I’m not very enthused about all of the reality shows that have been cropping up lately, but The Amazing Race actually looks pretty interesting. They don’t say much about the show’s rules or competition on the site, but travelling around the world in a race actually sounds pretty fun to me. I just read that Napster is down. I’m surprised anybody noticed. In the meantime, Limewire tells me that there are 57 terabytes of files available on the network. ...
Elliotte Rusty Harold is writing a new book called Processing XML with Java, and he’s publishing the whole thing on the Web as he works on it. I’ve already read Brett McLaughlin’s book Java and XML, but I’ll probably read this one too, since my professional life seems to revolve around, well, Java and XML these days. Was Brett Glass dumped by InfoWorld due to pressure from Microsoft? Your guess is as good as mine. ...
I’ve been away from the computer for a few days, and I completely missed the ruling by the appellate court in the Microsoft case. I’m sure Microsoft is glad that they’re not going to be broken up, but it doesn’t seem to me that anyone believed that remedy would be upheld either. There was also a very good chance that the court would dump Judge Jackson’s entire ruling – they did not. In fact, they held that Microsoft was, in fact, guilty of many of the things that everyone who pays attention knows they are guilty of. What happens next remains to be seen, obviously, but I feel good knowing that even the conservative appellate court agrees that Microsoft broke the law. ...
CNN has an interesting story about the marketing of American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s new novel. Microsoft Plans Shared Source .NET: Tim O’Reilly, Rael Dornfest, and David Sims interview Dave Stutz from Microsoft on their shared source plans for the .NET framework. I found it very difficult to discern what, exactly, my rights as a developer would be under shared source from Stutz’s answers to the interview questions. It’s interesting that Microsoft is going to implement .NET on FreeBSD rather than on Linux due to philosophical problems they have with the GPL. I’m operating under the assumption that this is simply an attempt by Microsoft to weaken Linux as the dominant open source operating system player and increase divisiveness in the open source community over licensing. ...
I’ve often wondered how serious Apple is about the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X, and also how seriously they take the fact that Darwin is an open source project. Well, the fact that they’ve hired Jordan Hubbard seems to indicate that their commitment to BSD is very strong indeed. Seth David Schoen’s comparison of Microsoft’s EULA and the GPL is particularly instructive when we’re judging which is more restrictive. It takes real temerity for the maker of proprietary software complaining about the restrictiveness of the GPL. ...
Microsoft has created quite a stir by releasing a software package that prohibits use of the software with “potentially viral software” (meaning open source software). This provoked an interesting thread on the FSB mailing list. It seems to me that the license terms described in the article are nothing but a publicity stunt. Microsoft has been referring to the GPL as viral for months now, and by referring to it (and other less restrictive open source licenses) as viral in an official sense, they’re hoping to get other people to latch onto that false characterization as well. It’s cheap and dirty, but it’s to be expected. ...
Jon Carroll wrote a great rant about Who Moved My Cheese? yesterday. My only brush with that insipid little book was that Spencer Johnson (the author) was a client of my former employer – we were building his Web site. Unfortunately, I wasn’t on the project myself, so I’m without dirt on the good doctor. All you really need to know about this book is that it’s ninety-something pages along, printed in large type and copiously illustrated. It costs $19.95. That, my friends, is a scam. ...
So after last night’s South Park, I was wondering what mee krob is. Fortunately, a quick search revealed that it’s a fried noodle dish. I didn’t remember it even though I eat Thai food pretty often. Now that the entire dot com economy has exploded into small unrecognizable pieces, tempers are wearing thin. XML.com has a good review on how various popular relational databases store XML. The methods used currently are a real freak show, I imagine they’ll improve with time. ...
Microsoft unveiled a service for sharing source code from within Visual Studio at their TechEd conference. Developers can contribute code to the repository or browse the code in the repository directly from Visual Studio. Microsoft was careful to point out that it’s not “open source,” because, you know, they don’t like open source. Timothy Noah at Slate wonders how Karl Rove managed to get away with taking a meeting with Intel to discuss some merger issues that would directly affect his stock portfolio. My theory is that the Dubya White House is so deeply in bed with corporate interests that people can’t even figure out where to start when criticizing them. It’s like criticizing lead for being dense. ...
Java Server Faces is a proposed framework from Sun for building Web applications in a somewhat standardized manner. It’s still at the proposal stage right now, and it’s unknown to me whether the building of Web-based GUIs really needs to be standardized at this point. The best practices are pretty well known, but even so, they’re still evolving. I don’t see this proposal being widely adopted, even if it’s pushed by Sun. ...