Clever Name TBD

I'm a pilot, and as such, I'm generally a fan of the FAA. FAA traffic controllers are generally friendly, helpful, and cool people, for example.

But they can be kinda stupid. Perhaps extremely so. Apparently, they have been replacing Unix servers with Windows servers. Now that's usually pretty dumb, but for air traffic control, that's just plain terrifying. And shockingly, the system broke, causing a highly dangerous environment in Southern California airspace for over three hours.

The new Windows servers have to be rebooted every 49.7 days in order to prevent the inevitable crash that one grows to expect from Windows systems. Undaunted by this (I'd say rather significant) flaw, the FAA has someone reboot the machines manually every 30 days in some fashion that is deemed safe, but someone forgot, and they all rebooted together and the system failer to recover on it's own. The Windows-based version of the system was deplyed a year ago.

This quote summarizes things nicely:

The shutdown is intended to keep the system from becoming overloaded with data and potentially giving controllers wrong information about flights, according to a software analyst cited by the LA Times.

"…wrong information about flights…" Sigh. I guess I should be extra careful when I fly South.

Ironically, the article linked to above has a big ad on it for Windows Server System. Sure thing; sign me up.

Posted by Wilfredo Sánchez at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Good read: Hey Crackhead.

Posted by Wilfredo Sánchez at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you haven't heard, Tribe is the new Friendster, and Orkut is the new Tribe.

There is a bit of angst floating around about Orkut's Terms of Service and Privacy Poilicy. Everyone seems to agree that the Privacy Policy is reasonable, but they are all up in arms about a clause in the Terms of Service. The Register, in an unsurprisingly reactionary article complains that "All your data belong to Orkut." The complaint is about this clause:

By submitting, posting or displaying any Materials on or through the orkut.com service, you automatically grant to us a worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicenseable, transferable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to copy, distribute, create derivative works of, publicly perform and display such Materials.

The Register dutifully flames about the terrible atrocity that is this clause while managing to saying nothing about why it's bad, other than "Microsoft did this once, too!"

Let's try reading the legalese… My read is that whatever information you post to Orkut's site, Orkut has permission to copy, modify, and display. They can do so anywhere in the world, and you can't "take it back". They will not pay you for it, and they can transfer this permission to another party. You are free to grant this same permission to other parties.

If you give your information to Orkut or post content on their site, it's not a big leap that they are going to want permission to display it; that's kind of whole point of their site. If you don't give them permission to do so, the site would be pretty damned boring, since nobody would be able to see anyone else's posts. Ths gist of this clause, as I read it, is that they don't want you to sue them for publishing what you post, and I don't really see what's unfair about that.

There are, of course, legitimate concerns about the personal information they collect, and what they do with that information. That they are also bound to abide by their Privacy Policy is the good news. In that document, they state pretty clearly what information they collect, and what they may or may not do with it. This constrains their usage of the above permission into parameters that I'm comfortable with.

Did I miss something?

Posted by Wilfredo Sánchez at 09:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It is occasionally somewhat unfortunate that the W key is right next to the E key.

Posted by Wilfredo Sánchez at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Interesting that a Google search for "TEN Technology" (with the quotes) doesn't turn up http://www.tentechnology.com/ until page 6, by which time I've usually given up. And yet, there are several results, starting in at page 2, which refer to TEN Technology and their one product. If you search for NaviPod (the product), you don't get a URL from their site until page 11. For a while there, I didn't think they had a web site. It takes a special kind of obscurity, to get missed by Google in that particular fashion.

Maybe I only find this interesting because it's late at night and I'm stuck at work shuttling data around. Guess I'll find out in the morning when I see this again.

Posted by Wilfredo Sánchez at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)