I met Jimbo Wales when he had visited Bangalore recently and he struck me as a very down to earth person.
In his own words, "I don't do much for wikipedia. I travel to places and wikipedia makes it into the local papers". I suspect he was oversimplifying his role in wikipedia, but that is the true success of
of a founder - to create a self-sutaining system which doesn't need him to stay alive.
I assume he'll be more involved in Wikia, which
though probably similar to wikipedia, can probably exist orthogonally.
Jokes aside, it is a company sitting on american soil, why would it be wrong if they actually had a partnership with NSA or CIA. It is their patriotic duty, No ?
No, jokes aside - I'm starting to have serious doubts about google's internal innovation engine. As someone recently
pointed out, the reason
startups are innovative are because they aren't constrained. From what I hear, google has retained a bit of the humility required to keep their startup ethos (to be a company of a hundred startups) for the last five years.
To do this, they've had to do more subtle PR tricks than there is in the book and I can truly admire the way they haven't got themselves cutdown in the tall poppy meets rake approach, we techies apply to the big monoliths (AOL, MS etc...).
But this recent trend of acquiring technology instead of building it in-house is a definite sign that the culture is starting to fade, at least in the management layers of the company. Instead of looking in-wards for innovation, they are going out & buying technology.
Anyway, I see the same sort of let startups experiment, let our business follow the successes (and $$$) attitudes elsewhere - and that leads into a different sort of hell altogether.
PS:Consider me even more scared if there was a master plan to all this than mere acquisitions.
I just saw a pumpkin camera - which is probably a bit more cool (IMHO) than the other mechanical monstrosity.
After all, cool electronics and a mac mini is no match for a cheap roll of film, a small hole and
a good hour of taping ?:)
I've done some benchmarks and measurements in the past which will never be made public (I work for Yahoo!). And the most important bits in those have been CSS and Scripts. A lot of performance has been squeezed out of the HTTP layers (akamai, Expires headers), but not enough attention has been paid to the render section of the experience.
You could possibly reproduce the benchmarks with a php script which does a sleep() for a few seconds to introduce delays at various points and with a
weekend to waste.
The page does not start rendering till the last CSS stream is completed, which means if your css has @import url() entries, the delay before render increases (until that file is pulled & parsed too). It really pays to have the quickest load for the css data over anything else - because without it, all you'll get it a blank page for a while.
Scripts marked defer do not always defer and a lot of inline code in <script> tags depend on such scripts that a lot of browsers just pull the scripts as and when they find it. There seems to be just two threads downloading data in parallel (from one hostname), which means a couple of large (but rarely used) scripts in the code will block the rest of the css/image fetches.
See flickr's organizr for an example of that in action.
You should understand that these resources have different priorities in the render land and you should really only venture here after you've optimized the other bits (server and application).
All said and done, good tutorial by Aaron Hopkins - a lot of us have had to rediscover all that (& more) by ourselves.
>
why do people continue to get worked up in a lather every rumor?
Well, I propose that mankind evolved its complex sense of language in
reponse to an instinct to complain^W gossip. And then there's His Steveness (no, not Steve Irwin).
I've played around with metasploit in the past, especially their VNC payloads. The tool seems to have a high likelihood of abuse, compared to a lot of the other security tools (starting from nmap,nessus and all). Except for a couple of courtesy terminals, the tool basically gets you in and gives you a general feeling of being in control.
Canned scripts hardly ever teach you anything, especially when they work out of the box. Making them writing your own exploits is the easiest way to get a script kiddie to learn a bit and grow up (sort of).
Openoffice draining KOffice (Hurd effect)
on
KOffice 1.6 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Eventhough I still use OO.org 2.0, I've always felt that the codebase has the feel of having been through too many hands, have had too many cooks mix in all their special sauce (*cough* Sun... *cough* Java...), for it to leave a good after taste.
But people still work on it and use it because it has the best MS Word.doc compatibility versus esoteric
features like MathML (@see LaTeX) - it is a chicken and egg problem of getting your users/developers and having
work done to get them (@see Hurd).
So, if there were on OO.org, I'd have estimated that Koffice would be much farther up in.doc compatibility than it is now. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
Over the past six years I've been playing with gimp, people have written off the project
as totally bass-ackwards enough times. But no matter what, the project seems to come back
with a few surprises once in a while to prove those critics wrong (though it is debatable
whether that would happen sans critics).
I'm not a graphics artist and in the rare occasions when I do have to draw something,
these days I prefer Inkscape - there are days when I want the Macromedia Fireworks
modes of bitmap-vector middle land, but not too many. But, I've been using gimp to post-process most of my photos and I've found that
it is actually a
really really powerful tool
. So the part that really made
sense for me in the GEGL docs is the following paragraph.
PNG, JPEG, SVG, EXR, RAW and other image sources. Arithmetic operations, porter duff compositing operations, SVG blend modes, other blend modes, apply mask. Basic color correction tools. Most processing done with High Dynamic Range routines.
And the concept really scores some points because it stores transformation pipelines instead of the result bitmaps, from the looks of it. That should really revolutionize Undo for graphics.
I've heard enough photoshop graphics gurus say that Gimp is very accurately named. And
probably for print media it still is - but for a hobbyist, it has started to really really kick ass.
At least that's what happens to a sinking ship. A maintainer going missing does not quite instill the users
with confidence, especially when it is happening due to reasons other than flagging interest. Most commercial
distributions have SLAs which sort of work against such brilliant work by an individual contributor - they
just can't depend on the whims of a person or his fate.
One of my friends once told me that "Extraordinary hackers are people with socially acceptable problems".
In fact to achieve what they feel they must, a lot of them give up a lot - health, social lives and financial security. But because a few do that, does not mean FOSS programmers are crackpots.
And I say this as a son who's home (which I can because my commits go to a public CVS)
watching over a sick father.
So as understandable as it is that commercial vendors might want to switch away, but that doesn't mean
anyone gets to shine a torch or make jokes into somebody else's darkness.
Does someone remember BBC's h2g2 ? It had some excellent articles (like the link in my sig).
I met Jimbo Wales recently, on his visit to India. He was very very clear about one thing - wikipedia is not
a technical innovation. The technology for wikipedia has existed for the last 10 years, but it has come of age
with the checks & balances recently. H2g2 died out because it didn't really focus on the editors, but on the
content - Mediawiki is somewhat heavily editor oriented, with easy ways to watch pages, revision history and
all that - which provides no value to the "user". Editing community is what makes wikipedia run.
Merely starting off with a copy of the current wikipedia does not automatically provide it with crowd of editors.
If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.
Get corkscrew and use the following in your.ssh/config
host homebox hostname "fubar.kicks-ass.org" # my old host port 443 ProxyCommand "~/bin/corkscrew proxy.work.com 80 %h %p ~/.ssh/http_auth"
ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using
firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your
SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").
Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and
how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a
clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network.
Now, my current office has only
a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need
to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some
image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).
And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting
fired/expelled for using this:)
PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs;)
"is working on new chipsets for the small form-factor notebook...Validation work on server processors 5300 and 7100"
As much as I'd love India to lose the cheap indian labour tag and actually find its place in the R&D world - this could be summed up as premature ejaculation. Validation work (aka quality assurance) is not really what I'd consider worthy of mention, but
chipsets are indeed a step forward - if indeed they are being designed here, not merely run through QA.
People here are comparitively cheap, but that does not automatically mean that "You get what you pay for",
unless you do shop around for a bargain.
Somehow the fact that Yahoo! has had Yahoo! Widgets for months, seems to shine down on the Google Gadgets. Recently, I did up a Spidermonkey+ZZiplib hack to get Y!'s widgets running on my linux box - it is not impossible for Konfabulator to work elsewhere either. But in general, I didn't expect Google to much of a follower into a market, but it seems that recently they've been doing that ?
India has been using an EVM for a while, it has no operating system and is a bare-bones equivalent of a calculator with a line printer attached. Hook it up to a standard dot-matrix printer and get voting. It is probably as simple as a system can be.
No government which outsources its technology to vote can remain soverign. Machiavelli didn't go on and on about mercenaries, for nothing. And all said & done, this doesn't actually mean an honest election brings up a good government - we're intelligent induviduals, who form dumb mobs, pulled & manipulated by politicians with electoral issues (which are non-issues in the real sense).
For those who've been watching livehttpehaders while looking at Yahoo! Mail Beta would have noticed something cool and awesome. Here's a snip from my dump.
The client to server protocol is SOAP and pretty much should be accessible with a standard soap library (I think). For those who all love GMail's once-quirky and now familiar features, this could mean modding opportunities to make it behave like gmail (think gmailui for it). And for those who want an outlook in a browser, there'll always be the current layout.
The system's a bit slow still, but I think that is more due to the number of individual requests skyrocketing rather than something inherent to it.
It would be really painful to use on say, something like a high latency VSAT trickle (like I ran into during my Himalayan trek), but for most people on broadband with a decent box, this should be a leap above the classic interface.
I'm just waiting for YDN to post the WSDL for the mail api so that I can start publishing my own clients (like one with *threading*) for Yahoo!. Though most probably, I'd rather write a Mozilla yahoo:// protocol for mail, mainly because the current API almost maps into IMAP. (I do work for Yahoo! and have done enough funky things with the new api)
And lastly, nobody seems to have noticed the anti-phishing seal on the new Beta login pages. I wouldn't have known it had been released if it weren't for the ycoolthing article.
We've made enough and more mistakes along the path of our history to assume one of our "reinventions" is safe merely
because somebody else used it before. Mad hatters, heavy metal colours, hallucinogenic potions, trepanning - just find a more upto date list.
Unless you want to add some mysterious oriental magic to it... *meh*
I've been watching the kororaa project for a while, ever since we did one tandem session with XGL and OS X on two machines, watching XGL rule - especially in the video across cube faces demo. But a few weeks later, the developer announced that he's stopping Kororaa because of GPL issues with properietary drivers.
And here's a
reply by the FSF.
Now, the point to note here is that GPL is redistribution license. The way the nVidia folks handle it is to give the user some code, a binary blob and effectively tell them to build it themselves. The code they distribute does not link to the Linux kernel *yet*, while the binary blob is the closed source bit. Now, what the user does is to link them all up and there you go - which is not the distributor's fault. And this works because they are not redistributing any code that is copyrighted by a Linux kernel author (for example laf0rge).
The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle, while the distributor (i.e nVidia) is in the
gray area of legality. This is of course, my understanding from following up all this (and then had an argument with a paralegal @ work about GPL).
So google basically did what ? Fix bit-rot ? Google has re-released some
open source code, essentially forking off the orginal ?
> License: (None Listed)
I'm a fan of the FOSS idea. Basically that makes sures that the
whole work to which I contributed, always remains available to me (and others).
It might not always work for a company, but as a developer it makes sense
to me. And the second thing I need to see is a License after
I see some code.
So explain to me how exactly this is open source (other than the "compile, but don't touch"
version of it) and *then* I might think of downloading it and probably fix a few bugs
or write docs.
No, it is well known in most advertising circles that word of mouth advertising is the most effective around. Especially, when dealing with the rebels, a real advertising campaign smacks of effort (he tries too hard, whatever !). If you're thinking of anything other than teen-pop (of the Hillary Duff flavour), that's probably half your market. And it does work too, very well.
All in all, myspace is looking for ways to leverage the community network. And IMHO, iTunes has proved that the first requirement for a store is a player:)
Right to Read explains the problem with the associated moral dillemas and pulls at the heartstrings. But it is serving as a sort of Animal Farm for DRM advocates, who seem to point out how much they can gain in the short term by enforcing these schemes to make people more money.
Basically, you have to ask the guy about whether he'd be allowed to own anything. DRM is taking America (and a few other countries) into a dark age where there is really nothing you can buy - you can only rent it or lease it,with the owner living downstairs and always prying into your life. Somewhat like Three's Company Too, but except Mr Roper isn't really one person, but a composite of the company director board.
But let me put my example up - I never bought new textbooks. In my college, it is customary to buy the books
off your seniors, with the associated writings on the margin, underlined points and the odd love letter hidden
in it. But as Right to Read illustrates, information when it loses its physical form becomes a commodity which
can be sold over and over again to the same induvidual - for different uses. Meaning that, if I had an ebook DRM
based textbook, all of them would have expired by now - while I still retain some of the CS books which have
changed the way I think about computers. OR playing quake1 on my new Radeon box, I don't know if I'll ever be able to play Doom3 legally once the Steam servers go offline.
DRM exploits the transience of information in the digital world to squeeze water from a stone, without adding any extra value to the customer (other than the carrots required for them to bite).
> If you are a paid programmer, RMS is not your friend.
A lot of people are paid to create software - custom software for some particular customer's needs.
For me, the act of writing of software is the process of creating wealth, not the act of selling it.
Enough companies make their living just producing code rather than licensing the same code over to
a million customers.
Now, when I create something out of nothing, I expect to be paid. But that doesn't go against
any Free Software concept to be remunerated for work, but it does go against a few of mine if
you merely sell licenses instead of the work done. Proprietary firms do exactly that, they
sell you the use of some code, but not the code itself.
And RMS might be a hardliner, but we need those in moderation too - because otherwise the
rational people among us will accept compromises which might be harmful in the
long run... (yes, I'm talking about ESR).
In short, with free software, you get what you pay for and sometimes a few developers whom
you didn't pay for.
From what I hear from a lot of people who attended the actual GPL v3 conference, the audience was quite uninformed and rude (RMS also lost his temper, but what do you expect). Here's the blog of somebody who was on the DRM panel.
This is neither the time or place for people to ask a Why? to RMS about free software. Sure, it was a place to ask a Why GPL v3 or about DRM licensing or patent protections, but the questions that were asked was almost total bullshit. Yet again, I'm not speaking from personal presence there - I've just talked to people on irc and read their blogs.
Was one of those weeks when I wasn't in Bangalore... but RMS was in Kerala (where I am now) and the discussions here were more practical than those quoted from Blr. The ones here were really about the freedoms and mostly by students or political decision makers versus the armchair activists from the software industry.
> Vista will be able to boot off flash drives and, just possibly, U3 flash drives will turn PCs into thin clients.
I predict a return of the boot virus and you won't even know you're carrying it to every box, just because the last one didn't boot right. And btw, Vista can also walk your dog, make breakfast and do your homework - just like it used to be able to do WinFS and so many other wonderful things which later got pulled.
Once as an experiment, I turned on BOOTP on my linux server in office and loaded up a 14 Mb initrd into the tftpd, during the weekend. To my surprise, on monday half the office machines were booting into a linux command line and all the administrators were tearing their hair out.
Secondly, most offices I know are starting to disable their USB connectors and some of the better ones are disabling the USB data pins (ipods still charge, but no copying). 16 Gb is a lot of data that can be pulled out of a place, especially with something which is magnet free (most of these places have scanners for magnetic media).
But it is a limited edition drive right now... till people actually work out the possibilities, once it starts getting popular.
Reverse Engineering ...
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Different standards exist for reverse engineering. For example, reverse engineering a binary is illegal, while reverse engineering a protocol (for compatibility purposes) isn't.
But the real question to ask is, a.doc a binary file or a protocol ?
(and then there are EULAs... which have started saying "You shall be responsible for anything any user does... to cover shared envs")
Slashdot Mirror
I met Jimbo Wales when he had visited Bangalore recently and he struck me as a very down to earth person. In his own words, "I don't do much for wikipedia. I travel to places and wikipedia makes it into the local papers". I suspect he was oversimplifying his role in wikipedia, but that is the true success of of a founder - to create a self-sutaining system which doesn't need him to stay alive.
I assume he'll be more involved in Wikia, which though probably similar to wikipedia, can probably exist orthogonally.
To repeat the brilliant Illiad - where do I sign up ?. Don't panic it is only beta.
Jokes aside, it is a company sitting on american soil, why would it be wrong if they actually had a partnership with NSA or CIA. It is their patriotic duty, No ?
The Borg, she grows - resistance is futile.
No, jokes aside - I'm starting to have serious doubts about google's internal innovation engine. As someone recently pointed out, the reason startups are innovative are because they aren't constrained. From what I hear, google has retained a bit of the humility required to keep their startup ethos (to be a company of a hundred startups) for the last five years. To do this, they've had to do more subtle PR tricks than there is in the book and I can truly admire the way they haven't got themselves cutdown in the tall poppy meets rake approach, we techies apply to the big monoliths (AOL, MS etc...). But this recent trend of acquiring technology instead of building it in-house is a definite sign that the culture is starting to fade, at least in the management layers of the company. Instead of looking in-wards for innovation, they are going out & buying technology.
Anyway, I see the same sort of let startups experiment, let our business follow the successes (and $$$) attitudes elsewhere - and that leads into a different sort of hell altogether.
PS:Consider me even more scared if there was a master plan to all this than mere acquisitions.
I just saw a pumpkin camera - which is probably a bit more cool (IMHO) than the other mechanical monstrosity. After all, cool electronics and a mac mini is no match for a cheap roll of film, a small hole and a good hour of taping ? :)
I've done some benchmarks and measurements in the past which will never be made public (I work for Yahoo!). And the most important bits in those have been CSS and Scripts. A lot of performance has been squeezed out of the HTTP layers (akamai, Expires headers), but not enough attention has been paid to the render section of the experience. You could possibly reproduce the benchmarks with a php script which does a sleep() for a few seconds to introduce delays at various points and with a weekend to waste.
The page does not start rendering till the last CSS stream is completed, which means if your css has @import url() entries, the delay before render increases (until that file is pulled & parsed too). It really pays to have the quickest load for the css data over anything else - because without it, all you'll get it a blank page for a while.
Scripts marked defer do not always defer and a lot of inline code in <script> tags depend on such scripts that a lot of browsers just pull the scripts as and when they find it. There seems to be just two threads downloading data in parallel (from one hostname), which means a couple of large (but rarely used) scripts in the code will block the rest of the css/image fetches. See flickr's organizr for an example of that in action.
You should understand that these resources have different priorities in the render land and you should really only venture here after you've optimized the other bits (server and application).
All said and done, good tutorial by Aaron Hopkins - a lot of us have had to rediscover all that (& more) by ourselves.
> why do people continue to get worked up in a lather every rumor?
Well, I propose that mankind evolved its complex sense of language in reponse to an instinct to complain^W gossip. And then there's His Steveness (no, not Steve Irwin).
I've played around with metasploit in the past, especially their VNC payloads. The tool seems to have a high likelihood of abuse, compared to a lot of the other security tools (starting from nmap,nessus and all). Except for a couple of courtesy terminals, the tool basically gets you in and gives you a general feeling of being in control.
Canned scripts hardly ever teach you anything, especially when they work out of the box. Making them writing your own exploits is the easiest way to get a script kiddie to learn a bit and grow up (sort of).
Eventhough I still use OO.org 2.0, I've always felt that the codebase has the feel of having been through too many hands, have had too many cooks mix in all their special sauce (*cough* Sun... *cough* Java...), for it to leave a good after taste. But people still work on it and use it because it has the best MS Word .doc compatibility versus esoteric
features like MathML (@see LaTeX) - it is a chicken and egg problem of getting your users/developers and having
work done to get them (@see Hurd).
So, if there were on OO.org, I'd have estimated that Koffice would be much farther up in .doc compatibility than it is now. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.
Over the past six years I've been playing with gimp, people have written off the project as totally bass-ackwards enough times. But no matter what, the project seems to come back with a few surprises once in a while to prove those critics wrong (though it is debatable whether that would happen sans critics).
I'm not a graphics artist and in the rare occasions when I do have to draw something, these days I prefer Inkscape - there are days when I want the Macromedia Fireworks modes of bitmap-vector middle land, but not too many. But, I've been using gimp to post-process most of my photos and I've found that it is actually a really really powerful tool . So the part that really made sense for me in the GEGL docs is the following paragraph.
And the concept really scores some points because it stores transformation pipelines instead of the result bitmaps, from the looks of it. That should really revolutionize Undo for graphics.
I've heard enough photoshop graphics gurus say that Gimp is very accurately named. And probably for print media it still is - but for a hobbyist, it has started to really really kick ass.
At least that's what happens to a sinking ship. A maintainer going missing does not quite instill the users with confidence, especially when it is happening due to reasons other than flagging interest. Most commercial distributions have SLAs which sort of work against such brilliant work by an individual contributor - they just can't depend on the whims of a person or his fate.
One of my friends once told me that "Extraordinary hackers are people with socially acceptable problems". In fact to achieve what they feel they must, a lot of them give up a lot - health, social lives and financial security. But because a few do that, does not mean FOSS programmers are crackpots. And I say this as a son who's home (which I can because my commits go to a public CVS) watching over a sick father.
So as understandable as it is that commercial vendors might want to switch away, but that doesn't mean anyone gets to shine a torch or make jokes into somebody else's darkness.
Does someone remember BBC's h2g2 ? It had some excellent articles (like the link in my sig).
I met Jimbo Wales recently, on his visit to India. He was very very clear about one thing - wikipedia is not a technical innovation. The technology for wikipedia has existed for the last 10 years, but it has come of age with the checks & balances recently. H2g2 died out because it didn't really focus on the editors, but on the content - Mediawiki is somewhat heavily editor oriented, with easy ways to watch pages, revision history and all that - which provides no value to the "user". Editing community is what makes wikipedia run.
Merely starting off with a copy of the current wikipedia does not automatically provide it with crowd of editors.
If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.
Get corkscrew and use the following in your .ssh/config
ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").
Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network. Now, my current office has only a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).
And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting fired/expelled for using this :)
PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs ;)
TFA clearly says
"is working on new chipsets for the small form-factor notebook ...Validation work on server processors 5300 and 7100"
As much as I'd love India to lose the cheap indian labour tag and actually find its place in the R&D world - this could be summed up as premature ejaculation. Validation work (aka quality assurance) is not really what I'd consider worthy of mention, but chipsets are indeed a step forward - if indeed they are being designed here, not merely run through QA.
People here are comparitively cheap, but that does not automatically mean that "You get what you pay for", unless you do shop around for a bargain.
Somehow the fact that Yahoo! has had Yahoo! Widgets for months, seems to shine down on the Google Gadgets. Recently, I did up a Spidermonkey+ZZiplib hack to get Y!'s widgets running on my linux box - it is not impossible for Konfabulator to work elsewhere either. But in general, I didn't expect Google to much of a follower into a market, but it seems that recently they've been doing that ?
Gmail was innovation ... *shrug*
India has been using an EVM for a while, it has no operating system and is a bare-bones equivalent of a calculator with a line printer attached. Hook it up to a standard dot-matrix printer and get voting. It is probably as simple as a system can be.
No government which outsources its technology to vote can remain soverign. Machiavelli didn't go on and on about mercenaries, for nothing. And all said & done, this doesn't actually mean an honest election brings up a good government - we're intelligent induviduals, who form dumb mobs, pulled & manipulated by politicians with electoral issues (which are non-issues in the real sense).
For those who've been watching livehttpehaders while looking at Yahoo! Mail Beta would have noticed something cool and awesome. Here's a snip from my dump.
The client to server protocol is SOAP and pretty much should be accessible with a standard soap library (I think). For those who all love GMail's once-quirky and now familiar features, this could mean modding opportunities to make it behave like gmail (think gmailui for it). And for those who want an outlook in a browser, there'll always be the current layout. The system's a bit slow still, but I think that is more due to the number of individual requests skyrocketing rather than something inherent to it. It would be really painful to use on say, something like a high latency VSAT trickle (like I ran into during my Himalayan trek), but for most people on broadband with a decent box, this should be a leap above the classic interface.
I'm just waiting for YDN to post the WSDL for the mail api so that I can start publishing my own clients (like one with *threading*) for Yahoo!. Though most probably, I'd rather write a Mozilla yahoo:// protocol for mail, mainly because the current API almost maps into IMAP. (I do work for Yahoo! and have done enough funky things with the new api)
And lastly, nobody seems to have noticed the anti-phishing seal on the new Beta login pages. I wouldn't have known it had been released if it weren't for the ycoolthing article.
We've made enough and more mistakes along the path of our history to assume one of our "reinventions" is safe merely because somebody else used it before. Mad hatters, heavy metal colours, hallucinogenic potions, trepanning - just find a more upto date list.
Unless you want to add some mysterious oriental magic to it ... *meh*
I've been watching the kororaa project for a while, ever since we did one tandem session with XGL and OS X on two machines, watching XGL rule - especially in the video across cube faces demo. But a few weeks later, the developer announced that he's stopping Kororaa because of GPL issues with properietary drivers. And here's a reply by the FSF.
Now, the point to note here is that GPL is redistribution license. The way the nVidia folks handle it is to give the user some code, a binary blob and effectively tell them to build it themselves. The code they distribute does not link to the Linux kernel *yet*, while the binary blob is the closed source bit. Now, what the user does is to link them all up and there you go - which is not the distributor's fault. And this works because they are not redistributing any code that is copyrighted by a Linux kernel author (for example laf0rge).
The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle, while the distributor (i.e nVidia) is in the gray area of legality. This is of course, my understanding from following up all this (and then had an argument with a paralegal @ work about GPL).
But I could be wrong you know ...
> It was open-sourced by HP and UNLV in 2005.
So google basically did what ? Fix bit-rot ? Google has re-released some open source code, essentially forking off the orginal ?
> License: (None Listed)
I'm a fan of the FOSS idea. Basically that makes sures that the whole work to which I contributed, always remains available to me (and others). It might not always work for a company, but as a developer it makes sense to me. And the second thing I need to see is a License after I see some code.
So explain to me how exactly this is open source (other than the "compile, but don't touch" version of it) and *then* I might think of downloading it and probably fix a few bugs or write docs.
No, it is well known in most advertising circles that word of mouth advertising is the most effective around. Especially, when dealing with the rebels, a real advertising campaign smacks of effort (he tries too hard, whatever !). If you're thinking of anything other than teen-pop (of the Hillary Duff flavour), that's probably half your market. And it does work too, very well.
All in all, myspace is looking for ways to leverage the community network. And IMHO, iTunes has proved that the first requirement for a store is a player :)
Right to Read explains the problem with the associated moral dillemas and pulls at the heartstrings. But it is serving as a sort of Animal Farm for DRM advocates, who seem to point out how much they can gain in the short term by enforcing these schemes to make people more money.
Basically, you have to ask the guy about whether he'd be allowed to own anything. DRM is taking America (and a few other countries) into a dark age where there is really nothing you can buy - you can only rent it or lease it,with the owner living downstairs and always prying into your life. Somewhat like Three's Company Too, but except Mr Roper isn't really one person, but a composite of the company director board.
But let me put my example up - I never bought new textbooks. In my college, it is customary to buy the books off your seniors, with the associated writings on the margin, underlined points and the odd love letter hidden in it. But as Right to Read illustrates, information when it loses its physical form becomes a commodity which can be sold over and over again to the same induvidual - for different uses. Meaning that, if I had an ebook DRM based textbook, all of them would have expired by now - while I still retain some of the CS books which have changed the way I think about computers. OR playing quake1 on my new Radeon box, I don't know if I'll ever be able to play Doom3 legally once the Steam servers go offline.
DRM exploits the transience of information in the digital world to squeeze water from a stone, without adding any extra value to the customer (other than the carrots required for them to bite).
Oblig. UF quote (where's pitr these days ?)A lot of people are paid to create software - custom software for some particular customer's needs. For me, the act of writing of software is the process of creating wealth, not the act of selling it. Enough companies make their living just producing code rather than licensing the same code over to a million customers.
Now, when I create something out of nothing, I expect to be paid. But that doesn't go against any Free Software concept to be remunerated for work, but it does go against a few of mine if you merely sell licenses instead of the work done. Proprietary firms do exactly that, they sell you the use of some code, but not the code itself. And RMS might be a hardliner, but we need those in moderation too - because otherwise the rational people among us will accept compromises which might be harmful in the long run ... (yes, I'm talking about ESR).
In short, with free software, you get what you pay for and sometimes a few developers whom you didn't pay for.
This is neither the time or place for people to ask a Why? to RMS about free software. Sure, it was a place to ask a Why GPL v3 or about DRM licensing or patent protections, but the questions that were asked was almost total bullshit. Yet again, I'm not speaking from personal presence there - I've just talked to people on irc and read their blogs.
Was one of those weeks when I wasn't in Bangalore ... but RMS was in Kerala (where I am now) and the discussions here were more practical than those quoted from Blr. The ones here were really about the freedoms and mostly by students or political decision makers versus the armchair activists from the software industry.
> Vista will be able to boot off flash drives and, just possibly, U3 flash drives will turn PCs into thin clients.
I predict a return of the boot virus and you won't even know you're carrying it to every box, just because the last one didn't boot right. And btw, Vista can also walk your dog, make breakfast and do your homework - just like it used to be able to do WinFS and so many other wonderful things which later got pulled.
Once as an experiment, I turned on BOOTP on my linux server in office and loaded up a 14 Mb initrd into the tftpd, during the weekend. To my surprise, on monday half the office machines were booting into a linux command line and all the administrators were tearing their hair out.
Secondly, most offices I know are starting to disable their USB connectors and some of the better ones are disabling the USB data pins (ipods still charge, but no copying). 16 Gb is a lot of data that can be pulled out of a place, especially with something which is magnet free (most of these places have scanners for magnetic media).
But it is a limited edition drive right nowDifferent standards exist for reverse engineering. For example, reverse engineering a binary is illegal, while reverse engineering a protocol (for compatibility purposes) isn't.
But the real question to ask is, a .doc a binary file or a protocol ?
(and then there are EULAs