Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Developer Jedi Masters Write....  Enterprise Application Architecture (Martin Fowler) is his long awaited book that's been evolving on his website for over a year. This book looks at design and architectural patterns of enterprise systems and discusses many practical implementations that can be built ranging from the quick and simple to very clever and scalable. [rebelutionary] 10:29:38 PM

Color Me Impressed. The Harrow Technology Report [The Shifted Librarian] 10:26:06 PM

IBM acquires PWC Consulting. IBM announced today it is acquiring PWC Consulting, paying $3.5 billion for a revenue producing unit that generated about $4.5 billion in revenue in the last fiscal year. IBM Global Services continues to be the revenue growth driver in IBM's portfolio of businesses. Hewlett-Packard was in discussions to buy the PWC unit for a reported $18 billion less than two years ago but backed away because of other difficulties at the time. [Scott Loftesness] 4:19:46 PM

Spam Escalation When I first installed SpamAssassin a couple of months ago, it worked great, catching about 99% of spam with only the occasional false positive (usually an automated emails generated by ecommerce sites). It was too good to last; today about 25% of the spam I receive is getting through again. It's really obvious that spammers are working around the SpamAssassin rules. SpamAssassin has one major design flaw: whenever it decides to flag a message as spam, it includes a detailed reason why, with exact scores. There's even a web page which might as well be titled Evading SpamAssassin. It takes about 5 minutes for a spammer to figure out how to avoid the filters. [Joel on Software] 11:17:48 AM

fear of a Bubble drives some home owners back to renting. the article talks about people taking the gains on their house and returning to renting. an inset talks about how to spot a housing bubble. 10:35:32 AM

manias, panics, and crashes An expert on bubbles gives his thoughts on the current economy. In short, the technology bubble followed the typical pattern but was pretty large. Between that and the binging on debt based on home equity that American's have done, he thinks we're at the bottom and likely to "bounce along the bottom" for a few years. He sees signs of a housing bubble, particularly on the West Coast. 10:13:22 AM

CNet.  Western Digital's new hard-drive arrives at 200 Gbs.   This is great: >>>Drive makers will surely need the new interface, as developments push areal densities to 100GB per platter. Such density could allow desktop drives to reach 400GB of storage by the end of next year.<<< It's too bad that overly generous copyright laws prevent this capacity from being utilized.  If copyright was at the Lessig threshold of 5 years, all manner of scenarios are possible.  A personal copy of the Library of Congress.  Archives of major newspapers, magazines, etc.  Societal memory at your fingertips.  Amazing.  What value is that to our civilization? To not fill this capacity and unleash the creativity it could spawn would be tantamount to Caeser's burning of the great Library of Alexandria.  In his quest for power and control, he accidently destroyed one of the founts of knowledge in the ancient world.  Aren't we experiencing a similar power grab by corporate copyright holders for the same motives? [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 6:55:05 AM