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I use SLF4J (as a wrapper around Log4J, usually), and consider Commons Logging deprecated. This is a blog post from the author of Commons Logging:

I'll come right out and admit it: commons-logging, at least in its initial form, was my fault...If you're building an application server, don't use commons-logging. If you're building a moderately large framework, don't use commons-logging. If however, like the Jakarta Commons project, you're building a tiny little component that you intend for other developers to embed in their applications and frameworks, and you believe that logging information might be useful to those clients, and you can't be sure what logging framework they're going to want to use, then commons-logging might be useful to you.

Most of the time I'm *not* building a Commons-style component, so JCL's dependencies hinder more than help. SLF4J, however, is very light-weight and very useful. One feature I like is a built in String.format function that won't evaluate if logging is disabled.

That's a pretty big grin on that smiley, but I'd like to introduce you to my standard creepy pic, the orangutan robot!

Print this out on a color printer and tape it to her screen:
Windows Emulator for MAC OSX

All right, all you Doubting Thomases. I double dog dare you to complain about the US court system now.

Oh, I think I can take a shot at that.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0120124/2003/08/12.html

Nah, I'm an optimist. They would come here so that they could be our housepet

Come to think of it, maybe they have already arrived.

If I download a program, the person I got from distributed it. I copied it.

If they decide to distribute what they have done, that is when the restrictions under the GPL kick in, not one minute before. At that point, the restrictions are precisely these...

127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 img.x10.com
127.0.0.1 ads.x10.com
127.0.0.1 www.x10.com
127.0.0.1 x10.com
127.0.0.1 ads.addynamix.com
127.0.0.1 leadgreed.com
127.0.0.1 www.leadgreed.com
127.0.0.1 c1.zedo.com
127.0.0.1 ad.trafficmp.com
127.0.0.1 media.adcentriconline.com

Consider that it's likely that they want to be Sony, not MS--or rather, have been trying to become what Sony should've been.

Let's see:

• Jobs admires their products and studied their business model
• walkman--> ipod
• entertainment hub computing
• laptops to envy
• consumer/pro product lines
• partly earned rep for quality
• sleekness
• aiming for upper end of market
• brand premium
• and now, content distribution

Your example of Gore is interesting, but at 7500 people isn't really that large. I'm thinking of companies in the 20,000 - 100,000 range. My last company which I referred to before has about 100,000 employees.

In "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell posits that part of the reason that we don't do well in large organizations is that our brains top out at handling about 150 social relationships(more here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/stories/2003/01/0 1/tippingPointNetVersion.html#number ), where those relationships include your relationships with the people, and their relationships with each other, so you know how everybody 'fits' together.

Hmm... I wouldn't have guessed that. My theory is that people are evil, dysfunctional, and incompetent (in some mixture of these, not all at once usually). For the evil part, many people in management are evil to some degree: they seek positions of power because they're attracted by power, and when they have it, they wield it in negative ways, doing what's in their own interest (like empire-building) rather than the company's. Then there's incompetent employees who aren't productive but find ways of sticking around and collecting a paycheck, many times by sabotaging other employees. Put together all these basic problems of human nature, and even the best-designed organization just seems doomed to failure.

"How do we build better institutions?" is clearly a big question. There is quite a bit of material out there about Gore, the people who came up with Gore-Tex. The 'big' difference is that their organizational structure does not have very much hierarchy in it. They even have a list of material about them as an organization on their website:

http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/reading/index.ht ml

I get the sense that the development side of Google is somewhat like this(the 20% time doesn't have any hierarchy at all right?), and they are doing well, even though they are a bit young to use as a reference for a good organization, and I don't have anything to point at as evidence. In "The Tipping Point", Malcolm Gladwell posits that part of the reason that we don't do well in large organizations is that our brains top out at handling about 150 social relationships(more here: http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/stories/2003/01/0 1/tippingPointNetVersion.html#number ), where those relationships include your relationships with the people, and their relationships with each other, so you know how everybody 'fits' together. (Part of the reason that this is interesting is that if you look here: http://www.gore.com/en_xx/aboutus/index.html you will see that Gore has 7500 people working in 45 locations. 7500/45=166)

Comparing the future to his predictions, as it happens, will certainly be interesting.

Brain modeling is interesting, and probably the best near term route to a thinking machine. Our current understanding of the brain basically says that intelligence is largely related to connectedness, and that the brain manages the complexity of that connectedness using self organizing principles. The basic design of the brain, if it is changing at all, is currently changing very slowly(and has been changing slowly for all of recorded history and a long time before that, and perhaps for a very long time before that). The most 'exciting' explanation for why humans all of the sudden started thinking more, that I have seen, is the one presented by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point; basically, our brains got bigger to help us socialize, and we are largely limited to being comfortable with ~150 other people(comfortable meaning understanding the abilities of that many people, and *all* of the relationships between them). So the key question that Kurzwiel hand waves around is whether our brains are limited by how much stuff they are made of, or by something else. If it is something else, thinking computers might not end up a whole lot smarter than us.

Outline of The Tipping Point:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0107127/stories/2003/01/0 1/tippingPointNetVersion.html

Absolute bullshit.

How do you call code in a "linear fashion" on Linux but supposedly not in Windows? It follows a line, in both cases, from a first function call to the end of the function call. None of the diagrams show what data is going through (even as an example) or what the intent of the function call is apart from the backtrace. It doesn't show anything but that every call trace goes back through a certain set of functions. Windows will have more for a lot of reasons - the fact that it is fundamentally a microkernel, it has a much more engaged message passing subsystem and set of HALs and interaction with "kernel-mode" drivers (especially the IIS acceleration features which are NOT implemented the same way as Linux's kernel http acceleration in the same way that neither are FreeBSD's HTTP accept filter).

That doesn't mean it's fundamentally worse, it just means it is architectured a little differently. As I said for each call there is no trace of how much code is executed nor it's data. For all you know from the diagram a lot of it is passing through DLL interfaces to other DLLs, kernel interfaces and driver subsystems. You can't just count the code back and say "well, it passed through more wrappers so it's harder to secure". Which of those functions are simply passing the data back onto the stack and calling the same principle function in another DLL?

http://radio.weblogs.com/0105852/stories/2003/01/2 5/takingBufferOverrunsSeriously.html

The VisualC++ libc runtime has a crapload of "security checks" wrestled into it if you use the right compiler flags, which pass it through many more layers than in glibc.. at the expense of slowing it down. On Linux, it's not in the C runtime, it's in stuff like SELinux and PAX. Stack checking and canaries and suchlike. You think that makes the code LESS secure that it is in the C runtime?

Starting with Windows Server 2003 (and XP SP2 and obviously a shitload more in Vista), even more is done on the OS side of things, built into NX bit handling and a ton of other checks. All of these run through all kinds of little calls. Is it less secure if you have 1 bug in 10,000 massively interlinked calls on Windows than if you have the same bug in only 1000 calls in Linux?

This is also just the STARTUP of Apache and IIS. Does IIS create more buffers, caches, spawn processes earlier, do any configuration details, doesn't registry access take a lot longer to do, isn't pulling configuration data out of Active Directory a very heavy process compared to parsing an Apache config file? How do these relatively innocuous things affect the security? It is just as easy for Apache to have a maliciously encoded line in a config file which is NOT going to affect a fixed, due to a parser bug or somesuch, which simply cannot be gained from accessing a fixed, structured LDAP database with significantly more strict rules (a lot of the data you'd want to exploit by mangling directives and arguments, you couldn't put in the Active Directory anyway - other parts of the OS that IIS doesn't even consider, is at work here).

The diagrams mean absolutely nothing. However of one thing I am sure; this guy earned ZDnet a lot of banner impressions today.

I'd meant to cite the original interview where I read this, unfortunately I couldn't find it. I did, however, find another article where it basically states the same thing. http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/03/09.html#a 6925 . "Why do some people hate ClearType? Because ClearType relies on how we perceive color. Some people, he says, have a heightened perception to some colors which makes ClearType less useful to them." I've hated ClearType since its inception and am further agitated that it's forced on us in both Vista and Office 2007 in such ways that are difficult to completely rip out. I've been in many arguments with people that it's difficult to read and makes me nauseous failing to understand why people enjoyed it and many years, operating systems and LCD monitors later, it still looks as awful as it looked to me the first day I'd tried it. What further bothers me is many examples are given with italicized serifed text which arguably makes it easier to decipher.

This sounds more like insider trading . . . Using timely insider knowledge to gain an advantage in the (political) marketplace. Just because the password is dictionary, doesn't make it legal.

Slashdot gets 73.5% of its science and tech news from there so it has to be good. Ronald Piquepaille's Technology Trends.

so many cheap/free used/broken iMacs being tossed out

I work as a network admin at a school

The old CRT iMacs may seem as useless as a prop to you, but they hold their own pretty well.

Of course, somebody at Microsoft already figured out how to kill the iPod over a year ago:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/19.html#a 8932

It's so simple-
1) start a blog
2) pay out the *ss for big name music stars and podcasters to design it.

How could the top brass have ignored this foolproof plan for so long?

Unfortunately OpenSourceCMS.com only showcases the lightweight CMSs, usually categorized under the low-end collaborative portals label.

Paul Everitt from Zope has a very good blog post about Open Source CMS positioning

The only image returned by the probe.

When they changed the elevators at the Marriott Marquis Times Square, not everyone was impressed.

There could very well be people getting into trouble who did nothing wrong. I service lots of residential machines and their loaded not just with spyware, but trojans and viruses that make their way into these machines through remote and browser exploits. Some these machines need complete re-installation even though I clean up all local machine and user specific startup entries.

These I suspect have been root-kitted to act as zombies or proxies. These people have no idea what kinds of traffic is running through their machines and connection. It sounds as if such people are getting sued in some instances, but probably don't the know well enough to realize what is happening.

It doesn't seem to me that a list of bittorrent peers associated with a copyrighted file proves guilt. The environment is too insecure to guarantee who the actual source is. It seems to me the RIAA should have to prove a couple things:

1) That they downloaded the file with the copyrighted name and verified that the content is actually the copyrighted material.

2) That the activity from the IP address of the peer being charged actually represents the activity of a particular machine's owner. They would probably need to confiscate the machine for this - is this feesible? Just charging the owner of a connection seems unreliable, many machines can sit on a home or business network. Can one be held responsible for hijacked traffic running through their pipe?

Where this is headed it seems is a battle over regulating net communication. The RIAA will begin to push technical mandates through congress to make the internet more "secure," which will be difficult at best without implementing lots of centralized control and monitoring. How long till we have sign our packets with keys? Then how long till "sponsored" packets become free, while others cost?

A recent slashdot story featuring Doc Searl's opinion piece, Saving the Net from the pipeholders" sum's up this position very well. It's kind of long, but but offers an insightful view of what's ahead, and is worth reading for anyone with interest in the future net as a decentralized, unprejudiced peer to peer medium.

Maybe you aren't trolling. But you are definitlely one thing. You're a moron.

I really fail to see how the takeover by a small group of people of the greatest technology for human connection and innovation (the Internet) fails to qualify as "stuff that matters". I also fail to see the truth in your assertion that an accomplished writer is really just "some failure".

I've seen that 70,000 new blogs per day figure, but you really need a filter on top of that to determine the real number of new blogs. Is blogging a phenomenon that millions of users are getting into? Or does it just look that way from the states?

I wrote and ran some software for a while that tracked blog posts by fetching data from ping.blo.gs and analyzing it looking for trends. The biggest trend I found was that most of the pings were spam.

Spam accounted for ~70% of the posts that came through. You can see it on http://www.weblogs.com/. There are probably (by now) millions of blogs on the major blogging services that exist solely as vehicles for spam. It sucks. A fraction of the data that I got was actually real blog posts written by real humans, and only a small fraction of that was useful content.

All that said, I run WordPress and I like it. :)

Ostensibly the government thought of that, since terrorists use linux.

Is Chris Sontag heading this project up, he might have a few good pointers...

I don't know about the other guy, but Hadi Partovi might be a significant loss to Microsoft. See this blog written by a Microsoft insider last summer: Hadi Partovi what are you thinking?

Scroll down to Strange but true
And just for fun, there's a screenshot in the middle of this page.

This is no suprise. Microsoft needs to try to become a great force in search to keep up with Google and AOL is content and no power anymore. Anyone at search.msn.com would be salivating over this kind of a deal so that the search services could be enhanced.

One great article by Microsofts Scoble http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/10/04.html#a 11372 shows that there is along way yet before search is over, the domination by Google is only for a short time if they only were to protect their lead but would be much more exciting if content were in the engine as well as the link to the result.

Scoble just reported that the story has been confirmed to be false.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/10/05.html#a 11375

We are not better off if google beats microsoft. The new boss is the same as the old boss, just different methods.

For what google is up to: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103955/categories/stupid HumanProgramming/2005/09/21.html#a200

"They are building a real time customer profile on your real identity. This is a very valuable commodity as it gives google the ability to sell high value campaigns to advertisers.

This may are may not seem obvious to you, but it struck me in a tetris like way how all the bricks fit together if you are trying to build up a real time customer categorization system that can be used across all properties. Other companies might do the same thing using a portfolio approach. But google has taken a less direct Sun Tzu Art of War approach.

If you notice google doesn't create word processors or accounting programs. Almost everything they do is about getting content and getting you to provide an identity to them. ..."

But if you have nothing else to go by, even bad documentation can often be of some help. As somebody once said: "Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing."

Read some other Microsoft blogs sometime. Either this "guy" is a real Microsoft insider, or he's spent far too much time studying the company. He's not writing about anything that isn't present on other websites, but he writes about them in more detail. Of course, there's also the fact that none of his fellow Microsoft bloggers (outside of Ballmer) seem to be saying that what he's saying isn't true. There's always a chance that this is an elaborate hoax, but I don't think the chances of that are very high. Some of these Microsoft folks would've stepped up to deny this, and wouldn't be saying nice things about mini-microsoft.

Hey, it's Robert Scoble, the Microsoft blogger. Looks like Slashdot is playing right into Microsoft's blog publicity campaign to repair their image after the damaging BusinessWeek fiasco. :)

I think its also fair to bring to attention a post made by scoble [http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011] on channel9 publishing an internal ms letter [http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=112 438#112438] which lists some of the efforts of employees into the hurricane relief.

...Nigel (the guy they .quoted) is wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

...Nigel (the guy they .quoted) is wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The Scobleizer already denied it, claiming that first-hand knowledge and exprerience show Nigel is wrong about Vista

Microsoft is already blowing their bloghorn about this as well:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/08/ 31/458879.aspx

(and that reactions has been resyndicated by the Scobelizer himself already:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/01.html#a 11011)

From the post:
"I'm a bit stunned by the overall proposal that was brought forward to the State though as it seems to be a bit short sighted and unnecessarily exclusive."

"unnecessarily exclusive"? Someone at Microsoft is claiming that someone else's decision to use an open alternative is unnecessarily exclusive? That does seem like grasping for the last straw doesn't it...

It would be news to me that MS is paying bloggers to evangelize Windows Vista. I think you may be referring to Team 99, but I don't believe they're being paid.

I cannot comment on DR-DOS. I know nothing about it and anything I'd say would be mere speculation.

According to the IE team leader,
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/28.html#a 10776 the toolbars should work in IE7.

Anyway this is an important issue so I highly recommend that people RTFA on this one. Basically, what it comes down to is that identity services should follow the same rules as your local S&M club: Sane, Safe, and Consensual.

• Shock and Awe: a constant pummeling of software bombs to beat the users into submission

It didn't take long for Scoble to try his marketroid magic to exploit the situation;

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/07/19.html#a 10693
"Rough week for Firefox team"

Don't forget to take a look at his comments section to see how hard his trying to spin this to show Firefox is even less secure than IE!

Scoble did link to Ed Bott's take. If you think the Scobleizer is an echo chamber you've a lot to learn.

And oh, it's really funny to see an anonymous coward carp at Scoble, who consistently has shown that his opinions are his own, whether it be about MSN/China or Microsoft/Gay Rights. Yes he works for Microsoft. Yes he blogs. If you can't deal with that, don't read him. But stop calling _him_ a brown-noser when we know nothing about you or your biases.

There's some really excellent analysis on this by Ed Bott.

Compare and contrast to the lies and misdirection spread (as is normal), by Microsoft's resident spin doctor Robert Scoble. See his Ballmer interview, aka, The Idiots Guide to Brownnosing, to see his true colors.

Lots of Gator-bashing is rightly occurring all over the MSDNosphere, see here for a funny example. Remember, even Microsoft employees (commenting anonymously, of course) hate this idea.

I'm guessing that Microsoft will somehow integrate Claria's obnoxious 'personal marketing' tactics into Internet Explorer 7 or the new RSS functions to get a chunk of the targeted intarweb ad market which Adsense has completely sewn up for normal web pages. We should go and tell them what we think about Claria and Gator, not to mention their general business ethics. Don't let Scoble's lies deceive you, and don't hold back.

Well this is annoying. Scoble complained just earlier on his blog that Slashdot hadn't linked to his Ballmer interview.

The post in question: Interesting that Slashdot hasn't linked to the Ballmer thing yesterday. Maybe they belong to the Andrew Orlowski "we-must-not-link-to-or-acknowledge-Scoble" school of reporting. Heh.

What's fun is that Ballmer, in the interview yesterday, took a swipe at open source and IBM and Oracle. Surely that'd be worth getting the Slashdotters all riled up.

He got a lot of comments pointing out the interview was content-free, a spin job, and otherwise of generally no interest to the discerning crowd here. How pleased I was to see Scoble's shot go amiss.

And then I refresh the front-page here :-(. Come on editors, even the interviewer semi-admits this as being a troll-piece in a /. context.

From Scoble's Blog

the same way Scobliezer does! We're just a bunch of tech savvy and malicious crybabies anyway...

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/06/16.html#a 10419

'Haute Cuisine' on Mars?

If you're lucky enough to be a crew member of one of the next European Space Agency (ESA) long-term missions, you will have the choice between eleven new delicious recipes, such as 'martian bread and green tomato jam' or 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles' when it's time for dinner. In 'Ready for dinner on Mars?,' ESA says that these recipes will use fresh ingredients grown in greenhouses built on Mars colonies or other planets. The future astronauts -- should I write 'farmonauts'? -- will grow potatoes, onions, rice, soya or lettuce. And it's interesting to note that the new menus were elaborated with the help of Alain Ducasse, the French chef who has almost as many stars in the 'Guide Michelin' as there are planets in our Solar system. Read more...

Below is a picture showing a 'potato and tomato mille-feuilles,' a recipe prepared for ESA (Credit: ADF - Alain Ducasse Formation -- site in French). Here is a link to a larger version (283 KB).

A 'Potato and tomato mille-feuilles' for Mars astronauts

The thin slices of potato, tomatoes and onion are cooked one by one, for a homogeneous colour and a melting and crispy sensation in the mouth. The basic ingredients are potatoes and tomatoes, both thought to be easy to to grow in space, on Mars or other planets.

So, what kind of vegetables will the 'farmonauts' be able to grow?

The menus were all based on nine main ingredients that ESA envisions could be grown in greenhouses of future colonies on Mars or other planets. These nine ingredients must comprise at least 40% of the final diet, while the remaining (up to) 60% could be additional vegetables, herbs, oil, butter, salt, pepper, sugar and other seasoning brought from Earth.

The nine basic ingredients that Christophe Lasseur, [ESA's biological life-support coordinator,] plans to grow on other planets are: rice, onions, tomatoes, soya, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, wheat and spirulina -- all common ingredients except the last. Spirulina is a blue-green algae, a very rich source of nutrition with lots of protein (65% by weight), calcium, carbohydrates, lipids and various vitamins that cover essential nutritional needs for energy in extreme environments.

Besides the fact that astronauts will have better food than today, this will have additional benefits.

Today all the food for astronauts in space is brought from Earth, but this will not be possible for longer missions. Although still on the drawing board, ESA has already started research to see what could be grown on other planets -- and what a self-supporting eco-system might look like on Mars.

"In addition to being healthy and sufficiently nutritious for survival, good food could potentially provide psychological support for the crew, away from Earth for years," emphasises Lasseur.

It is extremely difficult today to be selected as an astronaut. But tomorrow, when a candidate needs to show additional qualifications in farming and in cooking, it will become almost impossible...

Anyway, for other stories about space food, you also can read two previous posts, "Eating in Space" or "Astronauts To Eat Italian-Style."

Sources: ESA, June 13, 2005; and various sites