Load one physical CD, get two icons on my desktop
I know all this Sony rootkit/DRM stuff has made me paranoid. I loaded my
Sarah McLachlan CD into my Mac (a single CD), and two different CDs
appear on my desktop (see the screenshot on the left.) One apparently is the
music aspect of the CD and the other is the computer aspect of the CD.
Look inside the former, and you see a bunch of AIFF files. Look inside the
latter and you see a folder structure, including two executables! Probably
totally innocuous, right? Wait the CD is from Arista records. Any connection
to Sony? Is it loading a rootkit?I dunno. Paranoid. Technorati Tags:
mac,
sony,
rootkit
Why is everything free?
Have you noticed how man how many new apps that have appeared of late are available free of charge? Web 2.0 services like gada.be or flickr or del.icio.us. And more conventional client apps like Firefox? The list is approximately infinite. They come and go at an amazing rate. And they are all free. Not only are they free, users seem to expect them to be free. I am not sure how this came to be… Is it a unintended consequence of the open source philosophy? Is it a incorrect reframing of the fact that major and well known services like google and yahoo are (apparently) free (although ad supported?) Whatever the reason, I worry about the chilling effect this can have on innovation in our industry. How many great new innovations have died on the vine because there was just no way for the creators to pay the rent while building the Next Big Thing? Even after a year, two years of development, the prospects for getting users to somehow compensate for the value delivered were small to none. Is there another explanation? What if this was a pure supply-demand invisible hand phenomenon? What if the platforms on which these systems are built (Apache, Tomcat, PHP, MYSql, Java, and so on) have become so rich and so powerful that it has become comparatively very cheap to build wonderful innovative systems like Furl, Rollyo or Reddit, and therefore the market was valuing them correctly at zero dollars. (My friend Shimon Rura put forth a case along those lines the other day. ) While there's an element of truth in this second explanation, I believe it is only a small part of the story. I continue to believe that this tendency to expect stuff to be free has had a chilling effect on innovation in our industry. <!-
google_ad_client = "pub-7907243313795006";
google_alternate_ad_url = "http://www.blogbridge.com";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = "468x60_as";
google_ad_type = "text";
google_ad_channel ="7747325960″;
google_color_border = ["FDEFD2″,"DFF2FD","FDFFCA","B0E0E6″];
google_color_bg = ["FDEFD2″,"DFF2FD","FDFFCA","FFFFFF"];
google_color_link = ["0000CC","0000CC","0000CC","000000″];
google_color_url = ["008000″,"008000″,"008000″,"336699"];
google_color_text = ["000000″,"000000″,"000000″,"333333"];
//->
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"> Technorati Tags: businessmodel, supplydemand
The future of software?
Tim Bray likes Adium, the Mac OS X inter-network IM client. He says:
"Software of the future will be Open Source, will have a sophisticated and smart user interface, will take responsibility for making sure it's up to date, and will meet essential human needs. Like Adium." (from ongoing, Tim Bray's Blog)
Hmm, couldn't agree with you more 😉 Technorati Tags: future, software
Web Two Point No?
Om Malik writes that "The Web 2.0 Hit By Outages", saying:
"Over past 48 hours, there have been reports of Web 2.0 outages. Six Apart, one of the biggest blog service provider is experiencing serious downtime, which has left many a few influential bloggers in a tears of rage. (maybe that's why it hasn't made it to Mememorandum and Tailrank as yet?)" (from Om Malik's Blog)
Om connects this news, correctly, to scalability. Scalability is very very hard, and any site as popular as TypePad is certainly extraordinarily hard to architect and run reliably, Web 2.0 or no. In fact, I don't understand the association with Web 2.0 ("whatever that is."). These are just large web sites with huge loads and huge numbers of users. In fact I agree more with Adam Green's sentiment: "Web 1.1 is more like it", where he says:
"I challenge anyone who understands how all this new stuff, like APIs and Ajax, actually works to look me in the eye and honestly say this isn't just Web 1.1. Come on." (from Darwinian web, read all of it.)
Technorati Tags: web2.0
Can I do this?
I'd like to create a web page that list all web pages that don't link to themselves. Technorati Tags: odd
The System Administrators Song
"A song about those very special people that make sure your computer works. They are called System Administrators." "…. sometimes he just presses caps lock and walks away, and wow, hey, my password works again! … "
Funny! Technorati Tags: funny
Funny
Good for a 1 minute chuckle:
"In my lifetime, I have made nearly 15,000 credit card transactions. I purchase almost everything on plastic. What bugs me about credit card transactions is the signing. Who checks the signature? Nobody checks the signature." (from The Credit Card Prank)
Technorati Tags: funny
Robin Good has interesting predictions
Robin Good has some interesting predictions and prognostications.
"If you stop looking for a second at the hundreds of interesting new tools and events happening online, what are the key trends you see? Where among the new emerging online media, should you be looking next when trying to understand where to invest your future energies and money?" (from New Media Predictions 2006: What Will The Web Future Bring?)
Worth reading.
Using AJAX to do word processing on the web
You may not have heard of this, but we are now starting to see quite decent word processing applications implemented directly in the browser, using a technique that has become known as "AJAX" - Asyncrhonous Javascript And XML. As usual there is debate about what AJAX really means, who invented it (Microsoft claims that they had it like 5 years ago - which everyone scoffs at.) Here's a good article about Ajax and how it's being used to build word processing applications that run directly in the browser:
"None of these methods, however, are as simple to set up as a standard Web browser, which can quickly access a file from anywhere in the world. That's the promise that AJAX brings to the party." (from AJAX: the way word processing will be)
One very impressive example cited in the article is Writely. It's (of course) free and easy to try. It really seems to work. Of course when it comes to word processing, features matter, but reliability matters a lot too. Last thing I want is to lose the 10 page term paper and not be able to retrieve it. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: ajax
They are all fake…
Check out these amusing images which I came across on the Advertising/Design
Goodness Blog.
Yes, they are all fake , but very cool!
Technorati Tags: advertising,
attention,
cool