I've had a beef with URL shorteners for a long while now for reasons that have been covered ad nauseam (not the least of which being that in addition to adding significant overhead - typically hundreds of milliseconds per request - they are just plain evil). IMO the best solution is to let webmasters create and advertise their own short links using the "shortlink" link relation (e.g. rel="shortlink" in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD) such that they can be auto-detected by clients who then no longer need to generate their own using 3rd party services. I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback. The standard got a big shot in the arm last week when WordPress.com announced support for rel=shortlink on over 100 million pages. I've since requested support be introduced into the top 20 Twitter clients (representing over 80% of Twitter usage) and have had only positive feedback so far. A number of other high profile sites like PHP.net and Ars Technica have also jumped on board. Anyway if you, like me, are sick of URL shorteners then you're welcome to give me a hand making them go away...
I'm active in a various standards efforts including OASIS, W3C and OGF. The fact that I contributed to a charter for an interoperability working group a year ago does not preclude me from taking exception to shenanigans like this by way of a well-justified complaint.
Earlier today I created the hAl Microsoft Topic Ban incident on Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest Noticeboard, highlighting some of the particularly troubling points in the contributions of a user called hAl (who reveals little beyond liking beer). It seems I'm not the first to stumble on this apparent Microsoft shill, but hopefully I'll be the last (at least on Wikipedia) as with any luck he'll land himself a topic ban having been blocked 4 times already.
As I've explained in detail here and here, while the underlying concept is sound, the implementation has many problems:
- "rev" is deprecated in HTML 5, so essentially a non-starter
- "rev" and "rel" are easily confused - use the wrong one and you may well drop off the Internet
- messing with the canonical URLs is dangerous
- taking rather than giving canonical-ness is dangerous
- the solution can only work for one URL (the canonical URL itself), when there can be an infinite number
A *much* better solution is to use rel="shortcut" to specify a short (but not necessarily shortest or even shorter) URL. Other alternatives like "short" are ambiguous as to whether it is the URL or its target which is "short", and "alternate shorter" are just plain wrong.
Psion have essentially given an amnesty to bloggers and journalists using the term "netbook" (which may prove reason enough in itself to take the trademark off them since any licensing must include quality assurance). That includes blogs with advertising as explained here:
"where a blogger uses context sensitive advertising that is completely outside of its control (so it has no knowledge at all whether a 'Netbook' related advert will be placed in its blog site), then we're taking the view that we need to focus on working on persuading the featured retailer to adopt a term other than 'netbook'."
Actually no, the netBook rather than netBook Pro figures are relevant if only because it was on the basis of a netBook flyer that Psion renewed the trademark in 2006 (long after that particular product had been discontinued). This was the basis of Dell & Intel's claims of fraud, which could well undermine the trademark altogether (assuming abandonment and/or genericide don't).
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Sam Johnston <samj-at-".net> Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 9:31 PM Subject: Thanks for the heads up about your blog! To: Chuck Westfall <cwestfall@cusa.canon.com> Cc: Toni Scheinder <toni@automattic.com>, "Douglas E. Mirell" <dmirell@loeb.com>
G'day Chuck,
It's not every day that something truly entertaining comes to my attention but thanks to my mates at Slashdot[1] and your mates at Loeb & Loeb with their (surely fake?) letter[2] I was drawn attention to your refreshingly entertaining fake blog[3]. Anyway I'm sure I'm one of many who have immediately added your blog to my reader - it's truly amazing what a bit of viral marketing can do for you!
Kodos to the guys at Automattic too for identifying the letter for what it was so quickly and taking appropriate action - those guys rock!
Ok, excuse me while I spend my Sunday afternoon (and allocate a day every week from now until the end of time) downloading this week's 154.2Mb Trademark Official Gazette and then going to find equivalents in all the other jurisdictions I care about (which probably means the 80 members of the Madrid system, given a grant in any of them can be ratcheted up to a 'global' trademark within 6 months).
Either the USPTO has to do their job or the community has to do it for them - in the latter case I would suggest that we need something like feeds of the new applications and something like the Wikipedia New Pages patrol. Good luck with that...
If we're to have any chance of restoring order then we need to convince a national standards body to appeal. And if you can't convince them, convince the local authorities to make them, in the name of competition.
No point sitting here complaining - do something about it!
The security of the I$O standards process simply hasn't been subjected to this kind of sustained and distributed attack before, and is too slow to do anything about it mid-flight.
By the time the catch up to what's happened it could well be too late, unless someone convinces a national standards body to appeal within the next month or so.
In France we have free, which gives us 28Mbit ADSL (1Mbit up) with a static, 200 TV Channels (HD ready) and a phone line with unlimited free calls to 49 countries for a whisker inside EUR30 a month. These guys are making a profit of this too. It amazes me what you guys put up with in the US when it comes to voice & data connectivity, let alone entertainment! We have two for good measure.
I'd be interested to hear what you would pay for an equivalent service over there - I figure it's at least 3 figures and quite probably an order of magnitude more expensive.
This is almost certainly relating to fraud - sometimes Skype offer free credit and using something akin to a poor man's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) makes them sleep better at night knowing the hordes aren't running them up a big phone bill.
This is not to excuse this behaviour, both in terms of them for asking for the information and of the operating system for giving it to them!
1. Grab an iced drink and hang on to it. 2. Observe the temperature stay relatively constant so long as there's ice, and that ice melts quicker as there is less of it. 3. When the ice is gone observe that your refreshing drink is now warm as piss and you have to go find another new one.
This is a very serious issue that needs to be responded to immediately, and given its size it is unfortunately the responsibility of the US to lead the way on this one (though they have done a woefully inadequate job so far).
More generally people need to get better at risk management and focus on things that will certainly affect them (global warming, privacy, etc.), even if less interesting than the more sensational yet relatively insignificant 'global issues' (terrorism, nuclear energy, etc.).
The French are making the rest of the broadband world look like savages with their Freebox service. EUR30/month gets you upto 28Mbps down, 1Mbps up as well as a few hundred TV channels, tens of radio stations and video on demand. That's just the start of it though, you can point VLC at the box and watch TV on your computer (I was just watching Sky News over wireless on my MacBook) *and* vice versa - that is, play content sitting on your computer on your TV, navigating through it with the remote!
The version demonstrated to us at the Irish Linux Users Group (ILUG) AGM did support two networks; one with encryption. I've just ordered one in Ireland which I expect to receive in few days/weeks and I'm very much looking forward to it.
GNU/Linux does make sense in the context of GNU/OpenSolaris, GNU/Interix (Microsoft's POSIX environment which will ship with Vista), GNU/Hurd (a microkernel) and so on. Granted there's a bunch of non-GNU software out there so perhaps it's not relevant to use this terminology, but RMS & the FSF have been paramount in bringing us the tools (toolchains, shells, interpreters, etc.) that has made all this possible.
GPLv3 does tackle issues which are relevant and it has been drafted by people who do know what they're talking about and with significant public involvement. Patents for example are potentially a big issue for FOSS; as is DRM. I don't particularly like the idea of someone controlling what I do with hardware I own and we are getting to the point where running code of our choice on Tivos, XBoxes and so on is going to be virtually impossible, however maybe giving the manufacturers the flexibility to offer us cheaper hardware by sponsoring it with services (in the same way that prepaid phones locked to a given network are often cheaper than retail or even cost price) isn't such a bad thing.
I think the GPL has done us more good than people realise, in that it protects us from any one company or group of companies 'embracing and extending' Linux (which you can bet would have been the outcome were a more permissive license to have been selected). I do think there are issues though with having multiple copyright holders in that it makes changing the license extremely difficult. Whether you adopt the assigning of copyrights approach (ala FSF, which I consider cleaner and safer) or the assigning of license approach (ala ASF, which is potentially problematic for the project), the result is the same - the administrative entity (whatever form that takes, be it a foundation with a board or an individual like Linus Torvalds) has the flexibility to change the license and the users the flexibility to take their tools and fork off if they don't like it (pun intended). In some ways this means Linux is protected; in others shackled.
Granted this is off topic but I wonder if being able to offer commercial/proprietary licenses to fund Linux activities would be a good thing?
My definition of a watermark is something that does not impair the quality of the final product. Cap Codes do. I saw one in 'The Departed' the other day which was really quite distracting - something akin to the hard core porn spliced in in Fight Club(?).
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a beef with URL shorteners for a long while now for reasons that have been covered ad nauseam (not the least of which being that in addition to adding significant overhead - typically hundreds of milliseconds per request - they are just plain evil). IMO the best solution is to let webmasters create and advertise their own short links using the "shortlink" link relation (e.g. rel="shortlink" in the HTTP headers and/or HTML HEAD) such that they can be auto-detected by clients who then no longer need to generate their own using 3rd party services. I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback. The standard got a big shot in the arm last week when WordPress.com announced support for rel=shortlink on over 100 million pages. I've since requested support be introduced into the top 20 Twitter clients (representing over 80% of Twitter usage) and have had only positive feedback so far. A number of other high profile sites like PHP.net and Ars Technica have also jumped on board. Anyway if you, like me, are sick of URL shorteners then you're welcome to give me a hand making them go away...
Sam
I'm active in a various standards efforts including OASIS, W3C and OGF. The fact that I contributed to a charter for an interoperability working group a year ago does not preclude me from taking exception to shenanigans like this by way of a well-justified complaint.
Sam
Earlier today I created the hAl Microsoft Topic Ban incident on Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest Noticeboard, highlighting some of the particularly troubling points in the contributions of a user called hAl (who reveals little beyond liking beer). It seems I'm not the first to stumble on this apparent Microsoft shill, but hopefully I'll be the last (at least on Wikipedia) as with any luck he'll land himself a topic ban having been blocked 4 times already.
Sam
As I've explained in detail here and here, while the underlying concept is sound, the implementation has many problems:
- "rev" is deprecated in HTML 5, so essentially a non-starter
- "rev" and "rel" are easily confused - use the wrong one and you may well drop off the Internet
- messing with the canonical URLs is dangerous
- taking rather than giving canonical-ness is dangerous
- the solution can only work for one URL (the canonical URL itself), when there can be an infinite number
A *much* better solution is to use rel="shortcut" to specify a short (but not necessarily shortest or even shorter) URL. Other alternatives like "short" are ambiguous as to whether it is the URL or its target which is "short", and "alternate shorter" are just plain wrong.
Sam
Yeah I expect the "iPad" (for want of a better name) to be more like an iPhone than a MacBook.
See Crystal Ball: Apple's $599 "iPad" Netbook (with pictures) for more.
Sam
Psion have essentially given an amnesty to bloggers and journalists using the term "netbook" (which may prove reason enough in itself to take the trademark off them since any licensing must include quality assurance). That includes blogs with advertising as explained here:
This is why we believe the amnesty doesn't go far enough.
Actually no, the netBook rather than netBook Pro figures are relevant if only because it was on the basis of a netBook flyer that Psion renewed the trademark in 2006 (long after that particular product had been discontinued). This was the basis of Dell & Intel's claims of fraud, which could well undermine the trademark altogether (assuming abandonment and/or genericide don't).
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sam Johnston <samj-at-".net>
Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 9:31 PM
Subject: Thanks for the heads up about your blog!
To: Chuck Westfall <cwestfall@cusa.canon.com>
Cc: Toni Scheinder <toni@automattic.com>, "Douglas E. Mirell" <dmirell@loeb.com>
G'day Chuck,
It's not every day that something truly entertaining comes to my
attention but thanks to my mates at Slashdot[1] and your mates at Loeb
& Loeb with their (surely fake?) letter[2] I was drawn attention to
your refreshingly entertaining fake blog[3]. Anyway I'm sure I'm one
of many who have immediately added your blog to my reader - it's truly
amazing what a bit of viral marketing can do for you!
Kodos to the guys at Automattic too for identifying the letter for
what it was so quickly and taking appropriate action - those guys
rock!
Eagerly awaiting your next post,
Your [virtual] friend,
Sam
1. http://fakechuckwestfall.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/982873542.pdf
2. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/15/1830217
3. http://fakechuckwestfall.wordpress.com/
I am not a cloud expert, but:
Anything with "grid" in it makes me think "designed by committee" and "sucks"...
I am a cloud expert, and I tend to agree with you.
Sam
Perhaps, but there wasn't already hundreds of vendors selling products and services around these terms when they were trademarked...
Ok, excuse me while I spend my Sunday afternoon (and allocate a day every week from now until the end of time) downloading this week's 154.2Mb Trademark Official Gazette and then going to find equivalents in all the other jurisdictions I care about (which probably means the 80 members of the Madrid system, given a grant in any of them can be ratcheted up to a 'global' trademark within 6 months).
Either the USPTO has to do their job or the community has to do it for them - in the latter case I would suggest that we need something like feeds of the new applications and something like the Wikipedia New Pages patrol. Good luck with that...
If we're to have any chance of restoring order then we need to convince a national standards body to appeal. And if you can't convince them, convince the local authorities to make them, in the name of competition.
No point sitting here complaining - do something about it!
The security of the I$O standards process simply hasn't been subjected to this kind of sustained and distributed attack before, and is too slow to do anything about it mid-flight.
By the time the catch up to what's happened it could well be too late, unless someone convinces a national standards body to appeal within the next month or so.
if i wanted to feel like i was walking along a beach all day then i'd do exactly that.
In France we have free, which gives us 28Mbit ADSL (1Mbit up) with a static, 200 TV Channels (HD ready) and a phone line with unlimited free calls to 49 countries for a whisker inside EUR30 a month. These guys are making a profit of this too. It amazes me what you guys put up with in the US when it comes to voice & data connectivity, let alone entertainment! We have two for good measure.
I'd be interested to hear what you would pay for an equivalent service over there - I figure it's at least 3 figures and quite probably an order of magnitude more expensive.
This is almost certainly relating to fraud - sometimes Skype offer free credit and using something akin to a poor man's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) makes them sleep better at night knowing the hordes aren't running them up a big phone bill.
This is not to excuse this behaviour, both in terms of them for asking for the information and of the operating system for giving it to them!
1. Grab an iced drink and hang on to it.
2. Observe the temperature stay relatively constant so long as there's ice, and that ice melts quicker as there is less of it.
3. When the ice is gone observe that your refreshing drink is now warm as piss and you have to go find another new one.
This is a very serious issue that needs to be responded to immediately, and given its size it is unfortunately the responsibility of the US to lead the way on this one (though they have done a woefully inadequate job so far).
More generally people need to get better at risk management and focus on things that will certainly affect them (global warming, privacy, etc.), even if less interesting than the more sensational yet relatively insignificant 'global issues' (terrorism, nuclear energy, etc.).
The French are making the rest of the broadband world look like savages with their Freebox service. EUR30/month gets you upto 28Mbps down, 1Mbps up as well as a few hundred TV channels, tens of radio stations and video on demand. That's just the start of it though, you can point VLC at the box and watch TV on your computer (I was just watching Sky News over wireless on my MacBook) *and* vice versa - that is, play content sitting on your computer on your TV, navigating through it with the remote!
The best way to protect data is not to collect it in the first place.
The version demonstrated to us at the Irish Linux Users Group (ILUG) AGM did support two networks; one with encryption. I've just ordered one in Ireland which I expect to receive in few days/weeks and I'm very much looking forward to it.
do any of you guys happen to know when the US election is?
I'm dying to know and I'll be sure to let you get back to talking about whatever it was you were talking about when I do...
We have our very own island for that - it's called 'Tasmania'.
GNU/Linux does make sense in the context of GNU/OpenSolaris, GNU/Interix (Microsoft's POSIX environment which will ship with Vista), GNU/Hurd (a microkernel) and so on. Granted there's a bunch of non-GNU software out there so perhaps it's not relevant to use this terminology, but RMS & the FSF have been paramount in bringing us the tools (toolchains, shells, interpreters, etc.) that has made all this possible.
GPLv3 does tackle issues which are relevant and it has been drafted by people who do know what they're talking about and with significant public involvement. Patents for example are potentially a big issue for FOSS; as is DRM. I don't particularly like the idea of someone controlling what I do with hardware I own and we are getting to the point where running code of our choice on Tivos, XBoxes and so on is going to be virtually impossible, however maybe giving the manufacturers the flexibility to offer us cheaper hardware by sponsoring it with services (in the same way that prepaid phones locked to a given network are often cheaper than retail or even cost price) isn't such a bad thing.
I think the GPL has done us more good than people realise, in that it protects us from any one company or group of companies 'embracing and extending' Linux (which you can bet would have been the outcome were a more permissive license to have been selected). I do think there are issues though with having multiple copyright holders in that it makes changing the license extremely difficult. Whether you adopt the assigning of copyrights approach (ala FSF, which I consider cleaner and safer) or the assigning of license approach (ala ASF, which is potentially problematic for the project), the result is the same - the administrative entity (whatever form that takes, be it a foundation with a board or an individual like Linus Torvalds) has the flexibility to change the license and the users the flexibility to take their tools and fork off if they don't like it (pun intended). In some ways this means Linux is protected; in others shackled.
Granted this is off topic but I wonder if being able to offer commercial/proprietary licenses to fund Linux activities would be a good thing?
How can you be so sure? Many MS bugs have taken years to surface.
My definition of a watermark is something that does not impair the quality of the final product. Cap Codes do. I saw one in 'The Departed' the other day which was really quite distracting - something akin to the hard core porn spliced in in Fight Club(?).