I've heard about this trend before, but it is still very disturbing to see something like this where an application that screams out for a universal client that can be run on any platform is funded by Microsoft who dictates that the language be changed to C# leaving the original Java version to languish. Although, it's nice to see that the original is still available and has an open source license, it's disappointing that MS couldn't simply fund it as it was. As well as being a waste of money to do a port where none was needed, it certainly lends creedence to the arguments of Microsoft bashers.
I love my kinetic watch! Even though my old automatic was cool, the whole idea of a self winding quartz watch is even more cool and kicks solar ass. It even has a window on the back side where you can see the generator weight, gears, coils and capacitor, so you can show poeple how it works.
The only thing I don't like about kinetics is that there are virtually no options. They're all analog display. Why is it that the Casio G-Shock solar watches come in all sorts of flavours including a plethora of digital options and even 'atomic' setting radio, but none of this is available for kinetics, which seem to be a much more reliable power source? The fact that my ultra-cool Sieko kinetic watch requires manual changing of the date at the end of each month is pathetic!
What I want is an atomic, digital, kinetic watch with a few simple alarm and calendar functions, but nobody makes one. At this stage in our technological eveolution, a watch that you never have to wind, change batteries or set and has the capability of keeping track of the day of month shouldn't be too difficult, but seems to be almost beyond the capabilities of the marketplace.
I saved up for a long time to pay CDN$300 for a ZX-80. Finally, I had a computer that could do the stuff I was reading about in books for years and that a few of my more moneyed friends could do with their Comodore PET computers, but at a fraction of the cost!
It was loads of fun and could even be programmed in assembly language once you got beyond BASIC. I was so proud of this program I 'invented' to draw patterns on the screen based on nested loops and self modifying code to dynamically generate a random formula that produced pleasing patterns on the screen when evaluated for each pixel. Damn! I could've patented the screen saver back in 1980.
Of course, the machine had problems. The keyboard was a nightmare, and the 16KB memory module (external) had a habit of crashing the machine when aggressive typing caused a contact or two to momentarily open. Even worse, the way that the Sinclair managed to keep the cost down was something like the modern winmodem... he had the CPU do ALL of the work. The CPU did everything from scan and debounce the keyboard to generating the TV Video signal. My bouncing ball program with a black square on a white background was like watching a strobe light!!!
Then again, the lesson of setting the limits of the boundaries incorrecty so that a 45 degree hit right on the screen corner didn't trigger a rebound stuck with me. It was amazing to see the code listing after the crash... the ball had actually bounced through the code and you could see bits of the ball graphic character scattered throughout the code until it got to running code and crashed.
When the Acorn Atom came out, I quickly put my ZX-80 up for sale and managed to sell it for CDN$250. Even the modern Macs can't offer a 1.5 year TCO of $50. Sometimes I wish I had kept it, but I kept the Acorn for years and never used it and it was never much of a collector's item, so I guess I'm glad that I was shrewd enough to recover most of my hard earned money when it was still possible.
A few years later, when the price came down, a friend bought a ZX-81 for practically nothing and nailed it to the wall just to irk me, but I had moved on to more exciting things by then.
Perhaps you could still contact the Stanford Center for Internet and Society folks who were spearheading an effort to collect comments on cell phone locking and they could use your comments as an addendum or something.
Shout out to Lessig for his blog entry that pointed these folks out to me.
No. The hands were crossed over his chest. Clearly he was pointing at the W and the S on the compass dial... so obviously, Waylon Smithers did it. On the other hand, the way that the Egyptians orient a sarcophagus would mean that, from the Tut's point of view, the "W" would've appeared as an "M", so then it must've been Maggie Simpson;)
in reality it has 4M green pixels and 2M of each red and blue
That's why I was so excited by Foveon's X3 direct image technology, which uses three color sensors at each pixel location. None of this RGB checkerboard crap.
I was hoping that the obvious advantages of this technology would take over the marketplace and make the old style camera imagers go the way of the 8-track tape. Unfortunately, the Foveon imaging chip is only used by a small niche of high end cameras with correspondingly high price tags. I had hoped that there would be enough demand for the improved quality that these imagers can provide that adoption would be wide enough for high volume economics to push the price down. Well... I can still hope:)
A LONG time ago, I worked at a place that had similar problems, but anything that got product out the door always took precidence. So, if IT was dragging their feet, we did the work ourselves out of our own budget and cut out IT altogether. Since we could show that this got the job done way faster than IT could've we got away with it even though IT whined about it. In one case, they took a year and a half and lots of money to create a tool for us that didn't work right, so we never used it and put together a quick perl utility in a few weeks that did a much better job and that our guys could hack away at to add new features as people needed them. It was one of many useful examples we could point to whenever IT complained about our internal group. Unfortunately, IT had some power and annoying them had unpleasant concequences. Also, any project that required their co-operation was still at their mercy.
Several other departments also had their own internal IT groups just to keep the trains running on time. Eventually senior management noticed the trend. Of course the senior IT guy lobbied to annex these groups and make them part of his department, but management was smart enough to realize that these groups formed for a reason canned the senior IT guy and put in someone who was more co-operative.
The only thing this does is close the loophole whereby vendors could technically release source code that runs on their device, but if anyone actually tried to exercise their rights under the GPL by modifying the code (i.e. the entire point of it being Free Software in the first place) the device would refuse to run the code because the checksum/key wouldn't match.
I believe that the TiVo Series II does this to prevent the end user from hacking their device even though the device is built on Linux. Hacking the Series I devices generally requires adding a serial cable so that commands can be entered on a standard bash shell to load new software. However, the Series II TiVo's will fail to work if you change anything on the device because it checks the software signature before it will allow it to work. So, hacking the TiVo Series II requires a much more involved hack such as killhdinitrd to fool the TiVo's signature self checks. GPL v. 3 seems to be attempting to prevent this sort of thing.
One point to consider is that it is not necessarily the case that TiVo is trying to control the software, but rather to provide some assurance that their device is not a tool for stealing copyrighted material, which ultimately amounts to the same thing.
Jon Udell's recent article, Stanford, meet the lightnet. Apple, get a clue agrees that this is interesting, but too constrained by iTunes. They really need to open things up before this will be a killer app.
Although the english translation option right on the Wikipedia site is probably better, there's also a google translation available if you want to try something different.
OS/2's folders were highly configurable and extendable far beyond anything you see in Windows or even the Mac OS X 10.4 finder.
One extreme example of exactly what this article is talking about was RexxMail. From what I understand, instead of having a mail program with a dedicated custom interface, the developers of RexxMail simply extended the standard folder to list files of type email so that you can see the To: From: Subject and so-on in the view. When double clicking the file, it would open it in an appropriate editor and provide different options. This way you could use all the power of the Operating System's file system and folders to manage your email without having to learn some completely different interface that insisted that your email go in some specific place. Very cool.
I used to use emacs SPOOK , mostly as a lark, in all my email. In particular, there was a spookmime hack for Xemacs VM that put Spook words into the MIME boundary lines of every email so that it would be unobtrusive to email users, but, supposedly, trigger NSA keyword sieves. I stopped after 2001-Sep-11, but if I were living in Canada again, I'd definitely consider using Spook again... though I'd probably have to write a plugin for Thunderbird to do it.
If every ISP found that a significant minority of all of their users always had Spook keywords embedded in all of their email and lots of other traffic, that the system would be rendered useless. This would be an effective means of peaceful protest. Ref: CSIS.
Control thought of these things way back in the 1960's. Their highly advanced Cone of Silence(TM) and other innovations would be no match for such technology... er, would you believe that it's the other way around?
Everyone with an existing @gmail account will already receive email sent to @googlemail so in essence there's already millions of @googlemail addresses out there.
True, but the 'From:' line will only have an @googlemail for newer UK users. If Google wins it's case, they'll probably go back to using @gmail, but because it's not 'Not Evil' (TM) to change someone's 'From:' line on them Google will probably keep those as they are.
So, with the liberal application of a little slippery logic and lots of squinting, my already dubious assertion can be made to appear valid even in the face of a pretty good counter argument.
If this legal dispute goes Google's way, then they'll probably discontinue the practise of handing out @googlemail.com addresses, but will likely keep existing ones active. As a result, having one of those rare email addresses might actually have some caché amongst the technorati. I'm sure that someone will try to sell an @googlemail.com address for big bucks on eBay.
I doubt that the author of the article has much of a clue about ANYTHING he wrote about and consequently distorted things so much that it is meaningless. It's probably a waste of time to discuss something that has been so horribly mangled because people are reacting to the author's errors.
As the parent comment notes, he mis-represented what OSS was. There were plenty of other obvious errors, but I'd like to suggest that even the title and basic thesis are in error because it's not really open source software that is the key factor, but rather, low power, distributed, frequency hopping, spread spectrum, mesh networks.
Heck, the guy even thinks that Apache is a mining company, so how reliable can the article be?
This is Copernicus all over again! The parallels are eerie.
Back in the day, the prevailing theory was that the planets were attached to the crystal spheres and travelled in perfect circles. When the data didn't fit, they proposed adding epicycles to the circular paths. When that didn't work, they added more and more circles, increasing the complexity of the theory. Then Copernicus came along and pointed out that it was not so complicated at all... the planets just travelled in ellipses. Even though the firmament and crystal spheres provided a tempting theory, it wasn't even close to correct and the reluctance to abandon it kept them from seeing the simplicity of the system and instead keep adding complexity to their system to keep it in line with the observations.
Now, we have a similar situation where a reluctance to delve into the nasty territory of nonlinear analysis has blinded scientists to the 'simple' solution right in front of them and lead them to propose all sorts of overly complex additions to, a basically simple and elegant, theory. Rather than adding circles on circles on circles, they've been creating elaborate families of exotic materials and expansion forces to account for something that needed no extra accounting.
Strange how history repeats itself.
Naturally, this theory just happens to align with my own crackpot TOE, so I really like it;)
One of my favourite GreaseMonkey scripts was the Slashdot Live Comment Tree script that allowed dynamic expanding and collapsing of slashdot stories. This made viewing of slashdot stories much more convenient. Of course it had it's downsides such as not working well with long discussions that were multiple pages long when viewed with low thresholds and broken moderation buttons. I guess, I either have to wait for a new version or roll up my sleeves and port it to the new format myself... in my abundant free time.
Pulver Innovations had a WiSIP phone that would connect over your LAN to act as a standard SIP phone, which you could use, for example, with Free World Dialup or asterisk@home. Unfortunately, as one article points out, most WiFi hot spots don't co-operate and the the phone connect, so it has some major limitations. Even Pulver doesn't push it anymore... I had a tough time finding a link to it on any of their sites.
They also had a gadget that you could plug a cell phone into that would allow you to preferentially use the cell phone's free minutes for long distance calls from your VOIP system. Since most cell phones come with a huge number of free long distance minutes, it might be worth the lower quality to some, but I can't even find a link to it any more:(
FreeWorldDialup already has a free service that supports all sorts of existing standards. If you want to use a difficult to set-up SIP phone you can, but they also have an, apparently, brain-dead-easy Pulver Communicator for those who don't want to deal with the hassles. They also have a small set of pre-configured SIP phones and even sell pre-configured hard phones. The only thing they don't have is a huge marketing push to skype... err.. hype this service.
Actually, I don't have a good Java joke that's appropriate, but I'm sure there's one out there somewhere.
Perhaps something involving a claim that strong typing reduces ulcers and gives you strong fingers. Or maybe something that likens the banishing of pointers to the anti-oxidants? OK, that's probably reaching a bit, but I bet there's something good out there.
The headline gave me a Simpsons flashback moment... fade to grey...
Homer sees Lisa reading Wired magazine, grabs it and goes on about how much he likes 'Weird magazine', thinks GigaBytes is some kind of joke, then discards the magazine when he realizes it isn't 'Weird', but 'Wired'. The cover had a picture of a strangely Bill Gate-ish character wearing, what the headline claims are 'Electric Underpants' - 'Virtually Wedgie Proof' - 'Do we really need them?'
The eXcel templates are cute, but a neutral, open XML document format or RDF markup designed to publish the results of this analysis might actually be useful.
As it stands, The BRR system will work wonders for private consultants who would rather produce reports one customer invoice at a time. However, if it was easy to publish the document in a standard format, then you could use google to find out whose ratings of a particular program are most reliable and filter out the flames and over-exuberant raves from the genuine ratings. Add in a system like Blogger to make it easy for people to generate the files for those who aren't comfortable editing raw XML files and using command line ftp uploads and you end up with a wide range of ratings that are distributed and hard to censor. Add a choice of style sheets to make it look pretty and people might even use the system and post ratings on their personal pages, blogs, forum posts or news groups.
Now, if I could only do the same for movie and music ratings and convince google that a special search page would be a good idea then, instead of concentrating all the ratings on private sites like NetFlix and IMDB, we could have a distributed system that is hard to manipulate.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard about this trend before, but it is still very disturbing to see something like this where an application that screams out for a universal client that can be run on any platform is funded by Microsoft who dictates that the language be changed to C# leaving the original Java version to languish. Although, it's nice to see that the original is still available and has an open source license, it's disappointing that MS couldn't simply fund it as it was. As well as being a waste of money to do a port where none was needed, it certainly lends creedence to the arguments of Microsoft bashers.
I love my kinetic watch! Even though my old automatic was cool, the whole idea of a self winding quartz watch is even more cool and kicks solar ass. It even has a window on the back side where you can see the generator weight, gears, coils and capacitor, so you can show poeple how it works.
The only thing I don't like about kinetics is that there are virtually no options. They're all analog display. Why is it that the Casio G-Shock solar watches come in all sorts of flavours including a plethora of digital options and even 'atomic' setting radio, but none of this is available for kinetics, which seem to be a much more reliable power source? The fact that my ultra-cool Sieko kinetic watch requires manual changing of the date at the end of each month is pathetic!
What I want is an atomic, digital, kinetic watch with a few simple alarm and calendar functions, but nobody makes one. At this stage in our technological eveolution, a watch that you never have to wind, change batteries or set and has the capability of keeping track of the day of month shouldn't be too difficult, but seems to be almost beyond the capabilities of the marketplace.
P.S. Repost of Kinetics kick ass, but have no other cool options.
I saved up for a long time to pay CDN$300 for a ZX-80. Finally, I had a computer that could do the stuff I was reading about in books for years and that a few of my more moneyed friends could do with their Comodore PET computers, but at a fraction of the cost!
It was loads of fun and could even be programmed in assembly language once you got beyond BASIC. I was so proud of this program I 'invented' to draw patterns on the screen based on nested loops and self modifying code to dynamically generate a random formula that produced pleasing patterns on the screen when evaluated for each pixel. Damn! I could've patented the screen saver back in 1980.
Of course, the machine had problems. The keyboard was a nightmare, and the 16KB memory module (external) had a habit of crashing the machine when aggressive typing caused a contact or two to momentarily open. Even worse, the way that the Sinclair managed to keep the cost down was something like the modern winmodem... he had the CPU do ALL of the work. The CPU did everything from scan and debounce the keyboard to generating the TV Video signal. My bouncing ball program with a black square on a white background was like watching a strobe light!!!
Then again, the lesson of setting the limits of the boundaries incorrecty so that a 45 degree hit right on the screen corner didn't trigger a rebound stuck with me. It was amazing to see the code listing after the crash... the ball had actually bounced through the code and you could see bits of the ball graphic character scattered throughout the code until it got to running code and crashed.
When the Acorn Atom came out, I quickly put my ZX-80 up for sale and managed to sell it for CDN$250. Even the modern Macs can't offer a 1.5 year TCO of $50. Sometimes I wish I had kept it, but I kept the Acorn for years and never used it and it was never much of a collector's item, so I guess I'm glad that I was shrewd enough to recover most of my hard earned money when it was still possible.
A few years later, when the price came down, a friend bought a ZX-81 for practically nothing and nailed it to the wall just to irk me, but I had moved on to more exciting things by then.
Well, you missed the deadline for making comments to the "Exemption to Prohibition on Circumvention of Copyright Protection Systems for Access Control Technologies" proceedings that the Copyright Office is conducting. Too bad. I'm sure your comments on this issue would have been more useful than mine were.
Perhaps you could still contact the Stanford Center for Internet and Society folks who were spearheading an effort to collect comments on cell phone locking and they could use your comments as an addendum or something.
Shout out to Lessig for his blog entry that pointed these folks out to me.
No. The hands were crossed over his chest. Clearly he was pointing at the W and the S on the compass dial... so obviously, Waylon Smithers did it. On the other hand, the way that the Egyptians orient a sarcophagus would mean that, from the Tut's point of view, the "W" would've appeared as an "M", so then it must've been Maggie Simpson ;)
That's why I was so excited by Foveon's X3 direct image technology, which uses three color sensors at each pixel location. None of this RGB checkerboard crap.
I was hoping that the obvious advantages of this technology would take over the marketplace and make the old style camera imagers go the way of the 8-track tape. Unfortunately, the Foveon imaging chip is only used by a small niche of high end cameras with correspondingly high price tags. I had hoped that there would be enough demand for the improved quality that these imagers can provide that adoption would be wide enough for high volume economics to push the price down. Well... I can still hope
A LONG time ago, I worked at a place that had similar problems, but anything that got product out the door always took precidence. So, if IT was dragging their feet, we did the work ourselves out of our own budget and cut out IT altogether. Since we could show that this got the job done way faster than IT could've we got away with it even though IT whined about it. In one case, they took a year and a half and lots of money to create a tool for us that didn't work right, so we never used it and put together a quick perl utility in a few weeks that did a much better job and that our guys could hack away at to add new features as people needed them. It was one of many useful examples we could point to whenever IT complained about our internal group. Unfortunately, IT had some power and annoying them had unpleasant concequences. Also, any project that required their co-operation was still at their mercy.
Several other departments also had their own internal IT groups just to keep the trains running on time. Eventually senior management noticed the trend. Of course the senior IT guy lobbied to annex these groups and make them part of his department, but management was smart enough to realize that these groups formed for a reason canned the senior IT guy and put in someone who was more co-operative.
I believe that the TiVo Series II does this to prevent the end user from hacking their device even though the device is built on Linux. Hacking the Series I devices generally requires adding a serial cable so that commands can be entered on a standard bash shell to load new software. However, the Series II TiVo's will fail to work if you change anything on the device because it checks the software signature before it will allow it to work. So, hacking the TiVo Series II requires a much more involved hack such as killhdinitrd to fool the TiVo's signature self checks. GPL v. 3 seems to be attempting to prevent this sort of thing.
One point to consider is that it is not necessarily the case that TiVo is trying to control the software, but rather to provide some assurance that their device is not a tool for stealing copyrighted material, which ultimately amounts to the same thing.
Actually, I think that's hard to do while "laughing all the way to the bank".
Jon Udell's recent article, Stanford, meet the lightnet. Apple, get a clue agrees that this is interesting, but too constrained by iTunes. They really need to open things up before this will be a killer app.
Although the english translation option right on the Wikipedia site is probably better, there's also a google translation available if you want to try something different.
OS/2's folders were highly configurable and extendable far beyond anything you see in Windows or even the Mac OS X 10.4 finder.
One extreme example of exactly what this article is talking about was RexxMail. From what I understand, instead of having a mail program with a dedicated custom interface, the developers of RexxMail simply extended the standard folder to list files of type email so that you can see the To: From: Subject and so-on in the view. When double clicking the file, it would open it in an appropriate editor and provide different options. This way you could use all the power of the Operating System's file system and folders to manage your email without having to learn some completely different interface that insisted that your email go in some specific place. Very cool.
I used to use emacs SPOOK , mostly as a lark, in all my email. In particular, there was a spookmime hack for Xemacs VM that put Spook words into the MIME boundary lines of every email so that it would be unobtrusive to email users, but, supposedly, trigger NSA keyword sieves. I stopped after 2001-Sep-11, but if I were living in Canada again, I'd definitely consider using Spook again... though I'd probably have to write a plugin for Thunderbird to do it.
If every ISP found that a significant minority of all of their users always had Spook keywords embedded in all of their email and lots of other traffic, that the system would be rendered useless. This would be an effective means of peaceful protest. Ref: CSIS.
Control thought of these things way back in the 1960's. Their highly advanced Cone of Silence(TM) and other innovations would be no match for such technology... er, would you believe that it's the other way around?
What? I told you not to tell me that!
Recently, AC Propulsion's SoLong solar powered aircraft recently proved that a 48 hour flight was possible. And before that, the Helios solar powered aircraft that was able to reach 95000 feet under it's own power was enough to convice Sky Tower that this was a viable business idea.
Of course, way back in the 80's there was the SHARP aircraft that was powered by a microwave antenna on the ground beaming power up to it.
So, yes, solar is an option that is definitely in the running and blimps will have to work hard to beat them at this game.
True, but the 'From:' line will only have an @googlemail for newer UK users. If Google wins it's case, they'll probably go back to using @gmail, but because it's not 'Not Evil' (TM) to change someone's 'From:' line on them Google will probably keep those as they are.
So, with the liberal application of a little slippery logic and lots of squinting, my already dubious assertion can be made to appear valid even in the face of a pretty good counter argument.
If this legal dispute goes Google's way, then they'll probably discontinue the practise of handing out @googlemail.com addresses, but will likely keep existing ones active. As a result, having one of those rare email addresses might actually have some caché amongst the technorati. I'm sure that someone will try to sell an @googlemail.com address for big bucks on eBay.
I doubt that the author of the article has much of a clue about ANYTHING he wrote about and consequently distorted things so much that it is meaningless. It's probably a waste of time to discuss something that has been so horribly mangled because people are reacting to the author's errors.
As the parent comment notes, he mis-represented what OSS was. There were plenty of other obvious errors, but I'd like to suggest that even the title and basic thesis are in error because it's not really open source software that is the key factor, but rather, low power, distributed, frequency hopping, spread spectrum, mesh networks.
Heck, the guy even thinks that Apache is a mining company, so how reliable can the article be?
This is Copernicus all over again! The parallels are eerie.
Back in the day, the prevailing theory was that the planets were attached to the crystal spheres and travelled in perfect circles. When the data didn't fit, they proposed adding epicycles to the circular paths. When that didn't work, they added more and more circles, increasing the complexity of the theory. Then Copernicus came along and pointed out that it was not so complicated at all... the planets just travelled in ellipses. Even though the firmament and crystal spheres provided a tempting theory, it wasn't even close to correct and the reluctance to abandon it kept them from seeing the simplicity of the system and instead keep adding complexity to their system to keep it in line with the observations.
Now, we have a similar situation where a reluctance to delve into the nasty territory of nonlinear analysis has blinded scientists to the 'simple' solution right in front of them and lead them to propose all sorts of overly complex additions to, a basically simple and elegant, theory. Rather than adding circles on circles on circles, they've been creating elaborate families of exotic materials and expansion forces to account for something that needed no extra accounting.
Strange how history repeats itself.
Naturally, this theory just happens to align with my own crackpot TOE, so I really like it
One of my favourite GreaseMonkey scripts was the Slashdot Live Comment Tree script that allowed dynamic expanding and collapsing of slashdot stories. This made viewing of slashdot stories much more convenient. Of course it had it's downsides such as not working well with long discussions that were multiple pages long when viewed with low thresholds and broken moderation buttons. I guess, I either have to wait for a new version or roll up my sleeves and port it to the new format myself... in my abundant free time.
Pulver Innovations had a WiSIP phone that would connect over your LAN to act as a standard SIP phone, which you could use, for example, with Free World Dialup or asterisk@home. Unfortunately, as one article points out, most WiFi hot spots don't co-operate and the the phone connect, so it has some major limitations. Even Pulver doesn't push it anymore... I had a tough time finding a link to it on any of their sites.
They also had a gadget that you could plug a cell phone into that would allow you to preferentially use the cell phone's free minutes for long distance calls from your VOIP system. Since most cell phones come with a huge number of free long distance minutes, it might be worth the lower quality to some, but I can't even find a link to it any more
FreeWorldDialup already has a free service that supports all sorts of existing standards. If you want to use a difficult to set-up SIP phone you can, but they also have an, apparently, brain-dead-easy Pulver Communicator for those who don't want to deal with the hassles. They also have a small set of pre-configured SIP phones and even sell pre-configured hard phones. The only thing they don't have is a huge marketing push to skype... err.. hype this service.
Actually, I don't have a good Java joke that's appropriate, but I'm sure there's one out there somewhere.
Perhaps something involving a claim that strong typing reduces ulcers and gives you strong fingers. Or maybe something that likens the banishing of pointers to the anti-oxidants? OK, that's probably reaching a bit, but I bet there's something good out there.
The headline gave me a Simpsons flashback moment... fade to grey...
Homer sees Lisa reading Wired magazine, grabs it and goes on about how much he likes 'Weird magazine', thinks GigaBytes is some kind of joke, then discards the magazine when he realizes it isn't 'Weird', but 'Wired'. The cover had a picture of a strangely Bill Gate-ish character wearing, what the headline claims are 'Electric Underpants' - 'Virtually Wedgie Proof' - 'Do we really need them?'
The eXcel templates are cute, but a neutral, open XML document format or RDF markup designed to publish the results of this analysis might actually be useful.
As it stands, The BRR system will work wonders for private consultants who would rather produce reports one customer invoice at a time. However, if it was easy to publish the document in a standard format, then you could use google to find out whose ratings of a particular program are most reliable and filter out the flames and over-exuberant raves from the genuine ratings. Add in a system like Blogger to make it easy for people to generate the files for those who aren't comfortable editing raw XML files and using command line ftp uploads and you end up with a wide range of ratings that are distributed and hard to censor. Add a choice of style sheets to make it look pretty and people might even use the system and post ratings on their personal pages, blogs, forum posts or news groups.
Now, if I could only do the same for movie and music ratings and convince google that a special search page would be a good idea then, instead of concentrating all the ratings on private sites like NetFlix and IMDB, we could have a distributed system that is hard to manipulate.