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[SpikeWednesday] No maps on your iPOD, commons-email released, IBM joins small server market, Panda's sex lives tracked via satellites
Dan Gillmor writes an interesting observation regarding a copyright issue over an enterprising website that offers free downloadable maps for public transit systems around the world that can easily go on your iPOD. It would appear that New York and San Francisco transit chiefs aren't too happy about this and have launched a crackdown. Dan argues that the tax payer has already paid for the writing/composition for these maps and therefore should be free from copyright. What about common sense? Or as your mother would say, "don't cut off your nose to spite your face"? In this environmental sensitive age we want more people to be using the public transport systems, therefore anything we can do to promote its use has to be aplauded.
Apache commons-email package has been released. This library to allow you to send emails from Java. Wait a minute doesn't JavaMail not do that? Yes it does, and guess what, the commons-email uses JavaMail to actually do all the work underneath. Eh? The JavaMail API is not by any stretch of the imagination a complicated API. I have contributed many a JavaMail chapter to the J2EE tomb like books and it never presented any problems. There are some quirks with the JavaMail API that are more a symptom of the underlying mail server you are communicating with. Therefore I am really confused at why the Apache foundation permitted this project to be even allowed in their strong arsenal of libraries. What are we to expect next? A wrapper API to StringBuffer - commons-stringbuffer anyone?
Finally the heavy weights of the computer industry are slowly waking up to the fact that not every one is running an eBAY/Amazon style operation. The majority of companies have modest computing needs and historically the likes of Dell have grabbed a large slice of this market. In the last few weeks Sun announced an aggressive anti-Dell campaign to start eating into Dell's server sales. IBM have now followed suit with low priced servers (starting from $599). The arrogance of both Sun and IBM (or johnny-come-laties) is startling, with IBM stating "We deserve a share in that space". Read more:
In our Monday round up I noted the story of the fishermen who where caught watching erotic movies some 30miles out in the middle of the ocean. It would appear humans aren't the only ones not being allowed to explore their natural instincts without someone watching. A joint project with China and US, are using satellites to track the sexual behaviour of giant pandas. They are hoping they can figure out what makes these creatures tick before they become extinct. If you ask me, the poor beasts are under way too much pressure to perform, no one can expect anything with that stress. Read the story here:
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