It has been awhile since our last conversation. I had taken a few weeks off to study for my finals, then took a small break visiting California and attending a few conferences and now here I am.

So much has happened, so lets get to it.

Lot’s of news to go through real quick, then tomorrow we will get with the good stuff.

So news, tons of them so I will post the title and my words on it. Here we go in no particular order:

Senate to Tackle Net Neutrality this Week: It amazes me at how annoyingly dimwitted people can be. The ISPs knows that this subject has been on the table for quite some time now and instead of policing themselves in order to avoid mass legislation, companies like Comcast are shown to be “throttling” bandwidth. The problem I have with legislation on this is that: 1) it will give other nations a reason to force legislation on the Internet. 2) it will likely lead to removing any sort of reason for increasing the broadband infrastructure. 3) it will lead to more legislation controlling other aspects (check out the next news item). On the other hand, several ISPs have proven to be too moronic to understand what their market is and what their audience is. If there were more competition I would say let the bastards drown. Unfortunately, take where I live. I have one ISP and no alternatives aside from taking my cell phone and linking it to the router and use Verizon’s network to run my home network. My belief if their is legislation than it should be the government trying to increase competition in the industry and giving incentives for increasing broadband access.

‘Amazon Tax’ Lands in New York: Quite possibly one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard of. Looks good on paper, but I would like to see how they enforce this gem. Say a company that is in a foreign nation has a reseller in New York, well that company would have to pay out the sales tax. Like that’s going to happen. Also, instead of leveling the playing field this particular bill is like a pendulum swinging to the other side. State retailers need only keep track of their local and state taxes where as an online company that uses resellers will have to know a great deal more. If this tax is passed in other states we are looking at several thousand tax laws.

Report: Yahoo-Google deal moves forward: A many people know, I believe Google replaced Microsoft as the evil empire. That being said this is a brilliant move on Yahoo’s part. Having only a few more days to go before Microsoft tries a hostile takeover, Yahoo needs any means necessary to inflate their stock price and what better way than off the coat tales of an Internet giant. If they manage to fend off Microsoft they can continue to use Google or they can take some time to wow us with a different form of advertising (hopefully it won’t be as annoying as nearly every single generation that has come before it).

Google’s Urchin 6 arrives after years-long delay: Awesome…. took long enough. Personally I was beginning to think that Urchin 6 was the analytics form of Duke Nuke’em.

Ballmer: Vista is ‘a work in progress’: On the one hand it works for Google. The never ending beta is one of the greatest concepts since the invention of the electric cheese slicer…. Ok bad analogy. Unfortunately, Vista was sold as a complete OS and to call it a work in progress after its release is a cop out.

MySQL Not Going Closed Source? Some of the latest features for MySQL 6 will be on the paid enterprise version and not the open-source community version. Well I suppose that’s a good reason for Sun investing $1 billion dollars in MySQL, but on the flip side so much for open source solidarity. Then again this is not new. A lot of features have been pulled from the open version of MySQL through the years. The fact that they are offering a do it yourselfer version and a version for those who can’t be bothered will increase the audience of MySQL, which will lead to even more popularity at which point Sun can sink some of the paid version’s “investment” into developing better features for all. Lose the battle win the war, just look at the big picture and you will be able to sleep better at night.

That’s about all I have for the moment. It’s great to be back and I will see you all tomorrow.

Happy Hosting.