 Monday, February 2, 2004
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Oracle's integration plans, from CRN:
The final path in Oracle's road map is what Oracle calls a "data hub." The first example, to be released later this week, will be the Oracle Customer Data Hub. The hub, designed to give organizations a more cohesive view of their customers, will include data cleansing tools and will work with applications from Chordiant, E.Piphany, SAP, PeopleSoft, Broadvision, Blue Martini and Siebel Systems, as well as legacy apps. "Our objective is to create a single view of the customer with the data model, with near-realtime synchronization. This is not a data warehouse," [Oracle President Chuck Phillips] said.
This "single view of the customer" thing was pretty much discredited in the late 90's; it's a very naive concept. Service orientation, which takes advantage of existing investments, provides much more business value.
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Anybody else think the new ad campaign IBM launched in the Super Bowl (won by the NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS!!!) with the fake albino kid is just a little weird?
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Dawn (Peshawar, Pakistan):
Dr A.Q. Khan, who is credited to have set up Pakistan's nuclear programme, has admitted to having transferred nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya , authoritative sources disclosed in a background briefing to Dawn on Sunday. Abundant evidence to the effect is also said to have been extracted during the almost two-month-long 'debriefing' of most of the top scientists and officials of the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL), the sources said.
And the motive:
"Dr Khan was motivated enough to make other Islamic countries nuclear power also so that intense Western pressure on Pakistan's nuclear power could be eased," [the source] said.
Maybe while we're going in after Osama we can pay the good doctor a visit as well.
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Jim Fawcette of Fawcette Publications writes:
Attendance at Sun Microsystems' own JavaOne conference plummeted last year. By some outside estimates, attendance was down 75% from the show's peak...Late last year, I discussed the Java market with the CEOs of two prominent tools vendors. Both are discontinuing advertising in this market and shifting their marketing dollars elsewhere. As one put it, "Java on the presentation layer is dead...." Java, in particular J2EE, is a wonderful platform. But the ecosystem is withering...
Via Peter O'Kelly.
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The BBC runs a documentary on North Korea's prison camps (which hopefully will be on PBS Frontline soon), but stirs up some controversy of its own in the process.
The show reviews much of the evidence against the DPRK's horrific system of concentration camps, in which "enemies of the state," including small children and even infants, are routinely tortured and killed. That much is beyond dispute.
But did the BBC fabricate some evidence, specifically a "Letter of Transfer" which explicitly directs a prisoner to be moved for the purpose of being subjected to chemical weapons tests? South Korean intelligence (whose own motives in this Sunshine Policy era are suspect) thinks maybe it was.
The Marmot reviews the evidence.
But there are two points worth noting. First, Kwon Hyok, the defector who ran one of these camps, indicates that such letters are precisely how prisoners are moved about:
I [Reporter Olenka Frenkiel ] took one of the documents to a Korean expert in London who examined it and confirmed that there was nothing to suggest it was not genuine.
But I wanted to run a check of my own with Kwon Hyok. Without showing him the Letter of Transfer, I asked him very specifically, without prompting him in any way. "How were the victims selected when they went for human experimentation? Was there some bureaucracy, some paperwork?"
"When we escorted them to the site we would receive a Letter of Transfer," he said.
Second: what motives would anyone have for forging such a document? -- when compelling eyewitness testimony abounds.
Finally: looking at the document itself, it looks real enough to me. And this debate obscures the real issue, which is the horror going on just north of the 38th Parallel.
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Jan Mar
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