Back when Oracle acquired Sun, you really didn't think that it was going to continue with the free open source model, did you? Of course not. This is Oracle, and Oracle is all about business. It has expensive products and even more expensive support and maintenance terms. And if someone like SAP starts to offer — Continue reading »
Google Voice Transcription
📆 May 31, 2010
One of the features of Google Voice that I really like is the transcription service. Anytime a message is left on my number an email with the transcript of the message is shot out to me. That lets me quickly determine the nature of the message and take action. As good as the service's speech — Continue reading »
Google Voice, SMS Texting, and Gmail
📆 December 27, 2009
It's hard for someone like me who doesn't have a cell phone to stay in touch with people these days. I know, I should just get one and some day I may, but for now I stand on my principles. Besides, I don't really have that many people to stay in touch with, nor that — Continue reading »
Oracle and Sun
📆 December 18, 2009
Oracle reported stellar earnings tonight that promises to send the stock up to a 9-year high tomorrow, at least judging by the after-hours activity. The company's latest acquisition of Sun Microsystems, announced back in August, is still pending EU regulatory approval, but the latest signs appear to indicate that it will clear that hurdle soon — Continue reading »
Cloud Computing Pitfalls
📆 December 8, 2009
From a development standpoint, cloud computing is a flexible and elastic computing environment. Sort of a server with unbound resources capable of running infinite programs for infinite users, with infinite processing power, memory, storage, and bandwidth. Cloud computing is a dream for people like me who are developers at heart but spent much of their — Continue reading »
Google Translate, Persian
📆 July 3, 2009
Google Translate has been around for some time. you paste in a block of text or a URL, set the source and target languages and off it goes, translating. Aside from the omnipresent Spanish, German, and French translations, Google had been steadily adding other languages to its list, save one, Persian (known as Farsi in — Continue reading »
Certified U.S. Based Technicians
📆 October 26, 2008
Here is an interesting banner ad from AT&T I saw tonight while browsing a news site. I'm not sure what the certification process for U.S. based technicians is, but the ad addresses the angst Americans have had dealing with representatives with thick accents, unfriendly attitudes, or low qualifications. Personally, my experience with foreign agents hasn't — Continue reading »
The Demise of IT? So What.
📆 January 10, 2008
Here we go again with Nick Carr spraying his anti-IT bile around. This time it's in the form of a new book, arguing that IT departments and software developers will be extinct soon. Why does he matter? Because he's a so-called pundit, a Harvard-educated writer, who in 2003 wrote a scathing article in Harvard Business — Continue reading »
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