Just reading in the latest IEEE Spectrum online about the new disk technology that Seagate is working on; Heated Hard Drives. The use of heat is allowing them to experimentally reach to new levels of storage. Current technology that allows storage at 500GB per square inch is delivering us up to 1TB on a single hard disk ,this looks set to double to 2TB for the same size disk in the near future. Read the rest of this entry »

Today the Team released the latest Perl DBI driver for DB2 Announcement details below

IBM DB2 Database Driver for Perl DBI Version 1.7 has been uploaded on CPAN. Testers are please welcome to test the new features and report the bugs.

DBI is an open standard application programming interface (API) that provides database access for client applications written in Perl. DBI defines a set of functions, variables, and conventions that provide a platform-independent database interface. The DBD::DB2 driver works with DBI and a DB2 client to access databases.

**New In Release - Improved support for Getting Client Info using DB2 CLP “db2 list applications”. Enhancement on previous version defect 160229 - Errors while retrieving multiple resultsets from stored procedures using db2_more_results defect number 172486 - Support for Decfloat Datatype – 172301 - Support for SQLRowCount to prefetch the number of rows that can be retured by a Select/Update/Delete/Insert query 173018

Special Thanks to Hildo Biersma from Morgan Stanley for helping us gather a lot of these requirements and making our driver better and useful.

Download Link

http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/I/IB/IBMTORDB2/DBD-DB21.6.tar.gz

Installation Instructions for both Linux and Unix and PPM repositories Information

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/db2/perl/

Support Email Addresses

* This release is supported by Open Source Application Development Team * You may also report your bugs via the CPAN resolution tracking system: http://rt.cpan.org/ by searching for module DBD-DB2 * Such bug reports can be sent by email to bug-DBD-DB2@rt.cpan.org; they also get sent to opendev@us.ibm.com, etc.

Download DB2 Express-C for free, go to:

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.html?S_CMP=ECDDWW01&S_TACT=ACDB201

Getting started with DB2 Express-C:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/FREE+Book-+Getting+Started+with+DB2+Express-C

Thanks, Tarun Pasrija IBM OpenSource Application Development Team India Software Labs, Bangalore (India)

Duke University Pratt School of Engineering released the results of a study on Engineering and Innovation. Americans believe that they will fall behind and China is the most likely candidate for taking the lead. The respondents felt that reasons for the falling behind is that engineering is not a preferred profession, “not glamorous enough”, and lower paid for the extensive education with a call to beef up lower schooling towards a higher turnout for engineering.

One area I see for further consideration is litigation and its effects, Americans are excluded from research in some areas of cyber security due to the inability to conduct reverse engineering in some cases. There is possibly other areas that are affected in a similar matter. Patent madness especially in software and other decisions that US Legislature has taken to protect aspects of intellectual property may also well be contributors to the problem and should also be addressed. Do not be surprised that China gets the upper hand in cyber security over the next 15 years. They have a lot of research going on and it is unhindered by those laws that affect US researchers.

If America keeps legislating to protect IP in the broad manner taken through recent years, they risk dropping rapidly behind those that are not hindered by similar legislation. There is probably nothing wrong with very targeted legislation to some areas, but presently some is hindering American researchers.

America will see a lot of change this century, and much will be forced upon it by the global financial power shift as it continues to move around. Even if the US remains at the top of the stack, which I doubt it will, it will have a lot of its competitive edge removed. Innovation as was seen through the majority of the last century will be needed and this wont happen with the issues of infringement and legislation that is currently present.

See ya round

Peter