I'm pretty sure the Home Office is a Government department for the whole of the UK, not just England--and that includes many of its departments. As much as those of us in Scotland would probably prefer they didn't have any jurisdiction here, they unfortunately do.
For any confused Americans, it's akin to stating "California's Department of Homeland Security..."
Indeed, the reason why the EU is making such a fuss is because they realised the now-impotent DOJ just isn't gonna. The DOJ *could have* done something about it, but didn't. Realistically, the EU can't do a whole lot except try to prevent a repeat performance and dish out punishment for proven past disgressions (which they're perfectly entitled to do, as per European law, which Microsoft is bound to if it trades over here).
Insofar as the "biggies" are concerned, though: bundling of DOS, then Windows, then IE, then Media Player, there's not a lot that anybody can do after the fact. The EU has to be seen to be taking steps (preventative and otherwise), so they really have to do *something*. Certainly, web developers the world over still have a bitter taste in their mouths as a result of the bundling of IE, crowbarring it into being a monopoly itself.
The whole "they should be forced to unbundle {IE, Media Player, whatever}" thing really just comes down to "well, do we let them carry on, so that it looks like they've done nothing wrong?".
In the British public sector, people don't get fired.
Well, they do, but they tend to have to commit serious crime for it to happen. Kiddy-fiddling, murder, that sort of thing (little things like defrauding the taxpayer of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds tend not to cause much of a fuss).
It also doesn't matter two shits what the IT staff want, because they don't make the decisions. That's why we have organisations like BECTA, who (thankfully) have a relatively level head about such things and can tell local authorities what the deal is.
Of course, local authorities are typically in the supplier's pockets, and there's only so much BECTA, et al, can do about that, but at no point do they actually care what the skills of the IT staff are. As far as the local authority's concerned, the IT staff are employed to manage and maintain whatever the hell it is that they've decided should be in place this year.
Such a framework exists, after a fashion, though it's very slapdash.
FOAF is an RDF-based schema for linking "identities" together, but the only major service provider that supports it as far as I know is LiveJournal, and even then it's pretty limited.
Technically, FOAF+XFN+hCards+OpenID should make it possible to create everything that social networks (in their current form) have, although there might be one or two gaps which need filled. The biggest problem really is traction. In order to make it work, you'd need to:
a) Have a nice piece of off-the-shelf open source software that worked as a "profile server"--you could even build it on top of one of the blogging engines (e.g. WordPress). You give it the same sort of information that you'd give MySpace, Facebook, whoever, and it spits out a customisable profile page, complete with all the magical metadata for linking people together. People can authenticate via OpenID to leave comments, view restricted profile gobs, etc.
b) One of the major social network players starts supporting all of the above metadata--including OpenID--and adding friends by external URL, and picks up the metadata from the destination page. This would pave the way both for cross-relationships (e.g., my profile on Facebook is a friend of yours on Bebo) and for people running their own profile servers that were just part of the larger network.
The big big problem with it all is that there's very little impetus for the vast majority of social network users to want to look outside of the networks' walled gardens: everybody has profiles on every service, and it's only really an occasional hassle to create yet another one if it becomes the next big thing. Although an open-ended system would be the ideal, not to mention providing for a great deal more resilience and permanence, I have a feeling it'll be a long time before it actually becomes a reality.
In short, it's not the technology that's the problem.
Given that nobody outside of Apple has the first idea about what APIs will and won't be present, nor what the distribution and installation mechanism might be, you're jumping the gun somewhat.
...which is exactly what they're doing. The SDK is due in February. If you don't want to update before the SDK hits, you don't have to. It's not like iTunes doesn't give you a huge great warning before doing it, with plenty of opportunity to back out.
It's undoubtedly real--Apple isn't known for announcing that they'll definitely do something by x and then it turning into vapourware: it's one reason why Apple doesn't announce stuff in advance all that often.
Whether the apps prove to be any good or not is a different matter, of course, and depends somewhat on the quality and capabilities of the SDK when it appears.
I think you'll find that most newbies don't actually know that Google does anything other that search--and mail at a stretch--let alone that there's this thing called feeds and that they're useful and that Google has a free service that lets them keep up to date with them. This is the same (rather enormous) class of people who type URLs into Google because they don't realise that's what the URL field in the browser is for.
Mind you, it depends on what you class as a newbie, I suppose, but people who read feeds (via Google Reader or otherwise) would ordinarily be considered well out of "newbie" territory.
That's fair enough, but Google is the biggest and most powerful search engine in the world: what do people use to find things that have been "hidden" by secret URLs (but no authentication) that haven't ever intentionally been published? Google, that's what.
People have used Google to find stuff hidden this way for years, and anybody who's not a complete newbie (which isn't exactly Google Reader's demographic, after all) knows the folly of attempting to hide stuff behind secret URLs as a result. Then Google publishes feed items you've "shared" by way of a secret URL, and people wonder why it ends up non-private.
Now, admittedly, Google didn't bother with waiting for people to find out what the URLs are on their own (not really much point to it; Reader doesn't support authenticated RSS feeds, so the items themselves are public in the first place), and goes ahead and shares them directly with your contact list. Yes, it's a bit naughty of them--there should be a preference for it, and a "You've just logged in for the first time since we added this feature" message, but it's not sharing private items, because they weren't ever private to begin with, they were just obscured.
Err, it's called "CSS3 columns". Safari and Firefox both support it (possibly Opera too, haven't checked it)
In fairness, though, as another poster points out: columns don't work too well on the web, it's the wrong medium for them. (They do sometimes, of course, but generally where you control what goes in which column).
I wholeheartedly agree that web developers should stop working around the steaming pile that is MSIE.
However, when we do that we find we tend not to get paid for our work because clients (i.e., the ones who pay the bills), tend to want sites that look and work "right" in the most-used browser on the planet.
It's still very much broken, though. It doesn't have as many major issues as IE6, but it still has its own pile of quirks (some old, quite a few new) that you end up working around in most sites of a reasonable complexity that you build, and it still doesn't support lots of things that every other browser of more than 1% marketshare has had forever.
In other words: IE7 sucks. IE6 sucks significantly more, but IE7 still sucks.
That particular file is named that because it's compressed (originally with gzip, but later bzip2). The original output (before "make zImage") was named "vmlinux". Why the resultant file wasn't called "vmlinux.gz" is beyond me...
It's not quite the same as a direct download from YouTube, but UCB (and many others) have been making their material freely available via iTunes U for some time, which is handily also a standard format (MPEG-4 video, as opposed to FLV).
Mind you, YouTube have reportedly been encoding everything uploaded recently as H.264 as well as FLV, though I think that's more to do with the iPod/iPhone/Apple TV support than direct downloads (sadly).
Yeah, Bonjour, Open Directory, Darwin, WebKit, Darwin (QuickTime) Streaming Server, and a whole bunch besides... evidently the "bare minimum". With the exception of WebKit and the few bits and pieces of Darwin that come from third-parties under licenses that require it, there's an awful lot that Apple have made available--a fair amount of it Apple-developed code--that they didn't have to in the slightest.
The software doesn't have to tell Amazon anything, by virtue of you, um, buying stuff on the site, it already knows what you like, just like when you buy anything else from Amazon.
Here was me thinking this "news" piece was to announce that they'd finally given Eclipse on the Mac a UI overhaul and made it look, feel, and behave like a Mac application (rather than a cross-platform app).
No such luck.
On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, very good point! Mental note: don't write sloppily when correcting somebody else...
[Ob] So... a Mac, then?
I'm pretty sure the Home Office is a Government department for the whole of the UK, not just England--and that includes many of its departments. As much as those of us in Scotland would probably prefer they didn't have any jurisdiction here, they unfortunately do.
For any confused Americans, it's akin to stating "California's Department of Homeland Security..."
Indeed, the reason why the EU is making such a fuss is because they realised the now-impotent DOJ just isn't gonna. The DOJ *could have* done something about it, but didn't. Realistically, the EU can't do a whole lot except try to prevent a repeat performance and dish out punishment for proven past disgressions (which they're perfectly entitled to do, as per European law, which Microsoft is bound to if it trades over here).
Insofar as the "biggies" are concerned, though: bundling of DOS, then Windows, then IE, then Media Player, there's not a lot that anybody can do after the fact. The EU has to be seen to be taking steps (preventative and otherwise), so they really have to do *something*. Certainly, web developers the world over still have a bitter taste in their mouths as a result of the bundling of IE, crowbarring it into being a monopoly itself.
The whole "they should be forced to unbundle {IE, Media Player, whatever}" thing really just comes down to "well, do we let them carry on, so that it looks like they've done nothing wrong?".
In the British public sector, people don't get fired.
Well, they do, but they tend to have to commit serious crime for it to happen. Kiddy-fiddling, murder, that sort of thing (little things like defrauding the taxpayer of tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds tend not to cause much of a fuss).
It also doesn't matter two shits what the IT staff want, because they don't make the decisions. That's why we have organisations like BECTA, who (thankfully) have a relatively level head about such things and can tell local authorities what the deal is.
Of course, local authorities are typically in the supplier's pockets, and there's only so much BECTA, et al, can do about that, but at no point do they actually care what the skills of the IT staff are. As far as the local authority's concerned, the IT staff are employed to manage and maintain whatever the hell it is that they've decided should be in place this year.
Such a framework exists, after a fashion, though it's very slapdash.
FOAF is an RDF-based schema for linking "identities" together, but the only major service provider that supports it as far as I know is LiveJournal, and even then it's pretty limited.
Technically, FOAF+XFN+hCards+OpenID should make it possible to create everything that social networks (in their current form) have, although there might be one or two gaps which need filled. The biggest problem really is traction. In order to make it work, you'd need to:
a) Have a nice piece of off-the-shelf open source software that worked as a "profile server"--you could even build it on top of one of the blogging engines (e.g. WordPress). You give it the same sort of information that you'd give MySpace, Facebook, whoever, and it spits out a customisable profile page, complete with all the magical metadata for linking people together. People can authenticate via OpenID to leave comments, view restricted profile gobs, etc.
b) One of the major social network players starts supporting all of the above metadata--including OpenID--and adding friends by external URL, and picks up the metadata from the destination page. This would pave the way both for cross-relationships (e.g., my profile on Facebook is a friend of yours on Bebo) and for people running their own profile servers that were just part of the larger network.
The big big problem with it all is that there's very little impetus for the vast majority of social network users to want to look outside of the networks' walled gardens: everybody has profiles on every service, and it's only really an occasional hassle to create yet another one if it becomes the next big thing. Although an open-ended system would be the ideal, not to mention providing for a great deal more resilience and permanence, I have a feeling it'll be a long time before it actually becomes a reality.
In short, it's not the technology that's the problem.
Given that nobody outside of Apple has the first idea about what APIs will and won't be present, nor what the distribution and installation mechanism might be, you're jumping the gun somewhat.
...which is exactly what they're doing. The SDK is due in February. If you don't want to update before the SDK hits, you don't have to. It's not like iTunes doesn't give you a huge great warning before doing it, with plenty of opportunity to back out.
It's undoubtedly real--Apple isn't known for announcing that they'll definitely do something by x and then it turning into vapourware: it's one reason why Apple doesn't announce stuff in advance all that often.
Whether the apps prove to be any good or not is a different matter, of course, and depends somewhat on the quality and capabilities of the SDK when it appears.
I think you'll find that most newbies don't actually know that Google does anything other that search--and mail at a stretch--let alone that there's this thing called feeds and that they're useful and that Google has a free service that lets them keep up to date with them. This is the same (rather enormous) class of people who type URLs into Google because they don't realise that's what the URL field in the browser is for.
Mind you, it depends on what you class as a newbie, I suppose, but people who read feeds (via Google Reader or otherwise) would ordinarily be considered well out of "newbie" territory.
That's fair enough, but Google is the biggest and most powerful search engine in the world: what do people use to find things that have been "hidden" by secret URLs (but no authentication) that haven't ever intentionally been published? Google, that's what.
People have used Google to find stuff hidden this way for years, and anybody who's not a complete newbie (which isn't exactly Google Reader's demographic, after all) knows the folly of attempting to hide stuff behind secret URLs as a result. Then Google publishes feed items you've "shared" by way of a secret URL, and people wonder why it ends up non-private.
Now, admittedly, Google didn't bother with waiting for people to find out what the URLs are on their own (not really much point to it; Reader doesn't support authenticated RSS feeds, so the items themselves are public in the first place), and goes ahead and shares them directly with your contact list. Yes, it's a bit naughty of them--there should be a preference for it, and a "You've just logged in for the first time since we added this feature" message, but it's not sharing private items, because they weren't ever private to begin with, they were just obscured.
Err, it's called "CSS3 columns". Safari and Firefox both support it (possibly Opera too, haven't checked it)
In fairness, though, as another poster points out: columns don't work too well on the web, it's the wrong medium for them. (They do sometimes, of course, but generally where you control what goes in which column).
I wholeheartedly agree that web developers should stop working around the steaming pile that is MSIE.
However, when we do that we find we tend not to get paid for our work because clients (i.e., the ones who pay the bills), tend to want sites that look and work "right" in the most-used browser on the planet.
It's better than IE6, that much is true.
It's still very much broken, though. It doesn't have as many major issues as IE6, but it still has its own pile of quirks (some old, quite a few new) that you end up working around in most sites of a reasonable complexity that you build, and it still doesn't support lots of things that every other browser of more than 1% marketshare has had forever.
In other words: IE7 sucks. IE6 sucks significantly more, but IE7 still sucks.
Or, indeed, a factor of two to zero, if we want to reflect real-world sales figures.
That particular file is named that because it's compressed (originally with gzip, but later bzip2). The original output (before "make zImage") was named "vmlinux". Why the resultant file wasn't called "vmlinux.gz" is beyond me...
That would be the certified UNIX Fisher-Price PC, yeah?
White hats read "password recovery"
Black hats read "password cracking"
Perhaps they should save themselves some trouble in a few millennia's time and just switch to UUIDs.
It's not quite the same as a direct download from YouTube, but UCB (and many others) have been making their material freely available via iTunes U for some time, which is handily also a standard format (MPEG-4 video, as opposed to FLV).
Mind you, YouTube have reportedly been encoding everything uploaded recently as H.264 as well as FLV, though I think that's more to do with the iPod/iPhone/Apple TV support than direct downloads (sadly).
Yeah, Bonjour, Open Directory, Darwin, WebKit, Darwin (QuickTime) Streaming Server, and a whole bunch besides... evidently the "bare minimum". With the exception of WebKit and the few bits and pieces of Darwin that come from third-parties under licenses that require it, there's an awful lot that Apple have made available--a fair amount of it Apple-developed code--that they didn't have to in the slightest.
Given that the only 256kbps files that iTunes sells aren't protected with DRM, no, it's not.
Amazon trumps iTunes on DRM-free volume, but iTunes trumps Amazon by selling 256kbps AAC, as opposed to the 256kbps MP3 that Amazon sells.
The software doesn't have to tell Amazon anything, by virtue of you, um, buying stuff on the site, it already knows what you like, just like when you buy anything else from Amazon.
Here was me thinking this "news" piece was to announce that they'd finally given Eclipse on the Mac a UI overhaul and made it look, feel, and behave like a Mac application (rather than a cross-platform app).
No such luck.
On other platforms, I use Eclipse extensivey: I don't write Java apps, but there's lots that Eclipse can do, and on Windows it's easily the best all-round IDE. On the Mac, it just feels ugly and klunky-I end up sticking with Xcode for managing the projects and TextMate for editing.