Gallery for My Blog
For some time, I've been looking around for a good photo album solution for my blog. I wanted to be able to host it (as opposed to using a hosted solution like Web Shots). I also wanted something that would take the drudgery out of uploading the pictures, creating the thumbnails, index pages, etc. This weekend, I installed Gallery on my server. It seems to be just what I was looking for. Its PHP based and I'd never used that before, so the hardest part of the instlalation was just getting up to speed on PHP and getting it working on
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Selling Your Anonymity
Doing the Thanksgiving shopping at Albertson's, I was once again slightly enraged to find I'd picked up something, thinking it was a great price (in this case a 12 pack of soda for $1.99), only to find out at the check out stand that I only got that price if I used their "value card." The regular price was $4.50. Of course, that's just a way to convince me to let Albertson's add my purchases to their collection of marketing data. I don't mind the quid pro quo so much as the fact that you've got to really pay attention
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iBook is Best of Both Worlds
The iBook is quickly becoming my development platform of choice. I find its more intuitive to me than Windows (since I cut my teeth on Unix) and its easier to use than my Linux box (it runs standard open source tools with ease and the UI and management tools are superb). I just finished getting up to speed on jBOSS and rewriting a credit card gateway simulation bean I give to my class to use the jBOSS xdoclet template. The iBook was a great platform for this work.
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Identity Theft and Digital Identity
By now, everyone has probably heard of the identity theft ring that the FBI broke up yesterday with the arrest of this man and two others. Philip Cummings worked as a help desk technician at a company called Teledata Corp. He allegedly stole passwords for downloading credit reports on people and sold them on the street for $60 a pop. I couldn't help but put this news story in the context of my recent trip to the Digital ID World conference. One of the things that became very clear to me was that almost no one was interested or concerned about
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jBOSS and xdoclet
While I was reacquainting myself with some tools for my class, I ran across a good tool called xdoclet. My class uses jBOSS as their application server and since I don't get to play with these things as part of my job anymore, every year, I have to get up to speed on the latest release and what new features it has. jBOSS changes a lot in a year, to the point where almost nothing I knew last year is applicable anymore. While I was searching for a good primer, I ran across this document on the jBOSS site and
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Another Candidate for the Indexing Bake-Off
One of the realities of life for a CIO is you talk to lots of vendors. Often I show up at a meeting that someone decided I "just had to be at" with very little idea of why I'm there. I know, you're saying "take charge of your schedule" and believe me I try, but sometimes politics is a driver you can't ignore. The largest crop of vendors I'm seeing lately is the type that comes in and says "we were sitting around one day and suddenly we thought 'Wow! We have the answer to Homeland Security'." Today I had
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SmartUTAH's Tech Expo in Box Elder County
I'll be speaking at the SmartUTAH Tech Expo in Box Elder County on December 5th. SmartUTAH is a local non-profit foundation aimed at increasing the penetration of technology to the rural areas of the State. I've spoken for them in Sanpete and Uintah counties as well. My topic will be "New eGovernment Services for Utah." Microsoft has been an important sponsor of these events and a good corporate citizen in this regard. They usually send someone to talk about Microsoft's new directions and I have found them to be pretty interesting. Got one of my early previews of .NET at
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Bluetooth and CDMA Phones
Fazal Majid wrote to me about Bluetooth phones for CDMA networks (like those run by Sprint and Verizon). He pointed me to this article from The Register which discusses Qualcomm's monopoly over CDMA technology. The article cites that as the reason no Bluetooth CDMA phones are available. The article says: Consumers will not make their choice of network operator based on the underlying network technology. Their choices are influenced heavily by the the appeal, popularity and price of handsets and services. This is so true. I've been a Sprint customer since for 5 or 6 years, but I'll switch for a Bluetooth
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technolgy\\@breakfast
Once a month, the Utah Technology Alliance sponsors something they call 'technology\\@breakfast.' This morning's meeting featured Satel, a local security consultancy who supplied much of the computer security to the 2002 Olympics. I spoke briefly at the beginning on the importance of WiFi and the absolute necessity to stay out ahead of users in deployment if you're going to maintain security. If you don't stay out ahead of them, you'll have rogue wireless networks springing up all over. Stay out ahead and you get security and interoperability.
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Communications Hub
Apple has been making a lot of noise about the Mac being a "digital hub," that is, the central device that links your camera, PDA, MP3 player, etc. and provides the processing necessary to make them valuable tools. For some time, I've been looking for the same thing on the communications side: a "communications hub," if you will. The problem is this: I've got a laptop and an iPAQ that I use frequently. For a while, I've been using a Sprint WAW (wide area wireless) card to access the net from my laptop and my iPAQ when I'm out of
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Lindon Utah: High Tech Heaven?
Well maybe not, but for a town of 6000 people, Lindon isn't doing too bad. A few weeks ago, someone from the local (read small) paper interviewed me about high tech in Lindon. Lindon is only about 4 blocks from the old Word Perfect campus in Orem. Consequently, many of my neighbors are ex-Wordperfect folks and have worked in high tech in various capacities. Lindon is home to businesses like Key Labs, Canopy Group, Center 7, Altiris, Lineo, Caldera (now called SCO), and Modus Media to name a few. Most (but not all) of these companies have one thing in common: Ray
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Road to the Future?
Last month, the IT Commission asked me to prepare a vision document and present it this month. What I came up with is something I entitled "Road to the Future" after a diagram that I built the paper around. The diagram came from the Dept. of Community and Family Services in Australia. I liked it because I thought it was indicative of many of the issues that we face as a state. I had originally planned on gathering input from the ACIOs for the document, but it turned out that there wasn't time. A month is just not much time
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2002 Annual IT Report
I released my annual report to the Governor and Legislature on the state of IT in Utah today. The report is required by statute. In it, we discuss the Governor's plan for IT, annual expenditures, significant agency accomplishments, awards, ITPSC actions, and our progress on the Digital State act.
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Interoperability for Homeland Security
Today's USA Today has an article about how interoperability is a serious issue for first responders. The problem is that, for years, different emergency agencies blithely operated in frequency and technology silos. Now, they find that they need to work together and can't. Furthermore, the cost of fixing the problem is terrifically high because it involves replacing millions and millions of dollars worth of gear. This quote illustrates the problem: In Boulder County, Colo., Sheriff George Epp keeps a ''fire cache'' of extra radios for other jurisdictions to use at wildfires and other joint operations. It would cost $6 million
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Arizona Award
I reported earlier that Utah placed 7th in the Digital State Survey. Arizona placed 1st and so Gov. Jane Hull came to Tucson to accept the award as the final event in the conference. This picture shows Kent Lassman from the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Cathy Martin from HP (sponsored the award this year), Gov. Hull, and Cathelia Robinett from the Center for Digital Government during the ceremony. As an aside, I had breakfast with Gov. Hull and her husband last year during the Olympics. I just sat down at the Governor's Mansion for breakfast before and ISS event and
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Clay Jenkinson on Civic Participation
Clay Jenkinson, Senior Fellow for the Center for Digital Government if the Raconteur for this morning's session. Jenkinson is a Jefferson scholar and his talk is laced with references to Jefferson and Jeffersonian ideals. What's the tie to eGovernment? Read on... Jenkinson tells the story of his neighbor who didn't vote because he'd read in the paper that the new voting machines would increase the time it took to fill out the ballot to 7.5 minutes. In most ways this man is a model citizen, yet he doesn't participate in his government. The limit of most American's civic participation is
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Chris Warner on Citizens and Community
Chris Warner is the Founder and CEO of Earth 911. He is serving as the raconteur for this afternoon's last session. Earth 911 is a web site that gives people information customized to their zip code on where to recycle, what local water quality issues are, etc. The site functions in cooperation with all 50 states in a public/private partnership. The site uses a GET for queries and so its results are linkable. Here is the information customized for my neighborhood. Chris says that government hasn't been able to do this. California, for example, had 248 government funded hotlines to tell citizens
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Paul Taylor on Moving eGovernment from Commodity to Community
Paul Taylor, Chief Strategy Officer from the Center for Digital government is the raconteur for this afternoon's first session. He offers the following table: Citizen as... Season of Gov IT POV Pre-Y2K Customer Expanding Legacy Dot GOV Owner/Shareholder Efficient Extend Value Post Citizen Effective Transform Paul calls the Pre-Y2K and Dot GOV eras "Digital Government 1.0" and says they are mostly about moving routine stuff to the web. The citizen is sold on DG1.0 by choice and government was sold on cost (i.e. "efficient"). He views this era as being defined by the term "commodity." The Digital Government 2.0 era, called
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Chris Thomas on Web Services
Chris Thomas, Chief Strategist, Intel Corp. is the keynote speaker at lunch. He began by talking about portals. The Intel portal does $2 billion in business per month. The portal was deployed in 1998. In 1999 a partner survey showed that partners hated the portal because they had to enter data from company systems to portal and info from portal to company systems. Intel reaslized that they had forced the insertion of a person in the process. Intel has found that there are 700 places where a human is part of their business processes and they are a relatively automated company. Intel is asking the
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Office 11: Why it Matters
So far, I've pretty much ignored the news of Office 11 and its XML capabilities. In this InfoWorld piece, Jon Udell discusses in detail what it does and why it matters. After reading it, I've decided that I'd better start paying more attention to Office 11. I've written before about the vast amounts of government data that is largely unavailable because its unstructured and unindexed. Office 11, if used right (and therein lies the rub), promises to be an important technology in solving this problem. The 2000 and XP upgrades to Office were easily ignored. Many agencies have not upgraded
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The Real Economy
No conference like this can not talk about the economy. Joel Kotkin, Senior Fellow at the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute in Santa Monica, Calif.is the raconteur for the morning's opening session on just that topic. Cities and regions are always in competition with each other and ultimately, the question is one of survival. Cities come and go, at least in terms of their relevance. An interesting fact: the longest run for any current city as a "place that matters" is London at 400 years. There's a link here to
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Mayor Robert Walkup
The opening remarks for the conference are being given by Tucson's Mayor, Robert Walkup. Walkup is not a career politician. He was a retired engineer who decided to run when he saw a problem with water in the city that had a technical solution that no one would acknowledge or consider. He sings the same song that Gov. Leavitt does on quality of life and its link to economic development.
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RE:PUBLIC
I am in Tucson at a Center for Digital Government leadership conference they have called RE:PUBLIC. There's a relatively small number of people here and the conference is set up for discussion instead of talks. Should be an interesting couple of days. Tonight was the opening reception. I talked to a number of people, but particularly enjoyed a lengthy conversation I had with Lyle Wray, the executive director of the Citizens League, a Minnesota based public interest organization. Lyle runs a weblog on Blogspot called "The Pulse." I'll be blogging the conference live, so if you're interested, tune in an
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Transparency for Sex Offenders
In another example of the public policy side of transparency and accountability, two articles in today's Deseret news talk about sex offender registries. As you're probably aware, the Supreme Court heard arguments last week and will rule on their constitutionality. On one side, the argument is that these people have served their time and this is additional punishment that keeps them from leading productive lives. One the other side is the fact that their conviction is a public record and the kind of public record that might provide real protection to people. Utah has an online sex offender registry that is well designed. I'm glad
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County Property Taxes Online
One of our goals with utah.gov is to make it a place for all government in Utah, not just the State. The reason is simple: citizens usually don't know which level of government does what and there ought to be one place to they can go to find what they need. We took a step closer to that goal with the release of county property tax payments for Utah, Davis, and Toolee counties. The press release was picked up by Government Technology Magazine and FedSources.com.
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Privacy and eGovernment
I've written from time to time about privacy issues, and most recently have argued for transparency to support accountability. On the eGovernment side of things, I believe strongly that we must engender citizen's trust that their private data will remain so before most will be willing to use online government services. Al Sherwood is Deputy CIO for Planning and Policy and also serves, as a collateral duty, as the Chief Privacy Officer for the State of Utah. He gave a talk a few days ago on the subject to the Intermountain Chapter of the Association for Information and Image Management Information
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More on WiFi Antennas
Aaron Mefford sent me a couple of interesting links related to WiFi can antennas. The first has a number of useful links, incluing places to buy N-type connectors, etc. along with instructions for building and using the antennas. It even has a little javascript application that calculates key dimension for parts depening on the diameter of the can you use. The second, called Cantenna is a commercial product that you can buy for $19.95. Pretty good when you consider most commercial antennas with a 12dB gain cost around $150.
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Springville Get Into the Game
Not too long ago, I blogged about the incredible regional network growing up in Utah county. Now it seems Springville, another Utah county community, does not want to be left behind. Springville is buying the network assets of a company called Switchpoint (née Airswitch). This is how American Fork got into the game. I hope they got a good deal because from what I know, the Springville plant was the first prototype and American Fork was the second, more engineered build-out. Nevertheless, when you add in the communities that will be served by Utopia nearly every community in Utah County will
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Transparency at Delta
Jon Udell blogs about something that those of us who fly Delta regularly have known for a while: Delta is an airline that gets IT. Jon, in describing about the gate information system, says the following about one of its features: Seating status. A realtime window onto the secrets formerly known only to the desk agents. 1st class coach seats checked in (claimed) 22 153 seats reserved (unclaimed) 1 22 seats unassigned 1 48 Simple. Obvious. And yet, revolutionary. The line was moving slowly, there was only one agent at the desk, blood pressures were starting to cook. But at a
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Nursing Home Metrics
U.S. nursing homes took a giant step forward yesterday in terms of transparency and accountability with the release of a new Nursing Home search tool on the HHS Medicare site. The site allows you to search for any nursing home in the US (actually you can select them by state, county, and city) and view key statistics that the Feds collect (through the States) as part of the Medicare funding process. For example, in a matter of seconds, I was able to find the nursing home my Grandma was in in Blackfoot Idaho and see that 6% of the residents
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WiFi Grounded?
I am quoted in this opinion piece in CIO Insight entitled "Why WiFi Won't Fly." The author's opinion is that public, for profit WiFi nets won't make it. I'm not as negative as the quote in the article makes it sound. However, I do not believe that 3 college students in a garage running a wireless network in my neighborhood offers the level of reliability and customer support I'm willing to pay for. On the other hand, I've seen some plans for mesh networks and such in the public spectrum that I think could provide a reliable networking service, but
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IRIS: Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems
Courtesy of the latest Wired wired/tired/expired list, I found out about IRIS, an MIT project with NSF support to build P2P networks that scale and are resiliant to attack. The power point slide show gives the best technical detail about their methods (distributed hash tables). An article in Dr. Dobbs gives an overview. This is a topic I've thought about off and on for the last two years. An index or directory of some kind is at the heart of any P2P system and make it the most vulnerable to attack. Solve that problem and a lot of other things become
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Pete Hayes of Microsoft
This article in Government Computer News is an interview with Pete Hayes, Microsoft's Industry VP for government. The article caught my eye because Pete was in Salt Lake last Friday where we met for the first time. He let me play with his tablet PC, so he's OK in my book.
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WiFi in the Workplace
This article in Fortune magazine highlights WiFi installations at Novell and talks about the value of WiFi at work. There are claims of productivity increases in the article, although its not a study. Wireless networking (whether by WiFi or a wide area solution) certainly makes sense for people who spend a large portion of their day away from their desk. Its a lifesaver for me somedays since I can use time away from my desk, in between meetings, to check email, get messages to my assistant, etc. Before, I'd get home at 7pm, eat dinner and spend several hours going
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URI Design at Yahoo!
Seems like Jon Udell has got lots of people are thinking about URI design right now. I posted something last week in response to Jon's post and now Jeremy Zawodny has done the same regarding Yahoo! Finance. I think that some of the changes that they're contemplating regarding XML are fascinating and much needed. Jeremy asks for an opinion on three different design options for Yahoo! Finance URLs: The bulk of the argument boiled down to roughly something like this: 1. http://finance.yahoo.com/xp?YHOO Or... 2. http://finance.yahoo.com/x/p?YHOO Or... 3. http://finance.yahoo.com/x/p/YHOO That's right. We spent a long, long time arguing about the difference
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OpEd Irony
I found the lead OpEd piece in yesterday's Deseret News, entitled "Howling at the Moon," ironic. The piece is about the way conspiracy theories can come about and specifically about the various theories that NASA faked the moon landings. The piece begins: It's easy to come up with a new conspiracy theory. Just think of an event or a big institution, add in a hated (at least by some) group of people and throw in a suspicious motive for good measure. Greed usually will do, but sometimes the need to cover up or save face works better. Mix it all liberally with
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Gaming in Utah
Yesterday I went with the Governor to visit Microsoft's Salt Lake City facility. A few years back Microsoft bought a local company called Access Software to fold into their computer game unit. That group, now 150 strong, writes games for the Xbox. There are some pretty impressive things their doing with computer generated scenery. One of the things that surprised me is how fully developed some of the graphics is for games that are still 12 months away from launch. Their production process was very similar to what we saw last year at Pixar.
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Choose Your URIs Carefully
In my white paper on Enabling Web Services, one of the principles that I proffer is "Cool URIs Don't Change" (which, of course, is the title of a paper from Tim Berners-Lee). The larger point, however, is that URIs should be carefully designed, not just haphazardly thrown together. I just discovered a paper by Jon Udell from September 2000 called "The Art of Organizing Search Results" which makes the point even more strongly. Pay special attention to the second page of the article where he describes a de facto API for the Oreilly web site that was created inadvertently simply
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Utah Ranks 7th in Digital State Survey
The Center for Digital Government released their annual rankings of the states today. Utah ranked 7th, the same place we were least year. At first glance, that may seem like we're not making progress, but CDG raises the bar every year, so to "stay the same" you have to make significant improvements. Of the 6 states ahead of us, only 3 were ahead of us last year as well: Washington, Illinois, and Arizona. There's only a handful of state that are consistently in the top ten every year and Utah is one of them. This sort of consistency doesn't happen
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Utah Company Makes InfoWorld Top Ten
Associated Food Stores, a Utah-base food distribution company was ranked No. 9 in the InfoWorld 100 for wireless networking. The write-up says: Farr West, Utah, is home to AFS' 600-acre distribution center and massive wireless networking deployment that locates, tracks, and manages assets. The network uses WhereNet's Real-Time Locating System, which works with wireless LANs and bar code data-capture tools and rides on AFS' trailers, tractors, and dollies, to provide AFS with up-to-the-second location and telemetry information on the hundreds of vehicles rolling through the center. Led by Tim Van de Merwe, Internal Logistics Manager, the wireless system returned AFS' investment
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Network for Homeland Security
This InfoWorld article describes Steve Cooper's plan for a "network of networks" for homeland security. The message is similar to the one I blogged last week at NASCIO. I have a few comments: This needs to be built like the interstate highway system: the federal government provides the funding and sets the standards, but the states (and others) build it). We need to step up to the plate and help define this. If we do, it will likely be useful for much more than homeland security, the same way that the interstate highway system is useful for more than national
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Unstructured Data
Got a question? Somewhere, on some government computer, the information you need is probably available. Information you paid for and the government would gladly share with you---if only they could find it. There are thousands and thousands of documents stored on thousands and thousands of hard drives just in the State of Utah. Throw in city governments, county governments, school districts, universities, water districts, and other special use districts and the problem is staggering. Multiply that by fifty states and add in the federal government and its mind boggling. With all of the technology available to index, catalog, and store
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Pringles Can Antennas for WiFi
John Patrick has a list of links to information on making a WiFi antenna from a Pringles can. I've been meaning to do this for a while and see what kind of range you can really get. I haven't made an antenna (stringing wire for my FM radio in the living room probably doesn't count) since I made a radio telescope in high school from plans I found in Popular Science Magazine.
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Employee Web Sites
Yesterday, as I was meeting with Siebel, I started to develop a vision for what a employee web site ought to have: Unified help desk, not just across organizational boundaries, but across functional areas as well (like Facilities, IT, HR, Finance, Fleet, etc.). When the bathroom near my office needs attention, I want to go to the same place to get help as I go to get help with my email or fix a problem with my latest pay stub. Alerts for critical issues, personalized and targeted. For example, if I work in the Ag building, I don't want to see
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Petabytes and the Transparent Society
As I make my way through Daniel Brin's The Transparent Society, this article from CIO.com on near term availability petabyte levels of storage takes on a new meaning. Among some of the scenarios that they paint, consider the following: Suppose you came to work one day, took off your jacket, loosened your tie, sat down and found a letter on your desk from corporate counsel advising you that a court has just ruled that corporations are now responsible for retaining all business-related phone conversations for one calendar year. Under this letter is a memo from the PR department (labeled URGENT) advising
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No Bluelight Special?
This report from Reuters describes Microsoft's efforts to block the sale of KMart's bluelight.com ISP in bankruptcy proceedings because of the terms of the software licenses on the servers and other gear. Maybe they'll be successful and companies will decide that the only way to protect the value of their assets in a sale is to use open source software. OK...maybe not.
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