From the “I really don’t get it” files:

First I read that Google’s new Chrome browser & Internet Explorer modifications are threats to existing advertising models. And this is news? I have been using Firefox with NoScript and other add-ons in a VMWare partition that gets destroyed after use for a couple years now. Is there a difference? What’s more, there is an interesting parallel in that both are cleansing browsing history and not allowing certain cookie types, but rather than dub these ‘privacy advancements’, they are being negatively marketed as ‘porn mode’. What’s up with that?


Perhaps I should not be puzzled by this Terror database failure, as whenever you put that many programmers on a single project you are just asking for trouble. But I have to wonder what the heck they were doing, to fail this badly with the ‘Terror Database Upgrade’? This is not a very big database- in fact 500k names is puny. And they let go 800 people who were just part of the team? Even if they are cross-referencing thousands of other databases and blobs of information, the size of the data is trivial. Who the heck could have spent $500M on this? What, did they write it in ADA? Can’t find enough good Foxbase programmers? For a couple of million, I bet you could hire a herd of summer interns and re-enter the data into a new system if need be. It’s a “Terror Database” all right, just not the way they intended it to be.


MIT develops a network analysis tool that “enables managers to track likely hacking routes”. Wow, really? Oh, wait, don’t we already have a really good tool that does this? Oh yeah, we do, it’s Skybox!

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