"two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser â" listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project."
That sure wasn't our experience with contributing to FireFox. My company contributed several person months of code to FireFox 3 to build out a text placement capability. Our patches were never accepted; However, they took 80% of the code and reused it to fix half a dozen incidental issues that we had had to fix in order to implement the character placement issue that we were addressing.
All of which is OK, except that our authors were not given any acknowledgement or attribution.
But then they turned around and said we'd have to rework our original patch because now "80% of the code is redundant".
We are not contributing to FireFox any more. I thought about point out our experiences to Brendan Eich and asking him if he's OK with his people's behaviour. But it was easier just to walk away. We've now changed our focus to WebKit.
There's a phone,
a small pc,
another phone,
a vista pc,
a voice controlled robot,
a laptop,
a water resistant phone,
a hdtv usb dongle,
a media server + handheld pc + notebook,
and a piggy bank.
OK?
Yahoo is treading water. Microsoft is treading water. Neither company has innovated to grow new business for the last 5+ years. Meanwhile, Google has created growth. It has built and grown a large, growing advertising business. Now Microsoft has a paw on Yahoo, treading water next to it.
TFA describes how Jobs and co. designed a great device, and makes the point that traditional mobile phone handset businesses has been stifled and denied the opportunity to innovate by network operators.
It is nice that Apple is innovating, and computing on telephone platforms is advancing.
But progress may still be limited by network operators for the time being because to deploy software or services, providers have to go through the network operators.
And to consume services, consumers must first access the networks through the network operators.
Round 1 to Apple with the iphone. Round 2 is software and services.
Can innovation in software and services flourish despite network operators trying to gatekeep and tax all revenue opportunities whether they understand them or not?
Microsoft's continued abuse of its monopoly for operating systems is clearly apparent in its failure to implement web standards in IE.
Smaller browser vendors with vastly less funding have made giant strides in their implementations of CSS, SVG, mathml and DOM. Microsoft has done as little as possible to implement those standards, but somehow has found the resources and the rationalization to implement SilVerliGht, which is a stolen, bastardized clone of SVG.
Unlike 10 years ago, the world has moved past its reliance on Microsoft to embrace other vendors products willingly. No wonder IE's market share continues to fall precipitously.
"a reliable, tiered scheme is required for what he calls the 'Edisonet' -- which consists of 'communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds.'"
Why shouldn't we consider "communication-rich" applications to be a fundamental part of the internet in the same way that email and web browsing already are?
Standards for voice applications, meeting applications and graphics applications have already been developed, published and endorsed by the W3C, 3GPP and ITU. Let's use them.
Paragraph 1 of the Verizon terms state plainly that the Unlimited plain means unlimited bandwidth for a particular small set of uses:
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose.
The magazine gathered six staffers from around the world, set them up in a London office, and gave them six months to come up with a radically new idea for the business.
In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, wisky, condoms, flat screen televisions and gaming consoles.
In the second week, the staffers hired a young graphic artist through the internet for $35 per hour to set up a rudimentary web page asking for innovative ideas.
The next 5 months is a blur.
The final two weeks were a flurry of activities. So many good ideas to review! So little time!
I was glad to hear Fran Allen had won the Turing prize and went searching for an inspirational quote that would help me to appreciate the genius that sets her apart from other humans.
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
Not many communities are made up exclusively of starving illiterate children.
The kids that are terminally ill and too weak to benefit from a computer usually die sooner rather than later. It is the kids who are doing a little better, merely impoverished and frustrated, who will benefit from the education programs and work choices that computers promise. They'll grow up and make the community more skilled, more healthy and better able to prevent calamities such as war and famine.
The article states, "Executives didn't want anybody even to mention the company's name for fear that competitors could learn of its plans."
And the Google guy is quoted as saying he recognizes the need for legislative due process. "We respect the legislature needs to conduct its business, to deliberate on bills," Weiss wrote in a June 7 e-mail to Hobart. But legislators must understand that the project likely will be canceled if anyone "mentions the company's interest in the bill, North Carolina, or the project itself."
So the article doesn't even suggest that Google was seeking to quash debate on the issue or the principle of the tax break, merely to have the specific company name and project details kept confidential.
Those are normal requests in business negotiations.
Still, NC could have declined Google's request. And Google could have chosen to work with one of the 6 other states that were able to respect its request for confidentiality
That Google and NC worked through all the issues suggests... goodwill rather more than evil, wouldn't you agree?
At least 200 North Carolina citizens with new jobs would surely agree, don't you think?
Slashdot Mirror
"two of the key figures behind the success of Mozilla's Firefox Web browser â" listed inclusivity and transparency as two of the top cornerstones of any community-built project."
That sure wasn't our experience with contributing to FireFox. My company contributed several person months of code to FireFox 3 to build out a text placement capability. Our patches were never accepted; However, they took 80% of the code and reused it to fix half a dozen incidental issues that we had had to fix in order to implement the character placement issue that we were addressing.
All of which is OK, except that our authors were not given any acknowledgement or attribution.
But then they turned around and said we'd have to rework our original patch because now "80% of the code is redundant".
We are not contributing to FireFox any more. I thought about point out our experiences to Brendan Eich and asking him if he's OK with his people's behaviour. But it was easier just to walk away. We've now changed our focus to WebKit.
He is such a cunt
The article has a photo of a drive that's supposed to be the ST506. It looks more like an ST225, as the ST506 was full height.
The article pictures what looks like a 40MB 5.25" (half-height) drive, the ST412.
As you say, the ST506 is a full height drive, twice the height (and weight) of the drive pictured.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
--Charles Darwin
"Given the microstructure that we've seen, our best guess is that the rivets failed before the steel plates cracked, and the seams between plates simply opened up," Weihs says.
-- Johns Hopkins University Gazette, 26 April 1999
There's a phone,
a small pc,
another phone,
a vista pc,
a voice controlled robot,
a laptop,
a water resistant phone,
a hdtv usb dongle,
a media server + handheld pc + notebook,
and a piggy bank.
OK?
Yahoo is treading water. Microsoft is treading water. Neither company has innovated to grow new business for the last 5+ years. Meanwhile, Google has created growth. It has built and grown a large, growing advertising business. Now Microsoft has a paw on Yahoo, treading water next to it.
TFA describes how Jobs and co. designed a great device, and makes the point that traditional mobile phone handset businesses has been stifled and denied the opportunity to innovate by network operators.
It is nice that Apple is innovating, and computing on telephone platforms is advancing.
But progress may still be limited by network operators for the time being because to deploy software or services, providers have to go through the network operators.
And to consume services, consumers must first access the networks through the network operators.
Round 1 to Apple with the iphone. Round 2 is software and services.
Can innovation in software and services flourish despite network operators trying to gatekeep and tax all revenue opportunities whether they understand them or not?It'd be interesting to see if the money they got from their customers in '07 equals or exceeds that number.
Novell, Inc. ( NASDAQ:NOVL ) reported total revenue of $932.5 million dollars for the year to October 2007.
http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=ii&q=NOVL/
It is easy to love someone or something.
It is harder to feel loved.
And harder still to feel loved by something you know does not think or feel.
For that reason, humans will continue to feel loved (or not loved) by other humans more easily than they can connect with inanimate objects.
FTA: "Many travelers find the prospect of phone calls much less palatable than having a seatmate quietly browsing e-mail."
Yes. Imagine sitting in the center seat between two obese passengers talking non-stop about things you don't want to know about.
What would you do?
What could you possibly do at that point?Microsoft's continued abuse of its monopoly for operating systems is clearly apparent in its failure to implement web standards in IE.
Smaller browser vendors with vastly less funding have made giant strides in their implementations of CSS, SVG, mathml and DOM. Microsoft has done as little as possible to implement those standards, but somehow has found the resources and the rationalization to implement SilVerliGht, which is a stolen, bastardized clone of SVG.
Unlike 10 years ago, the world has moved past its reliance on Microsoft to embrace other vendors products willingly. No wonder IE's market share continues to fall precipitously.
Next time, remove the lens cap.
It makes sense for Apple to expand its phone product range, since it is now a phone manufacturer.
What if they succeed and sell tens of millions of units?
Then a computer company would be one of the world's largest phone manufacturers.
That would make the telecommunications industry a lot more interesting. Currently, it is dominated by phone type companies.
Thank you. I'm not time impaired but the article was too long. Your abridged version is all that was required.
Why shouldn't we consider "communication-rich" applications to be a fundamental part of the internet in the same way that email and web browsing already are?
Standards for voice applications, meeting applications and graphics applications have already been developed, published and endorsed by the W3C, 3GPP and ITU. Let's use them.
Brown Dwarf Stars May Not Be Missing Cosmic Link
Unlimited Data Plans and Features (such as NationalAccess, BroadbandAccess, Push to Talk, and certain VZEmail services) may ONLY be used with wireless devices for the following purposes: (i) Internet browsing; (ii) email; and (iii) intranet access (including access to corporate intranets, email, and individual productivity applications like customer relationship management, sales force, and field service automation). The Unlimited Data Plans and Features MAY NOT be used for any other purpose.Paragraph 1 of the Verizon terms state plainly that the Unlimited plain means unlimited bandwidth for a particular small set of uses:
The magazine gathered six staffers from around the world, set them up in a London office, and gave them six months to come up with a radically new idea for the business.
In the first week, the staffers bought beer, wine, wisky, condoms, flat screen televisions and gaming consoles.
In the second week, the staffers hired a young graphic artist through the internet for $35 per hour to set up a rudimentary web page asking for innovative ideas.
The next 5 months is a blur.
The final two weeks were a flurry of activities. So many good ideas to review! So little time!
The bigger challenge for Apple is not how to milk a few rich artists the most, but how to rejuvenate and renew music for the long term.
How will Apple help us to find good new artists worth listening to?
This from a professional reviewer after 19 months on the job:
"Is Vista more stable that XP? Hard to tell as I don't have a lot of problems with XP but I do feel that Vista is on the whole more robust."
On the whole, ZDNET adheres presents a robust standard of informative journalism. But there are exceptions.
I was glad to hear Fran Allen had won the Turing prize and went searching for an inspirational quote that would help me to appreciate the genius that sets her apart from other humans.
But alas... I only found these.
So I'm left wondering... maybe Fran Allen IS a computer...(?)
In which case... I'm excited! Fran Allen deserves the Turing prize!
If a child is starving and illiterate, because he lives in an area where the people do not possess enough basic intelligence to feed themselves or create schools, what good is a computer?
Not many communities are made up exclusively of starving illiterate children.
The kids that are terminally ill and too weak to benefit from a computer usually die sooner rather than later. It is the kids who are doing a little better, merely impoverished and frustrated, who will benefit from the education programs and work choices that computers promise. They'll grow up and make the community more skilled, more healthy and better able to prevent calamities such as war and famine.
Why doesn't Steve open up the iTunes store to indies?
Chris Anderson's Long Tail research makes it clear that more tunes means more iPod usage, even when those tunes are from the most obscure artists.
Anderson's thesis arises because "digital music is no longer subject to the artificial barrier of finite shelf space."
Or at least, that would be the case if stores like iTunes were more accessible.
C'mon Steve, open wide. Let the long tail wag.
"They evil is with the Nondisclosure Agreement!"
The article states, "Executives didn't want anybody even to mention the company's name for fear that competitors could learn of its plans."
And the Google guy is quoted as saying he recognizes the need for legislative due process. "We respect the legislature needs to conduct its business, to deliberate on bills," Weiss wrote in a June 7 e-mail to Hobart. But legislators must understand that the project likely will be canceled if anyone "mentions the company's interest in the bill, North Carolina, or the project itself."
So the article doesn't even suggest that Google was seeking to quash debate on the issue or the principle of the tax break, merely to have the specific company name and project details kept confidential.
Those are normal requests in business negotiations.
Still, NC could have declined Google's request. And Google could have chosen to work with one of the 6 other states that were able to respect its request for confidentiality
That Google and NC worked through all the issues suggests... goodwill rather more than evil, wouldn't you agree?
At least 200 North Carolina citizens with new jobs would surely agree, don't you think?