Posted by John Carroll @ 12:19 pm   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 An intellectual property middle ground - part 4 Posted by John Carroll @ 12:19 pm Categories: General Tags: After much delay, heres part 4 in my 3-part series on intellectual property (clearly, I dont scope my writing projects very well). Its a lot easier to analyze the current structure of things, and a lot harder to suggest solutions. That makes this installment the hardest of the bunch. In part one I discussed the economic ramifications of nanotechnology as revealed by Ray Kurzweil. In a nanotech future, most of our economy will be oriented around knowledge assets as raw production will be simple and cheap with nano-construction. This would make the information needed to construct something the essence of value. Im sure Research in Motion would prefer ...

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Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:27 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Covalent launches strike against JBoss with Geronimo Posted by Dana Blankenhorn @ 11:27 am Categories: General, Applications, Enterprise Policy Tags: Covalent has gone into direct competition with JBoss, announcing support for the Apache Geronimo application server. Covalent CEO Mark Brewer called to talk about it. He says enterprises who want an open source application server can now choose between a BSD-flavor license in Apache or a GPL license in JBoss. He admits that the JBoss product has more features right now but calls Geronimo more streamlined. News stories on the decision are more likely to emphasize Covalents hesitance, and its endorsement of IBM, which has 10 of the servers 25 committers thanks to its acquisition of Gluecode. (Chariot Solutio...

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Posted by Roland Piquepaille @ 9:06 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 When Mother Nature gets frustrated Posted by Roland Piquepaille @ 9:06 am Categories: Science Nature, Engineering Innovation Tags: When you make a choice between two things, be it a place for your next vacation or a decision about your job, one part in you is satisfied while another is frustrated. The same phenomenon exists in nature, where this state of frustration is an important factor of interaction between complex systems. And this is one of the basis of a research project from physicists at Penn State University (PSU) about artificial spin ice. Surprisingly enough, studying the interaction between hydrogen and oxygen atoms with this concept of frustration in mind might lead to advanced magnetic-recording devices and smaller hard drives. Here is an e...

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Posted by Dana Gardner @ 8:58 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Expect a building flood of adoption around Geronimo Posted by Dana Gardner @ 8:58 am Categories: Home, Open Source, Software Infrastructure, Web Technology Tags: The news that Covalent Technologies is offering commercial support for Apache Geronimo 1.0, an open source J2EE application server developed and recently made available by the Apache Software Foundation and distributed under the Apache license, sort of acts like a young Dutch finger being pulled from a dike. It signals that IBMs intentions and actions since acquiring Gluecode last year are not to let Geronimo wither on the vine (or worse). Indeed, for Covalent to dive deep on Geronimo shows that its willing to big bet on the success of Geronimo. And that should mean that others will bet big on it...

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Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:43 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 IBM publishes open source reference implementation for making more content searchable Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:43 am Categories: Open Source, Software Infrastructure, Government Tags: IBM this week made its Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) reference implementation available as open source via SourceForge.net. The goal is to allow more UIMA compliant analytical approaches to work with cohesion, and so to help close the gap between tacit human knowledge and what search engines do so well, namely to index and match labels. UIMA is poised to help take enterprise search to the next level: To go beyond swift location and access of relevant indexed information to excising a gem of human experience someone else labored over and applying i...

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Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 7:35 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Survey: Java EE, .NET neck and neck Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 7:35 am Categories: General, Standards Watch, Web Services Tags: Whats it going to be Java Platform or .NET? For larger enterprises, there answer is simple theyre using both frameworks to build out their Web services and SOAs. Many industry observers have been talking about the competition between the two platforms for years now. However, its not a case of either/or; enterprises want both frameworks for various parts of their IT infrastructures. Both fit into the development plans of most enterprises, at the exact same rate of adoption. Thats one of the findings of the most recent Evans Data Enterprise Development Management Issues survey, for which I authored the final report. The survey of...

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Posted by David Rickerby @ 5:06 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Can you have a GPLv2-only license? Posted by David Rickerby @ 5:06 am Categories: General, Open Source, Legal Tags: My very first try at blogging, and I made a blatant mistake. In talking about the Free Software Foundation’s move from Version 2 to Version 3 of the GPL, I pointed out that Section 9 of Version 2 provided for automatic updating of the license. I said This means that Linus Torvalds doesn’t have to decide to release Linux under V3, The GPL is a license, not a contract. anyone who has a copy of source code under V2 can release that code under V3! This is true of most GPL’d software out there and many components of Linux. However, a few projects have elected to be Version 2 only and Linux is among them (For discussion see: http://www.uwsg....

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Posted by Paul Murphy @ 3:22 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Recertifying CERT Posted by Paul Murphy @ 3:22 am Categories: General, Linux, Enterprise Policy, Infrastructure, Hardware, Government Tags: When CERT published its 2005 Vulnerabilities summary earlier year it drew hundreds of reality reversing headlines along the lines of Tom Espiners zdnet report: "Linux and Unix had more vulnerabilities than Windows." On January 10th I looked at the list of 2,328 claimed Unix vulnerabilities only to discover them greatly exaggerated. The people who control CERT need first to enforce standard policies on organizational behavior and impartiality. Not only are almost all of them application rather than Unix issues but most (62%) are duplicates, and, among the remainder, most of the ones I checked turned out to be either ab...

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Posted by Tom Foremski @ 3:03 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 A new VC fund to help develop the next-stage internet technologies Posted by Tom Foremski @ 3:03 am Categories: Trend watch, Venture capital Tags: Im not yet ready to announce this, Im still waiting on a couple of call backs, butI would love to launch the BBC venture capital fundto focus on investments in startups developing telemetry solutions. I believe that these are the types of technologies that will be essential in this internet 2.0 phase that is emerging. Telemetry technologies include network monitoring software, collecting data on how web applications are being used, statistical analysis of behavioral models by large populations, and of course, to complement those goals you need sophisticated identity management technologies, and personalized me...

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Posted by George Ou @ 2:10 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Are Wi-Fi security myths good for deterrence? Posted by George Ou @ 2:10 am Categories: Advice Tags: In response to my popular "The six dumbest ways to secure a Wireless LAN", Timothy wrote a letter to me asking if there was any legitimate deterrence value against the casual hacker to some of the common myths in securing a Wireless LAN such as "SSID suppression", "DHCP restrictions", and "MAC filtering". Timothy writes: I had some opinions on those specific items and I was curious what your thoughts were. My feeling is that most vulnerabilities to a network come from more subtle sources than a blatant hacker. While the three items mentioned will not keep out skilled hackers they may help secure a network from the malicious intent of a non-technically s...

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Posted by Richard MacManus @ 1:08 am   Year:January 24th, 2006   Source Site:zdnet

January 24th, 2006 Microsoft Search Champs Diaries: Richard travels to Seattle Posted by Richard MacManus @ 1:08 am Categories: Web 2.0, Tech Tags: Im over in the US for Microsoft Search Champs V4. In fact Im on a United plane from LA to Seattle as I write this, at the tail end of a 24 hour journey. Ive traveled all the way from New Zealand to be here, at the invite of Microsoft. And yes they are paying for the trip, as with all Search Champs participants. There are around 30 outside people attending this fourth edition of Search Champs, I think, mostly from the US but there are a few Europeans and a single one from Down Under (that would be me). The idea of Search Champs is for Microsoft to get feedback on their new products from people in the industry. Bloggers have been ...

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