As one of the co-founders of DevHouse, we are definitely trying to honor and encourage the spirit of Homebrew. In fact, Lee Felsenstein, who ran most of the Homebrew meetings, is now a regular attender (along with his lovely partner) and helps us shape the meetings to be maximally functional and useful. In a business cover article in the San Jose Mercury News, DevHouse was described as "resurrecting the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club" (digg). We were flattered.
In addition to using open source courseware such as Moodle, a number of teachers and administrators have been switching to wiki platforms like PBwiki and Wikispaces as a very lightweight replacement for heavy-handed, thickly-structured courseware. Disclaimer: I'm the founder of PBwiki. But I can tell you, we have tens of thousands of educational wikis set up with us, many of which are being used instead of Blackboard, even in districts where Blackboard has been paid for. PBwiki is proudly patent free; we'll compete on merit, thank you.:)
I signed up for the Vonage service, tried it, didn't like it, tried to leave. I went through a bit of a nightmare trying to cancel the service and ended up needing to resort to the BBB. I wrote up the experience here: http://david.weekly.org/writings/vonage.php3 - apparently from the comments others have had similar experiences.
So a brief caveat here - I'm a bit biased as to the potential uses for wikis, since I started and run PBwiki (which was developed at an all-night hackathon, but that's another story). If you're interested, I also gave a talk at Xerox PARC about wikis.
I think pretty much any time you email out a Word document and ask several people for changes or edits, you're in need of a wiki. Any time there's a "Document Master" for a particular piece of information a la "Oh, Linda's in charge of the phone list, you should let her know you have a new number" or "Tell Jimmy what you're bringing to the potluck" or "Coach Z has the schedule for the softball season" -- those are ideal spots for wikis.
While many people do use wikis personally, as a sort of notepad-on-steroids, and others use wikis as a simple web page publication tool, the killer app for wikis is in letting groups speak as one and create their own little universes of knowledge. Sometimes this means collaborative fiction or Dungeons and Dragons and sometimes this means documenting your project plans or brainstorming your next company idea.
While wikis have been around for some time, they're only just now starting to cross the chasm from geekland to the leading edge of regular people. Wikipedia can take nearly all of the credit for that. But hopefully we'll now get some of the power that geeks have had by way of CVS and Subversion and put it in the hands of regular people to collaborate and coordinate their thoughts, hopes, and ideas. This has been a long time coming.
I'm just in the middle of launching an easy-to-use outsourced CAPTCHA system at http://botblock.com/ - we'll be evolving it rapidly to try and make it easy as pie for web admins to block comment spam in an outsourced way. The difference between this and piece of software you download for your blog is that A) you don't need server access to use BotBlock and B) we can evolve BotBlock to use increasingly sophisticated CAPTCHAs without requiring website operators to change anything. I've already deployed it on my personal blog and gotten commentspams down to zero per week from several hundred a week. I'd love to hear what folks think.
Perhaps you missed the "...at work...at home..." bit? There are no current solutions other than IM Smarter that would easily let someone at work automatically and securely read their IM chat logs that they had at home.
Thank you for your comments; I do take them constructively.
I think that it's likely that there will be some folks that don't like the logging feature. I hope to very soon introduce a suite of services that that are compelling enough that people would be interested in using the service with logging disabled. I'd be delighted to welcome those users onboard as soon as we're ready for them. In the interim, we have a privacy policy, which is a legally binding contract obliging me to respect the integrity and privacy of your data. While IANAL, it is my understanding that a wilful breach of this contract on my part could open me up to a lawsuit.
Longer-term, we'd love to offer fully-encrypted centralized logging - something kinda like Hushmail for IM logs. The trick there is allowing the user to *efficiently* search those logs (and, well, letting the logging itself be efficient in the first place). In the interim, I'm just trying to keep my servers happy and fed.:)
Hi, everyone! I'm David, the author of IM Smarter. I'm glad that people are interested enough in the service to post about it. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to post this earlier, as I was in a (very long) meeting with some folks from the Chicago Beck Foundation to discuss different ways to promote literacy in the third world.
Anyhow, I'm here now, and I'd like to respond to some of the higher-order points that people have made. I think that it's correct that trust is a big issue here. This is part of the reason why we tried to create a privacy policy that would clearly hold your private data as sacred to us. This is also why we took the unusual step of making a privacy promise. The comments in this forum make it clear that we didn't do a good enough job in making it clear that your private data is yours alone. We would be delighted to work, with your constructive feedback, on a privacy policy that does a better job making it clear that your chats are for your eyes only. I actually did ask the EFF to edit and review my privacy policy, but they haven't set up a program for doing that. If any of you know of a consumer-rights organization that would be interested in working with a company on drafting a consumer-focused privacy policy, please do let me know about them.
Let me be very clear here: we will not scrape the content of your IM chats to deliver advertising to you. This is not GMail. We will not sell or otherwise disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties. We are here to use your information for you, not against you. If that makes it harder for me to rake in the big bucks as quickly, so be it. I am here to protect your privacy and improve your IM. (The last time I was on Slashdot, it was because my non-profit had successfully sued Diebold in federal court for infringing free speech rights. We won - thank you EFF!)
There was some concern that our intended deployment of Premium features would suddenly disable currently-available features. This is not true. There are a suite of kickass *new* features planned for Premium - the services that are currently offered as Free will continue to be offered without cost throughout the service's lifetime.
If you have any other questions or concerns about the service, I'd be happy to hear about them. Having launched less than two weeks age we frankly weren't ready for Slashdot with regards to our privacy messaging or site design (which, yes, totally blows but should be fixed in the next week or two). We've got a lot of great features yet to deploy - as I said on the Engadget interview, logging is really only the tip of the iceberg. Logging isn't the *point*. The point is having an agent who can work on your behalf to keep you in the loop about things you want to know about and who can keep away messages you don't want brought to you (at the moment because you're busy, or ever).
This is my baby, the fruit of my labors of a year. I realize my baby's pretty ugly and infantile right now, but my metric for going out of private beta was to launch at the point when I could imagine that at least one random person out there on the Internet could plausibly find the service interesting enough to use on a regular basis. I think we're at that point now, albeit not at the point where we're the service "everyone obviously should use". The service continues to make progress on a regular basis. I can only hope and pray that people will be patient with me as it creaks onwards towards becoming a great, genuinely useful service for people.
I actually hope that this guy does a very solid job of using facts to make clear exactly where Windows is better than Linux. I believe that it is true that in some aspects Windows is superior to Linux. By being specific, Taylor will draw a roadmap for Linux hackers to finally best Windows in all ways.
Having an archnemesis detailing your flaws is an incredibly useful position to be in. If Taylor succeeds, Linux will be all the stronger for it.
Dan enjoys being witty with words. A "keiretsu" is a conglomeration of not-100%-related business units under a single roof. Mitsubishi makes cars and huge boats, Yamaha makes motorcycles and electronic synthesizers, etc.
The Paketto Keirestu is a conglomeration of program units that do really bastardized and interesting things with packet manipulation and flow. It's a catchy little title, I thought, but that's MHO.;) Dan, for those curious, is (AFAIK) not proficient in Japanese. =)
[article author] A number of people have thoughtfully suggested trying out Intel's debugger (aka LDB). Unfortunately, from what I found, it looks like LDB has only a subset of gdb functions, and can't even do simple things, like attach to processes. It seems that Intel has given up making their own Linux debugger and has decided to join up with GDB development. That's why I didn't include it. Thanks anyhow to those who did suggest it and thanks to those of you who suggested some other debuggers; I'll take a look at them.
Differential GPS can give you the precision you need, at the time resolution you need. Internal gyroscopes (yes, they can be made small) can integrate "last know good" positions over time periods where GPS is unavailable (tree cover, ducking in a hole, tunnels) and give you lots
As for the people thinking you're crazy bit...well...hm. Give them a helmet too, then they'll see what all the fun is about and never take it off. =)
I'd like to chop my land line, but I know the same people will find my cell phone.
Just as a helpful FYI, it's illegal for telemarketers to initiate unsolicited commercial phone calls to a cellular number. Dump the land line and go wireless -- your calls will be only from your friends!
I just installed 10.1.3: the install froze on my titanium g4 about 1/3 of the way through the "optimization" phase. I rebooted after the system became unresponsive and it looks like all the updates are in place, although 10.1.3 isn't listed as having been installed on my Software Update Log.
Getting IMAP+SSL support in Mail is huge for me since that's the only way into my mail server (short of pine over SSH!). Unfortunately, Mail doesn't seem to support SMTP+SSL, so I have to rely on local relays which change depending on my connection. What a simple feature to add and what a joy that would bring to me!
You don't get unlimited minutes: time you spend on the data network is taken from your call minutes. Spending two hours reading up on news one day could eat half of your monthly minutes -- if you've gone over, your per-minute Internet access cost could be as much as forty cents, or $48 for a two-hour session. Yikes.
If you look on the side of every Apple store -- they say "5 down. 95 to go." Apple does want to have the market. They're not happy being a niche/luxury player. The analogies to BMW vs. Ford are not accurate -- BMW sells very expensive cars that are out of the reach of the proletariat. Apple sells computers for equivalent prices to PCs. The goal really is to win over the market, the whole market, with a solution that Just Works Better through their own flavor of "holistic engineering".
Jobs is about using better technology to win, not just to have better technology. He won me over: I had hated Macs for about a decade. Then the Titanium Powerbook came out along with OS/X and I just knew I needed to have the sexiest version of Unix around on the sexiest laptop ever made. Now, I'm a convert.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank *you*! Nothing a steam cleaning can't fix, anyhow. And the carpets look nicer brown than white. Really.
As one of the co-founders of DevHouse, we are definitely trying to honor and encourage the spirit of Homebrew. In fact, Lee Felsenstein, who ran most of the Homebrew meetings, is now a regular attender (along with his lovely partner) and helps us shape the meetings to be maximally functional and useful. In a business cover article in the San Jose Mercury News, DevHouse was described as "resurrecting the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club" (digg). We were flattered.
In addition to using open source courseware such as Moodle, a number of teachers and administrators have been switching to wiki platforms like PBwiki and Wikispaces as a very lightweight replacement for heavy-handed, thickly-structured courseware. Disclaimer: I'm the founder of PBwiki. But I can tell you, we have tens of thousands of educational wikis set up with us, many of which are being used instead of Blackboard, even in districts where Blackboard has been paid for. PBwiki is proudly patent free; we'll compete on merit, thank you. :)
I signed up for the Vonage service, tried it, didn't like it, tried to leave. I went through a bit of a nightmare trying to cancel the service and ended up needing to resort to the BBB. I wrote up the experience here: http://david.weekly.org/writings/vonage.php3 - apparently from the comments others have had similar experiences.
So a brief caveat here - I'm a bit biased as to the potential uses for wikis, since I started and run PBwiki (which was developed at an all-night hackathon, but that's another story). If you're interested, I also gave a talk at Xerox PARC about wikis.
I think pretty much any time you email out a Word document and ask several people for changes or edits, you're in need of a wiki. Any time there's a "Document Master" for a particular piece of information a la "Oh, Linda's in charge of the phone list, you should let her know you have a new number" or "Tell Jimmy what you're bringing to the potluck" or "Coach Z has the schedule for the softball season" -- those are ideal spots for wikis.
While many people do use wikis personally, as a sort of notepad-on-steroids, and others use wikis as a simple web page publication tool, the killer app for wikis is in letting groups speak as one and create their own little universes of knowledge. Sometimes this means collaborative fiction or Dungeons and Dragons and sometimes this means documenting your project plans or brainstorming your next company idea.
While wikis have been around for some time, they're only just now starting to cross the chasm from geekland to the leading edge of regular people. Wikipedia can take nearly all of the credit for that. But hopefully we'll now get some of the power that geeks have had by way of CVS and Subversion and put it in the hands of regular people to collaborate and coordinate their thoughts, hopes, and ideas. This has been a long time coming.
I'm just in the middle of launching an easy-to-use outsourced CAPTCHA system at http://botblock.com/ - we'll be evolving it rapidly to try and make it easy as pie for web admins to block comment spam in an outsourced way. The difference between this and piece of software you download for your blog is that A) you don't need server access to use BotBlock and B) we can evolve BotBlock to use increasingly sophisticated CAPTCHAs without requiring website operators to change anything. I've already deployed it on my personal blog and gotten commentspams down to zero per week from several hundred a week. I'd love to hear what folks think.
IP,
Perhaps you missed the "...at work...at home..." bit? There are no current solutions other than IM Smarter that would easily let someone at work automatically and securely read their IM chat logs that they had at home.
Cheers,
David
Lord Dweomer,
:)
Thank you for your comments; I do take them constructively.
I think that it's likely that there will be some folks that don't like the logging feature. I hope to very soon introduce a suite of services that that are compelling enough that people would be interested in using the service with logging disabled. I'd be delighted to welcome those users onboard as soon as we're ready for them. In the interim, we have a privacy policy, which is a legally binding contract obliging me to respect the integrity and privacy of your data. While IANAL, it is my understanding that a wilful breach of this contract on my part could open me up to a lawsuit.
Longer-term, we'd love to offer fully-encrypted centralized logging - something kinda like Hushmail for IM logs. The trick there is allowing the user to *efficiently* search those logs (and, well, letting the logging itself be efficient in the first place). In the interim, I'm just trying to keep my servers happy and fed.
Cheers,
David
Yeah, I'm lazy. But I've fixed it now. :) Thanks for pointing this out!
Yours,
David
Hi, everyone! I'm David, the author of IM Smarter. I'm glad that people are interested enough in the service to post about it. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to post this earlier, as I was in a (very long) meeting with some folks from the Chicago Beck Foundation to discuss different ways to promote literacy in the third world.
Anyhow, I'm here now, and I'd like to respond to some of the higher-order points that people have made. I think that it's correct that trust is a big issue here. This is part of the reason why we tried to create a privacy policy that would clearly hold your private data as sacred to us. This is also why we took the unusual step of making a privacy promise. The comments in this forum make it clear that we didn't do a good enough job in making it clear that your private data is yours alone. We would be delighted to work, with your constructive feedback, on a privacy policy that does a better job making it clear that your chats are for your eyes only. I actually did ask the EFF to edit and review my privacy policy, but they haven't set up a program for doing that. If any of you know of a consumer-rights organization that would be interested in working with a company on drafting a consumer-focused privacy policy, please do let me know about them.
Let me be very clear here: we will not scrape the content of your IM chats to deliver advertising to you. This is not GMail. We will not sell or otherwise disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties. We are here to use your information for you, not against you. If that makes it harder for me to rake in the big bucks as quickly, so be it. I am here to protect your privacy and improve your IM. (The last time I was on Slashdot, it was because my non-profit had successfully sued Diebold in federal court for infringing free speech rights. We won - thank you EFF!)
There was some concern that our intended deployment of Premium features would suddenly disable currently-available features. This is not true. There are a suite of kickass *new* features planned for Premium - the services that are currently offered as Free will continue to be offered without cost throughout the service's lifetime.
If you have any other questions or concerns about the service, I'd be happy to hear about them. Having launched less than two weeks age we frankly weren't ready for Slashdot with regards to our privacy messaging or site design (which, yes, totally blows but should be fixed in the next week or two). We've got a lot of great features yet to deploy - as I said on the Engadget interview, logging is really only the tip of the iceberg. Logging isn't the *point*. The point is having an agent who can work on your behalf to keep you in the loop about things you want to know about and who can keep away messages you don't want brought to you (at the moment because you're busy, or ever).
This is my baby, the fruit of my labors of a year. I realize my baby's pretty ugly and infantile right now, but my metric for going out of private beta was to launch at the point when I could imagine that at least one random person out there on the Internet could plausibly find the service interesting enough to use on a regular basis. I think we're at that point now, albeit not at the point where we're the service "everyone obviously should use". The service continues to make progress on a regular basis. I can only hope and pray that people will be patient with me as it creaks onwards towards becoming a great, genuinely useful service for people.
Have a great Saturday night, everyone.
Peace,
David E. Weekly
Check out http://kr.avatar.yahoo.com/ - Yahoo Avatars! Too bad my Korean's not so hot.
I actually hope that this guy does a very solid job of using facts to make clear exactly where Windows is better than Linux. I believe that it is true that in some aspects Windows is superior to Linux. By being specific, Taylor will draw a roadmap for Linux hackers to finally best Windows in all ways.
Having an archnemesis detailing your flaws is an incredibly useful position to be in. If Taylor succeeds, Linux will be all the stronger for it.
Go Taylor! Go!
Dan enjoys being witty with words. A "keiretsu" is a conglomeration of not-100%-related business units under a single roof. Mitsubishi makes cars and huge boats, Yamaha makes motorcycles and electronic synthesizers, etc.
;) Dan, for those curious, is (AFAIK) not proficient in Japanese. =)
The Paketto Keirestu is a conglomeration of program units that do really bastardized and interesting things with packet manipulation and flow. It's a catchy little title, I thought, but that's MHO.
-david
I roomed with the guy and can attest to the year or so he spent cobbling this stuff together. Go Dan!!
-david
I think you forget that Bush's parents and Osama's parents sat on the same board at the Carlyle Group. Interconnections may be tighter than you think.
The author's website has lots of links to some absolutely compelling and fascinating reads. Well worth a visit! (I didn't see this already posted.)
[article author] A number of people have thoughtfully suggested trying out Intel's debugger (aka LDB). Unfortunately, from what I found, it looks like LDB has only a subset of gdb functions, and can't even do simple things, like attach to processes. It seems that Intel has given up making their own Linux debugger and has decided to join up with GDB development. That's why I didn't include it. Thanks anyhow to those who did suggest it and thanks to those of you who suggested some other debuggers; I'll take a look at them.
Set your current year to 2099. Run QuickTime. Watch the uncaught Integer Overflow exception!
Actually, it *is* the same Bernstein. Look at the endnote [1].
Differential GPS can give you the precision you need, at the time resolution you need. Internal gyroscopes (yes, they can be made small) can integrate "last know good" positions over time periods where GPS is unavailable (tree cover, ducking in a hole, tunnels) and give you lots
As for the people thinking you're crazy bit...well...hm. Give them a helmet too, then they'll see what all the fun is about and never take it off. =)
Just as a helpful FYI, it's illegal for telemarketers to initiate unsolicited commercial phone calls to a cellular number. Dump the land line and go wireless -- your calls will be only from your friends!
I just installed 10.1.3: the install froze on my titanium g4 about 1/3 of the way through the "optimization" phase. I rebooted after the system became unresponsive and it looks like all the updates are in place, although 10.1.3 isn't listed as having been installed on my Software Update Log.
Getting IMAP+SSL support in Mail is huge for me since that's the only way into my mail server (short of pine over SSH!). Unfortunately, Mail doesn't seem to support SMTP+SSL, so I have to rely on local relays which change depending on my connection. What a simple feature to add and what a joy that would bring to me!
It's a good update, but some loose ends remain.
You don't get unlimited minutes: time you spend on the data network is taken from your call minutes. Spending two hours reading up on news one day could eat half of your monthly minutes -- if you've gone over, your per-minute Internet access cost could be as much as forty cents, or $48 for a two-hour session. Yikes.
If you look on the side of every Apple store -- they say "5 down. 95 to go." Apple does want to have the market. They're not happy being a niche/luxury player. The analogies to BMW vs. Ford are not accurate -- BMW sells very expensive cars that are out of the reach of the proletariat. Apple sells computers for equivalent prices to PCs. The goal really is to win over the market, the whole market, with a solution that Just Works Better through their own flavor of "holistic engineering".
Jobs is about using better technology to win, not just to have better technology. He won me over: I had hated Macs for about a decade. Then the Titanium Powerbook came out along with OS/X and I just knew I needed to have the sexiest version of Unix around on the sexiest laptop ever made. Now, I'm a convert.