Cody Taylor

snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister believes Oracle is next in line to make a play for Sun now that IBM has withdrawn its offer. Dismissing server market arguments in favor of Cisco or Dell as suitors, McAllister suggests that MySQL, ZFS, DTrace, and Java make Sun an even better asset to Oracle than to IBM. MySQL as a complement to Oracle’s existing database business would make sense, given Oracle’s 2005 purchase of Innobase, and with ‘the long history of Oracle databases on Solaris servers, it might actually see owning Solaris as an asset,’ McAllister writes. But the ‘crown jewel’ of the deal would be Java. ‘It’s almost impossible to overestimate the importance of Java to Oracle. Java has become the backbone of Oracle’s middleware strategy,’ McAllister contends.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sooner Boomer writes “I’m trying to help drag a professor I work with into the 20th century. Although he is involved in cutting-edge research (nanotechnology), his method of literature search is to begin with digging through the hundreds of 3-ring binders that contain articles (usually from PDFs) that he has printed out. Even though the binders are labeled, the articles can only go under one ‘heading’ and there’s no way to do a keyword search on subject, methods, materials, etc. Yeah, google is pretty good for finding stuff, as are other on-line literature services, but they only work for articles that are already on-line. His literature also includes articles copied from books, professional correspondence, and other sources. Is there a FOSS database or archive method (preferably with a web interface) where he could archive the PDFs and scanned documents and be able to search by keywords? It would also be nice to categorize them under multiple subject headings if possible. I know this has been covered ad nauseum with things like photos and the like, but I’m not looking at storage as such: instead I’m trying to find what’s stored.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Death Metal writes to tell us that a growing tide of complaints are being piled at Google’s feet in response to a far-reaching settlement that some feel will grant the giant too much power over the “orphan books” they have been scanning into digital format. The settlement could give Google near-exclusivity with respect to the copyright of orphan works — books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. “Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database. The settlement, ‘takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,’ said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. ‘Google will be a monopoly.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes “My father is a veterinarian with a small private practice. He runs all his patient/client/financial administration on two simple workstations, linked with a network cable. The administration application is a simple DOS application backed by a database. Now the current systems, a Pentium 66mhz and a 486, both with 8MB of RAM and 500MB of hard drive space, are getting a bit long in the tooth. The 500MB harddrives are filling up, the installed software (Windows 95) is getting a bit flakey at times. My father has asked me to think about replacing the current setup. I do know a lot about computers, but my father would really like the new setup to last 10-15 years, just like the current one has. I just dont know where to begin thinking about that kind of systems lifetime. Do I buy, or build myself? How many spare parts should I keep in reserve? What will fail first, and how many years down the line will that happen?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes “A science-savvy robot called Adam has successfully developed and tested its first scientific hypothesis, discovering that certain genes in baker’s yeast code for specific enzymes which encourage biochemical reactions in yeast, then ran an experiment with its lab hardware to test its predictions, and analyzed the results, all without human intervention. Adam was equipped with a database on genes that are known to be present in bacteria, mice and people, so it knew roughly where it should search in the genetic material for the lysine gene in baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Ross King, a computer scientist and biologist at Aberystwyth University, first created a computer that could generate hypotheses and perform experiments five years ago. ‘This is one of the first systems to get [artificial intelligence] to try and control laboratory automation,’ King says. ‘[Current robots] tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles.’ Adam has cost roughly million to develop and the software that drives Adam’s thought process sits on three computers, allowing Adam to investigate a thousand experiments a day and still keep track of all the results better than humans can. King’s group has also created another robot scientist called Eve dedicated to screening chemical compounds for new pharmaceutical drugs that could combat diseases such as malaria.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Ottawa-area MP is calling for an investigation of Google’s massive photo database it’s collected. he says there are privacy concerns that have not yet been addressed.

An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. ‘Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,’ which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM’s WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM’s database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM’s front against Visual Studio. ‘All in all, this move would solidify IBM’s role as “the developer company,”‘ McAllister writes. ‘In other words, if this merger goes through and you’re an enterprise developer and you’re not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'” And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL’s director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue’s control.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes “Non-relational upstarts — tools that tack the letters ‘db’ onto a ‘pile of code that breaks with the traditional relational model’ — have grabbed attention in large part because they willfully ignore many of the rules that codify the hard lessons learned by the old database masters. Doing away with JOINs and introducing phrases like ‘eventual consistency,’ these ‘slacker DBs’ offer greater simplicity and improved means of storing data for Web apps, yet remain toys in the eyes of old guard DB admins. ‘This distinction between immediate and eventual consistency is deeply philosophical and depends on how important the data happens to be,’ writes InfoWorld’s Peter Wayner, who let down his old-guard leanings and tested slacker DBs — Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine, and Persevere — to see how they are affecting the evolution of modern IT.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes “Non-relational upstarts — tools that tack the letters ‘db’ onto a ‘pile of code that breaks with the traditional relational model’ — have grabbed attention in large part because they willfully ignore many of the rules that codify the hard lessons learned by the old database masters. Doing away with JOINs and introducing phrases like ‘eventual consistency,’ these ‘slacker DBs’ offer greater simplicity and improved means of storing data for Web apps, yet remain toys in the eyes of old guard DB admins. ‘This distinction between immediate and eventual consistency is deeply philosophical and depends on how important the data happens to be,’ writes InfoWorld’s Peter Wayner, who let down his old-guard leanings and tested slacker DBs — Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine, and Persevere — to see how they are affecting the evolution of modern IT.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MJackson writes “The Open Rights Group (ORG) has issued a public letter to the Chief Privacy Officers (or the nearest equivalent) for seven of the world’s largest website giants (including Microsoft and Google), asking them to boycott Phorm. The controversial Phorm system works with broadband ISPs to monitor what websites you visit for use in targeted advertising campaigns. Meanwhile, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has issued a new report slamming the UK government’s plans for a Communications Database. This would be designed to intercept and log every UK ISP user’s e-mail headers, website accesses and telephone history. The report warns that the public are often, ‘neither served nor protected by the increasingly complex and intrusive holdings of personal information invading every aspect of our lives.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.