Blaming the lawyers is neither fair nor productive. The blame lies in a broken patent system that cripples innovation rather than promotes it. We need to change the laws such that software patents are not allowed. Blaming the lawyers is like shooting the messenger.

I'm not sure if there is a good free open source tool kit for this sort of thing. I do know that IBM offers a product to handle this sort of thing called TPC. The keyword you'll want to use when searching for a graphical representation of this stuff is "topology viewer".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Tivoli_Storage_Productivity_Center

For all the tech geeks out there interested in volunteering there is a great program called First Lego League to help gets kids get excited about technology. The program uses the Lego NXT kit like in the video. Legos + robotics + getting kids excited about technology = win.

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll/content.aspx?id=13056

Wherever your product fits on the software stack you want open APIs and open source at the place below you in the software stack. You don't make profit from open source. You make profit from building stuff on top of open source.

One example would be IBM which sells services and hardware on top of open source.

Red Hat is profitable by selling services and support on top of open source.

Another example would be Google and their Chromium project. An open source browser is a gateway to their profit engine which is selling advertisements through their search engine and web apps.

Headlines with question marks at the end annoy me. Reminds me of an old episode of The Daily Show where Jon Stewart makes fun of cable news headlines ending with a question mark.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-september-13-2006/the-question-mark

At the end of 2009 IBM employed 399,409 employees worldwide.

IBM U.S. labor force numbers.

2009: 105,000
2008: 115,000
2007: 121,000
2006: 127,000
2005: 133,789

Where IBM hired in 2009:

Asia/Pacific: 13,376
CEEMEA: 3,988
Europe: 2,923
India: 18,873
Japan: 868
Latin America: 7,112
USA: 3,514
Canada: 820

Here are the detailed numbers from the IBM March 1st, 2010 layoffs (2,901 cut so far)

STG Technology Development: 24
STG Sales Support: 80
CIO Application and infrastructure: 160
Software Group WPLC: 50
Software Group Information management: 99
GBS Global Account: 98
GTS Security Systems: 41
ITD Transition, Quality & Service Mgmt: 276
ITD Application Hosting and Database: 158
ITD Service Management Delivery: 66
ITD Storage Management: 178
ITD Distributed Server Management: 318
ITD SSO (IDMM): 120
GTS North America East IMT Region Maintenance & Technical Support: 66
Sales and Distribution Headquarters: 73
ITD Complex Engagement Services: 34
Tivoli: 51
SWG Application & Integration Middleware: 119
ITD Shared Services, Security & Risk Management: 216
Sales and Distribution Global Sales: 57
Human Resources Global Administration: 124
STG Global markets: 12
CIO Client Value Tranformation: 76
Corporate Marketing & Communications: 48
CIO Operations & Enterprise Portfolio Management: 8
STG Software Development & Lab services: 39
GBS Financial Services: 24
GBS AIS: 84
GBS ASAA: 202
Total cut so far: 2901

Source: http://www.endicottalliance.org/

In the digital realm it isn't a zero-sum game. If I help you write some code or share information with you then I don't lose it. In the physical world, if I share a cow or chicken with you then I have less food. It's easier to share when you don't lose that which you share.

I disagree philosophically with our current legal system allowing software patents. However it never ceases to amaze me how the internets take a patent, don't read it or understand it and then complain about things that don't even make sense in regards to the patent in question.

If you read the actual patent, it is talking about validating the text input as the characters are being typed in and highlighting the specific characters that don't match the regular expression. For example if you type in a SSN as: 1112-113-1111, then the 2 and 3 within the text field would be highlighted (e.g. highlighted red) as not matching the regular expression for a SSN. I think the key is that the error highlighting is done inside the text field. The highlighting of the text wouldn't occur until some timer expired (e.g. 200 ms without any new typing). This makes it so that the error highlights don't show up as you are typing but as soon as you stop. This is definitely more novel than the comments on this article make it out to be.

Should this or other software algorithms be patentable? No. However companies like IBM are forced to patent because if they don't then other patent troll companies sue them and win because they have trouble proving prior art. It is not illogical for companies like IBM to simultaneously pursue patent reform and continue to patent as much as possible under the current legislation. This is just taking advantage of the broken system while talking about how broken it is.

MVS is not dead. IBM just released z/OS version 1.10 in September, 2008.

One way to solve this chicken and egg problem is to preload Tor onto a USB stick. http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/28/2321219

That implies you have a choice of which OS to use which just isn't the case in China. Most people use a cyber cafe connection running on Windows XP. Most Chinese simply can't afford the cost of a computer of their own. Nor could they afford the cost of an internet connection of their own.

I went to China for vacation November 2008.  It was crazy watching the U.S. election from the Yengtze river.

Being the dork that I am I spent a good chunk of time playing around with the Great Firewall of China.  One thing that baffled me was the ease of which I could find "censored" material.  For example the wikipedia page for the Tiananmen Square protests was accessible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989).

Searching Google images for "Tiananmen Square" came back with hundreds of tanks, bloody civilians and the like - no different than in the U.S.

Yet some things were banned. I found that all the free http proxies that I tried were banned.  I couldn't get to wikileaks.org. And I couldn't get to the Tor website to download the installer.

This presents an interesting chicken and egg problem with circumvention software. How do you get the software in the first place if it's source of the software package is censored?  I ended up asking a buddy of mine in the U.S. to send me the Tor program via gmail, but not everyone has that option.

I was only on a very slow 8k/sec connection so at times it was difficult to tell if a site was banned or if it just was really slow.  I could only really tell by running a trace route.  It would always time out at the same router, presumably the router that bridged between inside and outside China.

In case anyone is interested here is a tracert going to a banned site.

C:\>tracert wikileak.org

Tracing route to wikileak.org [72.1.201.156]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1   490 ms   298 ms   298 ms  220.192.136.4
2   298 ms   299 ms   299 ms  220.192.136.251
3   298 ms   280 ms     *     61.242.160.182
4   280 ms   342 ms   296 ms  211.94.54.205
5   432 ms   439 ms   439 ms  211.94.56.105
6   438 ms   459 ms   459 ms  211.94.55.5
7   358 ms     *     1107 ms  211.94.39.98
8   499 ms   480 ms   479 ms  211.94.55.250
9     *     1108 ms   479 ms  sl-gw22-ana-1-0.sprintlink.net [144.228.79.177]

10   498 ms   500 ms   518 ms  sl-crs2-ana-0-1-2-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.1.12
2]
11   518 ms   519 ms   539 ms  sl-crs2-fw-0-13-3-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.1
97]
12   536 ms   538 ms   558 ms  sl-crs2-kc-0-0-0-2.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.14
1]
13   537 ms   558 ms   538 ms  sl-crs2-chi-0-8-0-3.sprintlink.net [144.232.18.2
14]
14   528 ms   539 ms   539 ms  sl-st21-chi-11-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.20.21
]
15   537 ms   539 ms   540 ms  sl-bigpi4-209998-0.sprintlink.net [144.223.6.30]

16   536 ms   559 ms   539 ms  rc2ch-pos10-0.il.shawcable.net [66.163.65.41]
17   537 ms   719 ms   539 ms  rc1ch-ge1-0-0.il.shawcable.net [66.163.65.1]
18   556 ms   560 ms   559 ms  rc2sh-pos13-0.mt.shawcable.net [66.163.77.13]
19   558 ms   557 ms   559 ms  ra2sh-tge10-1.mt.shawcable.net [66.163.66.78]
20   597 ms   578 ms   580 ms  rx0sh-hydro-one-telecom.mt.bigpipeinc.com [66.24
4.255.38]
21   578 ms   559 ms   559 ms  142.46.128.14
22   779 ms   779 ms     *     tol-gsr.telecomottawa.net [142.46.130.10]
23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
29     *        *     ^C
C:\>

Looks like a giant iPhone that can play flash. Other than that it looks way less portable and generally useful than the iPhone.

This just in, the US Army Sees the Human Mouth As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool".