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Dive into HTML5 has this at the beginning: "The Work shall remain online under the CC-BY-3.0 License." Anyone know a way to get complete archives of his books that's easier/better than scraping http://web.archive.org/web/20110726000452/http://www.diveintohtml5.org/ ?

He was a fun guy. I'll miss his writings. I've been reading his stuff for about six years, starting with http://howto.diveintomark.org/ipod-dvd-ripping-guide/ , which got me into using Handbrake shortly after I got a video iPod. No more google cache, but at least he couldn't/didn't remove himself from archive.org

Well, this is now content creators agreeing with them.

Not really.

Well, this is them doing half of that.

Sure, if by "doing half of that" you mean "locking down content even more and abridging fair use by not allowing timeshifting or spaceshifting." Oh, wait that's exactly /against/ fair use principles.

This is in opposition to the "imaginary property" advocates that maintain that all content should be free-as-in-beer because it doesn't cost any money to duplicate, damned be the (sometimes significant) creation costs.

This is so wrong, I'm not even sure I'm being trolled or not. Try to understand people's arguments before you put up strawmen of them.

Guess what? You're also screwing the content creator, whose work you apparently want enough to pirate.

No, the content creator was screwed when they signed a contract with the big publishers; anyone who doesn't realize this probably isn't a creator who's had to deal with the big publishers. The Internet has largely made big publishers moot, but unfortunately this cloud thing (which is a fad) is again threatening not just fair use, but the very basis of our culture. What are you going to do when (*NOT* if) they disappear part of your culture?

And before you label me as just another pirate, let me just cut you short by letting you know I pay for my media, usually directly to the artist, and I get a permanent copy (permanent meaning no one can restrict my access to it, either by DRM or "losing" it in the cloud). If it's not avaible in CD or FLAC, I don't buy. F*ck the cloud.

Written 3 years ago, I present The Future of Reading.

Somebody earlier this year wrote an article about this very topic: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2010/01/29/tinkerers-sunset

Things aren't the same as when the web was invented - where mostly text and a couple of inline images

When the web was invented, it was text only. Inline images weren't around until 1993 or so. NCSA Mosaic only supported gifs -- clicking a jpeg would launch a separate viewer (assuming you had it set up correctly).

obligatory link

Buy it for what it is, or don't buy it at all. Your choices don't get any more granular than that. - Mark Pilgrim on the iPhone

I'll never get this obsession with buying Apple products - supposedly it's because they "just work", but when you have to void the warranty to get it to do what you want it to do, you're obviously admitting that it doesn't "just work". Why buy it when you can get something that is designed to be open and hackable?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for hacking and modding and sticking it to the man, but since when is forking over your hard earned cash (to the man, no less) for a device that is hack-hostile "sticking it to the man"? Why not instead encourage companies that are encouraging you to be more than a consumer?

Remote desktops is a possibility, but the real loss that will stem from the tide of cloud computing is the atrophy of the personal computer down to a set top box whose usage is supported by ads. An iPad or iPhone is an apt example - when the personal computer no longer exists, where will an end-user's freedom to explore go?

The Tinkerer's Sunset is a good example of what bothers me about the current widespread embrace of cloud computing.

"Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end."

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0

People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...and they've made a very specific point of missing that boat for at least the last decade. They're marketing to fanboys who want it to be trendy and 'just work', not to nerds.

Too true. Obligatory links:

If wishes were iPhones
Tinkerer's Sunset

The above posts are from the same guy who wrote Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a brilliant little piece that really explains the philosophy behind Free software (oblig. quote: "Free software doesn't have "end users". That's kind of the point.")

People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...and they've made a very specific point of missing that boat for at least the last decade. They're marketing to fanboys who want it to be trendy and 'just work', not to nerds.

Too true. Obligatory links:

If wishes were iPhones
Tinkerer's Sunset

The above posts are from the same guy who wrote Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a brilliant little piece that really explains the philosophy behind Free software (oblig. quote: "Free software doesn't have "end users". That's kind of the point.")

People keep talking as if Apple really missed the boat with iPad, but the truth is they only missed the boat for hard-core, tinker-happy nerds...and they've made a very specific point of missing that boat for at least the last decade. They're marketing to fanboys who want it to be trendy and 'just work', not to nerds.

Too true. Obligatory links:

If wishes were iPhones
Tinkerer's Sunset

The above posts are from the same guy who wrote Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this to you, a brilliant little piece that really explains the philosophy behind Free software (oblig. quote: "Free software doesn't have "end users". That's kind of the point.")

See also Accessibility is a harsh mistress

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian' -- AC

FYI (in case you didn't know (or care)), this was originally said by Mark Pilgrim.

Hey, as long as we're telling preposition jokes...

What did you bring the book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?
(http://www.google.com/search?q=%22read+to+out+of+up+for%22, I recall it being told to me by my mother.)

Two women--a Southern belle and a New England Yankee--are on a plane.
The belle turns to the Yankee and asks, "So, where y'all from?"
The Yankee turns up her nose and says, "Where I am from, we don't end sentences with prepositions." Without missing a beat, the belle replies, "So, where y'all from, bitch?"
(Tweaked from http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/04/07/from, though I learned it from the Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Joke Book.)

And I also thought of this (which, IIRC, I saw as someone's sig here on Slashdot):
Take me out of the fridge and cut me up with a sharp knife an apple.

Fellow DiveIntoMark reader i presume?

I remember thinking that "The Future of Reading" was a silly, over-the-top bit of polemic. Well, here's hoping that those folks paid attention to Randall Munroe... or, I suppose, infringe local copyright law by downloading a copy from a jurisdiction where it's in the public domain.

Font creators want a comically bad permission scheme to use their fonts. Since there's no standard in place and no implementation in place, that effectively means that every font foundry is going to go out of business trying to sell their offline-only fonts to people who can't use them where they really want to. Mark Pilgrim has it right: Fuck the Foundries.

Right now, no browser will ever come close, and the specs are already 10x more complex than will ever get implemented, but adding "guess what the user meant!" crap just sucks the life out of any progress that these rendering engines have to do. IE8 punted and included IE7-mode -- that's how bad it's getting.

No, IE had stayed such a train wreck for so long that when they tried improving it they had compatibility pushback. Improving is not the problem; improving and maintaining compatibility with a neglected and inefficient engine (completely, by the way, of their own making) is.

Postel's law's not debunked by "Martian Headsets". I like Joel Spolsky, really, but "Martian Headsets" is maybe the worst thing he's ever written. Microsoft put themselves in this mess with Internet Explorer, and the road ahead is *not* to say that we should just hold everything, or to preclude progress because it's so damn hard. Think about what happens on a sub-atomic layer just inside your CPU every damn second; that's damn hard to set up, and we still made it work from the ground up. The correct course of action is to *do something about it*, and that will be painful for everyone, but the reason it's so much more painful for Microsoft than for any other browser vendor is, simply, "Microsoft".

The reason HTML5 defines tokenization and parsing is because it's meant to level the playing field. You're not angry because the rendering will, in the face of real world applications, turn complex, you're angry because it's already complex in the spec. You should be happy, because the reason it's already complex in the spec is because it already works in the real world! You certainly could, but there's not much left to actually amend the rules with, which makes HTML5 a damn good standard -- wasn't one of Joel's points that the reason HTML is so frustrating is because so much is left to the imagination or that it's all but impossible to build interoperable, perfectly implemented rendering?

Furthermore, I'd like to see one editor that neglects to open any text file with broken UTF-8. (I'm sure they exist somewhere, but I haven't ever seen that happen, and I've worked with some real messes.) UTF-8 is a lot easier and the spec is a lot more rigid, but even so you can't just fail in a real application. If you still believe in Postel's law as applied to XHTML, I encourage you to read http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experiment . "Well, the world is just going to have to get more perfect" has repeatedly turned out to not be a workable strategy. (As long as "the world" actually means "the world". Requiring strictness in a closed, scoped system where helpful recovery actually *would* mean disaster is certainly okay.)

Chris Wilson joined the HTML 5 working group (WHATWG) in April '07. Over one year, his sole contribution was that HTML versioning crap: ref.

I just read that and the WG discussion it links to, and from what I understand, Chris Wilson wants to maintain html version numbers in the doctype declaration, while others want to pretend html 5 is the only version of html in existence, which is completely stupid. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but Chris Wilson is completely correct here.

I haven't really been following the HTML 5 standard much so far, but I guess this means that HTML 5 has already done away with meaningful doctype declarations (which also helps to explain why a w3c acquaintance of mine doesn't like html 5 much).

Chris Wilson joined the HTML 5 working group (WHATWG) in April '07. Over one year, his sole contribution was that HTML versioning crap: ref. He has also been against @font-face.

What exactly is your point?

Is your point that publishers should work to minimize infringing copies of their works while encouraging purchase of legal copies? Well, I'm with you there!

Or is your point that publishers need DRM to accomplish that? Why would you believe that?

There is copyright infringement of music. And major music labels swore on their bibles, torahs, korans, and stock options that they needed strong DRM, or else there would be rampant copyright infringement and no new music would ever be created.

Today the market has largely rejected DRM on music. It's easier than ever to make and distribute infringing copies of songs. There is absolutely nothing preventing infringing copies from being made. Yet the world hasn't ended. Music is still being made.

A combination of ways to discourage infringement and encourage purchasing legal copies were found: Lower prices. Watermarking of songs. Making the legal market more convenient than the illegal market. Ensuring that the legal versions were just as good as the illegal versions. Encouraging people to support the artists they like by paying for the songs. But DRM went out the window.

So if by "finding an acceptable solution" you mean "lowering prices, watermarking games, making the legal market more convenient than the illegal market, ensuring the legal versions are just as good as the illegal versions, and encouraging people to support developers whose games they like by paying for games," great! But if you mean "We just need to find the magical level of DRM," not necessarily.

The deal breaker for me is that a Steam game, like any DRMed game, is not as good as the illegal version. What if Steam goes out of business? Or moves to Steam2 and decides they don't want to support Steam1 anymore? I lose access to all of the games I "own." Surely I can trust a large corporation like Valve, right? Ha! Large companies who screwed their customers in exactly this way include Yahoo, Google (although you got a refund), Major League Baseball, Microsoft (temporary reprieve for a few years), Wal-Mart, and Sony. Given that lineup, why should I trust an itty-bitty little company like Steam/Valve?

(To be fair, I can actually see a DRM system I would whole heartedly support: a binding public commitment to strip the DRM from the game after a short period of time. Maybe 6 to 12 months. This would hamper illegal copies during the highest profit part of the games lifespan. The binding public commitment means that someone like me would buy sooner than later.)

If you're so committed, why don't you have any free offerings? O'Reilly has tons of selections freely available online, and likely tons of books hidden in storage that are both out-of-print and never to return (at least without serious revision). Why not open up and share them?

The ePubBooks.com site says it wants ePub to be to books what MP3 is to music ... the only way that can happen is if there are tools to publish content, legal and questionable, and have free, questionable, and licensed media be easily shared. MP3 is what it is today because it was used for noncommercial purposes without restrictions. What resulted was a complete change in paradigm, putting the record stores almost completely out of business and then moving on to threaten the whole recording industry with a new model fronted by iTunes.

Is the book industry ready for such a transformation? You've got a bit of an advantage, with no easy way for users to "rip" books from bound tombs to ePub files, but that's only a temporary fix as user demand will push forward digital releases soon enough.

Brace yourselves and prepare. Is this the right path? Is there money to be made while still playing fair? Who will be the "iTunes" of books (and can they get there without DRM)? Take inspiration from Audible and friends, but also note the red flags waved around regarding what DRM does and why it is bad (and why even Apple ended up discarding DRM in the end).

You want ePub to take off? Take out the DRM. Offer books for free. Make it easy for users to publish free (and non-free) ePub books. Make it more accessible on everything from desktops to portable devices: standard readers across platforms, F/OSS ePub software (readers, converters, writers, and RSS/RDF-to-ePub aggregators) that leads the way rather than just limping along, etc.

Yes, you will start by losing money, just like MP3 did. But in the end, there will be a better product that can be shared and loved by all. And there's still profit to be had, too.

Alternatively, license out your DRM tech so Sony can build a reader compatible with your service.

I think you may be completely missing the point of their business model. One of the benefits of DRM is that everyone has to repurchase things.

I have MP3s that are nearly a decade old. Are there any DRM systems still extant from that long ago?

DRM media expires. That's the point. Removing the single point of failure contradicts the whole model.

For an entertaining and informative introduction to the many container formats and video codecs you could read this gentle introduction to video encoding by Mark Pilgrim.

Hm. This is why I don't pay for a subscription to slashdot. (scratches ass) ok, time to haul out the trollbait. Just be sure to wash your hands after sprinkling it around.

• The FSF is approaching this 180-degrees wrong. Apple will actually gain something out of this as paying Johns^Wcustomers discover that they can't get help they desperately need, like "why can't I eject my CD from my computer without my keyboard attached?"
• The FSF will suffer another public relations blow in doing so, allowing them to dwindle into background noise.
• Apple will continue to sexually tease^W^Wsurprise its consumer base, because they like the cool shiny-plastic phallic shape that "it" comes in.
• The Windows old folks home will continue to go on, because, um, we really don't know what else to do with them.
• Get off my lawn. Ma, get my gun.

Ok, let's play it out:

• Windows is here and will stay, as long as Ballmer doesn't do something stupid like, oh, attempt to buy Yahoo with all of their cash money. Or, say, market video games. And cell phones. Maybe one of those thin-display thingys but with something geeky-cool, like a touch-screen...
• Apple's market share will continue to grow as long as they can brush aside criticism of their business model. Of course, this is nothing new - it's been going on for a long, long time and no-one has really perked their head up to notice until recently. Everyone will miss the real point - that as Apple continues to accelerate in market share,they continue to tighten their grip on their customers through vendor-lock-in. This model worked well for the Microsoft/Business relationship, but there are far more Joe Sixpack customers out there than their are John Cubedweller office workers. And Apple would really, really like to get to know you, your wife, and the rest of your family.
• Linux doesn't have a business model, no matter how much Red Hat would like them to. As such, it remains always beyond Joe Sixpack's reach, even though it's embedded all over the place.
• BSD is in a ship that looks alot like the USS Linux but the crew thinks they're out to sea, despite still being tied to the dock. Hence, it charts a course to nowhere.
• Solaris will do well in markets that were previously dominated by Solaris, accounting for a strong uptick in Solaris adoption. This fits well with Sun's new (no, not that old one, the new one) direction.

Why are people leaving the industry again?

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

>>> Exherbo is a distribution designed for people who know what they're doing with Linux.

Are you so badass that gentoo is like ripping candy out of newb babie hands? Exherbo!

>>> Although it shares some code with Gentoo, and although many concepts are similar, and although many of the people involved were or are Gentoo developers, most Exherbo code is rewritten from scratch.

We know way more than those Gentoo tards will ever know.

>>> Exherbo is not, at the moment, a user-targeted distribution.

Come on... you want it, don't you? You want to be so badass to use my awesome distro, to be the most leetest person ever.

>>> It's not that we think that Gentoo is bad.

Gentoo is wretched for our godly needs.

>>> OK, I Want to Try Exherbo

I am high as a kite.

>>> Right now, all we care about is getting it into a fit state for a small number of developers.

We're announcing this publicly because we have no idea what product we're presenting, but we'll make it sound fucking awesome compared to everything else, plus way wore leetsauce, so we can get some actual developers to contribute something useful to make our project objectively good.

>>> The above paragraph does not apply if your pet project is something we find interesting.

Again, if you have anything that will make this distro more than a publicity stunt, for the love of god, please let us know.

>>> It's not that we hate you (unless we do).

Forgot how much better we are then you? You did? OK, in conclusion, fuck you.

1. Runs Linux
2. Actually has the source for its Linux available
3. Displays regular .txt files, HTML, and non-DRM PDFs
4. The text displayer is free software
5. Is hackable; allow me to install third-party applications using the screen, and to write my own

YES!!! Hypothetical: you're new to Linux. Someone tells you to open up a "terminal". OK.... You don't know what a terminal is but it resembles that command line thingy you've seen once or twice (and reminds you of the hackers at the movies). Now you see "sudo". wtf?? apt-get... wtf again. This kind of banter of "just type in garbel garbel garbel" just helps keep our operating system exclusive to us. While I don't think this year is "the year" (has it ever been?), Ubuntu has definitely made things way easier.

So, going back to your question. The average user is not going to understand that sudo mean "execute a command as another user", in this case the super user. Hell, they probably don't even understand what the root user is. They aren't going to understand that "apt-get install" will install packages for them. They also aren't going to understand what the ubuntu-restricted-extras package is. We can tell them to copy and paste this, but this reminds me of the "if you give a man a fish" cliche.

So what can they do instead? Well, this is where good package management software starts to show where linux has been advancing in the "average user" realm. I'm on a Gutsy laptop right now typing this. In hopes of not disproving my point, I opened add/remove. I typed in "mp3" in the search box. The first result was the restricted-extras package, which according to it's subtitle is "codecs to play mp3, sid, mpeg1..." :) However, I think this wouldn't have shown up with the default repositories enabled. But, according to Ubuntu Brainstorm the needed repositories will be enabled by default in Hardy. The terminal is a powerful and efficient tool. Yes, if I know the name of the package I want I use apt-get. But I do this because at this point I know what "sudo" and "apt-get" means. Telling new users to do it this way takes them out of their comfort zone. It's not necessary and doesn't teach them anything. For more anger about resorting to the terminal, I refer you to an excellent (NSFW) Mark Pilgrim rant.

As Mark Pilgrim said, "Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel." It's depressing that this isn't all a given.

Someone here linked to this which has so many good points I have no problem with reposting it.

But anyway: These people are being silly. The text editor problem has exaustivly been solved about 10 to 15 years ago. Since then we've gotten a few more, nearly all for free and one better than the next. And to all those who after 20 years of GUI computing still haven't gotten it:

YOU DON'T WRITE TEXT IN A WORD PROCESSOR!

If you're thinking "I know what I'm gonna do now - I'm gonna write a text." then DON'T use a word processor. Use an Editor of which there are countless around and available. Word processors are for formating and making documents print-ready. Repeat after me:" Word processors are *not* primary writing tools. " And don't even dare think of using a word processor for programming. There's a special place in hell for people who do that. Really.

I've been programming and writing for more than two decades now and the last time I abused a word processor as an editor for writing down my initial draft was with AmiPro on Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS4. And only because I was a n00b at writing on computers, it was a print document from the get-go and AmiPro was good enough not to suck at writing and Win 3.11 lacked a good editor. I've been using jEdit for allmost a decade now and have recently picked up Emacs (not recommended for people who don't know what awaits them) because it runs on the CLI which I often have to use.

Bottom line: It's called Text Editor, or 'Editor' for short, folks. This type of programm has existed for over 30 years. Pick your favorite. And they've all got a fullscreen mode too.

• No distractions. Full screen. Hidden menu bar. Hidden scroll bar. Nothing but text.
• In full screen mode text doesn't wrap over the entire screen. Instead your text is formated in a readable column in the center of the screen.
• Few important writers statistics (word count) pop up at bottom of screen, but hidden by default.
• Lots of control over the look (colors, cursors, and fonts and paragraph formatting, even in plain text mode)
• "Normal" app, user doesn't have to know about command line.

"Here's the basic problem: you're writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It's 2007."

If you're going to shill for Silverlight (which you clearly are, given your Scoble-soundbite title and your previous post here), at least be honest about it. This reads like one of those "evaluation guides" that sales put out for lazy journalists: "An XYZ app should be judged on features A, B, and C; by coincidence, our new XYZalizer product does A, B and C..."

I fully sympathize with your desire for a better way, but not at the cost of throwing away the Web and replacing it with the $VENDOR Network, which is what Silverlight (and others) are trying to do. Microsoft will not support an open Web. Not yet. They can't; they're institutionally addicted to monopoly rents, and monopoly rents require platform lock-in, whether that platform be Win32 or Silverlight or anything else.

I think Mark Pilgrim said it best, and far more entertainingly: "Seriously? Seriously? Do I really have to explain why this is a bad idea? Again? To a bunch of technological virgins who haven't been fucked yet?"

(Incidentally, we did a quick evaluation of Silverlight a few months back, and once you stripped away the layers of PR I really couldn't see what the excitement was about. All the demo apps were some variation of "Oh look, it's a another video player. Just what the world was waiting for." Completely uninspiring. And we're a .NET shop; gawd only knows what everyone else thought.)

Their goal is to enable you to buy a DVD and move the content to their devices (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV). The MPAA has shut down every application that allows their users to do this...

Via Daring Fireball, here's Mark Pilgrim on The Future of Reading. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has raised some questions about the DRM in Kindle ebooks (he loathes it): it's not possible to share books, even with other Kindle owners.

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content.

And here's at least one case where Mozilla did not, in fact, call the shots: Bug 364297. (I'd link directly to Bugzilla but they don't accept links from /.)

Quote from the bug:

Per contract requirements with Google, we need to make Google our default home page and search provider in CJKT locales.

For the home page. This may involve simply changing the DNS entries rather than the builds themselves.

For the search engine, we need to select Google as the default.

(Emphasis above is mine. "CJKT locales" is shorthand for China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Prior to this bug being filed these locales' default search provider had been Yahoo.)

I read the story with interest as something like this happened to me the other day. It didn't even occur to me that Google had been hacked. I figured the original site had been compromised. A hacked web site can be defaced for shits and giggles, obviously, but it could also have a meta refresh tag added to send the browser off to wherever the defacer wants. With the security hole history of most CMS systems out there, I'm surprised that doesn't happen more often.

It looks like Firefox 3 will allow disabling of meta refresh.

The Firefox NoScript extension might be worth considering as well.

You forgot to translate something as "I'm high as a kite."

It's a standard:
http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translatio n
http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/macrovision_tran slation
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-tr anslation
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/24/fm-tra nslation
http://waffle.wootest.net/2007/09/01/pr-speak-nbc- universal/
http://waffle.wootest.net/2007/05/02/pr-speak/
http://andersnorgaard.blogspot.com/2007/08/transla tion-from-pr-speak-to-english-of.html

You forgot to translate something as "I'm high as a kite."

It's a standard:
http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/adobe_translatio n
http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/macrovision_tran slation
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/04/16/dhh-tr anslation
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/24/fm-tra nslation
http://waffle.wootest.net/2007/09/01/pr-speak-nbc- universal/
http://waffle.wootest.net/2007/05/02/pr-speak/
http://andersnorgaard.blogspot.com/2007/08/transla tion-from-pr-speak-to-english-of.html

"Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel. I'm not saying data export isn't important, it's just aiming kinda low. You mean when I give you data, you'll give it back to me? People who think this is the pinnacle of freedom aren't really worth listening to."

In many ways, the tale of my switch is more of the same old story. Mac OS X was "free enough" to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer.

I'm not claiming that either Free Software or open formats are a silver bullet. There are many risk factors, and Free Software mitigates some of them some of the time. There are many layers -- data on top of applications on top of operating systems on top of hardware -- and open formats can reduce the friction between some of them some of the time. They're both lubricants that help you to slide out one layer and replace it without the whole thing toppling down. Apple would prefer that I not replace any of their layers, and they have gone out of their way to increase the friction between them.

Which brings us back to John Gruber's oranges. His counter-argument -- that lock-in hasn't been a problem for me yet, so why all the fuss now -- could not be further from the truth. It's been a constant problem for 22 years. Much of the data I've spent my life creating has been lost or seriously degraded through a series of proprietary formats and forced migrations. This is why I felt so betrayed, in particular, by Mail.app "upgrading" me away from mbox format. It took a lot of forethought on my part, not to mention actual time and effort, to convert all my disparate mail archives from all those different mail programs. I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format... and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time. It'll be the last time they get the chance.

In many ways, the tale of my switch is more of the same old story. Mac OS X was "free enough" to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer.

I'm not claiming that either Free Software or open formats are a silver bullet. There are many risk factors, and Free Software mitigates some of them some of the time. There are many layers -- data on top of applications on top of operating systems on top of hardware -- and open formats can reduce the friction between some of them some of the time. They're both lubricants that help you to slide out one layer and replace it without the whole thing toppling down. Apple would prefer that I not replace any of their layers, and they have gone out of their way to increase the friction between them.

Which brings us back to John Gruber's oranges. His counter-argument -- that lock-in hasn't been a problem for me yet, so why all the fuss now -- could not be further from the truth. It's been a constant problem for 22 years. Much of the data I've spent my life creating has been lost or seriously degraded through a series of proprietary formats and forced migrations. This is why I felt so betrayed, in particular, by Mail.app "upgrading" me away from mbox format. It took a lot of forethought on my part, not to mention actual time and effort, to convert all my disparate mail archives from all those different mail programs. I finally got everything into a single archive in an open, stable format... and just 3 short years later, Apple found a way to screw me one last time. It'll be the last time they get the chance.

If no browser accepts it, the developer will have to fix it or get fired.

More likely, the developer will stop using technology that makes their life harder, and will stick with invalid HTML4 and Flash and Silverlight and all the other possibilities, which defeats the aim of improving interoperability on the web.

Also, browsers have bugs. What happens when a user tests in one browser which accidentally accepts their invalid code, without noticing that other browsers don't? (Possible answer: other browsers will have to start accepting that invalid code too, else their users will stop using that browser and start using the one that can actually display the web. And since the specification would only say how to handle valid code, the other browsers will have to reverse-engineer each other to get mostly-compatible behaviour for invalid code, which results in a mess of incompatibilities - that is what has happened for HTML4, and is what HTML5 is trying to fix by defining how all invalid content must be handled in a way that is sufficiently compatible with the existing behaviour (and existing bugs) of browsers.)

Also, most content is generated dynamically, so you can't simply test the page before you upload it. Server-side code has bugs, and draconian error handling does not make things easy to fix.

Paraphrasing Mark Pilgrim: on a long enough timeline, the utility of all non-free software approaches zero.

Free software may get orphaned as often or more often than proprietary software, but it can get un-orphaned, and that's the important thing. Businesses who run on OS/360 are an interesting example of what happens when the proprietary vendor goes to great lengths to prevent the software from becoming orphaned in the first place... but who owns the applications that those guys run? I was under the impression that IBM provided the platform, but not the applications--if I'm wrong, please do correct me. If IBM closed up shop tomorrow, how affected would they be?

Also, I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare the stability of a single private company with the stability of the open-source community as a whole--which, if you're a company willing to support a developer, is the stability of the entire programming industry.

I worked at a medical office which ran Medical Manager for many years. It did what it needed to do, sent out bills, all that stuff. However, it was vulnerable to the Y2K problem, in that the program would not accept dates past 12/31/99. The company that had made the software had been purchased by another, larger company, which wanted to sell a new, fifty thousand dollar version which would require a hardware upgrade as well, and would run on a completely different platform. It would have been cheaper to hire a programmer to make the date change, update the tables and whatever... but they didn't have that option. Vendor lock-in is a very real problem; once you give money to that vendor, you're paying for the chains that bind you to them. It's not in their interest to help you be flexible.

Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple of decent articles about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.

Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know is that staying in control of your computer is a decent policy to stick to, and Opera would have to be significantly better than Firefox or Konqueror for me to use it. That's not being "blind", as you put it, it's being sensible in exercising caution.

Sometimes the best tool for the job depends on how far into the future you are looking. Free Software advocates are more pragmatic than you think. You just need to stop thinking about what works today and start wondering about what will work tomorrow. Mark Pilgrim wrote a couple of decent articles about the kinds of problems proprietary software can cause.

Now I don't use Opera for anything other than testing, so I don't know what kinds of risks that particular software exposes you to. What I do know is that staying in control of your computer is a decent policy to stick to, and Opera would have to be significantly better than Firefox or Konqueror for me to use it. That's not being "blind", as you put it, it's being sensible in exercising caution.

Bullshit.

New words come and go. Get used to it. The 'blogosphere' is a reasonable term for an extension of the web that's grown around new syndication media formats. It's used by quite a lot of intelligent people.

Are we going to suggest Jon Udell is a know-nothing, even though he's had very successful runs at BYTE and Infoworld? How about Tim Bray? Mark Pilgrim?
The folks at BoingBoing?

I remember back around 1995 when people thought the "Web" was a ridiculous word, because it really was all about the Internet, the Web was just a popular fad soon to be supplanted by other & better applications.