Category: Closed Course

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Walmart Expands IT

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will add 250 new IT jobs during the next year, filling the majority of the positions with new college graduates rather than experienced IT veterans. The retail giant also plans to promote about 25% of the IT personnel already on board.

Wal-Mart to add 250 IT jobs, expand online presence – Computerworld

Of course you’ll need to relocte to Bentonville, Ark. since most of the jobs are at HQ and “salaries and housing costs are lower than in other parts of the country“.

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Wikipedia Struggles for Credibility

Following two fairly high profile incidents regarding the anonymous editing of articles on the popular open-source online reference tool Wikipedia, the site said that it would make changes to how it operates to prevent future problems.

BetaNews | Wikipedia Changes Editing Rules

Only registered users will be able to create articles, but anonymous users will still be able to edit.  I just don’t see why Wikipedia can’t get a basic registration for both creators and editors.  If you are going to say soemthing for the world to hear, at least stand up let us know who you are.

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Audacity 1.3 Gets Podcast Friendly Features

Audacity: Audacity 1.3: Other features – The beta release of Audacity 1.3 brings a host of great features to this open source audio editor including FTP upload and speech-optimized batch processing.  These 2 features alone will make Audacity a key tool for podcasters.  I’ve been recommending Audcaity for those who want to record their Classcaster podcasts locally, and will certainly add these new features to that pitch.

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BitTorrent, MPAA Strike Accord

In a deal aimed at reducing illegal Internet traffic in pirated films, Hollywood reached an agreement Tuesday with the creator of the popular file-sharing software BitTorrent.
The agreement requires 30-year-old software designer Bram Cohen to prevent his Web site, bittorrent.com, from locating pirated versions of popular movies, effectively frustrating people who search for illegal copies of films.

Hollywood, BitTorrent Reach Agreement – Yahoo! News

Cohen will remove links to pirated films from the bittorrent.com search engine.  While this will certainly slow traffic in pirated films, it will hardly stop it.  Although BitTorrent has enough legit use to stop it from shut down like Napster or Grokster, it certainly lacks the resources to wage a lenghty legal battle against the MPAA.  I hope that Cohen’s decision here leads to a wider adoption of BitTorrent as a way to deliver properly licensed films.

Update: Seems Variety also thinks this move may signal the beginning of a better relationship between BitTorrent and the film inudustry.

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HigherEd BlogCon

HigherEd BlogCon aims to bring together in a single Web space many of the leading players who are transforming academe with their use of the new tools of the Social Web.

Preparations for HigherEd BlogCon – Overview

An online web conference to be held in April 2006.  It is corporate driven with ProfNet, CASE, Thomson Peterson’s, and PR Newswire doing all the organizational and logistic work.  Heck, they even have a tag: higheredblogcon.  This will be worth keeping track of.

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The FBI Is Not Watching You.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation issued an alert Monday about a scam involving unsolicited e-mails, purportedly sent by theFBI, that tell computer users that their Internet surfing is being monitored by the agency.

FBI Warns of E-Mail About Surveillance – Yahoo! News

This looks a lot like a replay of the Sober.K outbreak from Feb. 2005.  At that time the FBI issued a press release that was virtually identical to the one issued today.  My scanner reported a copy I picked up as Sober.cf.  It is interesting that the major AV sites have not picked this up yet.

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Dave Remembers XML-RPC

Scripting News: 11/20/2005:  It’s the fifth hit on Google for XML, ahead of some pretty famous sites. It’s by far the number one reason people go to the DaveNet site. I guess I pay too much attention to the critics who say that XML-RPC isn’t good enough for them.

XML-RPC is, I think, more significant than RSS in a number of ways.  Using XML-RPC allows me to give direct access to my data to developers so they can use it as they see fit.  In essence I can provide content and data (which I can do well) and let others worry about layout, design, etc (which I don’t do well at all).  I’m glad Dave is going to turn his attention back to XML-RPC.

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Google Pods?

This shipping container is a prototype data center. Google hired a pair of very bright industrial designers to figure out how to cram the greatest number of CPUs, the most storage, memory and power support into a 20- or 40-foot box. We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.

Slashdot | Google’s Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?

Wow.  Needless to say the /. is rather up in a lather about one corporation weilding this sort of power.  I wonder if they would as upset if Google were still private or if it were a non-profit.  Is there something inherently evil in one  corporation exercising a large measure of control over all the info on the net?  Can’t say really.  All we have to compare something like this to are the monopolies of the last centruies.  And none of that ended well.

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Skype, Radio Shack Bring PC2PC VOIP to Consumers

Beginning Monday, Fort Worth, Texas-based RadioShack will feature Skype products in a special kiosk, including a new Motorola Inc. headset that uses short-range wireless Bluetooth technology to make calls via Skype, priced at $100. It will sell a $40 headset from Logitech and a $129 cordless phone from Cisco Systems Inc.’s Linksys unit.The RadioShack kiosk will feature Skype starter kits for $5 with a simple earpiece/microphone, software and 30 minutes of free Skype calling time to any number in the world. Sales clerks will offer training videos and software to customers.

Skype in U.S. Retail Distribution Pact

This is huge for Skype.  Retail placement in Radio Shack will put the next to cell carriers like Verizon.  RS already has some of the hardware with Skype included available here.  A geek bonus would be if this hardware could be reconfigured to work with SIP.  I’ll be looking into this.