I’m disappointed to see a (un)civil war breaking out in the blogging community over RSS and a proposed new technique, nicknamed “Echo.” While there are surely limitations to the older formats (lack of well-formedness, difficulty in parsing), there is the undeniable situation of an existing standard, or standards. ASCII had limitations, too, but tearing it [...]
The Inquirer has two parts of their series on “Engaging with the Open Source Community:” Part One and Part Two posted already. I’ve only skimmed the article so far, and I’m ploppoing them up here as a bookmark. Links via SlashDot
Crashed the laptop hard this morning, just clicking on Windows Explorer. Restarting Outlook took many minutes, so I decided it was time to do some personal folders cleanup (after a backup, of course). Dropped about 20,000 messages from email lists with good archives, and decided to compact the file. Warning: don’t try this at home [...]
“Ironic” seems to be the buzz-adjective of 2003, misused in nearly all situations. Zoe Williams of the Guardian attempts to set the record straight in this column.
The Chief Counsel for the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen, responds to the numerous requests FSF has received for comment on the SCO-IBM lawsuit. The short, sweet summary: “SCO, knock it off.” Slashdot responds here with the usual assortment of punditry and flames (link set to a score threshold of 4 for better S/N).
Patenting unique ideas for exclusive licensed use is an abomination to the software culture I was raised in. Good ideas should be shared, enhanced, amplified and refined. The *expression* of those ideas should certainly be copyrightable, to preserve, for a limited time, the rights of workers to protect their hard work from cut-and-paste. But, if [...]
According to this page on the Microsoft site, the Visual Studio 6 exams will no longer be offerered after June 30, 2004. I interpret the cryptic note “no candidate requirements to retain certification” to mean that current certifcation holders do not have to take exams. A few years ago, Microsoft was glad to terminate certifications [...]
Rick Strahl, VFP guru extrodinaire and recently named C# MVP (congrats, Rick!), has a section of his white papers site devoted to “Industry Commentary” with some great perspectives on what’s happening.
250,000 people had signed up by 10:30 AM, and 370,000 by noon, meaning 1000 sign-ups per minute. It was a lead story on several news networks this morning. I tried to log on to do it, and got “Document contained no data.” Perhaps it hasn’t crashed, but it’s not surprising that the site is laboring [...]
Reclaiming the Public Domain. The Washington Post is the first to cover Congressman Doolittle and Congresswoman Lofgren’s support of the Public Domain Enhancement Act.… [Lessig News]
