect.
6:31:33 PM
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IBM ASP'ifies Siebel CRM. Flogging subs over the Web [The Register]
This is a biggy. I have to say software as a "utility" provided like electricity is quite a novel idea. And is a goal of more than a few big corporations. But the success of this one project, might be a harbinger of whether the model really works. I have to say the article here, really puts forth the idea that this is a killer app, since Seibel is still widely regarded as a must have application. But the cost of implementation when you OWN everything yourself, and have to keep it maintained, that puts off a large number of businesses, that might benefit from having a real CRM package. And it blunts somewhat M$ move into the mid-market app. market when it acquire Great Plains software. Now doubt they could take the software engineering expertise in the accounting area and stretch that potentially to CRM. Many have posited it might happen eventually.
6:08:29 PM
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Microsoft takes another shot at cable. Microsoft has signed up Comcast and Time Warner Cable to test out its set-top box technology, a back-to-basics package aimed at reviving the software giant's stalled cable TV push. [CNET News.com]
I remember reading all those scary stories on how M$ was becoming a "media" company like AOL/TW and they were going to eat everyone's lunch. And this was even prior to the Xbox shipping. Dark days, very dark days. But they lost out to other rivals already entrenched in the cable set top box business. And they had some OS to get out whose schedule slipped (Win2K maybe?), so they got back on track, curbed the Cable effort, but the M$ Hydra has many heads, and old Dreams die hard. This is proof that someone's got a mission and they're just not going to stop until they get a big win.
6:01:59 PM
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Commentary: Getting to know 'grid' computing. With vendors like IBM and Platform Computing now touting their capabilities, it's time for executives to get realistic about grid's potential--and its shortcomings. [CNET News.com]
I know that 2 months ago Scientific American had an article on Grid Computing that was really good at defining what it looks like now, and what the potentialities of it may be. This article, helps make those more concrete by defining grid computing as a business application, and what it looks like in that context, instead of the pure, scientific research context.
5:55:43 PM
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Microsoft steps up ActiveX security [CNET News.com]
At long last, Microsoft is trying to guide the great unwashed masses of Visual.Net developers in making secure software. Hopefully they themselves will take it to heart in their own engineering divisions and provide an even more rigorous security regimen for Windows Server 2003 products. Who says there's no such thing as progress???
5:52:02 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Eric Likness.
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