Category: blows against the empire

Chad Dickerson

Gartner is not alone among analyst firms in ignoring RSS. Mr. Safe wouldn’t find much searching for RSS at Forrester other than how to “boost margins with merchandise optimization.” Nothing at Giga (which owns Forrester) either (you’ll have to search yourself since they chose POST over GET). Call it whatever you want, it’s invisible to these guys at this point. That doesn’t mean that it’s not important (it is!), just that a lot of people have zero visibility on it right now. Maybe that means it’s a good time to make some changes while no one is looking.

I was re-reading this posting on Chad’s weblog and decided to look into this. It turns out that Gartner is not as ignorant as all that. If you search for RDF, you do a little better. Some stuff about how “XML has grown from a little-known standard to become the foundation of the Web computing infrastructure.”

Likewise, Forrester is somewhat clued in. And Giga had this article in their search results: What Is RDF and Should You Care?: Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a graph-based framework for describing metadata, describing the relationships between metadata, and interchanging metadata. … (Relevance: 93%)

Well, I may just stop logging referring URLs, since I noticed this morning that the top 22 HTTP_REFERER variables logged are all bogus, all spam, all designed to attract pr0n surfers.

This has all been in the last couple of days: traffic has quadrupled but it’s all meaningless, since I know it’s some invisible background hack running on a myriad of unsecured Windows PCs, all requesting “/” just to leave a bogus referring URL.

Since I don’t automagically publish all referring URLs, the geniuses behind this aren’t benefitting at all. Cretins . . . .

View the image

I find the textures of driftwood and other weathered surfaces fascinating; this one reminded me of a topographic map as I looked at it this evening.

BlogShares – quotidian

I had given up on this during the beta phase, but upon returning I find this fine web property being traded at 34 cents a share. Still some shares available if you’re interested . . . .

A friend, neighbor, and fellow UW drone sent me something off my Amazon wish list, and the whole clan is enjoying it immensely.

Thanks, Josh.

[Mac-users-discussion] A Question…

Obviously, life is Better when you can read, write, and listen to language.

You learn faster, absorb material better, and retain information longer. Unfortunately, IMHE (edit: in my humble experience), while there is often _extra_ material available online, it’s very rare that a listening portion of a class will be required for, say, homework. It’s also rare that you would be able to learn vocabulary words, or study readings or dialogs, by listening to them. The iPod, of course, changes that. You can do all of this and still have room for Dave Matthews and Cake.

So my proposal is to get these iPods in the classroom: Those who want could “check out” iPods for the duration of a quarter from the language department (it would require copious amounts of personal information, for sure… okay, maybe just the student name and number). It would be pre-loaded with all the audio material for the quarter, all dialogs and readings would be in there, and all vocabulary words would be on it. The advantage of studying vocabulary on the iPod, IMHO, is that you can put the foreign word as the song’s title, and the English translation as the song’s album, thus giving you one line of space between them. Voila, no more flashcards are necessary.

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent making flashcards for Korean, and now I just have all my vocabulary on my iPod. And since the iPod displays Unicode just fine, well, there you have it. Flashcards, both visual and audio.

The best part: The students need not even own a computer to take advantage of it.

The author of the original message is Apple’s campus representative, so his goals are not unbiased. But I think there’s merit to the idea.

Shame Steve still hates the Newton so much . . . .

Netscape DevEdge Redesign: CSS

The Advantages

At the end of the process, we were left with a situation where every HTML document on the server could be styled by a relatively small collection of files.

I find I have broken my vow to stop tossing rotten tomatoes at MSFT.

I tried, I really did.

A new category “blows against the empire” is born.

We’ve been hearing for ages now how GPL’ed code was going to kill innovation and destroy the computing industry. Here’s some stuff about it, straight from Redmond, but funny how the video uses a format that is, um, less than universal. If they really want to get their message out beyond their own community, you’d think someone would realize a more platform-neutral format would be a good choice, even as an alternate. Nope, it’s our way or the highway.

So Apple decides not to wait around for MSIE to get any better on its platform. Now, in many cases, when you might lose a customer’s business — after all, the five year deal to make IE the preferred browser has been over for awhile — you redouble your efforts in hopes of retaining that business. Not so at Microsoft. Evidently, you assume you’re still the only game in town and there’s no need to do a better job. I have often used the phrase “institutional arrogance” to describe their behavior: this seems to be a good example.

With IE languishing and upstarts like Chimera and stalwarts like Mozilla/Netscape making gains, Apple takes a look at the state of the field and chooses the KHTML rendering engine from the KDE project’s Konqueror browser (ironically, in KDE, it functions much like IE with file and LAN browsing built-in) as the basis for its free browser.

Not only that, they make a lot of improvements to the code base, give those away, as the GPL requires, and release a detailed changelog.

This makes for very interesting reading: there is already a bit of KDE code in Sherlock, apparently, and it’s instructive to see the Apple guys talking to the KDE developers as peers.

So where is the huge danger if other companies do this? How is Apple harmed by taking a freely available good — the KHTML and KJS code — making it better, and then giving away what they add? They save time, gain credibility, make friends, and lose . . . . what, exactly?

Obviously, it all comes down to your business model. Apple’s is to sell computers and the way to do that is to make them more valuable to people than any other on the market. Microsoft’s model is to sell licenses to use their software, ostensibly by making it best of breed, but more often by locking customers in. Where Apple will let you run anyone’s apps on their hardware, even as they make free and competitive offerings, Microsoft can’t and won’t let that happen.

How long will it be before some IT decisionmaker loses his job for buying into the hype, only to find he’s locked his company into a situation it can’t get out of?
Continue reading “So much for GPL’ed code being the “death of innovation””