For all you David Hasselhoff fans… courtesy of Stephen.

From slashdot a link to a pretty good AJAX tutorial on the IBM Developers website.

Check out this monitor from gizmodo.

Alan Cox talks about the next 50 years of computer security. Early in the article he makes the comment (which is a commonly held view),

Alan Cox: It is beginning to improve, but at the moment computer security is rather basic and mostly reactive. Systems fail absolutely rather than degrade. We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours. In a sense we are fortunate that most attackers want to control and use systems they attack rather than destroy them.

This is not strictly true. In nature, the most virulent pathogens in nature keep their hosts alive for long enough to pass on the disease to as many other hosts as possible. Reproduction, not death is the goal here. Any (computer) virus that killed its host immediately would fail to propagate effectively and time delay self destructs tend to be disarmed by the anti-virus crew.

Stephen Marshall writes about the Trouble with Open Source on the Britsh Computer Society website. What follows is an ill informed op-ed piece that cobbles together the usual bunch of unsubstantiated myths regarding Open Source.

He then goes on scaremonger about the “nightmare scenario of OSS at one extreme and Microsoft at the other with nothing else in between“. He should follow the practice I find useful in such instances, and replace “Open Source” with “Closed Source” and see if it presents an equally terrifying scenario.

Gizmodo has a picture of a fairly letal looking gravity simulator. Not a toy you want to have around the kids methinks!

John has posted a link to new five blade razor. The Onion riffed on this theme sometime ago but Gillette forced them to remove it, I guess, because it disappeared from their site. Luckily Andrée Robichaud-Véronneau kept a copy.

I see Microsoft has gone all gooey over workflow. Global centralised workflow is on a hiding to nothing for all but a very small subset of applications where people sit closely together and work on very concretely defined processes.

Most business processes are messy, lossy, and exception based. They thrive on loosely connected peer-2-peer type communcations mechanisms like Instant Messaging, email, SMS and telephone. When workflow starts to take account of these conditions it will take off, until then expect much flag waving and little progress.

Shockingly honest quote from Bill Gates straight from CNET,
“

So that would be the philosophical difference between Microsoft and what Google is up to at this point?
Gates: Well, we don’t know everything they are up to, but we do know their slogan and we disagree with that.

“

Tom Murphy wins my award for the longest blogroll. Goddamn Tom, don’t you do any work! 🙂