CBS Interactive's Distinguished Lecturer David Gewirtz hosts ZDNet Government -- ZDNet's politics and policy coffeehouse -- where civics lessons meet technology, nothing is sacred, and everything is fair game.
David Gewirtz, Distinguished Lecturer at CBS Interactive, is an author, U.S. policy advisor, and computer scientist. He is featured in The History Channel special The President's Book of Secrets.
I was talking to Doc Searls a few days ago and he told me about Ubuntu, a new Linux distro based on Debian. Ubuntu is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth, who probably best known as the guy who bought a ticket on Soyuz.
If you're not a Comcast customer, you're probably blissfully unaware of the problems that Comcast customers have been experiencing the last few weeks. If you are a Comcast customer, then like me, you've likely experienced serious downtime and you're probably wondering what's going on.
Baseline Magazine (still one of my favorite sources of information about enterprise computing) has an article discussing corporations that share homegrown software using the Avalanche Corporate Technology Cooperative. According to their Web site, Avalanche's mission is to provide: A gated community that enables our members to contribute, collaborate, and legally distribute intellectual property with other members.
Calling Vonage "the Amazon of VoIP," a recent article in Governing magazine discusses the issues surrounding the regulation and taxation of VoIP. The reason for the Amazon comparison is a feeling in the minds of State government officials that this "problem" is analogous to the issues States have in collecting sales tax revenues on eCommerce sales.
Harold Carr came and spoke to my graduate class on Middleware at BYU. Harold works for Sun and is the chief designer behind the PEPt architecture.
If you graduated from Berkeley, some identity data about you is now likely in the wrong hands. According to a UC Berkeley press release, someone stole a laptop from the Graduate Division offices that contained information on people who applied to grad school from 2001 to 2004, registered as grad students from 1998 through 2003, received doctoral degrees from 1976 through 1999, and some others.
In a series of posts, Carlos Peres declares SOAP comatose, but notofficially dead and then adds a fewnails to the coffin. Says Carlos:Today, half a year since my prediction of the rise of REST and the fall ofSOAP, denial has been now replaced with panic.
A CIO friend of mine recently went through an experience that we should all learn from. There was a power glitch at his data center and, as it was designed to do, the UPS took over.
This morning's opening keynote presenter was Larry Lessig, a natural at a conference about remixing. Larry gives an amazing presentation--very entertaining and informative.
This morning's events were geared more to the social side of emerging technology. Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT spoke about giving people in developing countries the means of fabricating things as a means of economic development (see Chris Jablonski's write-up as well).