Has anyone worked with a company that provides private label credit cards? I've found plenty by googling, but none panned out - I can't even tell which ones are legitimate and which only serve huge enterprise customers.
IIRC, in order to access the "production" eBay servers with your third-party app, even through their published API's, you have to pay eBay hundreds of dollars to have someone "certify" your application. Anyone know if this policy is changing?
I'm one of the developers of Kenosis a p2p RPC system, and this is a problem we've pondered from time to time. If anyone has ideas for practical steps that we could implement to make the software generally useful to actual dissidents, please feel free to join our mailing list and let us know. http://kenosis.sf.net/
I have dabbled in these sorts of extensions and "web services" a few times now. I was impressed by Yahoo's search API, and depressed by eBay's.
A9's is the easiest yet. You don't have to register for any special account or get permission. You just go to the submission page, give them the URL of your site description, and they validate it (as well as your sample search), giving you a preview.
The XML itself is a few simple extra tags to your RSS 2.0-compliant feed. If you already have a site search engine (like this one) it takes a few minutes to add an XML output option.
Once you get it working, it's immediately available as an a9.com column. It's that simple.
Incidentally, at IMVU, we use a customized version of the open-source osCommerce package. It'd be pretty neat if OpenSearch came standard on projects like this.
All of the various IM clients on the planet have different interoperability APIs, and "approvals" required to interoperate. This makes life difficult for everyone. If you want to help create a standard cross-IM-client plugin architecture, take a peek at http://imnarrator.sf.net/.
I'm a big fan of Google Local, but there's one thing missing that always bugs me. So in the category of "developer scratches an itch" is a GPL'd bit of software I've written to plug a hole on Google Local's offering: the inability to import results into your address book. I do this all the time now, especially on my Treo. I'd appreciate feedback/testing if anyone here is interested:
Thank you Mike, you are quite correct. Our goal with Kenosis was to hold ourselves to a higher quality standard than is usual with the litany of "p2p app of the month" candidates that were neat ideas but completely unstable (and hence, unusable as a platform).
Of course we'll fall short of the goal, but this way we encourage everyone who finds a bug to call us out and make us feel bad:)
test.py is designed to show the API working in various real-world situations. If you'd like to see a comprehensive set of tests that do not require any ports, please see:
These sites run both a.torrent index and a BitTorrent tracker, right? I can see how if they are indexing files that they provide tracking services for, they could be liable. But what if they used a distributed BitTorrent tracker (that they didn't run themselves) and provided.torrent files that linked to that? Seems like that would keep them one step removed from the actual providing of the tracking services, and hence just a search engine for content.
I'm one of the authors of Kenosis-BitTorrent that provides trackers with a way to organize themselves into a p2p network so that no one tracker is the central point of failure. There's also trackerbt, which provides a real distributed tracker service with multiple trackers sharing peer info.
I am the author of a free software program called im_narrator that provides text-to-speech services for a variety of IM clients on both win32 and Mac OS X. It's written in pure python and yet it uses a variety of platform-specific accessibility APIs, such as Microsoft's "Active Accessibility" and both Microsoft and Apple's TTS services. So it should prove useful to anyone who's interested in providing these kinds of services in free software.
If you're a old-time MUD refugee like me, you're invited to come by IMVU and make your own 3D environments, avatars, or games. No corporate control - make whatever you want and sell it.
Hey, I'm one of the engineers at IMVU. I thought many of the coolets things about IMVU weren't even mentioned in the article, and figured I'd post a link. Please feel free to post your comments. Oh, and if you're interested in joining one of our manyfreesoftware projects, drop me a line.
For those of you too lazy to click here is some text from our About Us page:
Our philosophy
* Censorship-free micropayment economy - We're creating a marketplace for digital goods that (as one of our customers put it) is "for the people, by the people." We have worked hard to prevent the IMVU experience from ever being overtaken by our opinions, preferring to leave it up to our customers to decide what they want to create and do with IMVU.
* Open platform - We know that good ideas come from all over, not just from our office. So we're committed to creating every opportunity to open up our platform to new kinds of creativity. Let us know if you've got a good idea.
* Eat our own dogfood - We've set up our business so that if our developers don't succeed, we don't succeed. We like it that way, because it prevents any distinction between our developers' interests and our own. Developers use the exact same tools we do to create content for IMVU, and can sell in our economy just as well as we can.
* Release early, release often - We are committed to fast fixes and rapid iteration, and strive to incorporate as much feedback as humanly possible. We think the fastest way to grow a successful product is to release the product as early as possible and to improve it over time in collaboration with our customers. We appreciate everyone's patience, and believe that we will all share in the reward of seeing IMVU's exciting and rapid evolution.
* Free and open-source software - IMVU would not be possible without the countless contributors around the world that have developed, tested, and maintained the many open source and free software projects we use. We strive to use free and open-source alternatives whenever they are available, and actively engage with communities that produce the software we use. We are contributors to many projects, and have even started a few of our own.
Over at IMVU, we're not exactly producing your standard game, but one of our goals is to enable anyone who knows python to create their own games with high production values, using 3D avatars and assets produced by our developers and sold in our censorhsip-free micropayment economy. We use Cal3d, osCommerce, python, debian, apache, php, BitTorrent, NSIS, and many other Free Software projects to make what we do possible. We also have created several FS projects of our own, including IM Narrator. So I think anybody who's developing software today who is not leveraging the power of Free Software is really missing out.
I'm still hoping someone will pick up the torch where Catalyst Recruiting dropped it and develop a Free alternative to these lame job portals. So much of the work is already done. You can see a demo here. All the code is GPL.
What is the FSF position with regard to taking over copyright of a potentially controversial (esp in this legal climate) software project that is under the GPL? What are the considerations that go into whether to accept copyright for a software project?
Seems like another way to get the same functionality would be to get the VC++ command-line compiler working under WINE. Has anyone had any luck with this?
Slashdot Mirror
Has anyone worked with a company that provides private label credit cards? I've found plenty by googling, but none panned out - I can't even tell which ones are legitimate and which only serve huge enterprise customers.
IIRC, in order to access the "production" eBay servers with your third-party app, even through their published API's, you have to pay eBay hundreds of dollars to have someone "certify" your application. Anyone know if this policy is changing?
I'm one of the developers of Kenosis a p2p RPC system, and this is a problem we've pondered from time to time. If anyone has ideas for practical steps that we could implement to make the software generally useful to actual dissidents, please feel free to join our mailing list and let us know. http://kenosis.sf.net/
Kudos to the Local team, this is a big improvement.
A9's is the easiest yet. You don't have to register for any special account or get permission. You just go to the submission page, give them the URL of your site description, and they validate it (as well as your sample search), giving you a preview.
The XML itself is a few simple extra tags to your RSS 2.0-compliant feed. If you already have a site search engine (like this one) it takes a few minutes to add an XML output option.
Once you get it working, it's immediately available as an a9.com column. It's that simple.
Incidentally, at IMVU, we use a customized version of the open-source osCommerce package. It'd be pretty neat if OpenSearch came standard on projects like this.
if you're looking to try it out, want to come help port gvcard (http://gvcard.sf.net/) to use Yahoo Local as well as Google Local?
All of the various IM clients on the planet have different interoperability APIs, and "approvals" required to interoperate. This makes life difficult for everyone. If you want to help create a standard cross-IM-client plugin architecture, take a peek at http://imnarrator.sf.net/.
I'm a big fan of Google Local, but there's one thing missing that always bugs me. So in the category of "developer scratches an itch" is a GPL'd bit of software I've written to plug a hole on Google Local's offering: the inability to import results into your address book. I do this all the time now, especially on my Treo. I'd appreciate feedback/testing if anyone here is interested:
http://gvcard.sf.net/
That is a very good idea. Any other suggestions?
Want to join the development effort?
Thank you Mike, you are quite correct. Our goal with Kenosis was to hold ourselves to a higher quality standard than is usual with the litany of "p2p app of the month" candidates that were neat ideas but completely unstable (and hence, unusable as a platform).
:)
Of course we'll fall short of the goal, but this way we encourage everyone who finds a bug to call us out and make us feel bad
test.py is designed to show the API working in various real-world situations. If you'd like to see a comprehensive set of tests that do not require any ports, please see:
kenosis/nodetest.py
We'd love to have your help making the software ready for primetime. Join our mailing list if you're interested.
if you'd like to see what RMS was thinking on this subject four years ago, see these two articles:
1 636202
1 910252
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/11/01/
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=00/12/14/
I'm one of the authors of Kenosis-BitTorrent that provides trackers with a way to organize themselves into a p2p network so that no one tracker is the central point of failure. There's also trackerbt, which provides a real distributed tracker service with multiple trackers sharing peer info.
I am the author of a free software program called im_narrator that provides text-to-speech services for a variety of IM clients on both win32 and Mac OS X. It's written in pure python and yet it uses a variety of platform-specific accessibility APIs, such as Microsoft's "Active Accessibility" and both Microsoft and Apple's TTS services. So it should prove useful to anyone who's interested in providing these kinds of services in free software.
If you're a old-time MUD refugee like me, you're invited to come by IMVU and make your own 3D environments, avatars, or games. No corporate control - make whatever you want and sell it.
Thanks for the link - that little map was one of the best I've seen in the whole campaign.
Hey, I'm one of the engineers at IMVU. I thought many of the coolets things about IMVU weren't even mentioned in the article, and figured I'd post a link. Please feel free to post your comments. Oh, and if you're interested in joining one of our many free software projects, drop me a line.
For those of you too lazy to click here is some text from our About Us page:
Our philosophy
* Censorship-free micropayment economy - We're creating a marketplace for digital goods that (as one of our customers put it) is "for the people, by the people." We have worked hard to prevent the IMVU experience from ever being overtaken by our opinions, preferring to leave it up to our customers to decide what they want to create and do with IMVU.
* Open platform - We know that good ideas come from all over, not just from our office. So we're committed to creating every opportunity to open up our platform to new kinds of creativity. Let us know if you've got a good idea.
* Eat our own dogfood - We've set up our business so that if our developers don't succeed, we don't succeed. We like it that way, because it prevents any distinction between our developers' interests and our own. Developers use the exact same tools we do to create content for IMVU, and can sell in our economy just as well as we can.
* Release early, release often - We are committed to fast fixes and rapid iteration, and strive to incorporate as much feedback as humanly possible. We think the fastest way to grow a successful product is to release the product as early as possible and to improve it over time in collaboration with our customers. We appreciate everyone's patience, and believe that we will all share in the reward of seeing IMVU's exciting and rapid evolution.
* Free and open-source software - IMVU would not be possible without the countless contributors around the world that have developed, tested, and maintained the many open source and free software projects we use. We strive to use free and open-source alternatives whenever they are available, and actively engage with communities that produce the software we use. We are contributors to many projects, and have even started a few of our own.
Over at IMVU, we're not exactly producing your standard game, but one of our goals is to enable anyone who knows python to create their own games with high production values, using 3D avatars and assets produced by our developers and sold in our censorhsip-free micropayment economy. We use Cal3d, osCommerce, python, debian, apache, php, BitTorrent, NSIS, and many other Free Software projects to make what we do possible. We also have created several FS projects of our own, including IM Narrator. So I think anybody who's developing software today who is not leveraging the power of Free Software is really missing out.
I'm still hoping someone will pick up the torch where Catalyst Recruiting dropped it and develop a Free alternative to these lame job portals. So much of the work is already done. You can see a demo here. All the code is GPL.
I am also a happy NEO customer. I found, reading the article, that many of the improvements they recommend are features I enjoy on a daily basis.
What is the FSF position with regard to taking over copyright of a potentially controversial (esp in this legal climate) software project that is under the GPL? What are the considerations that go into whether to accept copyright for a software project?
Seems like another way to get the same functionality would be to get the VC++ command-line compiler working under WINE. Has anyone had any luck with this?
Is there a linux equivalent for bejeweled?
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