if the technology is bad, just change its name

Apparently Microsoft has changed the name of its "Palladium" technology (of which I previously wrote some stuff here, back at the end of July) into the "next-generation secure computing base". Sheesh. Generic and non-descriptive enough so that people don't feel threatened. Is it just me, or is Microsoft relying more and more in marketing messages, instead of actually trying to at least copy other successful products? Sell a brand, rather than something of value...

bush and reagan

An interesting analysis from the New York Times comparing George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.

back online

My server had an outage today for at least 5 hours. It just came back. I have absolutely no idea of what went wrong; I am assuming something at the ISP level (internal gateway, switch, whatever) since the machine appears to be intact and it continued running statistics, etc, through the outage. Hopefully I'll get some answers from the support people and we'll be able to figure out what happened.

At times all of this infrastructure seems amazingly fragile (specially when you don't have an IT department with mirrored servers to back you up) :-)