Originally posted on the main site.
This document describes how schema extensibility is typically achieved in commercial enterprise software applications; in particular, in customer relationship management (CRM) applications. A future update will discuss newer extensibility mechanisms such as native XML column types in databases.
I’ve been using VOIP phones for over a year. I even dropped my local phone service about 6 months ago in favor of a VOIP line. I have had the most experience with Vonage. I’ve been a customer for over a year and have always been satisfied with call quality and have never experienced any problems. I also have no trouble sending faxes over my Vonage line and the price is pretty good: $25 / month for unlimited calling in US and Canada.
Based on the experience with Vonage, I signed up with Lingo as soon as they announced their service. Lingo is an even better deal: $20 / month for unlimited calling in US, Canada, and Western Europe (landlines only, mobiles are more). I also had my local number switched over to Lingo (a process that only took about 5 months). Compared with Vonage, Lingo leaves a lot to be desired. Lately, about half the calls get dropped. Messages show up in voice mail without the phone ever ringing. And I can’t send a fax with Lingo. I opened a support ticket about the fax issue and was told that Lingo does not support the T.38 fax-over-voip standard but I was welcome to try sending a fax anyway; it might work if I configured the fax machine to use a lower baud rate like 9600 or 14400. My HP multifunction device does not have a way to slow down the fax send rate so I would be SOL if I did not have the Vonage account. I’ll definitely be dumping Lingo soon if their service does not improve.
Current instructions for configuring Tomcat for JAAS-based Windows authentication.
This is the solution for my previous post.
(more…)
The (US) Federal Trade Commission issued recommendations to Congress on ways to reform patent law. The whole affair was rather disappointing. Most of the testimony on software was from people with a vested interest in the status quo: intellectual property lawyers and people from big software companies with large patent portfolios.
(more…)
Business Week Online reports a Boston-area company that was looking at sending work to India. They were quoted $40,000 per year per programmer. They decided to try to hire U.S. programmers for $45,000 per year and the labor market is so bad that they found takers. This is the inevitable consequence of offshore competition for programmers. Gone are the days when a newly-minted CS major with 2 years experience could expect to make $80,000 per year and get a signing bonus and a Senior Developer title. We should eventually expect the price of real estate and cars to drop as well as standards of living take a hit.
(more…)