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The
weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames EARTHDATE: March 5, 2006 OFFICIAL
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 WINDING DOWN An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news by Alan Lenton Arrg - this week's issue went on longer than I expected. I hope you don't mind... I'm in the middle of dealing with an ultra-dork UK delivery company called Initial City Link, who win this month's prize for the misuse of technology. Last Thursday, while I was out at work, they left a note saying they tried to deliver a parcel, and a card giving a number to ring. I was a bit puzzled since I was not expecting any packages to be delivered to my address, so I rang the number to find out who the package was from. Bad move - all I could get was a plastic lady giving me two options: Press one to have it returned to the sender, press two to collect it (needless to say their depot is in the middle of nowhere). No option to talk to a human, or to find out who sent it. This is a classic misuse of technology. Computers are brilliant at doing boring routine work when things are all OK. They are hopeless at sorting out something that's gone wrong - for that you need a human. Rest assured, I will never use them to deliver anything of mine, or recommend them to anyone else. Grrrr...
I reported a couple of issues ago that database mega-corp Oracle had bought open source embedded database manufacturer Sleepycat. In fact this was the second recent acquisition of an open source company, because last October it bought an open source company called Innobase. The acquisition of Innobase, which I managed to miss at the time, is even more significant than the Sleepycat purchase, because Innobase created the most robust and popular transaction engine for MySQL. The term 'transaction engine' is probably geek gobbledy-gook to most of you, so I guess I'd better explain. Most of the big databases in the world are what is known as 'relational' databases. Like all databases they store data in a format where, if the programmer has done his work properly, any arbitrary piece of data can be retrieved rapidly. (By the way, people who program databases tend to refer to themselves as 'database architects'. I think this is because it sounds more glamorous than being a mere programmer.) Lots of databases can perform this piece of wizardry, but relational databases have proved to be able, in general, to do it more efficiently, so they are what is used most often, and the relational database language SQL is the one most often used to extract information. However, while retrieving information fast is a necessary condition for any self-respecting database, it isn't really sufficient if the database is going to be used for any significant commercial application. Let me give you an example. Suppose you instructed your bank to make a US$500 donation to ibgames (because its online game, Federation II, which I wrote, is fabulous, dazzling, brilliant and real cool, and you want to help support it). Anyway, your bank needs to do at least three things to complete the transaction. It has to debit your bank account the US$500, it has to credit ibgames account with US$500, and it has to write the details of the transaction into the audit log in case there is any question about the payment ('transaction') at a later date. Easy I hear you say - three lines of Visual Basic, it's a snip - what's the big deal? Ah! But there are three separate things to be done here - what happens if there is a crash immediately after the money is deducted from your bank account? You lose the US$500, ibgames goes bust for want of the US$500, and the bank is smiling all the way to its bank (until the class action law suite arrives, that is). Preventing this from happening is the job of a piece of software known as the transaction engine. A transaction engine is one of the most difficult pieces of software to write, and Innobase (Remember them? This is a piece about Innobase.) wrote the transaction engine used by the top open source database, MySQL. Ooops! Obviously it's not good for your biggest rival to gain control of the company that wrote your transaction engine, although, being open source, Oracle can't just kill the product. Understandably, MySQL are starting to look elsewhere for a transaction engine, having already rebuffed Oracle's overtures. Enter Netfrastructure. MySQL's first move has been to acquire this company which makes tools and server software for web-based application. The consensus is, though, that the reason for this acquisition is not the company's product, but to get Netfrastructure's founder, relational database guru Jim Starkley, to work on developing MySQL's own transactional engine. If the rumour mill is correct, that's a wise move! Meanwhile, Oracle, who are not short of a dollar or two, are not standing still. Persistent rumours abound that they are looking to buy Zend Technologies. Zend's PHP-based Zend Engine is one of the most popular open source web site back ends, and is capable of using a wide range of back end databases. Only this week, Zend announced that they had upgraded the ability of their engine to work with Oracle databases, provoking a new crop of rumours. Databases are generally considered to be a pretty boring topic, but what is happening in the database market at the moment will have tremendous implications for the future way in which open source and proprietary software interact. For the ultra-hard-line open sourcers, these acquisitions mean that the end is nigh, but I don't think that's the case. It was always unlikely that open source, which I wholeheartedly support and use all the time, would remain in some sense 'pure' once it became mainstream. It was bound to start interacting with commercial software and the line would start to get blurred. We have yet to see where this will all end, but I suspect that it will result is a balancing act between the two types of software. In the meantime, I have to confess that I'm impressed with Oracle's strategy for dealing with open source challenges to its position, which is much more subtle (not something I normally associate with Oracle) than Microsoft's attempts at sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt. I wonder how many more commercial software makers will seek to emulate Oracle's example over the next few years? http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/02/28/zend_oracle_database_php/
There's an interesting survey just out from Parks Associates. It seems that a third of US households are not connected to the Internet, and that these refuseniks have no intention of getting connected to the net. I've mentioned before that there is a large chunk of the populations of western countries who are not connected to the net, and who won't connect. Governments worry about this and think that it's because the people involved can't afford it, or are there are technical issues, and they run campaigns to get people connected. The government officials just don't get it - the Internet doesn't provide anything that these people consider to be necessary. You can make it as cheap as you like, you can create brilliant technical solutions, but if the Internet doesn't provide anything they want, they won't use it. Full stop. And you know, that has really, really, bad implications for the cost of providing government services. Governments are rushing helter-skelter to implement eGovernment in the fond belief that everyone will use the services on line, thus massively cutting costs. Wrong. They will end up having to provide the electronic services that they made into a mantra, and also the manual services that exist at the moment. Just what we really needed - one for the price of two! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/27/us_net_usage_flatlines/ Armageddon failed to happen in Washington this week, as RIM, makers of the Blackberry PDA and NTP, holders of hotly disputed patents, finally came to a settlement costing RIM a cool $612.5m. A failure to have come to an agreement would have probably shut down Blackberry, resulting in Congress-critters, lawyers, lobbyists and bureaucrats being unable to access their spam. Indeed the Department of Justice was so worried about the impact on its staff that at one stage it pleaded with the judge overseeing the case not to issue an injunction against RIM. It must be nice to have friends in high places! http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?c=1651326-7863277&brand=news&ds=5&fs=0 You may have heard of Ernst & Young, they do lots of expensive 'consultation' for large companies with more money than sense. In particular, they have a department specialising in telling companies whether they are complaint with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) which was passed after the Enron affair to force companies to become more accountable. It's ironic then that Ernst & Young should feel it unnecessary to admit publicly that they have lost laptop computers containing personal data on its customers, including social security numbers. The loss didn't become known until The Register followed up a throw away remark by Sun CEO Scott McNealy to the effect that his own data had been compromised by a company advising Sun on SOX compliance. Some detective work by The Register pointed to Ernst & Young, who finally publicly admitted losing the data. As the saying goes: Who will watch the watchers? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/26/ey_laptops/ Some time ago I mentioned that the great white shark of the US legal system, New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer, had launched an investigation into the way in which the music companies are setting prices for online music downloads. Well there hasn't been a lot of news about how that investigation is going, but I'd guess it's revealing things the music companies would rather we didn't know, because now the US Department of Justice have fired up their newly reprieved Blackberries and launched their own investigation! More about these juicy investigations as the truth (or at least some of it) comes out. http://www.billboard.biz/bb/biz/newsroom/business_finance/
Found a great toy for geeks this week. For less than US$100 you can get your own two foot long robotic shark. The remote control is waterproof and works under water, so you can swim with your shark! Even if you don't live on the coast, can you imagine the consternation if you started driving it around the local swimming pool... http://www.hammacher.com/publish/72824.asp
'RFID tag' - the rude
words UK ID card ministers won't say Activists warn of
return of Euro Software Patent fight ICANN approves dotcom
contract New bill promotes net
neutrality Apple update fixes
'critical' security bug Microsoft accuses EU of
collusion, bias Unfolding Microsoft
Origami & iPod
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan. Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html. |
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