I’m not seeing this

Daring Fireball: On the Credibility of The New York Times:

Speculation is not a violation of trade secret law.

Inducing someone to break a non-disclosure agreement is.

So if I take you into my confidence and tell you a secret, which you then divulge, I should be angry with with the person to whom you betray my confidence, rather than with you?

If the central issue in the Apple v Think Secret matter is that someone — Think Secret or some other party — induced someone to divulge trade secrets, will prosecuting Think Secret stop the leaks? Or will it, as in the case of file sharing, force it to become decentralized and harder to isolate?

While I’m sure it’s infuriating for Apple to have some guy’s website steal their stage-managed thunder, it’s not like someone has leaked the product roadmap or the Aqua source code.

is email worth using?

The on-demand blogosphere:

What if the blogs we read didn’t just scroll past us in our RSS inboxes? What if we could consult the wisdom of our networks of bloggers on demand, in realtime, relative to topics of current interest?

I have been thinking about this a different way. I find that many people on email lists just don’t get information they’re looking for, either due to misconfigured spam filters or whitelisting or some combination.

What if we just dropped email altogether and “delivered” with RSS? You send me a message by creating a post signed with a public key (for which I have the private counterpart) and my client polls your feed so it can fetch and decrypt the messages as needed.

If you don’t know me (ie, you’re not on a whitelist or receiver filter), your client has to exchange keys with mine: if you don’t supply a key, you don’t get mine, and we don’t communicate.

Complex? Kludgy? Is the necessity of a key exchange going to make it harder to spam? I’m not sure. Perhaps if the keys are issued by an authority who verifies people’s information, not just a home-rolled gpg key . . .

What I want — again — is the transparency of email, where anyone can send anyone a message, but without having to deal with an onslaught of tedious advertising and crap.

This sold a subscription to MAKE

10-minute motor spinning for hours:

Mark Frauenfelder:

Picture 2

This morning I spent ten minutes making the motor from the Howtoons cartoon in Make. It consists of one AA battery, two safety pins, a magnet, some Scotch tape, a piece of telephone extension cable wire, a pad of Post-It notes, and a little nail polish. It’s been spinning for four hours so far. I like the clickety clickety sound is makes. I shot a little movie of it in action. (It’s an MP4, so you might have to download it to watch it.) Link

Very cool and there seems to be a lot more stuff like it in the mag. If you let Google help you, you can find a promotional code for a free additional issue (5 instead of the usual 4).

perspective, anyone?

Is it just me, or is anyone else having trouble equating Apple’s attempts to learn who violated their NDA to some fansites with the Pentagon Papers? It seems the righteous indignation ought to aimed at the judge in this case: attorneys try whatever they think might work, and if they find a sympathetic judge, they run with it.

Forbes.com: Is Apple The New Microsoft?:

It’s ironic that a company as innovative as Apple Computer could have such a regressive view of the changing world of American media.

The company, led by Chief Executive Steve Jobs, won a round in its quest to force three Apple enthusiast Web sites to disclose their sources on articles they published regarding unannounced Apple products. In court filings the company argued that the Web sites were not protected by free speech because they are not legitimate members of the press.

The ruling, if it stands, will have a chilling and potentially devastating effect on not only blogs, which are growing in stature and prominence, but online media in general.

This potential threat to first amendment rights and Apple’s crackdown on Web sites that, in general, love the company and its products, do nothing to bolster Apple’s image. In fact, the company’s success of late has yielded accusations of bullying and potentially unlawful business tactics, not to mention complaints that songs purchased from its iTunes music service, the dominant digital music store, don’t work with music players other than its own. To some, that might sound like its neighbor to the north.

So some Apple employees or developers spilled some information to a couple of Apple fansites, in (I assume) violation of their NDA or other agreements. I’m not sure I see competitive business information as being as important as a lot of other secrets. This is not exactly life and death, and while I appreciate the tech press taking their “right to snoop” seriously, I’m not sure I see a connection.
This is not to say I want to see ThinkSecret run out of business or some Apple employee to be canned, but surely everyone involved knew the risk involved.
And as for the “complaints that songs purchased from its iTunes music service, the dominant digital music store, don’t work with music players other than its own” this isn’t exactly a revelation.

A shame the C|Net plug for this piece was so strong: it’s lot of noise about nothing.

pencil, paper, and iPod

Other Campuses: Duke evaluates iPod experiment – The Daily Illini – News:

As the year-long “experiment” of providing 20-gigabyte Apple iPods to all freshmen winds to an end and the media frenzy slowly dies down, administrators have begun to evaluate the future of the project. Critics ask: Have students used them for educational purposes? Did teachers find innovative ways to integrate this technology into their curricula? Was it worth the $500,000?

gah, the article is spread across 6 pages and the print option requires you to go to their site: sorry about that.

Interesting overview, but I found it interesting that the professors were more into the technology than some of the students. The kid who planned to give his to his mom and the other who had never opened the supplied recording attachment, while claiming no one else used theirs, are both undeserving chowderheads.

When I was in college, back in the Stone Age, we had a prof who recorded his lectures on video, so they could be replayed through the day (he taught entry-level sections which were packed): by doing that, everyone got the same lecture and they could check it out at the media center if they wanted a refresher. Some of the Duke students and profs are taking the same approach: good for them, and I hope the other damp squibs don’t screw it up for them.

what GUIs are good for

One of the reasons to experiment with a visual interface is to see what options are available: the menus and buttons sometimes reveal choices that the written docs don’t. I was playing with the MySQL Administrator client I learned about earlier today, and was baffled by the discovery that I have no query caching.

Query Cache Query-1

Come to find out, there is some query caching on, but MySQL Administrator can’t find it. CocoaMySQL, on the other hand, while not as full-featured on administrative/health issues, does return some data on query cache rates.

And the command-line mysql client confirms it.

mysql> SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Qcache%';
+-------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+-------------------------+---------+
| Qcache_queries_in_cache | 851 |
| Qcache_inserts | 1668 |
| Qcache_hits | 14917 |
| Qcache_lowmem_prunes | 0 |
| Qcache_not_cached | 197 |
| Qcache_free_memory | 4230256 |
| Qcache_free_blocks | 1 |
| Qcache_total_blocks | 1725 |
+-------------------------+---------+
8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

What would be useful would be some direct query access through the “official” client, as you get with CocoaMySql.

Bug report filed with MySQL AB.

And just as quickly closed. For whatever reason, once I exited the app and restarted it, it is picking up the values now.

file under: no one wins but the lawyers

MSFT’s alleged theft of IP from Eolas (forcing the W3C to re-think it’s own standards) is tossed out, but wait, now someone is trying to get the real origins of DOS cleared up.

Eolas back to square one:

Personally I think it’s great news that the spurious patent ruling in favour of Eolas has been overturned because of prior art. There are some morons who think that because the defendant is Microsoft we should be sad about this, and I admit there is a certain justice in seeing a software patent advocate hoist by their own petard.

But Eolas submarine use of a software patent to subvert the W3C standards process is something we all have to fight, teaming together across competitive and ideological barriers to address the issue. If Eolas wins, we are all the losers. It’s just a pity that there’s no low-cost fast-track to achieve the result – the main damage software patents cause is that defence against them can only be afforded by rich corporations.

Suit may revise chapter on tech history: Origins of MS-DOS (3/2/2005):

A decades-old quarrel over a defining event in computer history — the creation of the program that propelled Microsoft to dominance — has suddenly become a legal dispute that could lead to a public trial.

What a muddled tale that is.