Point Lookout
Musings from the hillside

This Wi-Fi piggybacking widespread tripe is simply wrong-headed and legally stupid. There is no law saying that I must secure my WiFi port and furthermore, if I choose not to (and decide to take the risks associated) there is no law that says a neighbor or passerby is breaking any law. The article makes it sound like there’s law covering this and there simply is not.

Am I (are we) taking a risk of sniffing and password and identity theft? Yes. About as much as with any other network open to the public like T-Mobile’s or Boingo’s. They are no more protected than my home network and they’re in lovely places where there’s lots more concentrated action to sniff and snarf. The protections they offer are to themselves to assure people don’t get access to their unsecured networks without paying!

In a Reg Developer blog entry, this scion of history goes off on optimization. Quite amusing stuff actually. Amusing unless you’re the CIO of Google with over 450,000 servers because optimization shouldn’t be done. His arguments are, essentially, claims that nobody can do it, that hardware is evolving so fast it will make the optimizations irrelevant, and that since nobody can do it, they’ll screw things up.

It’s a classic example of being unclear on the concept. ‘Nuff said.

The Home Page of this Greenwashing organization. I’m completely sure this is a well-intentioned initiative from the industry. Completely.

Of course, it’s generally brain dead.

The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is a measure proposed. There are two very large and well produced (read that as form is TERRIFIC but function/content is, well, less than brilliant.

“If the datacenter were 100% efficient, ll power supplied would reach the IT loads. This would represent Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.0.” This is all made clear (we hope) in their PDF Green Grid Metrics. But it is certain that the corporations funding and supporting the Green Grid iiniative are making sure that the work is making their products look good.

In a glowing post about IBM’s new virtualization technology, we get this gem:

“The performance characteristics will depend on the types of workloads. We expect Java to perform well, but with certain applications, the performance hit could be in the range of 10 percent,” Handy said. “If the application is a heavily performance-oriented application, it’s probably not the best candidate for p AVE.”

’nuff said?

Too much video from too many conferences. Check out his “read my lips” picks!?

This post is a bit of techno-archeology. From the young ones.

The title of a eweek.com article on a Duke U. Study: There Is No Shortage of U.S. Engineers. Their findings are that offshoring is only and all about cost savings.

The funny part is that they cut custs by moving x jobs to India or China without asking if they need x / y people. There is a theory that states that most of these giants could achieve the same cost savings by reducing US staff by a similar percentage. It would be smart to keep the smart and/or productive ones but that’s something of a refinement on the strategy.

An article called The Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin on Lorelle on WordPress … the title says it all. And we’re tagging!

In an interesting letter, the writer raves about Concentrated Solar Power … with links. This is the mirrors and heated sodium salts approach.

Love the claims … 7,000GW from the southwestern deserts.

Doesn’t it always start with toys? An amusing line of solar powered gadgets to play with in UK pounds, unfortunately.