Month: January 2007

Oracle Vaporware

What is Fusion? Well, Oracle bills it as “The Only Comprehensive, Hot-Pluggable, Unbreakable Middleware.” And it would be, if only it existed.

This is the same product that Oracle was talking up 2 years ago as a way to tie together its disparate acquisitions. 2 years later, it seems that not a single line of code has been written. Greenbaum learned from Oracle that this isn’t cause to worry, because writing the code is the last thing that needs to be done (after mapping out the business processes, etc.). What a relief! I mean, it’s comforting to know that the code will just magically appear overnight after 2 years of talking about it.

oracle hasn’t written a single line of code after hyping for 2 years, but then again, why rock the maintenance boat (where the money is for them) with new products?

Boston Panic

The discovery of suspicious objects on bridges, near a medical center, underneath an interstate, and in other crowded public places has ignited fears across Boston, snarling traffic and sending state and local police scrambling across the city.

this is what happens if headless chickens run the news.
2007-02-09: Do you have what it takes to save Boston from the Lite Bright menace?
2007-03-01:

if it’s not an american flag, it’s probably a bomb.

heh. i wonder what happens if someone wraps a bomb in a flag? will they declare a war on flags? that would actually be neat.
2013-03-31: reminds me of their war against things with LEDs from a few years back. among their bumbling peers, boston pd are the most incompetent. so funny.

Boston Punk Zombies Are Watching You! The Boston police go undercover on the Internet to stop the city’s most dreaded scourge: DIY indie-rock shows.

The Algebraist

In The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks takes us to a time 1000s of years in the future. The galaxy is very old and has seen wave after wave of civilization come and go. In the current era the bureaucratic, hierarchy obsessed Mercatoria is the dominant galactic civilization and humanity is but one race among many and a pretty minor one at that. And at the edge of the galaxy, in the Ulubis system, is the gas giant Nasqueron and the setting for our story.

OA-like, onto the to read pile

Wikipedia HBS Case

Andrew McAfee and Karim Lakhani created the first Harvard Business School case on Wikipedia which is available for free online and published under the GFDL. The case explains Wikipedia mechanics and the story of the Enterprise 2.0 article for deletion debate. I guess we now have peer reviewed evidence that not only does Enterprise 2.0 exist, but Wikipedia exists.

oy. the “wiki consultants” can’t be far now.

France fashion overreach

Paris has stopped H&M opening a store on the Champs-Elysees, as part of a bid to halt the “banalization” of the avenue. The report quotes 1 champagne-guzzling snob local shopkeeper as follows: “High-class Parisians don’t want to come to the Champs-Élysées,” said Serge Ghnassia, owner of the fur shop Milady, which opened on the Champs-Élysées in 1933. “It’s not prestigious; it’s not pleasant. The people who come are very common, very ordinary, very cheap. They come for a kebab sandwich and a 5-euro T-shirt.” But that doesn’t seem to be the whole story. According to the Times reporter: things [on the Champs Elysees] seem only to be getting more expensive. The opening of luxury showpieces like Cartier in 2003, Louis Vuitton’s 5-story flagship store in 2005 and the Fouquet’s Barrière hotel last year (the least expensive room is nearly $900 a night) have given the avenue new glitter So which is it? Needless to say, sitting in New York, I don’t know. And the Times isn’t telling (balanced reporting, I think). But the decision to exclude particular retailers, capriciously, by government intervention, opens up some policy questions. You can easily turn particular retailers away, but that restricts competition and amounts, in the end, to a tax on the freeholders (and a subsidy to the existing tenants). Same for a general rent cap.

the french are legislating what stores cannot be on champs elysees. why not force shops by law to open there? heh