If you think US-Auz relationships are a little strained after reading this, try visiting as a Brit!
I was over for a month last year - fantastic time, most people really friendly, beautiful country (culturally felt like a cross between UK and US, plus the famous laid-back humour).
However, we ran into one bloke in Sydney that launched a tirade about the "f-ing Poms" thinking they ruled the world, that they still owned Auz, etc. Was a real shock: I'd also thought the sport-related Pom jokes and vice-versa were lighthearted, but this got us wondering.:|
Still heartily recommend visiting: Sydney is polished, stunning and lively. Melbourne is more bohemian, lots to explore in the surrounding area (e.g., Hanging Rock). Cairns was ugly as hell, horribly humid.. but Christ, the Barrier Reef is beautiful!
Just posted this comment on Ben Witherington's blog in question, and thought I'd share. Be interesting to see how Ben replies, and others' thoughts on this:
"Interesting discussion, there is further debate at Game Politics and the venerable Slashdot.
The commentary (particularly at the sites above) is sometimes quite openly hostile toward Christianity - this is not uncommon amongst the youth community today. I wanted to write a little about why I think this is the case.
Society has become far more sceptical of "messages of goodwill" and young people - quite rightly - demand more concrete evidence and credibility before committing to a belief.
This cynicism has developed out of necessity and I believe it is "a good thing". One only has to look at the widespread "good will" messages (with hidden motives) and false promises that we are bombarded with every day from marketers, politicians, et al to see how this cynicism has been nurtured.
"Our product/service will make you a better person!"
"Vote for X and build a better Britain!"
"Catch the monkey and win a FREE iPod!"
"There's something for everyone at Mecca Bingo!"
"If you download MP3s, you are funding terrorism!"
"Come join our Youth Group, it's loads of fun!"
When a young person rejects Christianity, they are not saying "I do not wish to be a good person" or "I do not believe in God". They are simply applying the same level of cynicism and questioning to something often promoted in a very similar way to - frankly - a miracle cure, a politician's manifesto or a bingo club.
Personally, I attended Sunday school in the UK until my mid-teens and maintain a strong interest in religion as a humanitarian subject. When asked to Confirm, I chose not to. My reasoning was that I believed in the common-sense principles behind Christianity, but was put off by the inconsistencies and uncertain history of the Bible. Therefore, I decided to live my life by commonsense, hold respect for Christianity as a belief alongside others, but I couldn't commit to unquestioning adherence.
Were I to make my decision now, as young people today must, I would also be strongly influenced by the examples of extreme negative effects of all-consuming belief in a particular religion that we see today. If my faith in particular teachings were so strong that I was prepared to detonate myself in a public place, killing hundreds, was commonsense not a better way to live my life?
Take Scientology too as an example of a vile cult that is marketed using the similar methods to Christian preaching. How is a young person to know with conviction the difference between your typical friendly-friendly leaflet-brandishing youth group leader and a smiling face offering free "personality tests"?
Without a means to prove credibility over the sea of other "me too" ideas that young people are exposed to and must weigh up every day, Christianity will face the same scrutiny, scepticism and sometimes outright hostility as any other message.
I hope this is a useful insight into the rise of Agnosticism?"
Los Angeles - - BitTorrent Founder and CEO Bram Cohen and Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman announced today that the motion picture industry and BitTorrent, Inc. are collaborating with the goal of inhibiting film piracy. Bram Cohen developed a revolutionary technology for websites to make large content files available on the Web and that technology is often used by others illegally to distribute movies and television shows. Today Cohen confirmed BitTorrent, Inc.'s commitment to removing links that direct users to copies of pirated content owned by MPAA companies from its search engine at BitTorrent.com. The announcement today is historic in that two major forces in the technology and film industries have agreed to work together and proactively identify ways to l and to promote constructive innovation in this area.
And from Bram Cohen, creator of the BitTorrent protocol, and Ludvig (Ludde) Strigeus, the writer of Torrent:
Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and Torrent AB have decided to join forces. BitTorrent has acquired Torrent as it recognized the merits of Torrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together Torrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.
Note that the above link title is misleading BTW - MPAA haven't "bought" uTorrent. Rather BitTorrent Inc have bough uTorrent and BitTorrent Inc have a commercial relationship with the MPAA.
I recall reading about a link between uTorrent/BT Inc and TorrentSpy too. At minimum, TorrentSpy.com is apparently planning to filter MPAA content soon:
Hmmm.. no particular opinion on the particular subject matter, but it is incorrect to say that trademarks are only protected in the UK if registered.
IANAL, but UK common law (per the 1994 Trade Marks Act) dictates that a trade term that is "sufficiently distinctive" and "does not conflict with prior registered or unregistered third-party UK rights" gains intrinsic protection, as means of identifying the origin of products or services.
From the ITMA website, for example:
What is a trade mark?
A trade mark is defined in the Trade Marks Directive* as "any sign capable of being represented graphically, particularly words, including personal names, designs, letters, numerals, the shape of goods or of their packaging, provided that such signs are capable of distinguishing the goods and services of one undertaking from those of other undertakings".
The essential function of the trade mark is to guarantee the origin of goods and services; and the law of trade marks has been designed to promote that essential function....
One of the most important features of trade mark protection is that it relates to specific goods and/or services. Consequently, a single sign may be registered by different companies in respect of different goods and services.
A little known reflection of this is that the "TM" mark can be used after sufficiently new and unique product names, etc, without registration. "RTM" is used when the trademark has been "actively registered".
Regarding the specific case of the "open source" label, however, I would have thought that the term is too generic to warrant reliable protection. Because no restriction on its usage has taken place to-date and because of the myriad of OSS licences, "open source" could be legitimately interpreted to mean a variety of things, e.g.:
Software with inspectible (and optionally modifiable) source code
Gratis (i.e., no cost) open sourcecode software (with usage restrictions)
Libre Open Source Software ("FLOSS") with no usage restrictions (e.g., LGPL, BSD)
Copyleft licensed open source software (e.g., GNU), restrictions on derivatives
Therefore, retrospectively restricting the meaning of "open source" seems the wrong approach. Surely this term should be left to mean "open source code" (which is better than closed-source, even if other freedoms aren't included) and more specific terms such as "FLOSS" should be used to mean LGPL, GPL, etc?
A couple of years ago, a friend of the family was accused of downloading child porn. He'd divorced and moved out of his family home several years before, but the UK Police clearly hadn't bothered to check this when they dawn raided his previous address and confiscated all computers, CD-ROMs, etc in front of his teenage children and ex-wife.
All his friends and family were shocked by the accusations and evil sounding charges. They were later dropped due to lack of evidence. It turned out he'd subscribed to an adult site that had allegedly hired models under 18, i.e., 16/17. As far as he was concerned, the site was a regular adult website - a life saver I expect in the advent of divorce! Who the hell would be stupid enough to subscribe to a website they knew to be illegal using their personal credit card?!
It was too late by then, though. The word had spread across the community that he was some sort of sick perv, and his ex-wife tried to ban him from seeing his children. Despite having known him for years, even I had moments of doubt, worrying that he was a secret Gary Glitter.
After all, the police wouldn't raid someone's home unless the alleged crime was a) intentional, b) supported with strong evidence, and c) the defendant was known to actually still live there.
Would they?
Are you quite certain every model on your favourite adult website is 18 or over? Because if they're not (even if the website incorrectly claims they are), you stand to face the same life-changing trauma.
"If web design was reduced to the level of Adobe InDesign and web development was made as simple as visualBasic, then much of the "Web Industry" would disappear."
LOL! So the entire web development industry (of which I am a member) exists solely to hand-code HTML/CSS? I beg to disagree. Granted, battling with browsers differences, broken CSS support et al saps a disproportionate amount of our working hours, but professional web developers do rather more than churn code!
Design of the look & feel of the website - most home-brew websites look awful due to lack of design expertise; no automated tool is going to create a great looking bespoke design to your requirements and branding.
Search Engine Optimisation - a constantly changing black-art with an entire industry dedicated to it; your typical amateur webmaster cannot be expected to keep up with best practice for delivering decent search result page (SRP) performance.
Functional requirements capture/modelling and Usability design - in our experience, clients often have a rough idea of what they want, perhaps a rough navigation plan, possibly even a full site spec. 9 times of 10, however, these plans are full of holes and designed from an internal rather than user perspective (= poor usability/sales conversions). A professional developer will get to the bottom of what you REALLY want and will translate this into an effective site structure and feature set.
Graphic design/editing? Copywriting? Back-end programming code? Database design (inc data modelling -> table design, DB config/tuning)? Client-side scripting to enhance usability when enabled? I could go on, but I have work to do - around 25% of which is HTML/CSS coding;)
I beg to disagree that a glorified copy of FrontPage would kill off the web design/development industry. We want more ubiquitous, bug-free standards more than anyone; clients see little value in time spent overcoming browser deficiencies, so this is one of the lowest profit aspects we handle.
The AJAX API is not a replacement for a Web Service API (SOAP or otherwise).
The AJAX "API" is a customisable, but Google branded search widget. It does not allow programmatic search queries (although it is technically possible to run direct queries to the Web Services powering the AJAX interface, the Google AJAX API T&Cs forbid this).
This is about Google ending programmatic access to its search results, nothing to do with the technical merits/failings of the SOAP technology ("business reasons rather than technical").
Um.. the discussion about the relative merits of web service technologies are all very interesting and all, but they seem to miss the point.
For "business reasons rather than technical", Google appears to have deprecated programmatic search queries full stop - neither the AJAX API (i.e., a search box widget) nor the GData API (RSS feed related, not search) provide the same functionality as the abandoned SOAP web service API.
It would appear there is no longer a supported method of querying Google programmatically and displaying the results in a custom manner (such as unbranded website searches and -blerrrg name- "mashups").
This is a crying shame and by Google's own confession, motivated by AdSense/Google Mini sales greed rather than technical issues.
The maximum number of simultaneous connections for Windows applications using the WinInet API (including Internet Explorer 4+) is determined by the following registry DWORD values:
These two settings affect HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 connections respectively and default to 4 and 2 respectively. More info (including similar tweak for Firefox).
For tweakers that won't leave sleep over hogging extra web server cycles, you can increase these limits to significantly reduce page load times. If the values don't already exist, go ahead and create them (DWORDs). A reboot will be required. The IE dev team have unofficially recommended setting both to 16 (decimal, 10 hex) for best performance.
Of particular note is the direct effect that these settings have on the maximium number of simultaneous file downloads allowed in IE.
I'm not sure LAOJ works out cheaper than MIMN. Oracle 10i is $15k/processor vs $5.7k/processor for MSSQL 2005. If you're developing for a typical MS corporate environment, that's quite a difference!
Agreed though, "Whatever tool fits the job". If scalability requirements are lower and the deployment environment is flexible/OSS/outsourced, then LAMP will do a great job.
Microsoft Nixes Outlook, Outlook Express Access to Free Hotmail Accounts
Citing concerns about spammers abusing the service, Microsoft will announce today that the company is dropping a feature from its Hotmail service that lets nonpaying customers access their Hotmail email from Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express. The feature is based on a technology called Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), an extension of the HTTP protocol on which the Web is based.
"Since we implemented Human Interactive Proof (HIP) to ensure that only humans and not automated systems were opening Hotmail accounts, spammers have found other ways to go after the system," MSN Lead Product Manager Brooke Richardson told me in a prebriefing Friday. "Recently, there's been an increase in exploits of the WebDAV protocol, which is used to enable people to access Hotmail from Outlook and Outlook Express. We've offered [this access] for free for some time, although it's typically a feature that other email providers charge for. But because of the rise in abuse of this protocol, we're making a change to WebDAV to curb abuse. Over the next few months, we're transitioning WebDAV to be available only to customers of our subscription services, such as Hotmail Extra Storage and MSN Premium. We expect this change will help us to more effectively stop spam emanating from Hotmail."
Richardson said that only a small percentage of free Hotmail account holders use the WebDAV feature. "About 5 to 10 percent of people have it set up," she said, "but most don't use it. And among that group, most activated it once, then never used it again. About 95 percent of our users don't use the feature." Richardson was also careful to note that this change doesn't mean that Microsoft is walking away from its nonpaying users. "We continue to invest heavily in Hotmail," she said. "We've recently instituted antivirus scanning and cleaning and brought back the [free] MSN Calendar. And we're actively moving free customers to the new storage allotments we announced earlier this summer." Richardson said that the company will upgrade storage allotments for all free Hotmail accounts by the end of the year. Microsoft has already upgraded paying customers, such as those who opted for Hotmail Extra Storage, she said.
Microsoft won't immediately shut off nonpaying users who have enabled Outlook or Outlook Express access to Hotmail. Instead, the company will phase out those customers over several months and give them plenty of warning that the change is coming. "Free Hotmail customers who want to use WebDAV have two choices," Richardson said. "They can opt for Hotmail Plus, which offers 2GB of storage space and 20MB attachments for just $19.95 a year. Or they can subscribe to MSN Premium." Microsoft will continue to enable WebDAV for customers of both products, she said.
There are simple technical reasons why readers will have noticed a discrepancy in the speed of Hotmail vs Gmail. Hotmail is built around a traditional client-server page model, i.e., the page reloads each time you do anything, along with all the unchanging 'boilerplate' page elements such as menu, ads, footer, etc.
Gmail, on the other hand, employs some beautiful client-side page loading techniques that mean that reading a message/switching to a different folder, etc., generally doesn't require a page refresh. The page simply queries the server for only the information that has changed (via XMLHTTP) and updates the page via DHTML. The result is a much snappier browser experience; the downside is increased min browser requirements (no chance of working in NS4, etc.).
XMLHTTP has been around since early 2002; it is primarily due to web developer laziness that has held-back more wide-spread use of this technique to improve the responsiveness of today's web applications.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think US-Auz relationships are a little strained after reading this, try visiting as a Brit!
:|
.. but Christ, the Barrier Reef is beautiful!
I was over for a month last year - fantastic time, most people really friendly, beautiful country (culturally felt like a cross between UK and US, plus the famous laid-back humour).
However, we ran into one bloke in Sydney that launched a tirade about the "f-ing Poms" thinking they ruled the world, that they still owned Auz, etc. Was a real shock: I'd also thought the sport-related Pom jokes and vice-versa were lighthearted, but this got us wondering.
Still heartily recommend visiting: Sydney is polished, stunning and lively. Melbourne is more bohemian, lots to explore in the surrounding area (e.g., Hanging Rock). Cairns was ugly as hell, horribly humid
Just posted this comment on Ben Witherington's blog in question, and thought I'd share. Be interesting to see how Ben replies, and others' thoughts on this:
"Interesting discussion, there is further debate at Game Politics and the venerable Slashdot.
The commentary (particularly at the sites above) is sometimes quite openly hostile toward Christianity - this is not uncommon amongst the youth community today. I wanted to write a little about why I think this is the case.
Society has become far more sceptical of "messages of goodwill" and young people - quite rightly - demand more concrete evidence and credibility before committing to a belief.
This cynicism has developed out of necessity and I believe it is "a good thing". One only has to look at the widespread "good will" messages (with hidden motives) and false promises that we are bombarded with every day from marketers, politicians, et al to see how this cynicism has been nurtured.
When a young person rejects Christianity, they are not saying "I do not wish to be a good person" or "I do not believe in God". They are simply applying the same level of cynicism and questioning to something often promoted in a very similar way to - frankly - a miracle cure, a politician's manifesto or a bingo club.
Personally, I attended Sunday school in the UK until my mid-teens and maintain a strong interest in religion as a humanitarian subject. When asked to Confirm, I chose not to. My reasoning was that I believed in the common-sense principles behind Christianity, but was put off by the inconsistencies and uncertain history of the Bible. Therefore, I decided to live my life by commonsense, hold respect for Christianity as a belief alongside others, but I couldn't commit to unquestioning adherence.
Were I to make my decision now, as young people today must, I would also be strongly influenced by the examples of extreme negative effects of all-consuming belief in a particular religion that we see today. If my faith in particular teachings were so strong that I was prepared to detonate myself in a public place, killing hundreds, was commonsense not a better way to live my life?
Take Scientology too as an example of a vile cult that is marketed using the similar methods to Christian preaching. How is a young person to know with conviction the difference between your typical friendly-friendly leaflet-brandishing youth group leader and a smiling face offering free "personality tests"?
Without a means to prove credibility over the sea of other "me too" ideas that young people are exposed to and must weigh up every day, Christianity will face the same scrutiny, scepticism and sometimes outright hostility as any other message.
I hope this is a useful insight into the rise of Agnosticism?"
As I just posted to the Firehose, Facebook are now offering grants of $25k - $250k to developers with promising ideas for new Facebook applications.
I guess that $10bn is going to a good home! Do you have an app idea good enough to justify a $250k grant?
Note that the above link title is misleading BTW - MPAA haven't "bought" uTorrent. Rather BitTorrent Inc have bough uTorrent and BitTorrent Inc have a commercial relationship with the MPAA.
I recall reading about a link between uTorrent/BT Inc and TorrentSpy too. At minimum, TorrentSpy.com is apparently planning to filter MPAA content soon:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Bye_Bye_TorrentSpy_and_I SOHunt_Both_to_Filter_Copyrighted_Content/all
Worrying times!
Hmmm .. no particular opinion on the particular subject matter, but it is incorrect to say that trademarks are only protected in the UK if registered.
IANAL, but UK common law (per the 1994 Trade Marks Act) dictates that a trade term that is "sufficiently distinctive" and "does not conflict with prior registered or unregistered third-party UK rights" gains intrinsic protection, as means of identifying the origin of products or services.
From the ITMA website, for example:
A little known reflection of this is that the "TM" mark can be used after sufficiently new and unique product names, etc, without registration. "RTM" is used when the trademark has been "actively registered".
Regarding the specific case of the "open source" label, however, I would have thought that the term is too generic to warrant reliable protection. Because no restriction on its usage has taken place to-date and because of the myriad of OSS licences, "open source" could be legitimately interpreted to mean a variety of things, e.g.:
Therefore, retrospectively restricting the meaning of "open source" seems the wrong approach. Surely this term should be left to mean "open source code" (which is better than closed-source, even if other freedoms aren't included) and more specific terms such as "FLOSS" should be used to mean LGPL, GPL, etc?
Cheers, Ben
A couple of years ago, a friend of the family was accused of downloading child porn. He'd divorced and moved out of his family home several years before, but the UK Police clearly hadn't bothered to check this when they dawn raided his previous address and confiscated all computers, CD-ROMs, etc in front of his teenage children and ex-wife.
All his friends and family were shocked by the accusations and evil sounding charges. They were later dropped due to lack of evidence. It turned out he'd subscribed to an adult site that had allegedly hired models under 18, i.e., 16/17. As far as he was concerned, the site was a regular adult website - a life saver I expect in the advent of divorce! Who the hell would be stupid enough to subscribe to a website they knew to be illegal using their personal credit card?!
It was too late by then, though. The word had spread across the community that he was some sort of sick perv, and his ex-wife tried to ban him from seeing his children. Despite having known him for years, even I had moments of doubt, worrying that he was a secret Gary Glitter.
After all, the police wouldn't raid someone's home unless the alleged crime was a) intentional, b) supported with strong evidence, and c) the defendant was known to actually still live there.
Would they?
Are you quite certain every model on your favourite adult website is 18 or over? Because if they're not (even if the website incorrectly claims they are), you stand to face the same life-changing trauma.
LOL! So the entire web development industry (of which I am a member) exists solely to hand-code HTML/CSS? I beg to disagree. Granted, battling with browsers differences, broken CSS support et al saps a disproportionate amount of our working hours, but professional web developers do rather more than churn code!
I beg to disagree that a glorified copy of FrontPage would kill off the web design/development industry. We want more ubiquitous, bug-free standards more than anyone; clients see little value in time spent overcoming browser deficiencies, so this is one of the lowest profit aspects we handle.
BJThe AJAX API is not a replacement for a Web Service API (SOAP or otherwise).
The AJAX "API" is a customisable, but Google branded search widget. It does not allow programmatic search queries (although it is technically possible to run direct queries to the Web Services powering the AJAX interface, the Google AJAX API T&Cs forbid this).
This is about Google ending programmatic access to its search results, nothing to do with the technical merits/failings of the SOAP technology ("business reasons rather than technical").
Um .. the discussion about the relative merits of web service technologies are all very interesting and all, but they seem to miss the point.
For "business reasons rather than technical", Google appears to have deprecated programmatic search queries full stop - neither the AJAX API (i.e., a search box widget) nor the GData API (RSS feed related, not search) provide the same functionality as the abandoned SOAP web service API.
It would appear there is no longer a supported method of querying Google programmatically and displaying the results in a custom manner (such as unbranded website searches and -blerrrg name- "mashups").
This is a crying shame and by Google's own confession, motivated by AdSense/Google Mini sales greed rather than technical issues.
The maximum number of simultaneous connections for Windows applications using the WinInet API (including Internet Explorer 4+) is determined by the following registry DWORD values:
These two settings affect HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 connections respectively and default to 4 and 2 respectively. More info (including similar tweak for Firefox).
For tweakers that won't leave sleep over hogging extra web server cycles, you can increase these limits to significantly reduce page load times. If the values don't already exist, go ahead and create them (DWORDs). A reboot will be required. The IE dev team have unofficially recommended setting both to 16 (decimal, 10 hex) for best performance.
Of particular note is the direct effect that these settings have on the maximium number of simultaneous file downloads allowed in IE.
~ PSdiE
You have a loose library? I never thought fornication and books mixed ...
I'm not sure LAOJ works out cheaper than MIMN. Oracle 10i is $15k/processor vs $5.7k/processor for MSSQL 2005. If you're developing for a typical MS corporate environment, that's quite a difference!
Agreed though, "Whatever tool fits the job". If scalability requirements are lower and the deployment environment is flexible/OSS/outsourced, then LAMP will do a great job.
Feck! Not any more ..
From Paul Thurrot's excellent WinINFO Daily (27/9/04):
Original ArticlePSdiE
There are simple technical reasons why readers will have noticed a discrepancy in the speed of Hotmail vs Gmail. Hotmail is built around a traditional client-server page model, i.e., the page reloads each time you do anything, along with all the unchanging 'boilerplate' page elements such as menu, ads, footer, etc.
Gmail, on the other hand, employs some beautiful client-side page loading techniques that mean that reading a message/switching to a different folder, etc., generally doesn't require a page refresh. The page simply queries the server for only the information that has changed (via XMLHTTP) and updates the page via DHTML. The result is a much snappier browser experience; the downside is increased min browser requirements (no chance of working in NS4, etc.).
XMLHTTP has been around since early 2002; it is primarily due to web developer laziness that has held-back more wide-spread use of this technique to improve the responsiveness of today's web applications.
PSdiE