Last Train From Austin

This being said in Googleland, and having the privacy options clearly enough spelled out for me that I even understood what I was checking off when opting in or out of this or that, there is some news today/yesterday about this issue that everyone should understand. Verizon got bitch slapped once again in a PA state court, where a judge said their practice of either mailing the opt-out cards to their wireless subscribers "stinks", since it rarely seems to happen, or when it does it's written in so much legal jargon that Atty Gen Holder would re-open GITMO just for their executives. I don't use them, so surfed on over to their website to view the thing for myself, only to be told that the "page unavailable" was Of Course, the one I wanted.

On the same issue, but regarding different carrier sources, The Free Press came out with a story called "The End Of The Internet" as relates to DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) that has been such a hoary problem for the big broadband boys Cox Comm and Comcast recently. The report seems to assign a bit more of a rant than a factual arguement to an issue thats been ongoing for years now, but not all that many people have been paying attention until we all found out how badly the NSA has been intruding into our interwebs. But it's certainly more than worth a read for anyone who's not schooled on the subject of net neutrality.

The last big and most interesting news this week was again, Cisco Systems in the slurping up San Francisco's Pure Digital, a 100 person 8 year old tech company that makes the very popular Flip videocam. Already it has captured about 1/5th of market share, putting right in direct competetion with Sony and the other heavyweights. For $588 Million in stock the company is seemingly a bargain. And since Cisco is going to most certainly have even more server market to divvy up, both Dell and HP are spinning off separate divisions to deal with it. And Rackspace Rackables launched itself into the fray, not that they weren't there already, but their edge is cutting power consumption by up to 25% by using the Intel Atom @320 per rack with it's own fan, and an onborard Ac-Dc power conversion. Makes this market more watchable by the day. Even Intel itself said that by the year 2011 nearly one quarter of it's chips would be used exclusively for the server market. Now just WHY didn't I buy Intel stock back when it was selling at $4.00?? Oh, right, busfare.