The Blog
21 Sep 2005 AOL to Begin New VoIP Service Roll-Out on October 4
The IM wars continue. Now AOL has beefed up their IM client and bolted it to a more traditional VoIP offering. A key sentence out of the press release. AOL has worked closely with open source solution provider Pingtel, Global IP Sound, and On2 on custom-developed solutions that will deliver state-of-the-art audio and video quality, simplify connections behind firewalls, and provide SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standard compliance and more to TotalTalk and AIM. So where does this compare with Google Talk, Skype, MSN, YM! and Jabber? And what's the effect on Apple who interconnect with AIM in iChat. Nothing like a bit of competition to stir things up. Prior to Google releasing the Maps API, I was messing around with their system and discovered that you can embed an address in a URL call to gmaps and hidden in the return html is the lat/long. I couldn't resist writing a 30 line php program to turn this into an address to lat/long convertor and posted it as public domain code with warnings that it was a proof of concept and not to be used (!). Completely inevitable, but I've just had the cease and desist from Google for breaking their T&Cs.
I understand this stuff. And I understand the need for restricting these things. But it still rankles that you can't make use of everything you find on the web. 20 Sep 2005 Scobleized!
So there you go. I pour out a screed that is not completely thought through. Strictly a personal view. And suddenly all these people are taking it seriously. Did I hit a nerve almost by accident? Try to read round the factual errors and that I temporarily forgot that Longhorn had a real name now. And try to get down to the core. - Lots of technically dumb people have XP machines that they can't control, that make them feel inadequate and that are broken in various obscure ways. They just followed the defaults but it led them to this. This is actually the norm not the exception. - We're now well into the cycle where anything that's wrong currently "will be fixed in Vista". - Right now Apple is not an alternative for the mass market. It is actually great, but having both hardware and software lock in to a single supplier limits the market. And no matter what the Apple zealots say, software/drivers gets developed for XP first and Mac second. - Right now Linux is not an alternative on the desktop. It's also great, but it's nowhere near as polished as Apple or XP. - When Vista finally ships there will be a lot of people who will question whether to upgrade, buy a new machine with Vista installed or to switch. I hope Apple and the Linux community understand that. 19 Sep 2005 I never get comments on this blog. Made me think nobody read it ;)
I post one article from a bout of frustration over XP and that I'm considering switching to Apple and suddenly I get a burst of people agreeing and disagreeing. I guess choice of OS is a religious issue. Doug Miller takes issue with my comment Doing Something Different: A Weblog by Doug Miller : The only reason I stay with XP is because so much software appears on XP first, Apple later and if you're lucky and Linux hardly at all.
I suspect that statement is becoming less true so I'm not going to argue back hard. My one example here is Skype. Skype 1.3 for windows appeared some long time ago. Skype 1.3 for Mac has just appeared. i had a whole bunch of people I wanted to involve in a group chat but couldn't because they were using Macs. I'm struggling for other well known examples but I know I have a ton of minor utilities on this machine, most of which I probably no longer use. Most of them are freeware or shareware. All of them are windows only. Are there alternatives that are available on the Mac? Maybe. Then there's device drivers for obscure hardware. And finally there's the sort of software that you probably discard immediately that comes on the CD in the box with a new hardware toy like a Digital camera. My other issue with the Mac is the lack of clone hardware. Apple are much more competitive on price than they used to be. And their hardware is much more open than it used to be. And with Intel motherboards that will increase. But there's still significant lock in with buying into a platform with only a single hardware manufacturer. XP on one side and Linux on the other is completely hardware open. 18 Sep 2005 First understand where I'm coming from. I've been using windows since V1.0 I run a heavily tweaked and minimalist XP with Classic windows and theme. I don't use IE6, Outlook, Outlook Express, Office except in emergencies or to check things. I have AVG, Spybot and Adaware installed but they never find anything. XP pretty much works for me with minimal annoyance. I hardly ever have to reboot. I've never caught a virus or any malware (touches wood) despite having this machine in the DMZ of my router for a long time and hence wide open on the net. And I have loads of software installed because I'm often trying new programs. I have an organised directory structure.
Now somebody I know got a new laptop for himself and his wife from PC World ready for a trip to the far east. It's a pretty ordinary Toshiba with XP Home loaded. They are not the most technical of users and simply couldn't cope with firing it up themselves so they got somebody else in to configure it for them. A few days later I'm in a meeting with them and noticed they didn't have Skype installed which they will need. So they downloaded the latest Skype Beta and tried to install it. The machine hung and refused to reboot without a full power cycle. At that point they said "don't tell my wife, I promised we wouldn't install anything so we could be sure it all worked for the trip." So I took over and tried to get it working for them. And my mind recoiled in horror. XP used all the yucky defaults with the default "telly-tubbies" theme. The full Norton anti-virus and firewall protection suite was installed. IE had about 5 lines of toolbar. The system was setup with 4 different users. There were loads of useless icons all over the desktop. I go to download the current Skype instead of the beta, save it, and then can't find the setup file. When I go to drive C: the machine throws up one of those helpful dialog boxes that says "accessing drive c may be dangerous" huh? After much messing around with configuring the Norton firewall, a couple of reboots and un-installing and then re-installing Skype, I finally get the whole thing working and stable again. So what we're left with is an operating system that attempts to hide everything from the user, collapses apparently randomly, tries to be helpful, but actually just makes most of its users feel inadequate. And actually all the MS application software is the same. Did you ever make a change in MS Word only for Word to helpfully reformat half the paragraphs and change all the quotes to "smart quotes"? Can you imagine any other business where a big percentage of the dominant manufacturer's customers feel inadequate because they can't use it? But then you and I are not Microsoft's customers. Their customers are actually Dell, Toshiba, Sony, and Merill Lynch. So what has this got to do with Longhorn. Well I'm reading more and more about how Intel and Microsoft in conjunction with the hardware manufacturers will be bolting DRM in various forms right in the middle of the OS. I'm reading about how I won't be able to do what I want to do. The only reason I stay with XP is because so much software appears on XP first, Apple later and if you're lucky and Linux hardly at all. But if significant software I want to run is prevented from running, It's finally going to tip me over the edge to switch. The other side to this is that MS is getting into the classic big software project mentality. Whatever the bug or feature is, it will be fixed in the version that comes out with Longhorn. Because all the software is so intimately tied to the OS, there's come a point where they can no longer ship each individual piece early and often. Everything has to wait for the big release. And that big release therefore ends up being vast and untestable. And late. Now it looks like I'm going to be due a machine upgrade round about the time of the Longhorn release. And by chance that coincides with when Apple-Intel laptops should be available. So finally I'm being forced into making a choice that I otherwise could have put off for a bit longer. Will I stay with MS for another cycle or is this the time I jump ship? Will all the endless annoyances of windows being added to by another load of DRM and control finally tip me over the edge? I think I'm not alone in this. A Unix based OS with a pretty face, stable drivers, and easy access to all that OSS feels awfully attractive. Just maybe a Linux distro will be as good as Mac OSX but I kind of doubt it. So I think this should be a call to arms to Apple and the OSS cadre. You've got 2 years or so to become a completely credible alternative. If you can manage it then you can do us all a favour and blow MS out of the water. Because everyone who currently uses XP is going to be faced with the same choice I am. And that's the perfect moment to say "'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" and just switch. Which leaves me with a problem. I've got 2Gb of compressed and encrypted email going back 8 years in an obsolete email reader that I love. I know I don't really need to keep it all and I could just start afresh but it's a big part of my outboard memory. And I've never found an alternative that works as well. Comments on a blog on Ecademy
My father believed that you must obey the laws of the land because if society didn't we'd have (gasp) Anarchy. And if you believe the law is wrong then you should work to get it changed not simply break it. But there's a problem. The law is frequently wrong in that it doesn't match with society's general consensus of what is right. And voting every 5 years for somebody who will go ahead and do what they feel like in between is a pretty blunt instrument for getting laws changed. And lobbying for change is also pretty blunt and ineffective. And in lots of societies neither of these options are even possible. So sometimes mass civil disobedience is the only way to effect change. My own belief is almost buddhist. It starts from a determination to follow right thought and right action and to take responsibility for the consequences. That leads to a system of ethics. Which is then a basis for strategies in playing what is just one big game. Now if you don't play by the rules of the game then every so often you will get caught, you will go to jail, you will not pass go and you will not collect 200 pounds. So if the law of the land doesn't match up with your system of ethics, then you should go ahead and break it as long as you accept that the keepers of the rules may punish you. And they have a bigger stick than you do. There's an interesting aside here about the courts. If a law is unjust then the court can decide to go against it. That means that a jury is not bound to measure guilt purely against the letter of the law. They can acquit if they feel that the defendant is guilty of the letter of the law but that the law is wrong. And the judge can choose to impose no sentence even if the jury find guilty. And this works alll the way up the court system to the House of Lords. This has actually been one of the most effective ways over the years of getting misguided legislation changed. Again as an aside different communities have different approaches to this. Northern Europe (and the USA) tends more towards my father's view that the law is sacred and must be enforced. Southern Europe takes more of a view that the government (at all levels) is in the business of making laws and is not very good at it. So let them do what they do and if it doesn't work, simply ignore it. And there is a very loose and fairly arbitrary pact between the populace and the enforcers of the law (the police) about what gets followed and what is ignored. Even though this leads to selective and arbitrary enforcement, I prefer this approach. It's only recognition of what actually happens in N European countries which is equally selective and abitrary about which rules are enforced strongly and which are effectively ignored. 16 Sep 2005 In a blog about Hossein Eslamabolchi on the future of the network, Joho says "So long as I don't have to ever hear the phrase "wisdom mining"?
This was just too good to pass up. First we had data mining, then we had information mining, then there was knowledge mining. The logical next step is wisdom mining. Combining this with The Wisdom of Crowds and a buzzword generator I came up with the perfect mission statement for a web 2.0 company. We're using Reed's Law synergies to leverage the collective wisdom of convergent communities. We call it Wisdom Mining. A small prize for the first sighting of this in the wild. And not the Montana DEQ Wisdom Mining District. BTW. Hossein really doesn't get it. The whole interview was filled with bellhead thinking. It's as though the last 8 years never happened. [ 16-Sep-05 7:33pm ] Here's a thing. People have started creating their own URI types. like
lastfm:// Last.fm skype:// Skype msnim:// MSN Messenger These usually launch an external application from your browser. Now quite apart from this being a somewhat dubious practice, that last one is a classic. If you install MSN V7.5 it makes the necessary registry changes so that IE6 knows what to do about it. But surprise, surprise it doesn't also register for Firefox so links that use it don't work for non-IE browsers. Proprietary extensions to the web. DonchaJusLoveEm? So if you know how to register a new protocol and URI scheme in firefox, do drop me an email at julian_bond at voidstar.com I'm hugely impressed with the level of thinking in SkypeJournal.
If you're remotely interested in VoIP and Skype I recommend you read it. Disclaimer: I didn't get a job at Skype 18 months ago. But then I didn't apply. Doh! In both the main google search and in the new blogsearch
Start with the keyword like the name of your site Add in -link:*.yourdomain.com Set sort order to Date Take the RSS feed of the results and read it in your RSS reader eg http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=voidstar+-site%3A*.voidstar.com&btnG=Search+Blogs&scoring=d Now every time somebody mentions your site, you'll get a new entry in your reader. What Bush actually wrote in the UN session.
I want my mommy Are you my mommy? 15 Sep 2005 14 Sep 2005 Google Blog Search
Good - It exists - It has RSS and Atom feeds (where are these for normal search?) - DC: entries in RSS - Seems to be pretty fast. Let's see how quickly they pick up on this post. Bad - Where's "Popular" and "Recent"? - There's nothing in the RSS/Atom content to say where the post came from - I desperately need a way of saying "not from this domain" Searches for "Voidstar" all come from this blog. What I want is people who point to me not me. - It doesn't seem to search tags - According to the FAQ, they're scanning the Ping services like weblogs.com So where's Google's ping service? 13 Sep 2005 In the space of two weeks we had
- Google Talk - Google Sidebar - Google Desktop search V2 - MSN v7.5 - MS buy Telio (MSN to plain old telephones POTS) - Skype Beta 1.4 - SkypeNet - SkypeWeb - SkypeMac 1.3 - Skype Voice Services - AOL announce links with Jabber - Skype bought by Ebay Now Google + Jabber open standards IM + SIP open standards Voice/Video + Apple + AOL could be a force to be reckoned with. It'll certainly make Skype, MSN and Yahoo! scared and push them into faster innovation. And Google's use of SSL provides some encryption but with the same caveats as with Skype. The problem is that Google talk is a v0.1 Alpha. And so it's not really usable. Can Google ship early and ship often? I'm curious to see how the eBay acquisition affects perception of Skype's encryption. I've written before that without peer review it's somewhat suspect. If the FCC and EU push for a wiretap backdoor, I don't see eBay pushing back very hard. What is tech.memeorandum ?
Is there something here or is it just another feed aggregator? [from: del.icio.us] 12 Sep 2005 Ebay nabs Skype before anybody else : IT SEEMS that Ebay has, after all, acquired Skype in a deal estimated to be worth $2.6 billion. The deal was done after hefty interest from other sectors including News Corporation and Yahoo, claims the Financial Times.
Ooh err. It seems that the rumours were true. Hmm. Paypal+Skype = P2P payments, and Identity with Presence     1541 to 1560 of 3860 |