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Sendmail flaw puts systems at risk, again. CERT warns of second serious bug this month [InfoWorld: Top News]

Sun, webMethods land WS-I board seats. Board may become too big for its own good [InfoWorld: Top News]

As I reported a few weeks ago…

BEA upgrades Java server software. The company delivers the first components of an important release of its Java server software and drops the price of its entry-level Java server product. [CNET News.com]

Congressman Darrell Issa wants the DoD to buy CDMA cellular network technology for Iraq's postwar wireless infrastructure. (Iraq is one of three countries without a major cellular system; Afghanistan and North Korea are the others. Guess we'll fix that problem for both of them, too.) Congressman Issa has drafted legislation to make that happen, complaining that GSM is “European” technology, and that licensing royalties would go to French and German companies if the DoD follows its current plan.

“If European GSM technology is deployed in Iraq,” Issa wrote in a letter to the DoD and to the US Agency for International Development, “much of the equipment used to build the cell phone system would be manufactured in France, Germany, and elsewhere in western and northern Europe. Furthermore, royalties paid on the technology would flow to French and European sources, not U.S. patent holders.”

Well, at least the money wouldn't flow back to his district, as it would if CDMA was chosen.

Congressman Issa is from the San Diego area, home of Qualcomm–the patent-holder for CDMA. He founded a company called Directed Electronics, which until last year was working with Qualcomm joint-venture Wingcast to develop hardware for “automotive telematics” based on CDMA technology. According to OpenSecrets.org, he recieved over $160,000 in compensation in 2001 from Directed (deferred from his wages in 2000, while he was still serving on the company's board). Qualcomm was his sixth largest campaign contributor.

GSM is an open international standard. CDMA isn't used by any of Iraq's neighbors. But, dammit, if anybody is going to profit from this war, it should be Darrell Issa, right?

Sun to drop its customized Linux .[C-Net]. Halle-friking-lujia.

However, I have my doubts about Orion, the Sun equivalent (apparently) to Microsoft BackOffice or something. This smells like yesterday's fish rewrapped in today's newspaper; not that it isn't technically superior in many ways to Microsoft's offerings.

My Neal Award arrived in the mail yesterday. Seven other Baseline staffers also received the award, for Best Department or Column, for Baseline's “Hands On” department.

So, now I have a handy brass paperweight.

Gateway just sent me one of the company's new Centrino laptops–the Gateway 450 XL–for me to test.  And, I've got to say that as someone who primarily uses Macs these days, I'm thus far impressed with the new Pentium M/ Intel WiFi chipset bundle, even if the WiFi technology is a little long in the tooth. The pricetag on this system is around $2090, and while it doesn't have all of the geek chic of my Titanium PowerBook, it'll do in a pinch.

We're minutes out of the box here, so I don't have a whole lot to say about the 450 yet except to give my first impressions.  The display, roughly 14 inches, is sharp and bright, and readable in the glare from my window.  The system's performance seems to be very good for a laptop, as advertised for the Pentium M –1.5 MHz is the advertised clockspeed of the CPU, though how much of that I'm seeing is open to debate.  The basic user aesthetics of the system are good; the keyboard is solid and has good key travel, and the trackpad pointing device works smoothly (though I suspect my carpal thumbs will soon protest over the two buttons and the center scrolling button).

Downsides: no DVD-R drive (the drive is a CD-R/DVD combo); the comparable Apple system has gigabit Ethernet now as an option compared to the Gateway's 10/100.

The web hosting company that serves up some of my domains is Vortech. Vortech recently shut down another customer, YellowNews.org, which posted pictures of the POWs that had been transmitted by Iraqi television and shown by television media around the world, because they said it violated an “adult content” clause in their terms of service.

I've been looking to consolidate my domains on a single host in any case; this helps me down my decision path. Anybody got any reccomendations for a decent, low-cost hosting company that respects free speech and can distinguish between news and porn?

Scott McNealy made a big deal about how people could use a Java SmartCard and log into a “dumb” Sun Ray workstation and have their own desktop come up as he spoke in Singapore during a recent everyone-else-bashing session.

One of my most vivid memories of the last JavaOne conference I attended was all the Sun Ray workstations synchronously crashing and rebooting because of a misconfigured server–a server configured by a Sun engineer. If they couldn't take light usage in the press room at Java One–arguably an ideal setting for this sort of computing–how would they do on corporate desktops?

Imagine a corporate exec swiping his smart card, and trying to pull up data from a spreadsheet, only to have his (and everyone else on the floor's) system reboot like a stuck elevator door for fifteen minutes. Now, that's real enterprise computing.

Henry Fountain's column in the Science Times observes that the radiation levels on Mars from solar and cosmic sources are so high that astronauts there for three days would recieve the maximum safe radiation dose for a lifetime, based on measurements from the Mars Odyssey probe. SPF 6 X 10^23 lotion, anyone?[New York Times: Science]

The difference in radiation exposures between Mars Odyssey and the International Space Station indicates one thing to me: it's good to have a liquid iron planetary core that creates a magnetic field. Elsewise, we'd all be as fried as microwaved popcorn by now.