« I’m sure a lot of men will be looking at Sooty with envy »
Source unknown….
I wish there was a way to have precise karmic aim and be able to choose in what form I want to reincarnate. What would you choose?
Update: How could I assume this was just a random old thing forwarded since the beginning of times? It’s fresh, and even the BBC is talking about it.
Slashdot has a story about a Dartmouth project that develops on TCPA using Linux. This will be fun to watch as it evolves.
So TCPA will not be a Microsoft-only field after all, it’s a tool that can be used for many purposes.
Every time we exercise control, we lose. Every time we let go, the thing we fought becomes the thing that feeds us. »
Jim Griffin of Cherry Lane Digital, quoted in LA Times, « Legal Effort May Slow but Not Stop Music Revolution« , in fine
[via Bag and Baggage]
I’m alone in thinking that Bell’s decision to use VoIP on it’s backbones or offer VoIP services to customers should be no big deal. It was all over the radio and the papers this morning. I guess it’s mostly because it involves Nortel.
Meanwhile, Businessweek reports that Vonage would rather forget about telecom regulations altogether, branding them as irrelevant.
I don’t have any clear ideas on how consumer VoIP could or should be regulated, but I do feel the current landscape does not allow for sufficient quality and accountability, on the part of both access providers and service providers to offer a solid alternative to the traditional POTS. Are the actual regulations appropriate? Most likely no. But an absence of regulation of a critical infrastructure element, either because of planning, ignorance or by omission, will not serve the consumers and the market well. Kevin Werbach seems to come to the same conclusions: this issue needs some rational policy making now.
Update: Chalk up one vote against regulation from Net2Phone’s CEO in that Cnet article. He does seem to accept that once VoIP is not considered a nascent business anymore, some regulatory attention will be inevitable, at the demand of the LECs.
New IBM commercial featuring a kid prodigy part of a global Linux ad push.
Avoid the irony of a Linux ad available only in WMP format by grabbing the QT or the MPEG on IBM’s own site.
Can’t wait for « The future is closed and proprietary. And delayed one more year. »
Bell will begin to transition some of it’s equipment to VoIP using Nortel’s boxes says CNet.
I think this should be a non issue. Whether Voice is done on IP or on circuit based connections will hopefully become irrelevant. It’s a service. Like mobile phones: using GSM or CDMA doesn’t matter as much as the end result, which is the provision of a mobile voice (ok, and a bit of data) services. The same argument could be made with cable or satellite TV services. Services are key, and some ways to deliver them will probably prove to be more efficient or flexible or lucrative.
Maybe the old way is more appropriate in some cases, maybe VoIP makes more sense in most cases. Hopefully telecom regulations will adapt to this new context and allow for a rich ecosystem of services.
I just found out about Waybath’s Buzz Maker tool.
It uses Waypath’s database to map the fluctuation of the occurrences of certain terms in the blogosphere.
Since they kindly provide the HTML code, I assume they don’t mind including a dynamically generated image: Here’s a example:
It seems, from experimenting a bit, that the big spikes are mostly due to spidering cycles, since they are present in all the keywords I tried. Or maybe they coincide with summer vacations?
« This is an experiment in property rights in the digital age, something that’s gotten surprisingly little attention. » An intrepid netizen is auctionioning a song he bought from the iTunes Music Store on eBay. The license doesn’t seem to explicitly cover (much less prohibit) this action. As more and more things become digital, what do we do with things we no longer want that have "value" but no physical substance?
Update: Picked up by Slashdot
Update: The auction was pulled.
Update 2: Apple’s director of marketing for applications and services says this whole thing does not matter since re-selling songs is impractical. Of course the question of what your service actually sell or licence (and what I get for my money) can’t be too important… What about asking the question to someone in legal affairs?
Son jeu préféré : Halo!
À lire! Très divertissant… pour un geek!
Cem Kaner proposes a Software Customer Bill of Rights .
Nicely done, good background hyperlinks.I especially like « A software vendor may not block customer from accessing his own data without court approval » and « When software is embedded in a product, the law governing the product should govern the software ».
[via Hack the Planet and Greplaw]
Declan asks if the liability rules surrounding computer software should be tightened: « the EULA is the slickest ‘Get out of jail free card’ I can think of in recent years » says a consultant quoted in the article.
It’s an issue that I feel is very important. As computers take a larger, more important, mainstream and legitimate place in society, will the industry be forced to mature and stand for itself? While Declan talks mostly about legislation, I was wondering about the feasibility of a professional order for programmers, which is another approach to address the same issues.
As a member of a professional order, I have mixed feelings. Yes, it is a layer of bureaucracy, it is often self serving, it is expensive, it adds inefficiencies.
On the other hand, it is there to protect the public (ok, the Bar in Quebec also has the mandate of defending the interests of it’s members, but that’s an exception), it imposes guidelines and rules, it implies deontology, it mandates acts that are reserved for the members of the order. It is socially the sign of an important profession which carries out a role that is considered important enough to be regulated and that can have a significant impact on third parties. In Quebec we have about 45 different professional orders.
So what to do? Limit liability exceptions (THE STUFF IN CAPS, as mandated by US law I believe) in EULAs? Arguably, in Quebec the Consumer Protection Act already does that, in the area of software sold to consumers. It has however never, to my knowledge, been used regarding any licence or any other contract related to software. Would specific legislation be needed? Declan is understandably congress-shy when it comes to law and technology given the previous legislative track record.
The problem is clear: we’re relying more and more on software that comes without the most basic guarantees. Should we refrain from relying on software or bear the consequences when we do so? Should we seek a legal remedy? Indeed the current legal and economical context do not seem to provide the necessary incentives to improve the situation, as it appears to me disruptions caused by software only increase as use, penetration and entrenchment of software in society increases.
Maybe we’ll reach a breaking point economical losses will make the (assumed) extra cost of providing higher quality software appear acceptable? Or would increase cost of licences simply translate directly in profits for vendor?
I can’t help but feel that while a software (and hardware) market where accountability would be greater would certainly be very different than what we currently know, it might be become a necessity. I’d be curious to know what ways you feel would be appropriate to achieve this accountability.
[Wired story via Furdlog]
This algorithm tries to determine the sex of the author of a text. Spooky. Is it accurate for you?
[via Remolino→Kairosnews]
Canada’s cell phone operators are planning the « Interac of WiFi« :
The 12-million people who own cellphones, personal digital assistants or any wireless device and subscribe to Bell Mobility (with Aliant Mobility), Microcell Solutions (Fido), Rogers AT&T Wireless or Telus Mobility will be able to use all Wi-Fi hot-spots operated by any one of those companies.
Ok, but are there any WiFi hot-spots operated by any one of those companies? I know about the Bell AccessZones. Are there others?
It seems the announcement is similar to the one that led to the « success » we’ve had with SMS interconnection, which is not very reassuring.
[via BoingBoing]
Remember that open letter to WIPO regarding a meeting on open source issues?
A meeting was initially planned, but due to vigourous pressure from the US administration, it seems the meeting is no longer on track.
This is sad because from strong intellectual property laws stem the right to do whatever you want with this intellectual property. Including licensing it under an open source licence.
Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, said that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.
The mission of WIPO is to promote the protection of intellectual property throughout the world through cooperation among States and, where appropriate, in collaboration with any other international organization. Licensed IP, even under the GPL is indeed protected, thanks to the various IP legislation everywhere, harmonized under WIPO or WTO treaties.
This is not p2p file-sharing, this is legitimate licensing of one’s own IP under the terms one chooses. Especially considering the interest developing, and not so developing nations, have shown in considering open source code, WIPO should do the right thing and promote intellectual property and not be lured into considering IP as a generic item of trade.
[thanks Brightblue]
[Update: Oh.. Lessig is not amused.]
[Update2: Slashdot picked it up. It’s great that this story is making waves…]
Some feeds I subscribe to put comments in their main news feed. (e.g. Unsanity or Toomuchsexy) I can understand why this is good in some cases. Most often though, it results in posts I don’t care about being marked as unread/updated in my aggregator of choice each time a comment is added. This bugs me.
A good compromise seemed to add the comment count in the main news feed (CFD does this). I thought about doing that but it does not solve the issue of posts being marked as unread in my aggregator.
There was a debate about the issue of updated or modified posts on the NNW beta mailing list. Brent’s (NewNewsWire’s author) original position was to set a threshold for modifications/differences to a post below which the post would not be marked as modified. Arbitrary rules were voted down by most people. This was around the time the defunct Winer Watcher was making noise and Aaron proposed his HTML diff program to highlight specific changes to posts, thus making pretty much everyone happy.
So now I see Brent’s wisdom (although I really like the HTML Diff highlighting: check it out in the latest public beta release of NNW) and I’m still trying to find a good solution to my original problem.
I think I found a good solution and I just added Phil Ringnalda’s technique for creating a RSS feed for every post that will include their respective comments.
Yes yes, a separate feed for every single entry. Is it overkill? Probably but the computer does all the work. Will it be used by anyone? We’ll see. Will it increase the number of comments? Hopefully. For this post, here it is.
The idea is that if a post is of interests to you, you can subscribe to it, add it to a special temp group in your aggregator or something, and monitor it separately. Hopefully this will add the convenience of being able to know if someone commented on an entry while not messing with the global feed. I like the idea of keeping a certain control on what goes out of to the public at large, same goes for the home page.
The links for the feeds are present both in the individual archives and in the comment windows in the other kind of archives, including the home page: find the text You can subscribe to comments on this page via RSS.
Ahem.. and for those if you who don’t use an aggregator, well… move along, nothing to see.