So the Taioseach and the Dail observe a minutes silence for the International Violence against Women day (25-Nov). But in the the same breath the Irish Times reports today (23rd November page 4) that the Sexual Assualt Treatment Unit (SATU) in Dubin, which is supposed to be manned 24×7 has been forced to close over the weekend for the past month.

So if you are raped you have to wait for up to 48 hours before you can be examined in order to collect the medical evidence that is vitally necessary in all rape prosecutions.

Hospitals say the problem is lack of funding, HSE says its lack of expert personnel.

Meanwhile women who are raped at the weekend must suffer on while somebody else sorts out this problem.

Several commentators have remarked that Sun’s decision to make Java available under the GNU Public License is unusual. Why did they not use the standard Sun CDDL license? Well the CDDL was crafted with a specific some specific goals,

• Allow Sun to Open Source Solaris
• Prevent Solaris key features from leaking into Linux by applying an incompatible license
• Allow relicensing with Apache-like flexibility especially to (Sun would love Dell to ship solaris on their servers)

So why the GPL for Java. Well despite all kiss and make up shenanigans between Sun and Microsoft, Sun would still dearly love to stick it to Microsoft in a big way and it has always seen Java as the key tool to pick the Microsoft lock on the market.

So the thinking goes, if we CDDL it (CDDL is a variation on the Mozilla license, which is a variation on the Apache License) then Microsoft gets to grab the code and do any number of things that would ruin Jonathan Schwartz’s day e.g.

• Fork Java and create an incompatible version that only runs on Windows (they tried this before)
• Swipe any cool virtual machine technology that Sun has developed and plug it straight into the Microsoft C# engine
• Gratuitiously extend Java so that developers are sucked into building applications that only run on Windows (a pretty standard Microsoft tactic)

The GPL prevents all this because the highly integrated nature of most of Microsoft’s technology means that the they key GPL constraint of linking to a GPL component entails extending the license to all linked components means they would have to open source most of the .NET framework. That is not going to happen anytime soon.

Its a double whammy for Sun because practically all the compilers on Linux are GPL licensed, so they dovetail nicely into that collection. Who’s not to say that Java could eventually migrate to the GNU backend so that Java just becomes another personality on top of that engine. They would reap huge portability benefits for very little work.

Tricky one for Microsoft, they can ignore Java and watch as the rest of the platform work (most importantly mobile) embraces this new language, but that won’t work becuase the mobile platform is a key plank of Microsoft’s strategy going forward. Or they could adopt it properly as a Visual Studio language, but it would always be a second class citizen becuase of the linking restriction.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Almost makes you feel sorry for the poor sods, especially after stuffing their whole  Visual Basic community with VB.net.

Andrew McNeile gave us the three ingredients for a successful elevator pitch as part of the last Hot House training session for HotHouse 10. He pointed out that an elevator pitch should be,

• Compelling (I have to have this product now!)
• Unique (I can’t get it anywhere else)
• Demonstrate real end user benefit (This solves a real problem for me)

Ciaran Bradley CEO of Sentry Wireless won our internal competition on the day hands down with a brilliant description of his new product KidSafe. 

His website give the full low down on the product better than I could,

Kidsafe benefits for parents

• Prevents mobile bullying and anonymous text messages
• Denies access to premium inappropriate services
• Allows phone to be locked during school or after midnight

Kidsafe benefits for mobile operators

• Differentiated services for parents
• No impact on core network
• Opportunity for increased ARPU /retention
• Device independent
• Works on voice, data and text
• Allows targeting of new markets responsibly

 Barcamp Ireland – SouthEast is on in Waterford on the 20th January 2007. Can’t grok stuff in January at the moment, but I may sign up later. If we are going to hold regular Barcamps I think infecting each one with a theme would be useful.

I registered a domain for a mate today. It had to be a .ie domain and even though I am a .ie conscientious objector I will perform the act for friends in need.

Blacknight.ie has good hosting offers for low-end users and they are an accredited .ie registrar and are cheaper (by 50%) than direct registration.

Unfortunately their order Wizard has one nasty bug which must be loosing them a lot of business. On the page below, you are expected to enter a county. 

 Its highlighted in red, but the workflow happily lets you proceed and fill in a pretty heavy duty multi-part form later on in the workflow. It then complains that the county is missing but there is nowhere to fill in the county at that point. Very confusing.

On the plus side, I rang up blacknight.ie and their support desk spotted the problem immediately and were able to indicate the fix. Still I had to rekey all the registration, address and VISA content again.

Two simple fixes are apparent here. Either, stop the user proceeding at the above screen (why do you need the county at this point anyway, you could just remove this field) or allow them to add the county when putting in the rest their address.

I would guess many people abandon the cart and this point and head somewhere else for a solution.

If ISPs (e.g. GoDaddy, Network Solutions) supported a REST API to DNS then applications like Google For Domains wouldn’t have to throw users to the wolves when it comes to configuring CNames and aliases.

Instead you could just give your credentials to Google and they could update your DNS entries directly. Most ISPs discourage direct fiddling with users DNS entries (for good reasons), but with the ability to customise your URL now a feature of Google for Domains, the need for non-skilled users to access this data is becoming more important.

 

LouderVoice, Conor O’Neill’s new venture sneaked out under the covers in the last few days. Definitely in the “one to watch” category. I remember Brian Caulfield muttering to me after BarcampIreland about how Conor’s proposition was “very interesting”,  Praise indeed!

Sxoop, PutPlace, LouderVoice, hmm, a few more and we’ll have a proper little boom on our hands…

We’ve quietly put up a proper website for PutPlace.com in the fast few days and as it hasn’t fallen over, consider this a mild invitation to run over there and pre-register for the beta. You can do the survey to boot and help make the world a safer place for Digital Content.

What does PutPlace do? Helps you to find, organise, secure and share  that huge and growing pile of photos, video, music, emails, documents and blog content that is building up day by day on you PC, phone, laptop and Media Centre.

So run along over there and register and we’ll send you a private beta invite real soon now.

BTW: Some of you may have come across us by our previous name Secantus, same product different name. It happens, we’ve got over it, you should too 😉

Infoworld reports on the launch of Workday, a hosted ERP vendor founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. They are both ex senior executives of Peoplesoft. What’s interesting about this company from an Irish perspective is that according to the article they have integrated Cape Clear’s ESB offering into their base product.

Aneel Bhusri is already on the board of Cape Clear as a Greylock investor.

Could this be the exit chance of a lifetime for the Cape?

The following is a update on a previous review I did of virtual storage and backup vendors backup in March 2006. I’ve limited the set of vendors to those offering pure play virtual storage and those focused on pure play network backup. This excludes offerings from the photo sharing sites (Flickr, PhotoBucket et al), hosting vendors (e.g. GoDaddy) and social networks (MySpace and Bebo). I’ve also excluded those who are currently in beta and are not advertising price plans or business models.

Since I did the original survey the whole virtual storage market has exploded with rumours of both Microsoft and Google entering the fray, new entrants raising significant VC and a dramatic drop in prices for the major players.

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The companies surveyed are summarised below, this is somewhat arbitrary selection based on Mike Arrington’s original Virtual storage review and my own experience of the space.

• AllMyData: Pure Play virtual storage with the added benefit of being able to share your own internal storage in order to contribute to the AllMyData storage grid. You get back what you offer on a roughly 10 to 1 basis i.e. for each 10MB of local storage you donate you get 1MB of secure virtual storage. This is a nice plan but it depends a lot on end-user trust. Tricky sell, when the world is telling you how unsafe the Internet is. Still benefits from being the cheapest kid on the block in terms of overall storage costs, regardless of whether you contribute to the grid or not. Their costs are probably dependent on a substantial proportion of their users contributing to the grid. Good luck guys!
• Streamload/MediaMax: Used to be called StreamLoad but are rebranding as MediaMax. There plan is to be your personal online media host. To this end they offer a whopping 25GB free for all registered users. BUT read the not so small small print. File sizes are capped at 25MB for the free plan (no storing your videos or DVDs please) and you can only download 1GB a month. So don’t expect to stream directly from here into you home wireless network (well not for more than a few hours). The pay-for-storage plans remove the file size restriction and increase the download limits per month to 10GB (premium), 25GB (elite) and 100GB (professional). Hmm, is it cooler to be elite or professional, oh the agonies of market segmentation.
• Amazon S3: I include S3 purely as a  price mark as it is just and API for developers at the moment. However ,while the ordinary Man in the street can’t use S3 directly, Jeremy Zwadony has collected a great list of S3 providers that you can download and attach to your S3 account. Most are free. The stinger with S3 is the bandwidth charges. Most of the other virtual vendors ignore the bandwidth costs because end-users can’t grok them, but Amazon wants other people to hide those costs for end-users (i.e. people like me). Still for the security of a big name vendor combined with a great price, S3 is hard to beat.
• Xdrive: XDrive was one of the bad boys in our previous survey coming in at a whomping $100 a year for 5GB of storage. However AOL obviously shook some sense into them and now you can get the same 5GB absolutely free. They also have a nice downloadable client that setups another labelled drive for access just like windows explorer. This is great for windows users, but the absence of FTP, WebDav or other access mechanisms means this client must be installed before you can use the software. This can be a pain if you are away from your own PC, and of course Mac users need not apply.
• Box.net: One of the first of the “new boys”, first with an API, first with a chunk of free storage (1GB) and recently in receipt of a nice chunk of change from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. You gotta love box.net who just do storage plain and simple. A big cheer for the little guy!
• iBackup: One of the old school (I was an iBackup customer until XDrive started throwing 5GB chunks around the place like confetti), iBackup’s strengths are in ubiquity of access. HTTP upload, FTP, WebDav, you name it they do it. This means they work real pretty with those lonely in the corner platforms like Linux and OS-X (the Mac O/S). Of course, they just can’t get used to the fact that somebody kicked the stool from under the virtual storage market so their prices (although dropping) haven’t kept pace with market trends. Still I bet they have a whole pile of incumbent customers paying top dollar ($20 per GB per year) who haven’t heard the news.
• Strongspace: Virtual space for superman surely! Strongspace people are big into security and won’t tolerate a virtual vendor that even considers using ftp. SFTP only Ma’am and you’d better know your gibibytes from your gigabytes. Of course all this security comes at a cost and with prices like $15 per month for 5GB (doh! I mean Gibibytes) maybe they are targetting the DoD as a potential customer. The rest of us should consider a lower priced vendor.
• iStorage: Now to make StrongSpace look cheap you have to get up pretty early in the morning. That’s no problem for theses fellas. They stayed up all night drinking so as to make StrongSpace look like good value. Each time I do this I have to double check my figures and gasp in awe and the audacity of these bad boys. Oh, hold on, wait a minute, now I get it, THEY’RE HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS. I can just see the meeting where the head of sales say “make sure those software boys don’t undercut our overpriced but lucrative disk business”. Don’t worry buddy, they didn’t.
• Fluxiom: You are taking the piss, no come on now, this is a satire site! The fact that you price your storage per MB ($36 per MB per Month) should be a giant RUN AWAY sign for anybody who comes near your service! I couldn’t even put you on the graph because all the other vendors disappeared in comparison.

There are a host of other services emerging as we speak. OmniDrive and MyFabrik to name two and of course if Microsoft and Google make good on their network hints then we could be in for some craic. Expect more upheavals in the near future as the Virtual Storage Vendors try and morph into network backup vendors and vice-versa.

The full table of price comparison data is available.

Next week, Network backup vendors.