Posts by Ian Michael Gumby

MySQL should be spun off.

Sorry but Oracle *is* the dominant database on the market and with mySQL they would be a bit too large.

Will the EU block the deal until Oracle divests itself from mySQL?

Oracle doesn't play well when you have multiple products in the mix. You can look at IBM and what it means having IDS and DB2 in the same space. While IBM doesn't release their license numbers, the whispers are that IDS is actually doing better in this space than DB2. Of course they are only rumors.

But based on the internal competition and the fact that mySQL has a lot of work required, it would be easier for Oracle to put mySQL out under Apache licensing.

The other database that isn't talked about is JavaDB. aka Derby, aka Cloudscape which was once the property of IBM when they bought Informix who bought Cloudscape for 80 million or so.

Time Warner is looking at this Bass-ackwards...

Ok,

Time Warner is a company that plays in a bit of a monopolistic environment. But they exist to make money.

Since they already have a large and varied subscriber base, they have a couple of options.

First they need to do some data analysis to determine the average amount of usage by their customers. Then determine the frequency of which an average user occasionally goes over the monthly usage.

In theory, Time Warner could crunch the numbers and determine a price point and revenue targets.

Keeping the numbers simple, suppose that the average household used 10GB a month but occasionally goes over that limit 1 or 2 months a year by 2GB.

Suppose that the current 'unlimited' service costs $50.00.

Time Warner could raise that 'unlimited' service to $75.00 and then offer a metered bandwidth pricing where the customer pays $40.00 for 15 GB a month, or $35.00 for 10 GB a month. Under either plan, they get charged the $1.00/$2.00 a GB for going over their monthly quota respectively.

This way, a consumer who only uses 10GB a month can opt for the $35.00 plan and save $15.00 a month from their current bill.

Those who need a bit more based on their usage can get the $40.00 plan and again save money.

Those that want unlimited get charged the $75.00.

This will definitely get subscribers to move to the new plans without having to worry about 'volunteers' and pissing people off.

Note: The numbers are just here for example purposes. The point is that it would be fair for TimeWarner to take this type of approach because for the average consumer, they'll be saving money.

Kind of a simple solution that passes the PUC (Public Utility Commission) sniff test because it solves two problems. 1) Reducing the average customer's bills. 2) Allowing TimesWarner better control over their network.

FIOS is cool too, and you can bet that when it rolls out, over time there will be the same issue of bandwidth. The larger the pipe, the more content will flow and they'll have a similar problem.

What I am suggesting is a pricing model that allows them to shift from a single tiered pricing to a multi-tiered pricing.

The black helicopter because this type of modeling should optimize the revenue a company can generate while appearing to give the average consumer a break. Its a dirty little capitalistic sekret!

IBM is trying pull the wool over everyone's eyes...

Its going to be costly for IBM to shift EU jobs out of the EU and they'll do it only if they don't think that there will be a customer backlash.

Here in the states, customers who are not already locked in to long term contracts are starting to put the squeeze on IBM. Lets face it. If you're a customer and you just found out that your local support staff's work is now being done in India, you don't think that you'll want to renegotiate the contracts?

The only ones happy are going to be IBM's legal team since they'll have job security with all of the contract issues either going to court or arbitration. They'll point to the T's and C's and offer IBM's assurances that there will be no slip up in the SLAs that were in the contract and that IBM will make them 'whole'. (Or is that hole as in a big black hole sucking all of the customer's money out of their pocket books?)

Sorry but IBM senior management don't have a clue. They're just fattening their nest egg before they jump ship when Sam retires in the next two years or so.

Anyone who's doing business with IBM needs to re-evaluate their T's and C's and consider doing business with someone else who isn't going to shift the workforce out of country.

With respect to federal stimulus monies, IBM supposedly is going to have two new sites in the US. (Iowa and MI). Care to bet that they'll use L1s and H1Bs?

The flame isn't for the Reg, but for IBM.

Bad corporate policy shouldn't be rewarded, right AIG?

Following your logic...

TD wouldn't be interested in following John Smith around the city.

It would be interested in things like watching all of the exchanges for changes in the price of lets say gold and any news articles that mention gold. So that the guy sitting at his trading desk can monitor different streams of data for a bunch of different commodities and see if/how they will effect the price of the commodity. An example... suppose you're monitoring the 'frozen concentrated orange juice' prices. (Ok bad reference to trading places.) And you see a report that the overnight temperature in Florida went below 30 degrees. You're more likely to place trades knowing that the prices will go up because the quantity of OJ is going to be hurt by the freeze.

You could do the same with stocks, like IBM. You can not only monitor all of the US exchanges which trade IBM, but also all of the news links that publish stories on IBM. (Like this one.) Then a human can decide if the information is relevant or not to the price of the stock.

The real interesting thing is what happens when there's an information overload... ;-)

Paris - Because for a 'dumb blonde' she's laughing all the way to the bank.

Just bomb an Alaskan Volcano

I believe that there's an active volcano in Alaska. Obama could have someone (US Air Force) drop a GPS guided or even a laser guided bunker busting bomb in to the crater to start an explosion. This should put a large dust cloud in to the atmosphere and it would have some effect on changing the climate. Why Alaska? Well for one, the US owns and controls it. Also its closer to the artic shelf, lower risk to populated areas...

Besides this would be a 'greener' solution since volcano activity happens all the time. ;-)

@Stu Reeves and Nick Palmer...

Stu:

You're forgetting that Sun does have other potential suitors. Not many at the asking price, but with the proper management team, Sun can turn things around. IBM *needs* Sun more than anyone in the press realizes and IBM is pretty tight lipped on this issue.

Nick:

IBM has more than just DB2 in the LUW space. They have Informix's products. In fact, if some of the rumors are true, IBM is selling more IDS than DB2 in the LUW space.

If IBM were to acquire Sun, IBM's IM could put mySQL on top of Informix's SE. Its a no brainer. This would cut in to Oracle's acquisition of InnoDB by providing a solid engine for the low end.

Because IBM needs Sun, they won't kill of the hardware or OS. Depending on the software, it will most likely be absorbed after some point and some stuff will go back to Open Source like JavaDB. (IBM released Cloudscape as Derby under Apache's license.)

IBM is being a tad arrogant because they thing they have a strong position. There are two other companies that could also acquire Sun and make a go of it.

Thumbs down because the author of the article didn't do his homework.

Goodbye Google....

The point that the court of appeals is saying is that Google is engaged in commerce by selling a competitor the trademark as an adword.

So suppose McDonalds wants to buy Burgerking's name as an adword. So that when someone searches for Burgerking, a URL for McDonalds pops up. Hey! One bad burger joint is just as good as any other fast food burger joint, no? :-)

With respect to the AC, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that rescuecom has purchased a phone number which may match an incorrect 'spelling' of a competitor. This isn't the same thing as google is selling the trademark as an adword.

@Hugh_Pym...

Is the Antigua case dead and over?

If so and the UN did rule against the US then it would be 'legal' for Antigua based companies to actually ignore copyrights of US based companies.

Here's a link I found on this:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_33/b4046041.htm

I don't believe that this issue is over. If so, imagine Antigua being a major exporter of Microsoft OS and products that are copies of the real thing. They in theory could flood the market with cheap copies and there would be nothing Microsoft could do.

Could Cisco have been the alternative buyer of Sun?

Cisco could make a lot out of Sun. Considering that they want to get in to the server arena.

Depending on which report you've read, one of the rumored reasons why the IBM/Sun merger talks failed was that IBM wanted to be the only bidder.

If Cisco steps up to the plate, you can bet IBM will be quick to counter.

@zvonr

Garmin? TomTom?

You must be talking about Garmin trying to put a last minute bid on TeleAtlas. Totally different situation.

TomTom and TeleAtlas had announced a deal. Nokia was then going to purchase Navteq. Garmin? They'd be left out in the cold since Nokia and Garmin could be considered competitors as there's a convergence between mobile phones / PDAs / and Nav Units.

Since the deal didn't happen, Garmin signed a long term deal with Navteq.

BTW, if you checked on all those stories about idiots who blindly followed their GPS devices, you'd find out that the bulk of them used teleAtlas' map data. ;-)

Do you think IBM cares?

IBM is cutting expenses anyway they can.

If it means making it more difficult for a worker to get their job done, they don't care. If you quit, they don't have to RIF you or offer you a package. They save money and they can move your job offshore.

IBM also wants to have their cake and eat it too. Without home internet access being paid for, do you really plan on cutting it, or downgrading service? More likely, you'll just take it on the chin.

If you have to go in to a mobile office, so what? You can't recoup your gas or mileage so the money you spend traveling to an office is probably more expensive than your internet.

If you flip to a 4G wireless card, you'll need your manager's approval. So if you're on a client site, you'll have more difficulty getting it approved than if you're in S&D.

Right now, if you're a client of IBM, you may want to start considering alternatives and you should definitely review the QoS in your contracts...

But what do I know? I'm just an ex-IBMer ;-)

-G

I'll stick with my E90 thank you!

Sorry but do you notice that all of the pictures of 'people''s hands using the QWERTY keyboards are all women?

Seriously, the one nice feature of the E90 is that it fits a man's hand. Since I do more texting and e-mail than voice these days, I want a large keyboard. I would have opted for an 810 if it only had a phone. Pair it with a blue tooth headset that has caller ID and lets you pickup/drop calls, you'll have a great system. Just keep the 810 or larger unit in your pocket/laptop bag/briefcase and you can still take calls on the run.

If the qwerty keypads get any smaller, you'll need a stylus if your a regular sized guy.

Evolution in Action...

The title says it all.

Too funny! But the answer is Steve Mills.

Sure Mills is a little long in the tooth.

But he'll continue to screw up IBM as Sam is currently doing. With IBM's current movement to offshore everything, like most offshore projects, IBM is doomed to fail.

IBM will suck itself dry and collapse after the two years are up and Sam has retired.

Seriously the day Sam P retires, short the blue pig.

Then after Steve Mills who knows... Since IBM now claims that the bulk of their revenue comes from outside of the US, then you can expect that the next leader of IBM to come from outside the US.

Ruby doesn't scale?

Mock shock! Say it aint so!

Ok, really scalability is a relative thing. I've seen apps where going with a spring/hibernate framework couldn't scale.

But looking at SCALA? Sounds like someone wants to pick the language du jour.

Seriously, you want speed, simplicity and ability to do almost whatever you need, look at C. You want 'flexibility and OO' then consider Objective C. Considering that Cloud is the new buzzword and its reminiscent of leasing mainframe time back in the '70's and early '80's then going back to C may be just the next best thing!

Just a few things...

A .38 doesn't have the stopping power of the .357 Magnum. Police used to carry the .38 then the .38 special. One problem of the .38 is that it *didn't* have the stopping power so Police started carrying larger caliber and more powerful rounds. Also Police have a nasty issue of 'over penetration' that they have to worry about. Criminals? Not so much. With today's bullets, you can have more lethality in a lower powered shell. If you want a decent round with stopping power, look at a .40 S&W.

With respect to the lawsuit... He was acquitted so there is the issue that the story could have happened the way he said it did. (Reasonable doubt). You sue the landlord because he's got the deeper pockets and should have insurance to cover this. 5 Million USD? Because that's probably the limit of his (landlord's) insurance.

I guess the only IT angle is that a lot of us computer geeks are also gun enthusiasts. I'm the guy who loves to shoot 7mm Rem Mag and .300 Win Mag 'bean field' rifles... ;-)

A lot of misinformation from ACs

Ok,

Lets clear up some things....

IBM claims that the US is no longer their main source of revenue. Ok, so one has to wonder how IBM recognizes revenue from an outsourced off shore account? Meaning if Company X outsources to IBM which offshores the work to India, how does IBM USA and IBM India record the revenue recognition?

To the point about US Tax code. That is blatantly incorrect. IBM is a US corporation and revenues earned overseas tracks back to IBM. The IRS has done a couple of things... one a tax amnesty for companies that under reported their overseas revenues and a crack down on US corporations which move their corporations offshore in an effort to dodge US taxes. Now IBM didn't do the latter, but under amnesty I believe the reported 8 Billion (USD) in unrecognized/under recognized revenue that year... (I'm going from memory so I could be wrong...)

The reason IBM is cutting US jobs is that they are moving the work offshore to lower wage countries. Over the past couple of years, IBM SWG moved their back room functions for North America to Brazil. While John Q Public doesn't notice any difference, just ask a sales rep about the additional headaches in trying to get a contract done at the last minute. With respect to GTS, these jobs are lost because the work has moved to offshore locations. IBM is doing this because while overall gross revenues are shrinking, the off shore margins are better. This is why IBM could record a record year and still RIF US workers.

While IBM is setting up Outsourcing centers in IA and MI, rumor has it that they will again be staffed with lower cost workers. (H1B, L1, etc ...)

You can bet that IBM is taking a gamble on their long term future by doing this. Outsourcing contracts contain QoS terms and even with weasle wording their contracts, you can bet that smart clients who find themselves offshored will sue or threaten to sue to renegotiate their T's and C's. When your only value add is price, you can bet you get caught up in a slow death spiral.

Net new business will be at a lower price as well, since customers know that the work is being off shored to lower cost centers so they will squeeze IBM on margins.

This cut has nothing to do with the possible acquisition of Sun.

After this stunt, I'd love to see IBM along with Microsoft lobby Capitol Hill for an increase in H1B visas. Sorry but there are plenty of displaced IT workers who've been riff'd because of too many companies gaming the system.

Thumbs down because its bad corporate IT governance.

And I'm posting under my well known alias. I'm not afraid to call IBM out for their blatant acts of stupidity.

Stallman has gone off his rocker!

Look,

I can understand that Stallman wants the world to be open sourced, however what does it mean to be 'free'. Yes I know the article tries to address this fact. And frankly Stallman considers anything where the IP is protected and not 'free' as bad.

The truth is that the javascript running is 'free' in that it doesn't cost the end consumer anything to run. That is that you're not paying a fee to run the software. Frankly, that's really what anyone cares about.

Unfortunately the only bad thing about Javascript is that you really can't hide your IP. You write a nifty widget, there's nothing to stop someone from looking at your code and then reverse engineering their own solution to embed in their own application.

I don't see this really as a trap since its possible to create open sourced version of java script and put them out on gitmo or some other website for distribution. Dojo is an excellent example.

Flame not for the Reg but for Stallman for being lame.

@AC

Switch to IBM's Informix engine.

Runs faster and better than either Oracle or DB2.

It's IBM's 'Dirty Little Sekret'. ;-)

Black Helicopter because a lot of the IBM DB2 folks don't want you to know anything about IDS or Informix. ;-)

You get what you pay for...

Symantec saved a couple of quid by moving their call centers to the cheapest area of labor. I would suspect that a class action lawsuit might make them consider that sometimes the lowest cost workforce doesn't really measure up to the stated savings.

Not only do you have id theft to contend with, but also a lower customer satisfaction rating.

Ever wonder why Dell split the call center duties between the US and India on their US sold laptops? Cheaper consumer kit was handled in India. More expensive business kit was handled in the US. Gee I wonder why.... ;-)

The pirate flag because US corporations need to remember that outside of the US, US Laws are pretty much unenforcable and you're at the mercy of the 'host nations' and their laws.

Its all about the margins...

Do you think that IBM is reducing rates to their customers?

I doubt it. Not on existing contracts.

IBM is taking advantage of the economic climate to squeeze even more margins to keep showing record profits.

You can only squeeze a company so far.

Flame to IBM, moving jobs to third world nations and now for cutting rates to subs that keep you afloat with local talent.

Intel has to walk a very thin tightrope...

Without actually seeing the cross patent licensing agreement, we're going to have to assume that Intel has a case. At least enough of a case that they can proceed ahead with discovery.

The real key is to understand what Intel is trying to protect. From the article, the issue isn't that AMD spun off their chip foundries but that they brought in a partner (Abu Dhabi).

Intel wants to make sure that Abu Dhabi isn't getting rights to re-distribute their IP and are using the joint venture to get around the road blocks that protect Intel's IP.

You can bet that Intel and AMD settle this in the near future by not allowing further transfer of Intel's IP.

On the flip side, Intel can't be too agressive because the lawsuit could be seen as an anti-competitive move.

While there can be some comparisons to Transmeta, AMD is not in the same boat. Splitting off their foundries actually makes AMD more competitive by allowing their foundries to perform custom third party chip manufacturing.

@Miami Mike...

PCI is a weak standard at best.

There are reasons why its weak, and it should be treated as a minimum level of security.

Unfortunately IT in retail is not a money maker but a cost center so retailers will do anything to cut down on their IT costs regardless of the consequences.

Could TJX been avoided? Absolutely.

Could the hacks at the clearing and payment processors been avoided? Sure, but if its an inside job, the amount of work securing the systems is a bit more tricky. Not to say that it couldn't be done, but that an insider has more avenues of attack and its harder to protect.

You have to understand that you're only focusing on one vector of attack. If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts, there's only one database that offers the extensibility to lock down the database and still provide the OLTP performance. IBM's Informix engine. But even there, it takes a bit of skill and a lot of planning. Money Retailers don't want to spend.

@Joe K.

There is actually a very good reason for this requirement.

The idea is to keep non potential bidders from getting a look at how bad things really are inside the company. Imagine if you were an analyst/reporter who wanted to look at how bad things were mucked up and then write an article.

The whole idea is that you have to prove that you can really afford to buy the company before they'll let you see their financial statements which probably has a lot of confidential information.

Just think how bad it would be if someone started printing out which customers got bilked and by how much... Then no one would want to do business in India and you'll see a big hit on offshoring ...

Hmmm maybe that's not such a bad idea. Maybe the Reg could raise the capital and do a report? ;-)

This isn't an issue of protectionism but IT survival...

"She said 80 per cent of non-EU IT staff coming to the UK were doing so on intra-company transfers. Swain called for a requirement for firms to advertise such internal jobs to UK candidates before offering them to foreign staff."

Essentially, what this is saying is that you have a multi-national company like IBM which will land a large contract and what they can't offshore, they'll onshore the workers. If you don't like IBM, you have Accenture and half a dozen other companies doing the same thing.

I'm all for a globalized workforce, however that's not the case. You're not bringing over someone from Germany who's an SAP wiz. You're bringing over some chap from a third world country that has been through a 10 week wonder course on a specific topic.

In short, the entire IT world on both sides of the pond are screwed up.

And its only going to get worse until it can get better.

This is actually a good thing. A very good thing...

Look at it this way...

Outside of the big 5, there are a handful of smaller countries that may have nuclear weapons. Its in everyone's best interest to not have more countries trying to gain nuclear weapons.

If you think about it, this is the first step in a process that can ultimately allow for non-nuclear countries to get clean energy.

If you can agree upon some common standards of fuel types and reactor plants, you can actually have a good thing going....

If you consider a pebble reactor, you can offer a country cheaper power.

You build the plants for them. You supply the fuel. You remove the waste and recycle it.

The upside is that they get cheaper and cleaner power.

Developing countries need clean cheap energy.

With respect to a dirty bomb, The Big 5 control the fuel and most of it is secured. Biological weapons are more dangerous and scary than a dirty bomb.

Even if you consider just North America and the EU, if they adopt plants based on this technology, you will still have clean energy and a reduction in the waste issue.

Your big expense in the US is finding a plant site, getting it approved through the EPA, fighting all of the lawsuits by non-nuke activits, and then eventually construction of a plant. You want green electric cars and electric trains... You're going to need something like this to make nuke plants more viable.

And what happens when they collide?

What happens when two massive black holes collide?

I don't think I want to be around close enough to see what happens... ;-)

I think you may have missed the point...

Suppose you want to do a long term archieve off site.

Suppose that its not just 25GB or 50GB but 100GB of data that you want to archive?

A portable Blu-ray player makes sense for a lot of the points you already mention.

Suppose you're a law firm and you're required to deliver your evidence to the other party? Instead of having box loads of paper, you may have GBs of PDFs online? So how do you transport a copy to your adversary? If you use a memory key, its possible and probable the something gets lost and misplaced. With a read only blu-ray drive, you don't have to worry that someone accidentally deletes a file from the key fob(s) containing the PDFs.

Its a cool idea and does have some practical uses.

Does this surprise you? Here's how they're going to do it....

First its no secret.

Companies can only delay critical projects for so long before they have to pull the trigger.

Outsourcing of operations is one way that companies can lower their IT costs and get a 'handle' on them. (Assuming that IBM can actually pull off the outsourcing)

That's on the sell side of the equation.

On the fulfillment side, IBM has and will continue to move their internal operations to lower cost countries. Like their North American Ops moved down to Brazil. The downside is that there's more pain internal to IBM, but not noticeable to the customer. Who cares if there's a 72 hour delay in the paperwork.... Then IBM will offshore as much of the outsourcing to cheap labor around the world. When they can't offshore the work, IBM will rely on Onshore tactics as well as H1B visas to get lower cost here in the US. Onshore meaning that they post an internal job opening that they can't fill so they relocate a lower cost worker who is an IBM employee to the US.

So its a margins game. IBM will continue to lose on Hardware, sell more software and make margins on the services.

Sam P is cutting the company to the bone to get his profitability up so he can cash out.

When he leaves, watch all the analysts short the shite out of IBM's shares.

The black chopper cause I've said too much and they know who I am. :-)

It actually makes some sense...

I have a Nokia E90. Why? Because of the size of the QWERTY keypad. I bought it because at the time the larger Blackberry RIM didn't have GPS yet and the newer models shrunk the keyboard.

If you send a lot of texts and email, the keyboard really is important.

I would have bought one of the 810 tablets except that its not a phone.

Yes the current machines are underpowered for some of the stuff that you want to do. However, if you look at the convergence of phone/pda in to a 'net book', you can keep it in your bag and just have a blue tooth headset for phone. If designed correctly, you should be able to swap in/out your communications (wi-fi, wi-max, etc ...) so whatever format wins the 4G race, you'll do ok.

From a market perspective, you can build a high end net book on Symbian. Its the lack of apps that can kill you.

Android has the edge in that they're using a Linux kernel that has already a built in market share and mindset of developers. That doesn't mean that Nokia can't make up ground or develop cross windows/symbian and linux/symbian development tools and software test platforms.

Oh and BTW, Nokia owns Navteq so TomTom is out of luck with their tele Atlas. Google on the other hand is getting in to the mapping business so both Tom Tom and Nokia should be scared.

@ Richard...

Contrary to the statement, all of the vendors are willing to make suicidal leaps on pricing if you play them correctly. ;-)

You just have to know which buttons to push. ;-)

If you read between the lines, what the article is saying is that the vendors are now probably forcing their sales staff to go higher up the food chain in order to get the higher discounted prices approved. And on hardware pricing, you don't have to really sell it at a loss to be in the 'suicidal territory'. If you add in the commissions and the cost of the local sales support engineer, you could still sell it above cost and still lose money on the deal. (YMMV)

Moore's law not dead yet!

While the article talks about using it for storage, it also has a play in chip lithography.

You're missing a big point...

Digital download tax could also mean that when you view a movie rental via 'video on demand' that your cable company has to charge you an additional tax. So your $4.99(USD) movie will cost an additional 4% for Wisconsin residents.

And the H1B and Onshore labor market will be happy...

Sorry to say but even these government contracts to improve their systems will be built with machines that are manufactured offshore, and the project staffing will be filled with ranks of H1B or onshored labor from one of the big 3 contractors.

Sorry to be cynic, but the rumor is that IBM which has finally started to sense the backlash against offshoring outsourcing projects, is now creating two US sites. Care to bet how many H1B's actually get hired over their US counterparts?

Sam's lining his pockets before he retires. Lower quality workers for higher margins.

Now we know why Sun is in trouble...

Robert Finocchio sits on Sun's BoD.

Just a clarification, Finocchio aka Pinocchio was the CEO of Informix after Phil White cooked the books because Illustra was too hard to swallow. After Finocchio, you had Dexmier, an ex French Fighter pilot jock who couldn't run a company either. The only thing he did that was notable was in purchasing Ascential, which somehow Peter Gyness (PG) ?sp? took over as CEO. PG was the one who sold Informix to IBM for a billion (way too cheap) and then later Ascential was sold to IBM.

The biggest problem with both Finnochio and Dexmier is that they acted as if relational databases were a commodity. You can't be successful if you run a company where you think/act as if the product you make is a commodity.

Having him on the Sun BoD is indicative that they are not getting the direction that they need from a board and sound advice to turn things around.

Sun's only saving grace is that IBM is screwing their own selves out of a market leader position.

But hey! What do I know? Just tell Finnochio and Dexmier that Gumby says hi. ;-)

@Lee

You have two issues...

First identifying the PCs involved in the communication traffic that you want to monitor.

Second decrypting the encrypted message/conversation.

There are things that the NSA can do to identify PCs that they might want to monitor traffic to and from.

Its breaking the encryption in a timely enough manner that is an issue.

If they knew what/how Skype is encrypting the data and which type of encryption, it makes it easier. (But still rocket science)

I think that this is a bit of FUD and I have more faith in the NSA and their billion(s) dollar budget and IT equipment. I wonder how fast you can break AES with a data center filled with PS3s running Linux in a cluster... ;-)

A year isn't long enough...

Crooks can wait a year or more to use stolen ID information.

If you think about the data that they are stealing, that data doesn't go stale within a year, or for the most part even 5 years.

So its a cheap way of creating a false sense of security.

IMHO, credit bureaus should maintain a database of compromised ids so that if someone attempts to use data from a heist 1+ years ago, it would be easier to track down the place of theft.

I know that if I were a thief, I'd steal the ids, wait 2+ years and then start using the pilfered data, mixing it in with data that I got from other sites. This would make it harder to track down the breach.

Black chopper cause I've said too much.

Its a good thing that the iPhone isn't powerful enough..

While yeah, you can record voices, you can take pictures on your iPhone, it doesn't have enough power to easily and quickly isolate a face or a voice from the background noise. (Maybe if you have one person talking and you're in a silent sound proof room...

There's no reason why using a 4G (WiMax) connection that you couldn't take the shot, crop it and send the cropped (uncompressed) image and or a voice file to a larger computer and let it do the heavy lifting.

Yeah, but think about the irony of IBM...

In terms of Information Management, good ol' IBM is pushing DB2. Yet if they really were concerned about going green, they'd be promoting IDS, their Informix database software. They'd be talking about a certain gaming company that was able to reduce the number of database servers running SQLServer by a factor of 10, just by switching to Informix.

Yet IBM is pretty much silent on that.

Its no wonder that they are partnering with Greenpeace. Aren't they against nuclear energy which is currently our cleanest and 'greenest' form of energy?

Tux, because if you head over to the IIUG.org website, you can get a copy of Informix for Linux (certain restrictions apply of course) for 'free'.