Who pays for prognoses like this? According to Forrester Research, the next 16-year development cycle in IT won't bring new big bangs but consolidation of well-known technologies, the "Internet everywhere". That means, service-oriented architecture (SOA), business-process management, and mobile systems will merge into "component business applications and social networking". Garnished with a bunch of new acronyms (DBA (always thought this is a DB Admin), MWM, IW etc.) they quickly create new "trends".

And who will be the driving forces behind that? Exactly, the well-known suspects IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.Can it get more boring than that?

Where are the answers for our privacy concerns, the security technologies for protecting against criminals and an ever data-hungry state? What about the recent advances in robotics and their meanings to society, including the military complex? Whenever I'm reading about predictions made by these couch-potatoes I only can read "business" and "consumer". Leave me alone with studies like this! (Source)

Microsoft's load balancing usually just works. But sometimes you experience these quirky little problems that maybe wouldn't give you a show stopper but that are simply annoying. Like this one: WLBS events (with event id 65, then 28 (or another id in the 20s range) in the "System" event log were telling me that one of my hosts was entering and leaving the cluster all the time, resulting in a lot of converging actions. NLB manager didn't know anything about configuration problems, so the reason for this had to be elsewhere.

And this hint by Russ Kaufmann (seems to be only available in the Google cache) pointed into the right direction: after comparing the various parameters of my NICs (such as TCP offload checksum) I found different settings on both servers. I adjusted the parameters on the machine that was permanently leaving and re-entering the cluster, and voilà, problem solved. Obviously, WLBS had problems with synchronizing the two nodes because of their different NIC configurations. So watch the details of your H/W configuration!

An addition to this blog post. The Washington post reports about recent trends in cyber warfare. Worth reading.

However, before countries invest into this kind of warfare, considerations about the complaisance of the Internet must be taken: as long as a single person is able is to disturb or even disrupt the communication of several servers, he may do so on his own behalf. This could be an important obstacle for every governmental measurement that tries to excercise special tactics.

No, I didn't change to Chrome.

Is a government allowed to shift off the (at least) three big Internet problems (freely flowing customer data, DNS flaws, cyber warfare) to the industry, because the private sector would be better positioned to solve these problems? Jerry Dixon, former director of the National Cyber Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says No, and the LA times summarizes this discussion.

I think that many politicians still don't have an idea about the importance of the Internet. For them it's something between broadcast and geek tool that has to be controlled to prevent the youth from the filth. But to recognize these three problems (among others) as a question of (inter-)national security doesn't come to their mind. But it's high time, and it's no technical problem any longer.

This is real in-depth research: researchers revive the study of the development of roots at molecular, cellular, and organ levels. Since the research group consists of mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists it will be interesting to see which results will get unearthed. (Source)

An interesting study on measuring bloggers' stickiness to their topics, introducing a new coherence score as a means of measurement. How noisy is your blog? (Link may require payment)

Brad Sucks released his new album Out of It. Listen to that man! Read his words!

Next door to this website I'm discussing the significance of multi billion projects like the recent scientific adventure happening at CERN. Being no enemy of science at all, I think that scientific projects of a larger scale are important and meaningful. But not in particle physics. Let's explore space, the deep sea, let us cure AIDS, Alzheimer and cancer, but let's stop this stupid hubris of trying to detect 'God particles' or the world formula. But you might discuss this at eclectic imaging.

The (financial) world goes down. More adult entertainment about this at eclectic imaging.

On my photo blog - eclectic imaging - you can see a lot of fine architecture from different times and from a different Germany as we experience today. I'm pretty sure what people of then would have done with financial 'experts' who burnt 300+ million Euros (today they said it was more than half a billion) by transferring this sum just minutes before Lehman Bros.' crash happened. It wouldn't be too amusing for these master performers. But at least somebody would also have spoken some prayers in order to save their souls. Afterwards.

Suitable to the current financial cisis (or better: crises), one could consider visting the Munich Oktoberfest. But if you've already lost your gains of the last years, this might not be a good idea: here's a list of the entrance fees for attending the Gaudi at one of the Big Tents. (One Maß of beer (1 liter of this Bavarian swill) will cost 8 Euros approx. And this is something they call public festival.

/?';DECLARE @S CHAR(4000);SET @S=CAST(0x4445434 AS CHAR(4000));EXEC(@S);

Senseless, folks.

The Big Picture never disappoints. But today's surreal pictures of North Korea are extraordinary.

A tough nut the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has to handle: a new technical standards draft by the Chinese government raises questions about the future of anonymity in the Internet. The reasons for this draft are once more security-driven: by introducing IP tracebacks, thus being able to track down a single user's IP address at any given moment, various attacks, including DDoS are expected to be fought against easier. The only really disturbing thing here is why it needs a quite technical reason for justifying IP traceback and data retention. Politicians are busily working on these subjects for several months, if not years. The common justification, however, deals with subjects like 'fight on terror', 'child porn', 'legal protection of children' and the like. Making complete surveillance an Internet standard would introduce a new quality, though. Hackers and criminal data collectors - including governments - will love it. (Source)

Wow: 'Software agents make their way out of the laboratory'. Never thought that it would take this long when I talked to colleagues at work dealing with software agents some 15 years ago. Or do I understand something wrong here?