So Mike Warot addressed on my questions about a capability-based file system with a two part ditty that, after first leaving me a little confused, ultimately answered quite a few questions. But what with class tonight and what seemed (from a myopic Beltway perspective) to be the crazy politico drama unfolding this evening I can’t […]
Another great essay from Mark Pilgrim, but it’s a shame to see his disdain morph into defeat in the end…
As you might expect, the EFF is just bursting with joy at the prospect of rubbing salt in the wound and saying “I told you so.” This is their “I told you so” letter. I would […]
David Weinberger on his attempts to learn more about Microsoft® Expression® Media:
The popup conscientiously informs me that once installed, Silverlight “updates automatically,” where “update” means I am giving Microsoft the right to load stuff onto my computer without asking or informing me. In addition, the privacy statement says Microsoft will only transfer information it […]
The official Hardy Heron release has been out for a few days and I’m finally getting around to upping my systems. But sitting here meditating to the install status bar has got me thinking…
I have quite a few laptops I maintain, and every time I do a fresh Ubuntu install on one of them — […]
Bill Gates on free software…sorta:
“There’s free software and then there’s open source” he suggested, noting that Microsoft gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with.”
Free Software advocates always seem to ascribe malicious intent Gate’s actions, but based […]
OLPC switching to XP?
Insistence upon using only free, open-source software had hampered the XO’s usability and scared away potential adopters.
Bullshit. The ability to add proprietary software exists. This isn’t about whether it will ship with a few non-free modules like Flash and MP3 support — which I’d be fine with. This is about shipping a […]
Interesting take via Slashdot…
You are starting to talk huge political downside if you start directly publicly advocating for the RIAA now (except perhaps in a few Hollywood districts). You have tons of pissed off students and tons of pissed off academic administrators who have let it be known they are very unhappy with the heavy […]
Slashdot has a piece up on an open source business model that uses the patent system against itself (similar to how Stallman used copyright against itself with the GPL). I’ve batted ideas like this around in the past, but in my head at least, it always breaks down right at the patent troll level: I […]
So the latest Ubuntu release, Hardy Heron, is rapidly approaching. I dropped the beta on my laptop a few days back, and Holy Shit am I loving life. I’ll be completely whiping my Gutsy partition as soon as I get the chance!
I’m reading a lot of chatter about people being none too pleased that Hardy’s […]
I can’t believe it: Enso is finally Free!
Of course, this had been hinted at for a while, so it’s no great surprise, but it’s still pretty big news for the Python geek and the HCI geek in me. Jono’s humane explanation of the open source development model is a great read for the uninitiated…
But the […]
I hadn’t yet heard the saga of Shareaza, the yet-another-p2p-app that has been hijacked by a pretty scammy bunch. There are even rumors a’swirlin’ in the echosphere that Discordia Ltd. is really just a shell for the MAFIAA, evidenced by the fact that they’re a US firm and no US firm could survive for long […]
Having decided to contribute more here, I’m already thinking I need a better application to pump out posts than this TinyMCE hack that sits inside Wordpress. I know there are some desktop apps out there that can handle this via XML-RPC — I’ll have to carve out some time for some research…
In the meantime, I […]
Scientologists, take heed:
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion. - L. Ron Hubbard
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“Linux is not communism, Vendor lock-in is.”
Via /.
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Yet another reason to make the switch to Ubuntu now…
The application, filed in 2006, describes a multi-faceted, robust ad-delivering system that lives on a “user computer, whether it’s part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications.”
“Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key […]
LinuxWorld has a breakdown of the difference between hackers and think-tankers and why software patents look so different depending on who you know…
To the ‘think tank’ types, lawyers are basically free and software innovation is hard to get. Most of the think tanks are in Washington, DC, where you can’t swing a cat without […]
The best I can tell, Dave Winer’s been pretty close to the mark with his predictions (here’s a golden oldie from the around turn of the century). So I was surprised to see such a brazen little called shot so depressingly wrong…
Ponzi: “How do we decide how many social networks is enough? Are there any […]
A friend from class sent along this little gem: Google Wins Appeal on Copyright of Nude Images…
Giggity giggity giggity goo…
But forgetting all the glorious breasts that shall be liberated, it’s always nice to see a higher court come down with a ruling strengthening fair use. Though this is a little concerning:
The appeals court instructed the […]
In an insane stretch of the DMCA, a new kind of copyright troll is appearing, filing suit to make DRM mandatory…
Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com have issued cease and desist letters to both companies and to Adobe Systems Inc (nasdaq: […]
The AACS crack story, not itself substantively interesting, does have pretty fascinating societal undertones. The free speech flag, nothing more than a pure isomorphism of a big ass number, perfectly encodes the now famous encryption key into colors. Is this infringement? If so, how so? Can you even copyright a number; a fact?
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I just learned of the push for POSH over at Standardzilla — short for Plain Old Semantic HTML. Why the hell do we need another idiomatic acronym clogging web2.0’s tubes? I certainly agree microformats are the future, but why go with something that sounds even more ridiculous than AJAX? What we need are more entertaining […]
Dare Obasanjo has a great post up about Amazon’s web platform offerings — S3, an online storage and hosting service, and EC2, a pretty fascinating virtualization platform, or as they describe it:
…a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, […]
I was doing a little reading up on microformats when I found my way to the future service Resolio (or is it Resiolio as in the page title of this sample resume? There’s something magical about funprofessional young startups). It’s refreshing to see another great microformats implementation materializing while the semantic web is still nowhere […]