Cubic

I just had a really funny thought. I was watching the evening news this evening and just happened to hear Dan Rather or some other equally ancient dude talking about how younger people seem to not care about private savings accounts and all the hoopla surrounding Social Security. My inital thought was, "Well, they don't care because they are watching Cartoon Network instead of the evening news." http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/ At least I thought it was pretty funny. In reality, the reason we don't care is because I can name three things that are on the evening news occupying over half the timeslot: 1) Someone died in Iraq by carbomb/whatever or announcing airport security stinks. 2) Someone discovers that bananas cause cancer or another FDA approved blah blah blah gets mad cow disease or some other such nonsense. 3) Someone is pushing budget balancing, social security reform, this reform, that reform. (Other, more minor, negative news follows - very rarely any p

Oh boy - two posts in one day. That's a rare treat for all of you, but I absolutely have to share this: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.html Don't bother reading the above unless you are in the security industry. There is only one thing you need to know: e-commerce = seriously busted. See, I am into the whole security industry thing and you don't need to be. However, when something this huge happens, you need to know about it - and perhaps the underlying technology of how it works. And this is huge. Okay, we all remember...we probably don't remember but think we do...back when e-commerce was this huge buzzword and everyone was talking about how it was the hot next best thing? That was somewhere around 1998 and escalated into 2001. It is now 2005. In computer to human years, that is 80 total years for e-commerce. E-commerce is based on a technology called Secure Socket Layer (SSL). SSL is called a layer because it transports data secur

I had no idea people could get SQL Server - you know, that huge hosebeast of a database server - for free: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/msde/default.asp Granted it only supports 25 concurrent users, but seriously, how many people is 25 concurrent users? The way I figure it, if a single user is considered as connecting and disconnecting within 100ms after executing their query, that's a total of roughly 250 users per second or roughly 15,000 users per minute without collisions. Of course, that assumes perfect timing connecting and disconnecting at that rate, so I'll assume there is some delay and say roughly 7,000 users per minute to be safe. Of course, if people are hanging onto their SQL connections longer than 100ms, then the number drops dramatically. Basically, if you are using Access or Jet or whatever, you can use this as a drop-in replacement. Sort of an intermediate step to a full-blown SQL Server environment. At the very least, it will be faster executing queries a

Completely unrelated to what I want to talk about (but got me thinking about CubicSpot): http://99zeros.blogspot.com/ Mark Jen got fired from Google after leaving Microsoft and putting information about Google on his blog, which is above. It was easy enough to find - thanks to Google it was the "I Feel Lucky" link from my keyword search "Mark Jen". CubicleSoft ( http://www.cubiclesoft.com/ ) has been tasked with the task (there's an interesting paradox - tasking people with a task is a task that has to have been tasked) to move roughly 1.5 million lines of C code to C++. The process isn't incredibly involved because a majority of the code has already been written in a modular format and has been well debugged. It is just the stuff that isn't modularly written (or the stuff that needs to be _re-written_) that is the major time killer, what with all brand-new test cases and what-not. As such, I haven't been loyally blogging to my heart's conten

Everyone's chatting about the latest development at Apple, so this is likely to get lost in the mix. I've been in contact with Bill Fox at www.macsonly.com . Great website, by the way for understanding what is happening in Mac land. Anyway, here is what I've been looking for in terms of hardware details that PC users are wanting to know. Bill's reply to my major issue with the Mac mini revealed some important information about the internal guts: "The hard drives in the mini's are not Mac drives they are typical 2.5" ATA notebook drives found in PCs and Macs. Their RPM is 4200. You can get a 100GB 5400RPM notebook drive or a 60GB 7200RPM drive and those are the largest and fastest available. If one needs a huge drive, one can use an external FireWire or USB 2.0 3.5" drive." Apparently the Mac mini hard drive is not only small, but ALSO kind of sluggish. Most PC notebooks seem to have 5400RPM drives in them, but the mini is only 420