fathom

Tams11 Fathom is a challenging puzzle game in which users must correctly guess the colors and order of four balls. It's not bad, but we feel that it could easily become tedious and boring, given the fact that it really only does one basic thing.

The program's interface is plain and dated-looking. The publisher's description likens the game to the board game Mastermind, which we had never played, so we had to consult the game's Help file to figure out how everything worked. The computer chooses a combination of four colored balls, and users have to &… Read more

There were two very interesting pieces of news to come out in the last week related to the availability of relational databases in the cloud. One involved a start-up you have almost certainly never heard of, and the other involves a major player in on-premise database products.

The first was an announcement to the crowd at "Whose Cloud is It Anyway?"--a "roundtable and meet-up" sponsored by TechCrunch, held Friday on Microsoft's Mountain View, Calif., campus.

(Charles Cooper has more on the "roundtable" portion of the program. My favorite part of the afternoon was the fun comment by Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff; he noted the irony of hosting a cloud-computing meeting at the facilities of the vendor most disrupted by the trend.)

During the "pitch" section of the afternoon, Justin Santa Barbara of start-up FathomDB announced that the company has released to beta testing a sort of virtual managed hosting service for "standard relational databases" running on Amazon.com's Elatic Compute Cloud, or EC2, service. (There is a video of the afternoon's pitches; FathomDB starts at about 49:30.)

The start-up's current service simply allows someone to get a basic relational database management system, or RDBMS, instance (initially MySQL) up and running in minutes under its management, with services including creation, monitoring, and backup.… Read more