This looks pretty sweet.

A coworker found this link, which has some well-illustrated pictures of what the different types of RAID are. If you’ve never heard of RAID, then this link probably won’t be very interesting. Essentially they are different methods of using multiple hard drives to gain either performance or reliability (or both).

How to use them in normal English. Link here. I have probably had to refer back to this tutorial 10 times in the last few years. Worth having a link to.

This story reported on Slashdot is pretty incredible.

DirecTV is suing anyone known to have purchased a smartcard programmer, regardless of whether or not they’re actually using the device to enable stealing their programming. They’re sending out letters & when people call to clear up the confusion, DirecTV is demanding a $3500 settlement as well as the programming device. They’ve filed 9000 federal lawsuits against alleged pirates thus far.

This sounds just plain crazy. I think this poster has the right idea though.

Related to this post, the plot thickens… Microsoft announces they will license Unix code from SCO (Slashdot discussion). I don’t know much about the legal implications of this (IP in particular) but it would seem to me that such a move could cause Microsoft to then say “we have a financial stake in this, so we will help in the fight against Linux.” SCO is not a particularly threatening company that carries a ton of weight… Microsoft on the other hand, is.

Like I said though, this is all pretty much speculation and I don’t know if there’s even a legal foundation for it.

A related article, definitely worth a read, was released by the Open Source Initiative: Position Paper on the SCO vs. IBM Complaint. It is a fairly comprehensive rebuttle to the suit from SCO although I haven’t finished it yet. Quite good so far. Addresses in very specific detail where statements by SCO are misleading and in some cases outright false.

This whole story about SCO lately is fairly frightening if you ask me. They are suing IBM for $1 billion, claiming that the Unix technology that IBM licensed from them was then ripped off and copied into the open-source Linux operating system. It may not be a problem for just IBM however, because they are also hinting at going after users of the Linux OS.

From the Q&A with SCO GM:

What about SuSE and Red Hat customers and other Linux users? Could they face litigation or be affected in any way? Certainly, as the evidence mounts, there could be concerns and issues for end customers. When you’re talking about copyrighted materials or trade secrets being inappropriately obtained and released, even the recipients of that information have to have concerns.

Slashdot has some interesting discussions as well.

This article is pretty interesting, it’s about a project called Grub.

“It will be the first comprehensive index (of the Net),” said Kord Campbell, the programmer behind the Grub software. “We can conceivably crawl every Web page, every day.”

By contrast, today’s fastest search engines, such as Google or Inktomi, crawl about 150 million pages a day. Google indexes about a third of the Web, and refreshes its index every 30 days, according to LookSmart.

Google does make some good points, however:

Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, said while the Grub project is topical and interesting; improving Web searches isn’t a problem of widening an index, but narrowing it.

“It isn’t a problem of computing resources but deciding what parts of the Web should be updated more frequently than others,” he said.

Although I just started using it, Oxygen XML seems really cool. It looks pretty sharp, plus it uses Java Web Start which is a very interesting technology for bridging the gap between desktop apps and web-based apps. It’s free to use for 90 days, and relatively cheap after that (relative to, say, XML Spy).

An interesting article posted on Slashdot from the author of XML. Having worked a fair bit with XML parsing, I would agree with a lot of his concerns. Although I guess I can say my code is more “extensible” after having moved to XML as an input format, I sure had to write a lot more code, including introducing and fixing new bugs and writing lots of little workarounds for the Java-based parser I was using (Xerces).

Slashdot has posted a link to a very interesting editorial on the future of Microsoft, and software in general. It’s quite long, but also very good. A lot of it talks to the .NET initiative and web services industry. There are also a ton of great references at the end. My favorite quote from the article:

Just about nobody trusts Microsoft any more, not even after a few drinks.