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Sunday, February 01, 2004 |
How to get spyware-free RealPlayer through the BBC. An anonymous reader sez, "The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuicance-free version of the player. It's because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it."
Link
(Thanks, Anonymous Reader!) [Boing Boing Blog] 
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Congrats to Rob Currie and Arthur Van Hoff. TiVo, the digital hub, powered by Strangeberry?.
TiVo is finally getting its digital hub act together. The
purchase of Strangeberry is yet another proof that it is going to be
competing with the likes of Microsoft in the digital hub sweepstakes.
While most of its conjecture, some nuggets gathered during course of
reporting tell me that this is the direction TiVo might be headed in.
ANALYSIS: For past few days the PVR universe has been hubbub about TiVo’s acquisition of a little known company called
Strangeberry. I have refrained from posting anything about this for a
couple of days because first, I was busy with work, and secondly I had
to go through my old emails to dig-up some juicy nuggets about the
company.
Strangeberry had caught my attention, thanks to a tip off from a
venture capitalist who at the time was in the know about Marimba, a
software company known more for their chief executive than their
products. Nevertheless for JavaHeads this was big news. I did some
follow-up reporting but nothing came off it, and since at that time Red
Herring was going through some shaky times, it fell through and was
forgotten. Anyway since then nothing much has been reported on this
company, and TiVo’s SEC filing does not say much either.
On January 12, 2004 we acquired Strangeberry Inc., a small Palo Alto
based technology company specializing in using home network and
broadband technologies to create new entertainment experiences on
television. Strangeberry has created technology, based on industry
standards and including a collection of protocols and tools, designed
to enable the development of new broadband-based content delivery
services. In exchange for all of the issued and outstanding capital
stock of Strangeberry, we issued shares of TiVo common stock to the
stockholders of Strangeberry in a private placement. We have agreed to
file a registration statement on Form S-3 to cover the resale of these
shares by the Strangeberry stockholders.
So what are they really building? My best guess is that Strangeberry
crew, all former Sun folks, developed a piece of software that actually
makes finding devices on the home networks as easy as turning on the
power switch. And it is using some variant of Apple’s Rendezvous
technology. I remember these guys had released some variation of
Rendezvous for Java in the early days of their operation. Rendezvous is
a technology which can and does work with all sort of networks - Wi-Fi,
Ethernet or powerline networks.
Now, at the 2003 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas, a colleague of mine saw them talking to folks from companies
like Philips and Sony. Add the two together, to me its seems that
Strangeberry folks were developing an application for home
networks—something that can detect all of the devices on the network
and interact between them, maybe something that would let you control
your Internet home gateway, PC, TV, stereo,
etc. from one remote control device. Of course since more and more
companies are supporting the high speed Wi-Fi networks and some are
even contemplating streaming video wirelessly using the super speeds
offered by 802.11g implementations, it does not seem that far fetched
that Strangeberry came up with this killer app.
I am still trying to get more details on this, but if this is the
case then TiVo could easily become a big player in the digital hub
business. First of all it does not have the heavy footprint of Windows
Media Player. This distinguishes the company from many PVR
clones out there, and also provider higher value to its partners such
as Sony, Toshiba and Phillips. I think this would be a killer and
unique selling point for TiVo which has seen its innovation of PVR get commoditized.
More proof at the bottom of the San Jose Business Journal article?
Two weeks ago at CES, TiVo announced new development partnerships with digital photo and music companies XM Satellite Radio, Adobe, MoodLogic and Picasa that it said will expand the features and capabilities of the TiVo service.
In a press release, TiVo CEO said:
“DVR was just the beginning for TiVo… we’re committed to extending
the TiVo experience to a host of new and exciting, yet very easy to
use, services for our subscribers. Strangeberry shares this vision and
can help us accelerate innovation for the TiVo service through our own
engineering initiatives, and through our expanding third party
developer program, to build new products and services for the TiVo
platform,” said Michael Ramsay, CEO of TiVo.
TiVo at present can save video and playback video easily. It can
easily take music stream from your computer and play-it back through
your music system. (I personally would buy TiVo over some standalone MP3
streaming device - it is a great two for price of one deal, which
somehow does not get enough attention.) And now if Strangeberry can
provide easy control and management through TiVo, you are talking big
dollars.
[Om Malik on Broadband]
Marc's additional info:
Strangeberry was started by Rob Currie and Arthur Van Hoff - two
former Marimba folks. Kim Polese introduced me to them. They had a
killer home networking OS which built on top of a Java implementation
of Rendevouz.
The system enabled humans to point their remote control at a TV -
and selct any PC on teh HJome LAN. The human coudl then selct any
movie, song or photo and have it play./display on teh TV set. All
totallyc lean, smart, no stupid installs, blah blah blah.
Strangeberry only did the software - the hardware was a reference design. Now that they're TiVO - watch out world - here we go! [Marc's Voice]
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Mobile interface myths. Twelve myths about mobile interface design:
Myth: Users want power and aesthetics. Features are everything.
Myth: What we really need is a Swiss army knife.
Myth: 3G is here!
Myth: Focus groups and other traditional market analysis tools are the best way to determine user needs.
Myth: If it works in Silicon Valley, it will work anywhere.
Myth: The killer app will be games, er, no, I mean, horoscopes, or
Myth: Mobile devices will essentially be phones, organizers, or combinations, with maybe music/video added on.
Myth: The industry is converging on a UI standard.
Myth: Highly usable systems are just around the corner.
Myth: One underlying operating system will dominate.
Myth: Mobile devices will be free-or nearly free.
Myth: Advanced data-oriented services are just around the corner.
My only modification: for "Silicon Valley," substitute, "Silicon Valley, Japan or Finland."
Link [Boing Boing Blog]
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There are three ways to build a hot weblog.
To be a connection machine (people with huge
blogrolls and/or RSS lists that point to other weblogs -- they do add
their two cents and sometimes their thinking).
To be a name dropper (people that imply they
understand what is really going on -- and you don't -- given their
personal connections that they constantly let you know about).
To be an ideologue (people that support a single cause with unquestioned faith).
Here are the ways to build a second tier (but still popular) weblog:
To be a thinker (people that delve into topics with intelligence and/or wit).
To be a topic owner (people that own a topic and report on it with unquestioned knowledge and depth).
To be a voice of outrage/affirmation (people that critique others as often as they can or are on the bandwagon).
To be a cool hunter (people that find the newest of the new or the strangest of the strange).
Which one are you? Are there more categories? Am I wrong? I will add to this post as new thinking arrives. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Hidden beauty in a missile's nosecone. This wall-hanging made from the circuit-boards from the nose-cone of a Minuteman Missile is awfully, lethally pretty.
Because
the missile was perpetually armed, Williams explained, the circuitry
was immersed in liquid Freon to keep it from critically overheating. In
the event the missile was launched, the coolant would be abruptly
disconnected and the circuitry would have approximately 10 minutes
before it burned itself up - just enough time for the missile to reach
its target. Freon, it turns out, was an excellent preservative for the
colorful (but now ancient) transistors, resistors and capacitors
displayed here.
Link
(Thanks, Hugh!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Economy: A Financial Pearl Harbor???. From The Connection's archives: Robert Rubin on his new book (In an Uncertain World) and the economic well-being of the US. Worth the time spent to listen to it.
With the deficit near $500 b this year, there is a risk of
a financial melt-down in the long term (ie. due to a lack of job
growth, historically high short term interest rates, etc. and
exacerbated by baby boomer retirements). However, the real problem is uncertainty in the short term.
Risk can be projected and compensated for (if you do get burned by
risk, it's your fault). Uncertainty can't be quantified or analyzed. It
can only guarded against by not placing yourself in a position where it
can't topple you easily. We are in a position where uncertainty can put
us into a crunch situation in very short order.
For example, uncertainty is an event like 9/11 and the subsequent
invasion of Iraq. This sequence of events were unanticipatable, in any
reasonable way, but they have had a major impact on our financial
status. Some other uncertainties that we have on our plate include a
series of major terrorist attacks on US soil that negatively impact
regional economies and confidence, a failure/quagmire in Iraq that
drags on for years at an escalating cost and a global loss of
confidence, and full war with North Korea. Any of these events could
cause the budget deficit to surge to unsustainable levels over an
extended period, cause the US to lose its safe harbor status, and turn the rest of the world against us (not willing to help us when we are in crisis).
This is exactly how we could convert (through our lack of
preparedness) the risk of long-term financial crisis into a short term
crisis. Given this, why isn't fiscal responsibility a National Security
issue??? If our economy collapses due to external uncertainties
becoming real events, we would be hard pressed to defend ourselves. We wouldn't be able to afford it. [John Robb's Weblog]
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How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?.
How Many Social Nets Are Too Many?
Posted Jan 28, 2004, 8:33 PM ET by Judith Meskill
Today in Wired News, Leander Kahney has a story — Social Nets Not Making Friends — in which she talks about: an SNS backlash brewing; Jason Kottke’s parody job listing on craiglist.org; and the fact that the social networking service field has “ballooned to include about 20 different services.”
Well
Leander, by my count, there are more than 100 social networking
services that I have been observing — cruising past my virtual radar
gun — in the past few months. I have been tracking this burgeoning
growth of services aspiring to help discover and connect my friends,
potential partners, business cohorts, and various levels of
acquaintances — and I have this scary feeling that I am only carving
shavings off of the tip of an iceberg with this list.
Here is a copy of my accounting — replete with links — of this daunting deluge of SNSs:
Affinity Engines, Amigos.com, AsiaFriendFinder, Backwash, Backwash for Pets, BuddyBridge, BuddyZoo, Chia Friend, Classmates.com, Community Zero, Company of Friends, The Conneck, Contact Network, Corporate Alumni, CraigsList, Delphi Forums, Dude Check This Out!, easeek, ecademy, eFriendsnet, 8minuteDating, Eliyon, enCentra, Eurekster!, everyonesconnected, Evite, First Tuesday, FriendFinder, Friendity, Friend Surfer, Friends Reunited, Friendster, Friendzy, GermanFriendFinder, Globe Alive, GoingProfessional, gradFinder, Growth Company, HeiYou, HelloWorld, hipster, Huminity, IndianFriendFinder, InterAction, ItsNotWhatYouKnow, KnowMates, LianQu, LinkedIn, Living Directory, Love.com, The Lunch Club NYC, Match.com, matcheroo, Mediabistro, MeetUp, Monster Networking, mrNeighborhood, MyEMatch, NetMiner, Netmodular Community, Netparty, Netplaya Burning Man Community, Networking For Professionals, Nerve, Online Business Networking Resource, The Opinion Exchange, orkut, PalJunction, Passion.com, peeps nation, PowerMingle, qpengyou, RateOrDate, RealContacts, ReferNet, RepCheck, Ringo, Ryze, Salesforce.com, SeniorFriendFinder, Shortcut, Silicon Valley Pipeline, Small World Project, Social Circles, Social Grid, SocialTree, Sona, The Spark, Spoke Software, StumbleUpon, Sullivan Executive Networking Community, Talk City, There, Tickle by Emode, Tribe.net, uDate.com, UUFriends, Visible Path, Wallop, WisdomBuilder, WorldShine, YeeYoo, YOYO, Zdarmanet, and Zerodegrees.
Cynthia Typaldos has an excellent post (from September 14, 2003) and database — that she started but has turned over to all interested parties to maintain — on Social Networking Sites and Software with perceived focus. [The Social Software Weblog] [Marc's Voice]
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IDEA#.NET is coming....
This was posted on the intellij.net forums today: EAP of VS.NET plugin
is planned for February 10. -- Valentin Kipiatkov Chief Scientist, Vice
President of Product Development JetBrains, Inc
http://www.jetbrains.com "Develop with pleasure!" I hate to hype this
up too much as the first early access release is bound to have its
share of bugs, but I am really looking... (217 words) [Luke Hutteman's public virtual MemoryStream]
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Structured search, phase two.
The next phase of my structured search project is coming to life. For
the new version I'm parsing all 200+ of the RSS feeds to which I
subscribe, XHTML-izing the content, storing it in Berkeley DB XML, and
exposing it to the same kinds of searches I've been applying to my own
content. Here's a taste of the kinds of queries that are now possible: ... [Jon's Radio]
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New Creative Commons licenses RFC. Creative Commons has released a draft version 2.0 of its licenses and is asking for public feedback on the modifications:
# Warranties will now be a matter of choice for the licensor. See Section 5a.
# The attribution clause will include a link-back requirement simliar
to the one previously discussed here. Licensees will only be required
to link back to licensors if (1) it's reasonably practical to do so;
(2) the licensor actually specifies a URI; (3) that URI actually points
to license information about the work. See Section 4d.
# The Share Alike provision will be more flexible. The provision will
allow licensees to license resulting derivative works under Creative
Commons licenses that feature the same license
restrictions/permissions, including future and iCommons versions of the
same license. The Share Alike provision will also be clearer about what
happens when different kinds of Share Alike content is mixed together
(e.g., How to license a collage made from an SA photograph combined
with an NC-SA photograph). See Section 4b.
Link
(via Joi) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Perl Everywhere! - Now on Nokia Series 60 phones. Excellent. Now I need to get one of these phones so I can have some fun Perl hacking!
QUOTE
Nokia will make an internal
version of the Perl scripting language for Series 60 smartphones
available to its developer community, Lee Epting, Nokia's VP of
Developer Relations, tells us. Nokia acknowledges a demand for more
developer options as Nokia's Symbian-based Series 60 platform reaches
mass market volumes.
UNQUOTE
[Roland Tanglao's Weblog] It's Python, not Perl, see Slashdot post below
Slashback: Zip, Language, Opportunism [Slashdot]
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Desktop Linux predicted to hit Microsoft "faster than expected". Groklaw reports:
"The Inquirer highlights a Yankee Group study that finds 43% of small
and medium businesses are worried about being dependent on Microsoft
and of that group "72 percent said that they are actively seeking other
vendors to diversify their portfolios", according to the Yankee Group
press release about the report. Here are the relevant portions from the
Decatur Jones report."
Also in the blog is a troubling prediction: "Desktop Linux will affect Microsoft faster than expected."
So, should I get out my résumé? Oh, now I know why Joel handed out résumé tips on his blog the other day. :-)
Seriously, I'm not worried about my job. But, this is a challenge to
us to ship better products and service. Are we up to the challenge? The
market will decide, and if this article is right, it'll decide quickly. [The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]
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Joel wants a linker. I'm gonna give him Longhorn instead. Joel Spolsky wants a .NET Linker.
I've been hearing this request for more than a decade now. Let me explain.
In the beginning there was Windows. To build Windows apps you needed
Assembly, or C, or C++. You compiled your app into an .exe and it ran.
Everything that that app needed to run was included in Windows itself.
So, apps were small.
Then along came Visual Basic. Visual Basic had one goal: make it
easier to program Windows. Dramatically easier. But, that had a cost.
To make it easier to program, Visual Basic needed to include a runtime
library so that programmers didn't need to do things like memory
management. Among other things. To run a Visual Basic app, you not only
needed Windows, like the C or C++ apps did, but you needed the Visual
Basic runtime.
So, shareware guys who needed to distribute over modems didn't like
that. They needed to choose between the quick development time of
Visual Basic, or the quick download time of C++.
Obviously I'm simplifying things a bit. But stick with me.
Today we have .NET. Same problem, but worse. Now the .NET runtime is
more than 20MB. But, with that runtime, programmers still get a
productivity boost when compared to C++, or even Delphi. At least
that's what they tell me. Note that many of the best RSS News
Aggregators are built in .NET (NewsGator, IntraVnews, SharpReader,
DesktopDean, RSS Bandit, and a few others).
The argument still exists. Do you go for the better programmer
productivity of .NET? Or do you go for the faster download speed of,
say, Visual C++ or Borland's Delphi? (Nick Bradbury wrote FeedDemon in
Delphi, for instance).
I hate to play the "it'll be fixed in Longhorn" card, but I'm going
to. Why is that? Longhorn requires the .NET runtimes, because parts of
Longhorn are being built in .NET itself. In other words, Longhorn won't
run if the .NET runtimes aren't there. Translation: we're finally
eating our own dogfood.
Now, what does that mean? .NET apps on Longhorn are gonna be smaller
(and easier to distribute) than Delphi or Visual C++ apps. Why? Because
when you compile a C++ app, it links in stuff that it needs to run that
app.
One way to solve this problem is the way that Greg Reinacker solved
it for NewsGator: he has two installs. One for people who already have
.NET. One for people who don't (and he has a little app that figures
out which install you need).
So, the question becomes a business one. Do we spend programmer time
building a linker, or do we spend programmer time on adding more
performance to .NET, or more features, or better security? [The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]
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VB'er wants to switch away from Microsoft. RebelGeeks writes a public letter to Sun Microsystems' CEO: "What
we are asking for is the creation of a new language like visual basic,
making it java's younger brother, not to compete against it, but to
complete one family under one Sun. To introduce us to the new world of
linux...."
You might not know this, but I owe my career to Visual Basic and
have been tracking its development since VB 1.0. Make no bones about
it. Microsoft did screw old Visual Basic programmers. How? They did the
same thing Canon did in the mid-80s when Canon changed the lens mount
of their cameras. That screwed people who had invested thousands of
dollars in lenses for the old Canon system.
Why did Canon do that? Because their old lens mount was its achilles
heel. It was hard to use. It took more parts than Nikon's system. It
wasn't flexible (adding autofocus to the old lens mount would have been
very difficult).
So Canon said "the hell with it." And obsoleted their old customers.
It pissed off a lot of people. I remember customers yelling at the
Canon reps who came into the store I worked in: "I'm switching to
Nikon."
But, changing the lens mount was the right thing to do. Why? Because
back then no professional used Canon gear. Seriously. I sold cameras to
the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. They all
used Nikons in the early 1980s.
Today the situation is reversed. Nikon is struggling to hold onto
its professional customers and Canon has taken a huge amount of market
share away from Nikon.
Was Microsoft's decision about Visual Basic the same thing? Time
will tell, but I think it'll play out that it was. Already, my friends
who used to hate Visual Basic because it wasn't object oriented enough,
or because it wasn't powerful enough, have been quieted.
By cutting ties with the past, VB.NET is now on equal footing with
C# and C++ in the next Windows world. I don't see that as a bad thing,
do you?
That said, I do agree that now Microsoft should focus on helping
VB6'ers make the leap over to .NET (you're seeing leaps in that
direction in the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Whidbey).
And they should focus on getting new programmers (like me) into the
.NET world.
I talked with Robert Green over on the VB team the other day and
he's very focused on just that. If you have any ideas/feedback, I'll
make sure Robert sees it. [The Scobleizer -- Geek Aggregator]
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CMake. Despite my current monogamous relationship with C#, I've spent most of my
career writing code which really needed to be cross-platform. I've come to
understand how very hard it is to create any non-trivial body of code that runs
on multiple platforms, and I have a great deal of admiration for solutions that
actually work well.
One of the toughest parts of cross-platform development is the build
system. No matter how clean and portable your C code is, getting the tree
to build on multiple platforms is a whole different problem.
One solution I have used in the past is to do a completely Unix-centric build
system with bash and make, using cygwin to
run it under Windows. This works very well, except that it really annoys
the folks who prefer Visual Studio project files. (I've had people assert
that my tendency to run emacs on Windows is proof that my parents were brother
and sister.)
Personally, I have always believed that build management was by far the
weakest part of the Visual Studio environment. MSBuild looks like a step
in the right direction. VS.NET is actually pretty decent. (The build
system for Vault is done entirely in a VS.NET .sln file, and it's quite
complicated.) Previous Visual Studio releases simply didn't have the power
to do custom builds of larger projects, and the result wasn't cross-platform
anyway.
This week I discovered a nifty tool I had never seen before. It's
called CMake, and it's the build system used
for Kitware's Visualization Toolkit.
I've seen lots of alternatives to 'make', but this tool is surprisingly
different and deeply neato.
I started by downloading the VTK tarball on a MacOS X system, which from my
point of view is Unix with a nice UI. I ran CMake and edited the
configuration settings without much difficulty. But then, instead of
performing the build, CMake generated a regular Unix makefile. I typed
'make' and the entire tree was built with no problems. I was impressed
with the fact that CMake was not replacing my standard toolset, but I didn't
really appreciate this tool until I repeated the build on Windows.
I downloaded the exact same tarball to my Windows machine. I ran CMake
and once again edited the configuration settings. When I told CMake to
proceed, it generated a complete set of Visual Studio .NET 2003 project and
solution files. I opened the .sln and built the entire tree with no
problems.
I didn't go further, but I saw indications that CMake can generate output for
other build systems as well, including CodeWarrior on the Mac, and presumably
others.
Very, very cool. If I ever end up working on a cross-platform
project again, I will be inclined to use CMake.
[Eric.Weblog()]
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Unison. Unison
is a new Usenet newsreader from Panic. I haven’t downloaded it yet, but
it looks great from the screenshots, which you’d expect from the Panic
folks. [inessential.com]
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"Tijuana bible" proto-pr0n.  On Fleshbot: Tijuana
Bibles were your grandfather's low-tech equivalent of Internet porn:
pocket-sized stroke mags published between 1920 and 1960 featuring
illustrations of "wildly sodomistic situations" and politically
incorrect smut before anyone realized such a thing existed.
Link
[Boing Boing Blog]
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MP3s of former slaves telling their stories. Mind blowing recordings taken between 1932 and 1975 of former slaves describing their lives.
The former slaves discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders,
how slaves were coerced, their families, and, of course, freedom. It is
important to keep in mind, however, that all of those interviewed spoke
sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their
full lives, rather than their lives during slavery, that are reflected
in their words. They have much to say about living as African Americans
from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond. As part of their testimony,
several of the ex-slaves sing songs, many of which were learned during
the time of their enslavement.
Link (Via The Cartoonist) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Terry Heaton's 10 step guide to learning multi-media.
You and I may quibble about the specifics (e.g. PowerPoint!?!), but I
guarantee that if you master the 10 things on your list, you will be
well on your way to becoming a multi-media maven. Read the full post
for all of Terry's cool multi-media rant/manifesto/HOWTO.
From TV News in a Postmodern World The Future is Multimedia
QUOTE For existing news people —
and I'm specifically referring to those in TV News — you have two
choices. Carry on and begin looking for what you really want to do for
a living downstream or begin developing the skill set you'll need in
the new world. For those who choose the latter, here are 10
recommendations.
- Learn the Internet. ...
- Get involved in the community of bloggers. ...
- Get yourself an RSS news aggregator. ...
- Learn digital, non-linear editing. If it means coming in on weekends or staying late, learn it, learn it, learn it. ...
- Put
the camera on your shoulder. Better yet, if you can find one, get
behind the wheels of a Sony PD-170 or similar camera. This will be a
tool of tomorrow's journalist. The days of 2-person crews are on the
wane. ...
- Learn html and Photoshop. ...
- Learn PowerPoint. This may seem silly, but producing a nice
PowerPoint presentation is an essential part of life in a multimedia
world. ...
- Get to know your station's Webmaster and spend time with him/her....
- Be proactive in getting your stuff online. ...
- Expand your personal network to include multimedia players....
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Know your webhosting prices.
Too much choice leads to 'buyer fatigue' and you end up picking a
webhosting package, DNS and domain registrar that's too expensive. Take
the time, do your diligence and find out what's best for you. As of
January 2004, GoDaddy is definitely cheaper than Register.com and as far as I can tell, there's no difference that I can tell between these two domain registrars.
QUOTE The current situation I have
illustrated is using BlueDomino’s Extreme web hosting package and
Register.com as the registrar. The proposed situation illustrated here
uses Eryxma’s Advanced Shared Hosting solution as it seems the most
comparable to the BlueDomino Extreme package. ZoneEdit is the DNS
provider in the proposed situation. GoDaddy is the registrar in the
proposed situation. The proposed situation is $110.62 less than the
current situation and provides greater control and flexibility. Of
course there could be an even greater cost delta depending on the
vendors you choose. This cost analysis applies to starting a new web
site, not switching from one provider to another. To determine
switching costs, you need to factor in the cost of transferring domains
between registrars and the time you would spend working on the
transfer. In the situation illustrated here, the cost of transferring
domains to GoDaddy is a flat fee of $7.95. Register.com has no transfer
out fee, but other registrars might. I’ll leave the costs of your time
up to you to figure out. UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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What is the blog revenue model and can blogs gather news as opposed to pontificate on it?. Great summary from the Davos 2004 blog session.
I don't have the answer. Will blogs be able to finance themelves and
even make money? Can blogs gather news as opposed to merely commenting
on it? I think these two questions are intimately related.QUOTE
This
creates a classic free-rider problem. If the blogs eventually steal the
mass media's audience (or at least, key parts of it) and the Internet
as a whole continues to steal its revenues, there will come a time when
those big, expensive news-gathering operations will become economically
insupportable. Either the mass media will have to abandon its existing,
adverstising-driven, business model, or it will have to scale back its
news-gathering functions to a bare minimum. That pressure to do the
latter is already extreme, as any journalist can tell you.
I can easily forsee a time when access to information of the
quantity and quality of, say, the daily Reuters news feed will cost
thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Only large corporations
and government agencies will be able to afford the price -- just as
only a relative handful of financial institutions can now afford access
to Bloomberg terminals.
Can the blogs fill the gap? Only if the "neural net"
gets a lot more self-organized, and can develop some chops at gathering
the news, as opposed to pontificating on it. But that, I suspect, is
going to require a revenue stream. (Or, as the cynical reporter puts in
the movie The Right Stuff: "No bucks, no Buck Rodgers.")
Where are those bucks going to come from? As commercial
propositions, blogs face the same problem every other content provider
faces on the web: How the hell do you make money at it? The Internet is
gradually destroying the market power that traditionally has allowed
media providers to "bundle" content -- forcing their customers to buy
the sports news along with the business news, for example. And the web
seems to be congenitally inhospitable to advertising forms that rely
either on passive absorption (TV) or sensory attraction (retail
display.)
So where will the revenues come from, if the blogs go commercial?
The German media guy, Burda, seemed to have an almost religious
conviction that a viable business model will appear, if the blogs
continue to attract an audience -- if they come, someone will build it.
But I'm not so sure. Or, more precisely, I'm not certain a business
model can be developed that won't completely compromise the
independence and integrity that has made the blogs so attractive in the
first place.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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.NET reality check.
There's been some pushback recently, in the .NET blogging community,
about Microsoft's habit of living in the future. For example:
It is abundantly frustrating to be
keeping up with you guys right now. We out here in the real world do
not use Longhorn, do not have access to Longhorn (not in a way we can
trust for production), and we cannot even begin to test out these great
new technologies until version 1.0 (or 2.0 for those that wish to stay
sane). I know there's probably not a whole lot you can do, but this is
a plea to you from someone "in the field". My job is to work on the
architecture team as well as implement solutions for a large-scale
commercial website using .NET. I use this stuff all day every day, but
I use the 1.1 release bits.
Here's my point, enough with the "this Whidbey, Longhorn, XAML
is so cool you should stop whatever it is you are doing and use it".
Small problem, we can't. Please help us by remembering that we're still
using the release bits, not the latest technology. [Michael Earls]
In the spirit of Michael's plea, I'm working on an upcoming article in
which I'll compare what was promised for the .NET platform (er,
framework), two and three years ago, with the current reality as it
exists today. Examples of the kinds of issues I want to consider: ... [Jon's Radio]
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The art and science of software testing.
Test-driven development does require a lot of time and effort, which
means something's got to give. One Java developer, Sue Spielman, sent a Dear John letter to her debugger
by way of her Weblog. "It seems over the last year or two we are
spending less and less time with each other," she wrote. "How should I
tell you this? My time is now spent with my test cases."
Clearly that's a better use of time, but when up to half of the output
of a full-blown TDD-style project can be test code, we're going to want
to find ways to automate and streamline the effort. Agitar Software's
forthcoming Java analyzer, Agitator, which was demonstrated to me
recently and is due out this quarter, takes on that challenge. [Full
story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
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Next-generation e-forms.
E-forms, a technology that's been around for a long time, is now a
hotbed of activity. Microsoft's XML-oriented InfoPath, which shipped
with Office 2003 in October, is now deployed and in use. Adobe plans to
ship a beta version of its PDF-and-XML-oriented forms designer in the
first quarter of this year. And e-forms veterans such as PureEdge and
Cardiff, whose offerings are built on an XML core, are lining up behind
XForms, the e-forms standard that became an official W3C recommendation
in October 2003. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
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The forest and the trees.
The genius of Jon Udell's work is not sheer technical
innovation (not that TransQuery amounted to anything like that either)
but rather the ability to make sense of how such technologies can be
used in simple but powerful ways over compelling content. ... [Jon's Radio]
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BYOB: Build Your Own Browser.
(via "inessential") - Excellent. Hack your own Safari-like browser
using WebKit without writing much code! Now if only it was just as easy
to hack your own browser using IE or Mozilla.
QUOTE There are a lot of things
to like about Apple's Safari web browser -- the stylish user interface
(especially the tabs!), SnapBack feature , popup blocker, Google
toolbar, and of course, Safari's speed. For developers though, one of
the coolest features is hidden under the hood: WebKit -- the
Cocoa/Carbon framework that's the basis for Safari.
Why is WebKit worth paying attention to? Well,
it's a fully documented, fully functional set of web browsing
components that developers can integrate into their Cocoa/Carbon
applications. WebKit gives developers the ability to make their
applications much more powerful with very little added effort.
This is the first in a series of two articles
describing how to develop applications using WebKit. This article will
cover building a basic web browser without writing a line of code. The
browser we will have at the end of this article will include just the
basics, a browser frame, a location bar, and seven buttons (backwards,
forwards, stop, reload, print, smaller text, and larger text). The next
article will show a little bit of code that will allow us to add some
advanced features to the browser. By the time we are done with both
articles, we'll have constructed a browser with several advanced
features, but without writing hardly any code.
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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Twitch game to end all twitch games. Dolphin Dash is white-hot searingly intense twitch game, the kind of thing that feels like it was designed to be played by people on better stimulants than I'll ever lay hands on. You navigate a dolphin through a sidescroll and collect coins and power-ups, but it all happens so fast and with so much crazy-ass surf guitar, it almost hurts. "Time for lunch," the power-up sound effect, is ringing in my ears like the afterburn of a savage beating.
375 Flash Link
(via MeFi) [Boing Boing Blog]
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RIP, Whole Earth Review.
Whole Earth magazine has gone bust (they owe me money!) (and they
changed my life!) (and their editorial board insisted on utterly stupid
edits to the story they owe me money for!) (and they really did change
my life!) (boy, those were stupid edits!). This is bad news.
Whole Earth magazine -- spawn of the amazing Whole Earth Catalogs,
source of the WELL, first to mention in print the Gaia Hypothesis, the
Internet, Virtual Reality, the Singularity and Burning Man (or at least
so the legend goes), the place where folks like Stewart Brand, Kevin
Kelly and Howard Rheingold found their voices, and where a whole
generation of young commune-kid geeks like myself learned to dream
weird -- is no more.
Link
(Thanks, Alex!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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Book Review: Singer's "Corporate Warriors."
But these are small points and do not detract from Singer's distinct message that it is time to wake up and smell the coffee; states no longer enjoy a monopoly on the means of violence. The sooner we recognize and deal with that fact the better off we will all be. Amen to this.
Asia Times.
Infrastructure attacks in Iraq cause economic and political
dislocation. In terms of risk/reward, these attacks are the most
fruitful for the guerrillas.
Tactically, these attacks seek to disrupt the overall
reconstruction effort and, with the Iraqi oil sector playing such a
significant role both in terms of post-conflict economics and regional
geopolitics, also serve as a major psychological blow to the
stabilization effort.
The resulting shortages of crucial oil products also lead to
greater Iraqi frustration and anger, and exacerbate a lessening of
credibility and legitimacy for the coalition. For example, as the price
of the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) has doubled in recent months, all
Iraqi families are affected since they rely on it for all cooking, and
especially for the hobutz flat bread, a basic staple for all Iraqi
families.
Interesting tidbit on the rise and roles of corporate mercenaries:
A $39.5 million contract was signed in August 2003 with the
Erinys International security firm of South Africa to improve security
along the northern pipeline system. This firm, an international
business-risk consultant, is engaged in the recruitment, screening and
hiring of some 6,500 Iraqis to guard 140 key installations, including
oil wellheads, pipelines and refineries and electricity and water
facilities. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Secret, personal weblog of slain CNN employee Duraid Isa Mohammed.  A
BoingBoing reader who wishes to remain anonymous points us to the
personal weblog of slain CNN employee Duraid Isa Mohammed. Duraid died
earlier this week along with fellow CNN employee Yasser Khatab, when
the vehicle they were traveling in came under fire from Iraqi
insurgents. The weblog, titled "Memories of a war torn heart: Sometimes I feel like screaming", was started just one week before Duraid was killed.
The following poem, "Risks" -- printed in English and signed
"anonymous" -- was found in Duraid's personal car in Baghdad. The
nature of the poem is similar to other material on his short-lived
blog. It is presumed that Duraid did not author the poem, but that the
handwriting was his (a quick Google search turns up the same poem on
various "inspirational quotes" webpages throughout the 'Net).
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before a crowd Is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair.
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken, because the greatest hazard in life is To risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing dies nothing, Has nothing and is nothing.
They say they avoid suffering and sorrow, But they cannot learn, Feel, change, grow, love, feel.
Chained by their attitudes, they are slaves.
They have forfeited their freedom.
Only a person who risks is free.
-- Anonymous
Duraid's
blog does not bear his full name; each entry is signed "Mr. D.," and
one post states, "I work as a journalist now with a big corporation, I
was a basketballer in college, I was a DJ in my Baghdad, a war-torn
town by now." The blog includes lyric quotes from Poison and Bon Jovi,
and mentions that its author was permitted to travel with the military.
This link to a related CNN story
mentions also that Duraid was a DJ before the war. The BoingBoing
reader who brings this story to our attention shares further
information (and asks that it not be repeated here) which leads me to
believe that the blog is in fact Duraid's. [Boing Boing Blog]
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Juarez killers: five untouchable drug-lords?.
An investigative journalist is publishing a book alleging that five
untouchable rich narco-gangsters are responsible for the murders of
hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez.
'Mexican federal authorities have conducted investigations, which
reveal who the killers are,' she claims. 'Five men from Juarez and one
from Tijuana who get together and kill women in what can only be
described as blood sport. Some of those involved are prominent men with
important political connections - untouchables.'
The chosen victims are so young, explains Washington, to avoid
sexually transmitted diseases. Underlings supply new victims: 'They
capture the girls and bring them to their masters.'
Washington alleges at least 100 women have been killed by these
men, of whom all but one are multi-millionaires. They have political
connections going all the way to President Vicente Fox, and some have
allegedly made contributions to Fox's presidential campaign. They have
ties to the Juarez Cartel, and have used their drug wealth to build
respectable businesses.
Link
(Thanks, Zed!) [Boing Boing Blog]
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More fun with queries.
I should probably get a life, but instead I can't stop myself from
writing more new queries against my growing database of well-formed
blog content. Here are some queries that find the following things in
the last few days' worth of my inbound RSS feeds: ... [Jon's Radio]
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Do I have the midnight disease? - Is this what compels me to blog late at night?. Hmmm.
From Press Release for The Midnight Disease by by Alice Weaver Flaherty:
QUOTE Why
is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect
sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard
deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight
Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain
(Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the
hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia —
the overwhelming urge to write — and its dreaded opposite, writer's
block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of
creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our
greatest writers.
A neurologist whose work puts her at the forefront of brain science,
Flaherty herself suffered from hypergraphia after the loss of her
prematurely born twins. Her unique perspective as both doctor and
patient helps her make important connections between pain and the drive
to communicate and between mood disorders and the creative muse.
Deftly guiding readers through the inner workings of the human
brain, Flaherty sheds new light on popular notions of the origins of
creativity, giving us a new understanding of the role of the temporal
lobes and the limbic system. She challenges the standard idea that one
side of the brain controls creative function, and explains the biology
behind a visit from the muse.
Flaherty writes
compellingly of her bout with manic hypergraphia, when "the sight of a
computer keyboard or a blank page gave me the same rush that drug
addicts get from seeing their freebasing paraphernalia." Dissecting the
role of emotion in writing and the ways in which brain-body and mood
disorders can lead to prodigious — or meager — creative output,
Flaherty uses examples from her own life and the lives of writers from
Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King:
UNQUOTE [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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