The Blog
19 Apr 2008 Another great Anti-DRM rant from Cory. ...
Another great Anti-DRM rant from Cory. [from: del.icio.us] Web 2.0 flowchart and Diagramming site ...
Web 2.0 flowchart and Diagramming site [from: del.icio.us] Where is the internet's attention focused today? ...
Where is the internet's attention focused today? [from: del.icio.us] Wow! A library spider that has assembled a vast amount of information abou ...
Wow! A library spider that has assembled a vast amount of information about books. [from: del.icio.us] This one was new to me. Needs more exploring. ...
This one was new to me. Needs more exploring. [from: del.icio.us] A bunch of articles and scripts about using PHP with Web 2 APIs, mainly bas ...
A bunch of articles and scripts about using PHP with Web 2 APIs, mainly based on Yahoo!'s APIs [from: del.icio.us] 14 Apr 2008 "This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks," he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.
So. We give a local monopoly to cable companies to encourage them to build out Cable TV with considerable tax incentives. Then we turn a blind eye while the inevitable shake out happens until there's a single nationwide monopoly. Then they start to abuse that monopoly. It's not the same situation but the end result feels remarkably similar to BT. In BT's case we forced them to resell wholesale bandwidth to 3rd party ISPs at a fixed rate and forced them to allow 3rd party ISPs access to their Local Loop. Ironically Virgin Media take advantage of both of these requirements. So isn't it time that the monopoly cable provider was forced to do the same thing? Then we can get on with the next infrastructure requirement. By granting a limited local monopoly and tax incentives to anyone who wants to build out Fibre to the home. 04 Apr 2008 Microsoft extends XP through 2010 for ultra-low-cost laptops | The Industry Standard : Microsoft confirmed Thursday that it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs beyond the current deadline of June 30, 2008, to accommodate a new class of ultra-low-cost PCs (ULCPCs) that are just beginning to pepper the market.
And then today I also get an email from VMWare As a blogger the VMware Fusion team considers important to the Mac community, I wanted to let you know about a new customer contest, both video and blogging, we're launching today. So I guess the question is whether Parallels, VMWare or VirtualBox count as an "ultra-low-cost PC" ;) MS will still apparently be dropping XP retail, but XP OEM is easy to obtain quasi-legally from eBay and loads of other suppliers. The important thing here is that this should continue as quite a number of OEMs and white box suppliers will still be able to obtain them legally from MS. And of course, the announcement is recognition that there's a growing market for very low end PCs that are designed to have most of their applications on the web. Like the eeePC, Cloudbook and Intel Classmate. And this is a real double edged sword for Microsoft. 01 Apr 2008 Something really quite strange is happening over at OpenSocial. Here's my reading of it.
It started as Google's reaction to Facebook. They already had a gadget spec aimed at iGoogle and wanted to compete with Facebook. But Orkut and iGoogle weren't getting the publicity and traction that Facebook were getting so they played the politics card and turned it into The World vs Facebook in the hope of creating a critical mass of App developers and Container developers that could compete. The first spec was very much Google driven and based on what Orkut and iGoogle does. There were quite a few oddities about this. For instance, fairly obvious missing fields because they were also missing in Orkut. It used Google technologies like GData and AuthSub. But having roped all the non-Facebook people in then faced push back from people saying they didn't want GData and AuthSub in a global standard. Then in the space of a week, we get OpenSocial Foundation, Yahoo supporting OpenSocial, MS announcing Live Contacts and Google announcing the Contacts API. Viewed in the context of the MS-Yahoo buyout attempt, this begins to look like poison pills and more political posturing. Now we have the OpenSocial spec being passed over to the OpenSocial Foundation and being treated as a community developed spec in the style of Atom. It's very much based on the first Google proposals but is losing it's Google flavour in favour of a more open, vendor neutral approach. The big drivers here are Apache with the Shindig container project and MySpace as a major player and implementer. The big question now for me is to what extent the open-speced version of OpenSocial gets rolled back into Google and implemented there. There's really quite a lot of overlap between things like the OS People Data API and Google's Contacts API. Or between OpenSocial's Gadget API and the iGoogle gadget API. And proprietary AuthSub (and BBAuth) vs oAuth. The push to open up the spec to compete with Facebook is going to feed back into Google's own APIs and mean they lose control of them to some extent. This isn't entirely new since Google makes extensive use of Atom and are very much involved in the creation and development of that standard. They're walking a difficult line here between open-ness and closed-ness. There's quite a few areas here that are core to data portability and DataPortability. Moving profiles and contacts lists is one of DataPortability's key use cases. Having contacts APIs multiplying is both good and bad. It's good that APIs are appearing. It's bad that there's so many of them and they're all different. 31 Mar 2008 From out of the wild wild east, the internet just got dirty again. In the last week I've had,
A huge increase in spam making it past greylisting, spamassassin and my other filters and mostly aimed at postmaster at ecademy.com. The fact it's beating greylisting means this has to be botnets using machines with valid email sending mechanisms. For while there we were keeping spam under control by just throwing it away or refusing to accept it. Looks like they just escalated the game again. 5 machines in China hammering away at Ecademy.com. They don't read robots.txt, they're on Chinese broadband IPs and they have a user agent that looks like a standard windows XP install. Why? What is going on here? Is it some great wall of China thing that is positively encouraging me to just deny all for the entire Chinese IP ranges? Bots that ignore 403 forbidden and robots.txt and just keep on requesting pages when they never get anything. Why? I'm looking at you here voila.com and voilabot A big increase in hand input spam into web signup forms. What is the point in trying to advertise blue pills by putting the Ad into an RSS feed suggestion form for a site that aggregates UK political blogs? The only person to see it is going to be me. Same thing for the signup form for a website specialising in recumbent motorcycles that is moderated so every signup has to be approved. Both of these are completely and utterly pointless and do nothing but waste the time of the moderator. 27 Mar 2008 Way cool project. A new public wireless interface: Hivenetworks successfully launch 'Street Radio' in Southampton | The Next Layer
10 low power FM transmitters with spoken word descriptions of their immediate vicinity on a loop. This reminds me of William Gibson's VR art idea. VR art pieces that can be seen overlaid onto physical locations. Like a virtual River Phoenix lying on the pavement outside the club where he died. The advantage of using FM radio is that the barrier to entry to view the art piece is so low. I feel like this could be combined with QR Codes and a wiki mentality to allow another form of graffiti tagging of physical locations.     1001 to 1020 of 3860 |