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Wednesday, 19 June 2002 |
I must say, Radio is kinda addictive. Oh well, what is life, if not a playfield for addictions?
6:40:33 PM 
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"Society has benefited from high-volume, low-cost software and a rapidly evolving ecosystem" where disparate computer systems, software and hardware link up, Mundie said. "Microsoft can't control that process. If the printer driver tanks the system, who do you hold liable?"
Um. I hold Microsoft responsible for that. Absolutely. Of course. [Patrick Logan's Radio Weblog]
I think Microsoft is going to have to own up to making Windows so insecure that a printer driver *can* tank the system so easily. Something to do with running everything at Ring 0. I mean, we could move most of these processes out to Userland and have them talk to devices through block devices, and thus having a printer driver tank means that printing doesn't work.
Errr. Thats Unix isn't it. NT is better than Unix. Heh. Fuckers.
5:16:07 PM
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Generating SOAP. XML.com: Generating SOAP " Last month we used the Google web services API to point out some warts in WSDL. This month we'll use the same API to walk through the steps involved in building an application which uses Google. We'll do the implementation in Python. Python is open source and runs on all the popular platforms. Python is the kind of language that's very well-suited to SOAP and XML processing: it's object-oriented, so you can build large-scale programs; it allows rapid development cycles, and it has powerful text manipulation primitive and libraries, including comprehensive Unicode support." [ZopeNewbies]
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/06/12/soap.html
4:49:39 PM
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Another bust in Silicon Valley:. "'I've lived here for 12 years and finding a date is almost impossible,' said a tech executive who asked to be referred to as 'Fred.' 'I am not saying I'm gorgeous, but I'm well-educated, wealthy and decent looking. [evhead]
Reminds me of a story about how in designing shopping malls in Korea, they made sure each shopping mall had a "Massage Parlour". Shows how sensible Asians can be when they try. Also shows how fucked up sexually repressed Yanks can be.
Hohum.
4:39:05 PM
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posted by thereisnocat » June 13 8:46 PM | 15 comments. Blogroots' own Meg Hourihancontinues the campaign to reclaim the term "blog" from mainstream writers who don't have the experience of actually creating within the medium; who misconstrue what the word means based on a limited spectrum of blogs, often those that the mainstream media itself keeps writing about. It's the kind of superheterodyne feedback loop the media specializes in. [Blogroots]
Is anyone still listening to the mainstream media? Fools.
4:36:50 PM
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posted by mathowie » June 16 10:26 PM | 8 comments. Enetationis the latest to enter the weblog comment system fray. With several comment services closed to new users and others implementing limits, the question for any of these free services may be: will it be able to stick around and scale up? [Blogroots]
Simple answer, no one can afford to run the server centric model content system. So migrate the ability to the weblog tools. Gets back to my Email+News+Aggregator+AI model doesn't it?
4:35:25 PM
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posted by sudama » June 17 8:59 AM | 1 comments. "'I could talk very freely and very frankly about things I could never talk about in any other place, about subjects that are banned,' said one of the first women to start a blog in Iran." BBC: Web gives a voice to Iranian women. [Blogroots]
I am going to say this only once. Bye bye Iran. You have just lost control.
Makes me wonder how much further behind other people in the impoverished lands are. We will see.
4:33:23 PM
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Woodcocks unwelcome at Passport. Passport won't let you create a new ID if your surname happens to be "Woodcock:"
Your lastname contains a word that has been reserved or is prohibited for .NET Passport registration. Please type in a different lastname
Link
Discuss
(Thanks, Patrick!) [Boing Boing Blog]
Proof finally that Microsoft wants to dumb down the universe.
4:20:39 PM
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Amiga Inc: “Close That Open Hardware!”
Bye bye Amiga. How I once loved thee. I owned an A1000, and craved the A4000. But, I wound up with a PC instead.
With Linux on it. Believe it or not.
4:10:03 PM
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Red Herring: Who's afraid of ultra wideband? "Indeed, UWB mightily threatens a number of existing markets. The 802.11 community will be in immediate danger, and Bluetooth, the emerging wireless standard for device-to-device communications, may be rendered obsolete before anyone actually gets to use it." Such FUD. Even if UWB was fully approved today, it would be a year before any standards based on it could be finalized. [Hack the Planet]
I can tell you who is scared - Telcos. Take a bunch of people pissed at the entrenched oligopoly who now understand the power of p2p (thanks in no small part to the meme of napster), and you can play join the dots.
3:58:39 PM
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Pirating Software. Here's the reason for Windows Product Activation.
I've been in China and know firsthand that almost no one buys software over there.
Of course, someday they will (hey, I pirated software when I was in high school. I no longer do).
On the other hand, these kinds of reports are simply paid for by the computer software industry, so they tend to skew things a bit. I doubt the software industry would sell all the copies they say we're stealing, even if it were impossible to copy them.
So, the industry is getting larger thanks to its easy-to-copy products. Did the car industry go from no cars to more than half of the population having cars in 25 years? I don't think so.
Microsoft and Adobe have definitely benefitted from gaining market share due to piracy. I remember pirating both company's software in the early 1990's. It got me addicted to both company's software and now I'm a legal owner of lots of both company's software. Is Photoshop really worth $500? Who's ripping off whom?
In China the average annual wage is about what a copy of Photoshop costs here. Is there any question why piracy is going on? The industry's products are overpriced. But companies can't lower their prices because they've grown too used to the high margins that they've been making.
So, we're all criminals. Pointing the fingers at each other.
Looks like we're going to get more product activation stuff. Didn't ya know? I'm a criminal and I must be stopped. [Scobleizer Radio Weblog]
I like the fact that windows now uses Product Activation.
It is making everyone seriously consider if they really want to have to deal with the Devil.
3:48:24 PM
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Wi-Fi Changes Meeting Dynamics. More signs that journalists read blogs: "Wi-Fi Changes Meeting Dynamics," says this piece on 80211-planet.com. [Scobleizer Radio Weblog]
Bloggers Fact check speakers. Cool.
I remember reading a fantasy idea back in the 80's about how people at conferences would use uber-powerful search engines to pull up facts on each other for use as ways of pulling apart each others arguments.
I suspect the uber-powerful search engine is going to be a uber-distributed intelligence known as Bloggville.
3:46:43 PM
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Good morning germs!
I love Ofoto. On Thursday evening I ordered some pictures. On Saturday they had already arrived.
Same with Netflix. On Thursday I ordered a new movie. On Saturday it was waiting for me in my mailbox.
My buying behavior has definitely changed because of the Internet.
It's interesting that at least some of the hype surrounding the "Internet bubble" was true. The Internet does change things. It just took a lot longer than the two years that the venture capitalists were willing to give companies to get profitable.
I'll bet that in 10 years companies like NetFlix and Ofoto will be hugely profitable. Why? Because they serve customer need. Kudos to them! [Scobleizer Radio Weblog]
So, who wants to set up Ophoto in Australia?
3:36:10 PM
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The GPS friendly fire incident: design versus training. On Saturday I mentioned Alan Cooper's anecdote about a design flaw in a military GPS device. An email correspondent, Jim Hanna, who I'm quoting with permission, clarifies the story: ... [Jon's Radio]
A very sad tale of a hardware and training gone terribly wrong. The next time some offers to write embedded software in asm so that it will “go a little faster”, hit said alpha geek with a brick.
We need less low level optimisation behaviour, and more wholistic design. Munge munge.
3:21:10 PM
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[Paul Holbrook, about news aggregators] At first blush, this sounds great. But how do you prioritize those kinds of items? At what point does your news aggregator start to resemble the fire hose that email has turned into?
Paul is right, in fact I did not mean that the current Radio aggregator is going to be the final solution, but it is showing us the way. Using Mark Paschal's Kit set of tools, for example, you can already categorize items in a news aggregator, and suddenly everything starts making more sense, just like we use filters to manage email.
The point is that with tools like Radio, users can move a significant part of the content management workflow to their desktop, they can choose how to visualize it and define the flows of information. Most of all, they can decide how to visualize those contents.
While some might choose to keep all work feeds in one category and news feeds in another, others might prefer to see the New York Times news next to their budget updates.
Besides, unlike email, where the message is only stored in your local mailbox, aggregators are just a way to be notified about updates, the actual data still sits on the New York Times site, your accounting software, intranet server, other weblogs, etc. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Take Email, news feed, aggregator, and add some artificial intelligence. Hmmmm. Could be fun. 
2:57:35 PM
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Scripting News: A news aggregator is "software that periodically reads a set of news sources, in one of several XML-based formats, finds the new bits, and displays them in reverse-chronological order on a single page."
It's important to consider that "set of news sources" could also mean reports generated by your accounting software, status of your servers, posts in a discussion group, orders from your e-commerce site, updates from your co workers workflow management software ... got it? [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Probably the biggest thing required is the ability to have radio check some rss feeds much more frequently than others. I want radio to check my machines status messages at least every five minutes...
2:54:46 PM
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Maasai's 'Ultimate Gift' Of Cows To US. (via Simplicissimus) [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
And from the allafrica.com article, the following quote, that proves once and for all, that diplomats must be liars, if only to save face for everyone involved:
Mr Brencick added: "In the United States, many cows are raised and highly valued. But I know that for the Maasai people the cow is valued above all possessions and that the gift of a cow is the highest expression of regard and sympathy."
2:48:13 PM
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JRo essay: Telecommunications Implosion [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
What else can I say... I totally agree: fiber should get to homes!
The most important issue, however, are applications (applications, applications, applications!). Nobody will ask to have fiber to their home to see flat web pages. Large amount of bandwidth will create the environment for a new breed of interactive applications, somebody has to start working on these new applications ASAP.
Ask Marc Canter [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Interesting pdf. I, however, disagree with Paolo's assertion here. We do have applications that users want broadband for. It is just that no one in telco land can see that far. They are too interested in continuing to get oligopily profit from their currently installed copper last mile loops.
Sooner or later the telco's are going to get wiped out. By who? Good question...
2:36:38 PM
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Interop results udpated to include the WebMethods endpoint, and the group C Sun endpoint, and revised results for NuSOAP, Axis & Apache SOAP. Axis seems to be shaping up, just needs the mustUnderstand handling straightening out. [Simon Fell]
Axis is starting to look like a whole load of fun. So who is writing the O'Reilly animal book for it?
2:24:07 PM
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Some URLs for meekrat abuse. Funfunfun.
2:21:33 PM
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Beating Debt. Fools on our credit card discussion board are triumphing over debt. [The Motley Fool]
After reading the above, I don't feel so bad about my own financial situation. I'm fucked, but I am working to bring it under control. But, I also see why we had ten year boom.
It was financed on the back of credit card spending.
We are not coming out of this recession any time soon. Too many people are going to be excessivly credit shy for a while.
1:59:11 PM
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The headlines all weekend on Fox News (We steal it from satellite in Belgium) are about the Golf course prostitution bust.
Coverage included helicopter footage of the 'sex-tents'. Geez, what's the problem?! If you put up a Club Med sign it would be ok. Silly yanks, always arresting people for having paid-for sex. Isn't there a war on terror to fight somewhere? [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Adam, you gotta understand that America is one of the most confused countries on the planet. On one side of the country, they are laid back, and quite normal w.r.t. sex, on the other, they are all uptight and jumpy about it.
Figuring out which side is which is left as an exercise to the reader. Heh.
1:45:48 PM
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Published in a New York Minute. Online techniques and technologies give publishing a new urgency. Also: Innovative new authors ... shrinking iUniverse ... and more in M.J. Rose's notebook. [Wired News]
Publishing meets blogging. After all these “bogging is not journalism” rants, I think the above methodological change in book publishing is going to prove it once and for all.
Blogging is not journalism. Just as a Photographer is not a Painter. It is something new, but a lot of the old skills get carried through. And a whole bunch of new people are going to start trying their hand at it.
What happens at the end of the day? Probably the elimination of the “One Voice” editorial norm. A final adminission that there are many sides to any story. And this is a good thing.
1:37:37 PM
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AOL fills online bargain bin with new music. The Internet service is teaming with corporate cousin Warner Music Group to offer songs in the unprotected MP3 format to generate hype for musicians' albums. [CNET News.com]
When are they going to realise that the real scarcity that they can make money off of is attention? Sure I am willing to pay real money to the ai/service/company/individual that can find me music that I like.
Napster was a lot of things, but able to predict what music I wanted? Nope.
I have some ideas how to build a p2p music distribution system that does predict what music the people want to listen to. Now that could be interesting.
1:31:51 PM
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http://www.typorganism.com/. [Swhack Weblog]
Who'd a thunk'd it? There is a flash player 6 out. And the download site gets confused at the sight of Moz1.1a. Heh.
Just had a play with that site. Its a bit whack.
1:27:34 PM
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Disney Embraces GNU/Linux for Film Animation. AaronSw: Probably part of their cost-cutting plan: get labor from China, code from the net...; pixel: Also, Pixar (now nearly a division of Disney) has been using Unix render farms since it's inception, and Disney has been using Unix in various functions (cell coloring, background matte paintings) since the mid 80's;
(2002-06-18 14:41) [Swhack Weblog]
On one hand they want to ban any operating system that can't do DRM, and on the other they cut costs by using huge render farms full of machines running an OS that will never do DRM.
Anybody else notice the schism?
1:24:27 PM
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Jon Udell: Eclipse casts shadows. [via HackThePlanet] [Sam Ruby]
Another toy that I am going to have to spend some time playing with. Could lead to some very intersting little tidbits. Or something.
1:19:42 PM
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Why I am buying Nvidia's stock (Wes, do you agree?):
- Graphics processors are chewing up cycles faster than the flatlined PC CPU. Usage equals demand. Control of the interface is extremely important.
- The parallel architecture of graphics processors allow it to boost price performance at a 2 to 1 rate over PC CPUs. A doubling rate of 6 vs. 18 months. Nvidia's chips have twice the number of transistors the Pentium 4 has.
- There is going to be convergence between the graphics used to create movies and games. This is going to be huge. Imagine if the Star Wars game looked as good as the movie -- the sales would be huge.
- Nvidia will likely acquire AMD to add CPU functionality as a side feature of its chips (to move beyond their joint venture). That means over time the price of a multimedia PC using an AMD/Nvidia combined chip could be 30% lower than an Intel powered model. Given AMD's major second quarter loss, this acquisition will likely be done for a song.
- Microsoft is likely to create a home server that is tightly integrated (following on the heals of the Xbox's second generation). An AMD/Nvidia chip could be central to that new box. It's also likely that the brand of the chip used will be subsumed into the general conumer electronics style marketing that this new home server will use. That loss of branding will hurt Intel.
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
What I really want is the ability to take one of these GPU monsters and repurpose it as a neural net driver. Because, unless I miss my guess, these things are going to be getting pretty damn close to being full blown vector computers sooner or later.
Not that NVidia really wants to be seen having their way sexy graphics powerhouse used for mere academic purposes, but hell. Its there. Right?
1:15:24 PM
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Forbes. Patent Nonsense. Gary Reback.
>>>An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"
After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list. <<<
[John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Funnily enough, this is probably going to be the main reason that I am going to get a TiBook instead of a thinkpad.
Not that Apple is exactly smelling of roses in this regard - anyone remember the look & feel lawsuits?
1:10:21 PM
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JRo essay: Telecommunications Implosion [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Interesting read John. Apart from the fact that the Telcos (at least here in aus) have just decided that they don't have to innovate. They got absolutly spanked here in Aus by the PayTV cable roll out. They spent billions, and barely anyone can be bothered signing up.
Why? Because we would rather talk to each other than watch Celebrity Who Wants To be a Millionaire Survivor. But, the telcos, hollywood, and everyone else in MoneyTown can't see that.
They are too busy trying to repurpose their Newspaper content. Fuckers.
Bring on Community WiFi.
1:07:59 PM
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LA Times: Devices That Move Digital Media Complicate Piracy Clampdown. While Hollywood studios try to rein in what consumers can do with digital files, some consumer-electronics companies are speeding ahead with products that make it even easier for people to move movies and music around the home and the Web. [Tomalak's Realm]
Heh. This is the sound of Inevitibility.
Ps: Can I just say that "Registration Required" websites suck arse? Thanxs.
12:58:57 PM
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McVeggie. The Guardian is reporting that McDonalds is to pay out 6.85m pounds (that's currency, not beef) to Hindu and vegetarian groups after neglecting to mention that their pure vegeteable oil fried french-fries contained "essence of beef for flavouring purposes."
Before you reach for that shake, you veggie you, bear in mind that nobody ever
said anything about not enhancing that thick, yummy vanilla delight with ...
cory> [raelity bytes]
My condolences to anyone stupid enough to believe anything that McDonalds says.
12:54:04 PM
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Jim Highsmith has a great idea for figuring out the big picture of the products you build: "design the box."
[Joel on Software]
Damn fine idea really.
12:45:56 PM
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In thinking about the microeconomic principle of complements, I noticed something interesting about open source software, which is this: most of the companies spending big money to develop open source software are doing it because it's a good business strategy for them, not because they suddenly stopped believing in capitalism and fell in love with freedom-as-in-speech.
[Joel on Software]
I think Joel isn't the only one who is confused as to where Sun is trying to earn it's money.
12:41:02 PM
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Word for the day: Anticiparallelism - what a computer should worry about when its thumbs are twiddling. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
Is it just me, or is this a question of teaching coders to think about wholistic user interface design?
Too many programmers are too busy micro-optimising a solution to spot that they solved the wrong problem.
12:37:46 PM
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The Bear has some words on the situation in and around Israel. I must say, personally speaking, watching video's of school kids in the occupied territories singing songs at school praising their own for killing Jewish peoples makes me sick.
There will be no peace in the area until the brainwashing stops. And I can't see that happening anytime soon.
12:35:13 PM
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Scott Ladd: "Free software suffers from such problems as well; read the daily mailing lists for the Linux kernel, or the GNU compiler collection, or any large "open" product, and you'll see that many eyes do not necessarily mean better software. Someone finds a "bug" or wants an enhancement, so they dive in, create a patch, and submit it, without any real concept of how the new code fits into the overall product. Ever wonder why so many "free" software projects lack documentation? It's because the programmers are more enamored of coding than they are of design and writing." [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
Free software has one massive advantage over commercial-ware. A whole raft of newbies in training. Sure, someone posts a fix that doesn't fit in with the main code. But, more often than not, during the process of fitting said patch into the main code base, the patch submiter will learn a whole bunch about the code base.
And thus people grow accustomed to large project maintenance.
12:26:32 PM
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This is too funny. Think different taken to a new level. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Proof, if it were required, that JohnRobb needs a holiday. Or something.
12:21:37 PM
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Funny stuff. (via Peter Drayton)
The Two Doofuses OR Why Type Safety and the Garbage Collector Really Exist.
Take the time to read this. It is funny. [Lambda the Ultimate]
It would be funnier if it wasnt so true ...
12:19:14 PM
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Peekrat. Interesting...
12:15:00 PM
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Now I want an AntFarm WebCam.
12:03:15 PM
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Hey, heres an easy way to loose lots of hours of sleep...
JavaML. If I ever get a chance to (or if anybody else would like to) try generating Java bindings for RSDL, then JavaML might be worth looking into since it'd be a similiar approach to the Xml2CodeDom syntax that I output for the .NET languages.
I have a vague recollection of finding a Java API for constructing source code trees (a la .NET's CodeDom) many months ago but seem to have lost the link. Did anybody else happen to come across this, too? [authorities here are alert.]
11:45:59 AM
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Google’s UI. You know what, as much as I love Google for their cool, clean UI—and I do—there is one little thing that bugs me. You know how in the search results the URL appears in green at the bottom of each item? Well, even after all this time of using Google, I still click on the URL. And of course it’s not a link. It seems like it should be. [inessential.com]
I completely agree; I do the same thing. [Wavicle]
Actually the funny thing is when you are in a normal gui app, and there is some text in a different font that says something like "To view the x files that weren't backed up, click on the log tab", and well you just click on the highlighted text. And then curse.
The world as a web browser.
11:16:55 AM
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One of my bosses still disses Linux as a toy, and tells me how good Sun boxes are. He's right, Sun boxes are nice, hardware wise.
But they expensive. How can sun think it can compete hardware wise with white boxes? Maybe they think they can be the Linux geeks Management Friendly solution?
Sun's 'Big Bear' Linux server to appear in August. System to run rival Intel's chips [InfoWorld: Top News]
9:38:10 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.
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