Defenestrated

CA Ingres going open source

Now this is an interesting development! Ingres is indeed a great database -- a number of folks I know use it, and like it a great deal -- and potentially could massively disrupt the database market.

This goes to show that open source is moving up the stack. Conquering the database truly represents the next greatest payoff potential after the OS. MySQL seems to have gone down a blind alley, licensing-wise, so maybe CA can actually innovate for a change. God knows they need the positive publicity.

Not at all fishy

The Register reports that Flordia needs to hang more Chads, of the human kind this time, because they've lost records from the 2002 elections due to a server crash.

I have absolutely no faith in electronic voting machines, and every story I hear just makes me more sure. On NPR yesterday, a lobbyist-type for the electronic voting machine industry (read: Diebold) said that, because paper trails are confusing to voters, a confirmation of votes placed should be delivered in some other way, such as a spoken confirmation.

What about deaf people?!

They just don't get it, do they...

Gateway dives...and saves!

So I finally made the leap and bought a decent-sized TV (as opposed to the multi-format 21" TV we've had since 1999). After a lot of hand-wringing, we decided on a large-screen TV from Gateway which was on sale. We hesitated for a while because of the $300 shipping fee but, after due haggling, that came down to $200. The cause for the high fee, said Gateway, was that the thing was shipped by express freight and wouldn't be hanging around anywhere. Well, guess what: it hung around at the freight destination for 96 hours before it got to me.

Since Gateway closed all of its bricks-and-mortar stores, they rely on their shippers to deliver good customer service to their customers. So, not being a happy camper, I gave Gateway a call. Without hesitation, they refunded half the shipping fee and apologized profusely. So while I'm not happy about the delay in delivery, they did a great job in making me feel I'd been compensated for it.

All the same, Gateway needs to fix this problem if it's going to continue on the .com-only model. More instances like this, it won't matter how good their technology is (and it is quite good!), no-one's going to want to suffer the pain of getting the stuff into their own homes.