LXer Weekly Roundup for 24-Jun-2007
LXer Feature: 24-Jun-2007
A weekly recap of the big stories concerning Linux and Open Source Software.
NO. 3 FOR IVANA
IVANA Trump plans to walk down the aisle for the third time. The former wife of Donald Trump is now sporting a "ginormous" pink diamond, said a spy yachting with her in St. Tropez. And she's now calling on-and-off-again boyfriend Rossano...
Is Mike Scioscia's Role-Playing Rigidity Costing the Angels?
When Mike Scioscia's assigned roles for Angel players are clicking, nobody notices. But when there is a rip near the seam, the exposed pathetic rigidity of these uncreative placings outrage even the casual SoCal baseball fan. The Speier-to-Shields-to-Frankie countdown is designed to make a 9-inning game a 6-inning game. It works often. But when ... (Read on Source)
Beck has bright future with Dolphins
The Dolphins' most impressive rookie will play a couple of quarters, who knows, maybe even three quarters depending on how kooky Cam Cameron feels Thursday, when Miami closes the book on this preseason. (Read on Source)
Getting Away Cheap After a Hack
A simple backup plan saved the California ARB from being shut down following a hack of the ca.gov domain.
Nick Cohen: The cranks who swear by citronella oil
Nick Cohen: On 1 December, faith healers will meet at Roots & Shoots in south London to discuss how to treat Aids with magic pills. They won't call themselves faith healers, of course, or shamans or juju men. They will present themselves as 'homeopaths': serious men and women whose remedies are as good as conventional medicine. (Read on Source)
BVS announces a/b/g/n Wi-Fi Analyzer
Berkeley Varitronics Systems today announced its latest Yellowjacket B/A/N/G 802.11b/a/n/g Wi-Fi analyzer. The B/A/N/G is a Yellowjacket 802.11 BAG Wi-Fi analyzer with upgrades for draft 802.11n and signal-to-noise ratio measurements. OlderYellowjacket models can be upgraded free of charge. The Yellowjacket-B/A/N/G is available now. Pricing...
Multiwinia Hits PCs in September, XBLA in Late 2008
Independent developer Introversion Software has informed Shacknews that it expects the upcoming Darwinia multiplayer variant Multiwinia: Survival of the Flattest to hit PCs this coming September. The studio also revealed that Darwinia+, a version of the title for the Xbox 360's Xbox Live Arca...
Unintended Consequences
Edward Lewis runs SEOConsultants.com, one of the more well known and trusted directories in the SEO space. When I first started learning SEO about 5 years back Edward sent me an email letting me know that something I wrote was incorrect. He was right and I made sure I fixed the issue, but he was also quite abrasive.
When Traffic Power was spreading their slime through the SEO industry, Edward Lewis was one of the main people helping to fight them off...so much so that Traffic Power even created a hate site about him. Edward cares a lot, but sometimes a bit too much. Recently he documented his experiences at Sphinn, where he was largely outraged by some inaccuracies he saw. In less than a week he was banned from the site for being too curt, abrasive, and disrespectful.
The problem with trying to clean up everything on the web is that conversations are controlled by power laws...for every person in the know, there are 100 people new to the field. Plus many of the people who know what they are talking about eventually exit the conversation. Given that trend (and how companies like Google profit from spreading misinformation) the goal of killing misinformation is equally painful and self-defeating.
Being correct is not enough to ensure success. You also have to package your message in a format that people find appealing. Which is part of the reason why blogs are so popular. Someone slicker than you is going to take your ideas and repackage them in a profitable format...may as well be you doing the repackaging rather than letting others take credit for your work.
We all get invested in what we know, and to hear something from a different perspective challenges our identities. Easier for people to buy off on changing their opinions if they learn from a trusted messager, especially if they do not have to admit that they are wrong to do so. An easier way to create change is to share your side of the story on your home turf using good formatting, clear language, and logic. Some people will listen and follow, others will not.
Allowing people to self-select is a much more efficient marketing strategy than trying to force change upon others. It allows network effects to work for you, rather than against you. You pretty-much need legal or military might (government) or a monopoly (Microsoft or Google) to get away with forcing change, and even then it usually ends up creating unexpected consequences (just look at Iraq).
Alcatel-Lucent sheds three top execs
PARIS, July 29 (UPI) -- Technology equipment giant Alcatel-Lucent said three top executives would depart the Paris company in the wake of a second-quarter loss of $1.7 billion.
Politics
Copyright ©2007 the Detroit Free Press. All rights reserved. Users of this site agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy/Your California Privacy Rights (Terms updated March 2007) (Read on Source)
Damnation Screenshots and Trailer Go Vertical
Publisher Codemasters has provided a new trailer and some new screenshots from Damnation (PC, PS3, 360), Omega Blue's vertical-oriented action shooter.
Originally a "steampunk fantasy-western" Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, Damnation has been beefed-up for its standalone release, which is expected later this year. [video]12673[/video] Shackvideo users can use the HD Stream.
Not So Cuil After All
Cuil is a startup search engine that's chock full of people with tons of experience building search engines, not the least of which is Louis Monier of AltaVista and EBay fame; I'm partial to him because he's French and well, I'm with the French posse. (Read on Source)
New Report Details Historic Mass Extinction Of Amphibians; Humans Worsen Spread Of Deadly Emerging I
Amphibians, reigning survivors of past mass extinctions, are sending a clear, unequivocal signal that something is wrong, as their extinction rates rise to unprecedented levels, according to a new paper. Humans are exacerbating two key natural threats: climate change and a deadly disease that is jumping from one species to another.
You Call That Broadband? Group Decries Plodding Pace of US Net Speed
A nationwide study released Tuesday by the Communications Workers of America labor union found that Internet connection speeds in the United States have increased little over the past year. The nation's median data download speed gained just 0.4 megabits per second, it reported. At that rate, it will take more than 100 years before the U.S. attains speeds currently found in Japan, according to the CWA.
Microsoft upgrades support with Premier Ultimate
The software giant has a new, proactive support plan that sounds like a winner.
Bono pumps up the volume, lets slip new U2 songs (Reuters)
Reuters - Rock stars may have to rein in their taste for loud music after a fan overheard U2 frontman Bono listening to tracks from the group's forthcoming album and recorded them before posting the songs on the Internet.
Sprint inspection at Tipperary
The Irish Turf Club has announced there will be a 7.30am inspection of the sprint course at Tipperary on Wednesday ahead of the scheduled Thursday fixture.
Privacy feature in Internet Explorer 8 leaks private data
A privacy feature built into the second beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 browser aren't as private as advertised. The InPrivate Browsing feature in Microsoft's latest browser is designed to delete a user's browsing history and other personal data that is gathered and stored during regular browsing sessions. The feature is commonly ... (Read on Source)
Is Web 2.0 already on its way out?
At a conference that devoted much of its attention to celebrating the rise of collaborative platforms, media, and technologies, you had to wonder if the "Web 2.0" collaborative future would die before it really began. That was my takeaway from the Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, which gave 72 startups six minutes each to show their stuff, usually in beta form.
Most of the startups focused on collaborative technologies, from the still-popular but overcrowded photo sharing and contacts sharing services to the more intriguing ones such as Qtask's eponyous online project collaboration suite in the business space and MixMatchMusic's self-named service for musical collaboration, which is meant to let artists work together and then share in revenues from their works.
[ Demo Fall 2008 covered more than collaboration; find out about the hot security-related startups in Bill Snyder's report, and check out the spcial report with all the news from Demo and Tech Crunch 50. ]
I was struck by how obvious and redundant many of the startups' ideas were. For many, the goal was to own a social channel -- such as document sharing, photo sharing, contacts sharing, music sharing, or video sharing -- and somehow ride the social networking/Web 2.0 buzz to profits, usually based on ads. Never mind that Web 2.0 stalwarts such as Facebook haven't been able to do so. Or that such sites are a dime a dozen today, all vying to be your only hub for whatever information they store on your behalf. Or that they all seem to assume that people really do want to watch every video ever made or see every photo ever taken. Many of this ilk seemed like last-gasp attempts to get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon before the VC community moved on.
In separate presentations, Demo executive producer Chris Shipley and AllThingsD.com co-executive editor Kara Swisher noted this gap, and both suggested that the "hanging out" type of Web 2.0 environments like Facebook and MySpace wouldn't stay relevant much longer. In their place, Shipley predicted the rise of "collaboration for a purpose" sites and services that would come with lucrative business cases. Sites like Facebook certainly were critical for showing that the Web was about more than informational pages and transactions, but they wouldn't have the same financial effects as either of the previous Web generations, she said. The purposeful sites she saw emerging would have that impact, Shipley proposed.
Swisher noted that two underpinnings of many of the Web 2.0 startups were in doubt: advertising and ubiquitous connectivity. She noted that the poor economy, which is likely to remain that way for some time, made advertising a risky basis for business success. And she said that poor wired and wireless broadband speeds and coverage, coupled with its very high price compared to the rest of the world and the moves by carriers to limit user bandwidth usage, made it risky to base a business on ubiquitous, fast, cheap broadband coverage to carry all that data, video, and audio.
Still, there were some indications of a change toward purposeful collaboration, Shipley predicted. Compared to two other project-collaboration services at the Demo Fall show, Qtask's project service seemed to be viable, covering not just shared documents and messaging but actual project management tools to track schedules, approvals, and assignments. Given how much time people spend in e-mail anyhow, it's unclear whether they can be convinced to use such a service and not fall back to sending out mass e-mails to project participants instead.
Another example was Cinergix's Creately, an online business process modeling tool that, in Microsoft Visio fashion, lets you diagram processes such as network design or mortgage approval workflows, with embedded rules that let you validate the process as you diagram it. Such tools have long existed, but not in a collaborative Web environment in which users can propose their own business logic.
Everything You Should Know About Dmoz
A large thread at WebproWorld forums discusses facts and myths about Dmoz (Open Directory Project) and I thought it should be summarized (and expanded) here. (Read on Source)
Fuentes' likely exit quiet - and puzzling
Somehow, the best closer the Rockies ever had is on his way out the door with virtually no fanfare, and precious few complaints. It's a little odd. Brian Fuentes' impending departure as a free agent doesn't bring anywhere near the debate the possible losses of Matt Holliday and Garrett Atkins do, even though the Rocks arguably have fewer options ... (Read on Source)
Green IT Promotion Council to Hold Green IT Award Ceremony to Be Held at CEATEC
... Van West discusses some best practices techniques on installing software, new or old under Windows Vista. He offers a few things to think about before you install new software, such ...
Short URLs With Analytics
The problem with using short URL services such as TinyURL is that you can't really tell how effective they are ( how many people click on them ) much less where they have been seen on the wider Web. In a time when analytics is so important, I believe that services such as Cli.gs ( which offers short URLs with traffic statistics ) will ... (Read on Source)
In Case You Were Wondering
Katie Couric doesn't have a lot of respect for the Republican nominee for vice president. Are we going into Tiffany's? Am I jealous? (Read on Source)
Time to patch Windows again, ASAP
Featured links from the CNET Blog Network
Time to patch Windows again, ASAP--If you use a Windows computer connected to a network, a newly discovered bug makes it possible for a bad guy to wreak havoc on the computer without your doing anything.
Two more iGoogle alternatives for custom start pages--The new Symbaloo home-page helper and Yahoo's not-so-new Delicious bookmark manager give you different ways to access your favorite Web resources.
All MySQL's children--MySQL is being eaten away from within and without by former and current employees, perhaps calling for a way to protect itself: commercial extensions.
Survey: Obama is Google; McCain is AOL; and Palin is, um, Google--The 2008 Presidential Image Power Brands List suggests great similarities between Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
Cloris Leachman Bounced From 'Dancing'
At 82, Cloris had impressed her critics, regularly returning week after week to the ballroom as a host of celebs including Rocco DiSpirito and Kim Kardashian were voted off. (Read on Source)
Over-use Of Organic Fertilizers In Agriculture Could Poison Soils, Study Finds
Excessive doses of organic residues in agricultural fields could be dangerous for plants, invertebrates and micro-organisms living in the soil. This is the finding of a new study that shows that the use of appropriate levels of fertilizers would prevent this toxic impact on the soil biota.
U.S. solves childhood obesity epidemic
If you believe the federal government: Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year's sharp economic downtown, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.... (Read on Source)
Kosher iPhone App Now Live
Getting hungry just thinking about it! You can get the new Kosher iPhone App by searching for "rustybrick" or "kosher" in the App Store or by using this link . The price is only $1.99 now, but the next release will give you the ability to add new kosher institutions, edit them and even review them, as long as you have Internet. You can use the ... (Read on Source)
name: MAGPIE